My impression is the USA is falling apart. Every year people get more rude, more selfish, break more laws, are less courteous, there is more crime. I'm not sure I believe the "crime is going down" stats. (hope that doesn't make me stupid)
The problem as I see it is people stop reporting crimes because they know the police will do nothing about it. I've had my car broken into 5 times. I don't think I reported it more than once. Further, some places like California, have declared they won't prosecute property crime under a certain amount so again, even less reporting. So, the numbers appear to be going down but in reality they seem to be going up (That's certainly my personal perception but maybe I'm being influenced by sensational news and personal experience. I definitely see objectively going up in traffic violations. People don't seem to give a fuck anymore. They just do whatever they want)
I have no idea how to fix it or influence people to be nicer and more respectful of the law. Maybe it's the bankers getting off from the financial crisis. Maybe it's the police being perceived as part of the problem. All I know is more and more I think I should go back to a 1st world country because this one no longer feels like one.
In a theead about public toilets you move within 3 sentences to a vague thesis that the US is 'falling apart' without any metrics to a definition of what that looks like, a framework that is simpke, vague, generalized with very little quantitative datapoints that I cannot help but simply disregard the rest of what you have to say as anything more than hearsay amateur opinions.
If you want to make a comparison between a pair of nation, state your specific metric and bring numbers. Ive had plenty of rude encounters in south america and europe
on median, no. But the extremities make me think that he US falls below the arithmetic mean in urban areas. If you have 200 polite people and one person with a knife being swung around, guess what impression you get of that area?
We don't calculate "rudeness" in a mathematically logical way.
You can jump to 1:30.
As an example I've had issues where I've ordered groceries delivered online and had the driver tell us that they won't deliver to us because there isn't parking at our apartment, and I've left the apartment ten minutes later and seen their delivery truck parked literally a one minute walk up the block. We called and complained, and we got a voucher we can use to get some amount off of our next order. Sure. Ok. But now we are still without our groceries.
The thing is the person we were complaining to was front desk call center staff for a large supermarket chain. They have absolutely no ability to do anything to help us in a meaningful way. They do not have permission to tell the delivery driver to cross the fucking street, or to talk to the deliverer's manager, or anything like that. They literally cannot actually solve my problem.
Same with making a doctors appointment. It's now done by software, which helps things scale but when it goes wrong none of the people you personally are interacting with are likely to be able to fix themselves.
This is still ultimately the result of business squeezing every red cent they can out of every link in the chain, which leaves things brittle as hell/designed to work at scale but not necessarily be able to accommodate things even slightly out of the ordinary.
Where I'm at, decreased crime rates are very obvious. Our restrooms are all open, our grocery stores barely have any staff monitoring the self checkouts, and we barely think about locking our doors. People are as friendly as ever.
Most U.S. states don't prosecute property crime as a felony under a certain amount. In fact, more than half of the U.S. states use $1000 or more as the threshold for treating theft as a felony. At $950, CA actually has a lower threshold than more than half of the U.S. states.
so again, even less reporting.
It's crazy that you took the overturned policy of a single D.A. in a single city and FUD'd that into the policy of an entire state of 40 million people. That D.A. was kicked out of office the following election, and his successor did not maintain that policy. He tried again in L.A., and his staff not only refused to go along, they actually sued him over it and won.
I have no idea how to fix it or influence people to be nicer and more respectful of the law.
Not spreading FUD would go along way.
doesn't fix his car's windows for the 6th time, though.
It's not anything special. San Fransico is one of the top 5 largest cities in the US, maybe even in the world. So while crime may be average or even below average, it is going to feel worse because you will see more instances of it. Because there are more people.
Where is your correlation now?
Or, maybe, just maybe, complex problems have complex causes and complex solutions.
If it stays up for several years then I would see a problem, but all I'm seeing right now is the expected result of a forced regime change.
SF businesses already have to deal with a near daily hosing down of human feces from the street in front of their stores. If they opened up their bathrooms to vagrants it would just double the number of places they’re literally cleaning shit up.
The well-meant and originally-necessary drive to end criminalising poverty overcorrected into absurdity by equating poverty with mental illness, and compassion for the mentally ill with not arresting people who smear feces over restroom walls. This fallacy, which dovetailed with anti-police sentiments, is most pronounced in San Francisco. But it’s also present in other American cities.
The toilets and piles of human defecation rolling down the hill are a consequence of the above, and unsolvable until the above is addressed first. You can't borrow ideas from other cities around the world because those don't have rampant inequality.
of which services are funded by and voted in by taxpayers.
So yes, to some extent it is the people's fault.
Except it is a similar problem in most cities?
The only exceptions are cities with nasty weather which basically "solves" the homeless problem every winter or cities which basically shuffle the homeless into jail.
I haven't really seen any big city (even in Europe) "solve" their homeless problem any other way.
San Francisco and Portland and Seattle could spend tons of money trying to fill a need that most businesses in the US fill for free, or they could spend that money solving the root problem.
"Between 2005 to 2017, the city of San Francisco sent 10,500 homeless people out of town by bus.[1]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_homeless_relocation_pr...
According to the Guardian the free tickets to SF are in the 100s, while SF sent 10 000 away.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
In fact I have created such a drug. Unfortunately at the moment I have neither the time to write down nor is this post sufficiently capacious to allow delineation of the significant factors involved in the development of the drug. However I do resolve to do so at a later time.
I have been offered billions to NOT release this drug or its derivatives b/c it's use would severely disrupt the USA wage structure: wages would plummet (as a tremendous number of highly-qualified amped-IQ former homeless entered the market), immigrants would suffer and indeed, everyone doing well would suffer. I have refrained from releasing the drug not for that reason but b/c, were I to do so, everyone who posts on HN would then hate me!8-)) But I digress...
My point is that, if we cured this problem(drug addiction) we would only be creating other problems. The only solutions that could work are socially unacceptable. Nonetheless I personally favor the "Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B" solution from "Hitchikers' Guide to the Galaxy":
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_...
Like what problems, that they could then hold a job? Drug addicts can't hold a job. Their only interest/activity is drug seeking. This is why they are homeless.
I don't pretend to know how to cure drug addiction, but treating it as an economic problem is like giving cough drops to a lung cancer patient.
And besides, this feels like a cause and effect issue. Are they addicted to drugs because they became homeless and it was the most humane way to cope outside of suicide? The alternative scenario where perfectly normal Seattle citizens get baked to the point where they can't keep a job seems fantastical.
Cleaning literal blood and shit off the walls is a shared experience of “retail service” workers everywhere. This is both a hazard to workers and the customers that keep the place running.
Hell I had to do it at least weekly in an expensive sandwich shop in a small midwest city downtown that was 99% middle/upper class whites and no homeless or druggies in sight.
I cannot imagine having open bathrooms in an area populated with those more likely inflict problems.
> To the extent it is a problem in the rest of US, it's not a big enough problem to outweigh the benefits to the business of offering a public restroom.
There are a few cities where businesses have had to take the extreme measure of closing all public restrooms to combat this abuse. Most haven't.