Smart urinals stuck on boot at a gas station in Germany

South Park recently had a very funny (and tame for them) episode about toilet paper and bidets. Obviously it’s fictionalized but a combination of marketing and non historical usage keeps people in the US from widely adopting something that would be hugely beneficial to them.

For one thing, I don’t eat with my bum. I’m still in favor of bidets.

- you need an electric plug, and builders tend to avoid putting them in the toilets or aren't asked for in the first place.

- once you have them, the water clogs the thin pipes with calcium apparently. So every one/two year we'd have to replace the tubes.

I don't know about you but I don't tend to touch my keyboard or food with my anus like I do with my hands

But the reason for the shorter partitions isn't generally cost.

1. Security: you can see if someone is still in the toilet when it is closing time, etc.

2. Cleaning: it is easier to clean with a gap, more clearance for the mop.

What I really wish we would get is stall door locks that indicate if locked or not. A properly hung stall door should naturally move to the open position but most are not properly hung. So you have a row of stalls all with the door closed and no idea if they are occupied or not. Which means you are either pushing on the doors, looking under or through the gap. It's Barbaric.

Go insane when a nipple shows on TV, but fine to almost see each other's parts in public.

You literally just T junction off the line that's already present. Not complex at all. The bidet itself has a valve that stays closed until you're ready for it to spray.

In Belgium, you'd better not need to pee on the highway on Sundays or at night because the restrooms (paid, or reserved to clients of the restaurant/shop owner) are simply closed, outside of a handful of gas stations where they cost 0,80€ AND are only moderately clean.

So for example, the restrooms after the ticket barrier for a high-speed train will almost always be miles ahead of the restrooms available as part of the before-the-gate in a subway or Metro.

The best public toilets I've ever used were free, actually, and can be found at the waterfront in Vancouver, Washington, just north of Portland[0]. They're called the Portland Loo.

https://www.columbian.com/news/2018/oct/10/portland-loos-ins...

A lack of competition aka mono/duo/oligopols controlling markets is obviously unhealthy, because too large and powerful entities can and will gouge customers in the best (=most harmless) case, or actually make absurd demands from politics in the worst case when they get way too large (see the recent Credit Suisse bank scandals).

The other way around, too much competition, is also bad, as it incentivizes unhealthy business behaviors such as wage theft, tax evasion, barely making profits (and thus, having no reserves for the event of an externally-caused economic shock), or exploiting customers to the point that they rather piss into a bush (and annoy residents) than pay 50ct for a loo.

And to make it worse, a part of the problem is that there are a ton of gas stations - in Germany, about 14.000 [1] - but only a handful of oil suppliers. And the suppliers have an insane amount of leverage here: the gas stations are effectively locked to them (e.g. virtually all oil in Eastern Germany originates from two refineries in Leuna and Schwedt), so the refineries can charge whatever they want, and gas stations don't have the freedom to add markup to make profits on gas.

[1] https://www.adac.de/verkehr/tanken-kraftstoff-antrieb/deutsc...