The plight of the public potty (thebaffler.com)

Since there are no trash cans, you have to carry garbage with you until you're back home, or maybe find another store where you can dispose of it.

The toilet paper and tissues in Japan are extremely thin and in my view quite inconvenient.

For what it's worth I think a middle ground leaning closer to the west is the best approach. Save injection sites like the one in Vancouver have been a disaster, however

Japan can largely ignore its public debt because its mostly owned by the Japanese themselves, and thus contained within the nation & erodible via inflation.

Most other countries are restricted from doing this due to the massive foreign ownership of national debt, & ending up in hands/firms/governments outside of their nation.

I don’t know if that’s a key contributor but with those economic policies you also it seems wind up with low economic growth and in a time when you might end to raise interest rates doing so is catastrophic - leaves little room for flexibility.

Thy micturitions are to me,

As plurdled gabbleblotchits,

On a lurgid bee,

That mordiously hath blurted out,

Its earted jurtles,

Into a rancid festering confectious organ squealer.

[drowned out by moaning and screaming]”

—Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

It is quite interesting to note, that when I read this as a teenager, I did not even try to find out what “micturitions” are, because I confidently assumed that these were all nonsense words.

If taxes are what matters, America would have the best public restrooms in the world because it's the richest country.

But what really matters is culture. If you have a small percentage of people who are bad actors and are not punished for it, they ruin it for everyone.

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Let me give you a small example of culture and enforcement. I live in a small city in Romania. I once traveled by plane to London. The airport in my city is very small. When boarding, despite the fact that the zigzag queue was 3 lines long, people lifted the cordon and went straight to the door. I was probably the only one who followed it.

When we arrived at Heathrow, people did the same thing. The zigzag queue at Heathrow is very long, so it feels slightly fairer to skip it if there's literally no one in front of you (it was 2 AM or something). But as soon as the first person skipped the line and a second person was going for it, a guard noticed him and ordered him to go back. He tried to "negotiate" but the guard only lifted a finger and told him to "go back".

No one tried to skip after those two.

When you have a culture with no enforcement, a small minority (maybe 2%) of people ruin it for everyone and you feel like an idiot still following the rules. This makes the majority imitate the bad actors because "I might as well too".

No amount of money in the world can fix bad culture.

Result is all the clean and useful bathrooms are private, because only thus can shit-smearing vandals be reasonably excluded (and only then, somewhat.)

It's like saying child labor should be legalised because your business would go bankrupt without underpaid child workers: it just means your business model isn't viable!

But that's all the more reason to get and keep the infrastructure working.

They are the losers, the educated affluent, the youthful of our society.

They are the problem. What is the solution?

But - my experience - it's just another day of the week when advocates for hunger relief do everything from spending money on mass-market advertising, to showing up en masse at city gov't meetings to argue for the laws|zoning|city support|whatever they need, to personally mopping the floor at the soup kitchen after the meal has been served.

Vs., as a generality, "support" for public restrooms seems to consists of complaining about the status quo either privately or on the web, then going back to suffering.

Based on how involved various churches seem to be in hunger relief stuff, I'd bet most of those groups' organizational advantage comes straight from pulpits and pews. Say whatever you will about the Bad Things that religions have done all through history, or about their deities and beliefs being BS - but organized religion is organized, and understands how to make stuff happen. And it's pretty common for their Believers to also believe in working pretty hard to do just that.

Vs. - at least in private comments I hear, and the occasional essays I recall seeing on HN about this - there have been essentially zero suggestions of ever lifting a finger to address the public restroom problem. Send an unhappy email the Mayor? Nope. Google search for what a city council candidate might have said on the subject before you vote? Never. Even being tidy in the restroom of a non-restaurant business, and showing some hint of gratitude to the clerk? It is a point in favor of this particular article that it doesn't advocate an entitled and thankless attitude.

You on the other hand would definitely not want to contribute, and if any were built you'd go out of your way to ruin it, though indirectly (e.g. by working to reduce/remove funding for maintenance)