It's too late for this comment to be seen and make a difference, it will sink to the bottom of the thread without a trace, but in case anyone is interested in reading more HN comments about this, it was submitted and discussed just 2 days ago:
I'm not sure if this was put here to ridicule Stallman or as a coda to his comments about Skype but this is a simple well-explained argument that I happen to agree with.
If local government can't use local taxes to provide shared toilet facilities to stop us all having to defecate in the streets then what are they (and taxes) for?
Community toilets (and streets clear of shit & piss) are, in my opinion, a fundamental and should be the basis of all civilised society. The fact that so many modern cities seem to have forgotten this is beyond me.
Coming from Spain and having lived in Japan, I have come to believe that the US is really far away from what can be considered a civilized society. There's a huge mismatch between the public opinion (best country) and the reality that you can see through smaller things like this. Some of these things are better even in the so-called "third world countries".
Note: Spain was named for the smaller things like this; public toilets are not widely available here (even though there are some).
"If local government can't use local taxes to provide shared toilet facilities to stop us all having to defecate in the streets then what are they (and taxes) for?"
Well, there are many different ways to tax things. This is a pretty big area of study in e.g. economics and public polciy.
Certainly, one way to tax is to e.g. collect income taxes from everyone and then use it to maintain public toilets. But another way to tax things is to directly tax the thing itself - like in this case, taxing the use of the toilet.
This has some drawbacks and some benefits. One of the benefits is that you're making the toilet more akin to a regular, private good - people pay for what they use, which works pretty well in most cases.
Of course you can appeal to emotion and say "what, we'll make poor people not able to use restrooms"? Clever as that is, what about the alternative appeal - are you really comfortable with a poor person's taxes going to support the public toilets of the 1%? The areas they live have public restrooms too, and I'm sure they cost a hell of a lot more to maintain than most public restrooms.
I have no idea how this actually works in the real world - do rich 1%'ers public toilets cost a lot? Are they supported by taxes (at least, not on the municipal level)? Is there any amount of poor people unable to find access to restrooms that this is even a problem?
I don't know. I'm just saying, the view expressed by Stallman is not nuanced, doesn't provide any data to back him up, only goes for a totally surface-level idea of the morality, and supports it with emotion.
NOT everything in the world is a totally clear black & white moral issue, and not everyone that disagrees with you is necessarily morally wrong! When you make every issue a moral & emotional one, you lose out on actual thoughtful intelligence, or on the idea that smart people can think of different ways of cooperating that might make sense to them.
I can't believe you're making an argument against public toilets.
> But another way to tax things is to directly tax the thing itself - like in this case, taxing the use of the toilet.
That is not really Tax, but more so a Fee.
> Of course you can appeal to emotion and say "what, we'll make poor people not able to use restrooms"? Clever as that is, what about the alternative appeal - are you really comfortable with a poor person's taxes going to support the public toilets of the 1%? The areas they live have public restrooms too, and I'm sure they cost a hell of a lot more to maintain than most public restrooms.
I find it hard to think how the poor would use public restrooms less often than people who are more well off, considering the work environment, public transport dependency, and other factors.
> I don't know. I'm just saying, the view expressed by Stallman is not nuanced, doesn't provide any data to back him up, only goes for a totally surface-level idea of the morality, and supports it with emotion.
Access to public toilet in a civilized society is a matter of dignity and should not be only afford to those who can pay for it. Period.
> If local government can't use local taxes to provide shared toilet facilities to stop us all having to defecate in the streets then what are they (and taxes) for?
If local government can't use local taxes to provide free food to everyone to stop us all having to starve in the streets then what are they (and taxes) for?
Is access to toilets a more fundamental human right than access to food?
Edit: Stallman explicitly demands that public toilets should be free to everyone, independent of their financial situation. Using his logic, we should boycot food until food is available to everyone free of charge.
Of course I'm not arguing against feeding the needy, or against social nets in general.
>Stallman explicitly demands that public toilets should be free to everyone, independent of their financial situation. Using his logic, we should boycot food until food is available to everyone free of charge. Of course I'm not arguing against feeding the needy, or against social nets in general.
I actually don't see how you could unironically argue against providing essential foods (think bread, beans and chicken/fish[whichever is local]) free of charge, basic income style.
If that's affordable, we should totally do it. Of course, affordability is a key part of the equation. I don't know if a basic sustenance program is affordable. I do know that basic sanitation is /totally/ affordable.
Also, I feel compelled to point out that there's a public health interest in making sure everyone has a sanitary place to defecate. Societies that failed to provide this were regularly ravaged by cholera.
If you accept that government letting people starve to death is ok, the only thing I have left to point out is that toilets tend to be more of an immediate need.
That's the point of welfare programmes: to provide the basic life-sustaining means to those who don't have them. Food, housing, warmth, and sanitation.
So yes, many societies do use taxes to provide free food (or food-stamps, or a welfare cheque) to those in need, to stop us having to starve in the streets.
>Of course I'm not arguing against feeding the needy, or against social nets in general.
Of course you do. You just concat a nice relativizing clause to the end, to not feel like a monster.
Sorry, but in a world where people are starving, because the likes of you want to shirk responsibilities, noone could ever be not on guard. What a nightmare.
To constantly have to live with your back to the wall. And the irony, is that after you paid for the gated community guard, for the area to be exclusive, for the medicine and for the weapons- you paid more then European taxes for a "welfare" state - and got less.
You are right this posting was a bit tongue in cheek with regards to the multiple Stallman posts already on the frontpage. But I do genuinely agree with him and this shows his uncompromising viewpoints and how he applies his ideals to topics outside of tech.
> Community toilets (and streets clear of shit & piss) are, in my opinion, a fundamental and should be the basis of all civilised society. The fact that so many modern cities seem to have forgotten this is beyond me.
Totally agree with that and Japan and many countries in Asia really get that.
I know at least in my city the removal of public bathrooms is due to homeless and drug problem. If you have 24 hour public toilets they just become homeless houses. It is frustrating though to be on the train through a less-than-great neighborhood and having to go to the bathroom... knowing that there are no available public ones and all of the commercial entities either try and refuse or force you to purchase something. Bit of a nightmare when you're in that I NEED TO GO NOW emergency mode.
Somewhat off topic, but UK law means any toilet in a licensed establishment is available for free. The law requires licensed establishment to provide free tap water to anyone requesting it. A separate law requires somewhere that serves drinks to someone to give them access to toilets. So if you ask for free tap water, you can use the toilet.
You might think it's funny, but plenty of us agree with his stance and I'm sure we could have a decent discussion about it. Whether or not the fact that it's stallman makes it suitable for HN is another matter.
I still am not a fan of Stallman and still have to agree. Stallman sadly is right about most of the things he says. He has rather extremist stances sometimes, but that doesn't mean he is wrong.
Maybe I'll stop using some of those services. I actually have a resolution going on about not buying books off Amazon anymore. I just came across too many authors and bookshop saying that Amazon has the practice of saying "either give us specical/exclusive rights or we won't sell your book". I used to like Amazon, and heck, I also was understanding about them trying to avoid taxes, because most companies start doing that at some point, but extorting authors of books is way too horrible.
Also here there are counter examples. There is many games you can get from the developers, from Steam and from GoG for example, so why can't Amazon not be horrible?
Sorry, got a bit distracted about the Amazon link also being up there.
Calls for boycotting companies somehow aren't as popular anymore, despite having the internet and topics like the NDAP going viral. I think most people agree that in our society money has a lot of power and phrases like "vote with your money" have a point. Yet looking at the 60s till 80s those things were way more popular, which is a bit odd.
Be it Skype, Uber or Amazon. You don't have to hate them, but calling out bad practices and acting upon that information with not using their services seems to be a reasonable way to have a positive impact.
In other words it seems odd that certain minor design improvements can justify paying a lot more for a product or service, while that barely seems to be true for the ethics of a product - outside of the food sector that is.
> "either give us specical/exclusive rights or we won't sell your book"
Amazon thinks of themselves as a publisher now, so when you put your book on Amazon without publishing via them they view you as 'the competition' using their hard won resources.
As a publisher, they view asking for exclusive rights to be a normal course of doing business.
The problem is that some people still think they're just a book store.
Is using the toilet a human right then, and if so, whose duty is it to volunteer to clean it up? Why are paid toilets nastier than paid food? Why not give poor people money instead of spending time (and in this case, a certain effort you can't even brag about in polite society) on yet another boycott? Is there any social institution that is not boycotted by Stallman?
> "[...] whose duty is it to volunteer to clean it up?"
While this isn't applicable in all areas, a rule of thumb could be "those who making money with the people which have to use toilets".
Anecdotal example: I'm living in an amusement district of a big German City. There are very few public toilets and most of the few are paid ones. So every weekend the whole district is smelling like a big bowl of piss, except in winter when the frozen pee of multiple weekends accumulate until there is the big pee-melt.
Why not making all those bars, clubs and liqor stores pay for the maintanance of free public toilets?
Or better yet, why not enact laws that say bars, clubs, gas stations, liquor stores, restaurants and cafés have to have free toilets? Give them some compensation, e.g. government pays for putting in or upgrading the bathroom and the restaurant just has to keep it clean and open. It solves most of the problems with public toilets out on the street, such as them being nasty and occupied by homeless people, because the owner of the establishment wants to keep it nice and clean.
It's a question of property right. In particular, the shared property of the common parts of a city.
For the private parts of a city (eg. apartments), they usually include toilets, and you expect your guest to use them instead of shitting in your kitchen or living room.
Similarly, as _owner_ of a share of the common parts of your city, you have the choice of providing public toilets, so that guests, visitors, or just citizen far from their home can be expected to use them, instead of shitting in the public space, thus degrading the bacteriological common space (feces can transmit some bad illnesses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal–oral_route ).
The right is with you and I to not have to step in someone else's shit when walking down the road. Therefor it is our responsibility to provide toilets for those who have none, those who need them more often and for those who are far away from their own. This is what tax is for.
Indeed, it effectively used to be - they typically are and were paid for with property taxes, which is a proxy for LVT. The political decisions to decline property tax revenue is the reason why many closed.
Landlords' entitlement to an ever larger stream of rental income that includes the value of land which they had no hand in creating or making valuable is largely why state/city budgets are in such a mess, why the 1% steadily gets richer and why property values keep going up.
> Pay toilets are nasty, and ought to be illegal. Those of us who are not poor can afford the price, if we accept the practice; poor people can't.
Can't this be applied to basically anything? Food, water, electricity, pubic transport. Let's refuse to pay for all of these otherwise the poor can't afford it. Is this a parody webpage?
You don't think society has a duty to feed people who would otherwise starve to death? Who do you think should pay to clean up the rotting corpse they leave behind?
Food and water are already largely covered as a basic need in modern countries. Electricity and pubic transport have nothing directly humiliating or existential about them, but people are also negotiating to introduce a basic right for these commodities. Payed toilets in some sense do occupy a special spot in this space because they are such a basic and often very immediate and unpredictable need. This is different from e.g. the need for water, because you can typically suppress it for several hours or even days in an emergency situation.
I understand why toilets aren't free. Free public toilets in urban areas are almost invariably dens of filth and crime. Unfortunately, pay toilets are invariably filthy themselves.
It boggles the mind that rich "western" countries aren't able to keep public infrastructre clean and free.
In my experience, it's a function of the environment in which the toilet lies. A toilet in a quiet underground car park is almost guaranteed to be more disgusting than a toilet in a well-lit, busy concourse. I've used pay toilets that are pretty disgusting, too; never thought to ask for a refund, though...
Where I live, we don't have pay toilets, but when I was on vacation last I thought they were great. I was happy to pay a little bit for a clean bathroom instead of having to go at a coffee shop or restaurant.
Stallman has a point, but it's easily addressable. The government could give the indigent vouchers to use the pay toilets. I'd even be happy to pay more to use the bathrooms to subsidize such a program.
I had the opportunity to use public bidets with heated seats in Osaka. It felt very fancy, and my only complaint was that the previous user had left the seat on "extremely warm". I wasn't expecting anything in particular, but it was a very nice public bathroom.
Wait, how does giving free tickets to indigent people relates to segregation based on nationality?
Btw, here in France, we give a lot of free stuff to people in need, and we certainly won't allow this to be prohibited by European treaties. So yeah, providing free tickets for toilet is indeed a solution that can be considered.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13322288 (56 comments)
If local government can't use local taxes to provide shared toilet facilities to stop us all having to defecate in the streets then what are they (and taxes) for?
Community toilets (and streets clear of shit & piss) are, in my opinion, a fundamental and should be the basis of all civilised society. The fact that so many modern cities seem to have forgotten this is beyond me.
Note: Spain was named for the smaller things like this; public toilets are not widely available here (even though there are some).
Maybe this is correlated, maybe not, but just scoffing and saying "they're uncivilized" lacks a little nuance.
Deleted Comment
Well, there are many different ways to tax things. This is a pretty big area of study in e.g. economics and public polciy.
Certainly, one way to tax is to e.g. collect income taxes from everyone and then use it to maintain public toilets. But another way to tax things is to directly tax the thing itself - like in this case, taxing the use of the toilet.
This has some drawbacks and some benefits. One of the benefits is that you're making the toilet more akin to a regular, private good - people pay for what they use, which works pretty well in most cases.
Of course you can appeal to emotion and say "what, we'll make poor people not able to use restrooms"? Clever as that is, what about the alternative appeal - are you really comfortable with a poor person's taxes going to support the public toilets of the 1%? The areas they live have public restrooms too, and I'm sure they cost a hell of a lot more to maintain than most public restrooms.
I have no idea how this actually works in the real world - do rich 1%'ers public toilets cost a lot? Are they supported by taxes (at least, not on the municipal level)? Is there any amount of poor people unable to find access to restrooms that this is even a problem?
I don't know. I'm just saying, the view expressed by Stallman is not nuanced, doesn't provide any data to back him up, only goes for a totally surface-level idea of the morality, and supports it with emotion.
NOT everything in the world is a totally clear black & white moral issue, and not everyone that disagrees with you is necessarily morally wrong! When you make every issue a moral & emotional one, you lose out on actual thoughtful intelligence, or on the idea that smart people can think of different ways of cooperating that might make sense to them.
> But another way to tax things is to directly tax the thing itself - like in this case, taxing the use of the toilet. That is not really Tax, but more so a Fee.
> Of course you can appeal to emotion and say "what, we'll make poor people not able to use restrooms"? Clever as that is, what about the alternative appeal - are you really comfortable with a poor person's taxes going to support the public toilets of the 1%? The areas they live have public restrooms too, and I'm sure they cost a hell of a lot more to maintain than most public restrooms.
I find it hard to think how the poor would use public restrooms less often than people who are more well off, considering the work environment, public transport dependency, and other factors.
> I don't know. I'm just saying, the view expressed by Stallman is not nuanced, doesn't provide any data to back him up, only goes for a totally surface-level idea of the morality, and supports it with emotion.
Access to public toilet in a civilized society is a matter of dignity and should not be only afford to those who can pay for it. Period.
If local government can't use local taxes to provide free food to everyone to stop us all having to starve in the streets then what are they (and taxes) for?
Is access to toilets a more fundamental human right than access to food?
Edit: Stallman explicitly demands that public toilets should be free to everyone, independent of their financial situation. Using his logic, we should boycot food until food is available to everyone free of charge. Of course I'm not arguing against feeding the needy, or against social nets in general.
I actually don't see how you could unironically argue against providing essential foods (think bread, beans and chicken/fish[whichever is local]) free of charge, basic income style.
If that's affordable, we should totally do it. Of course, affordability is a key part of the equation. I don't know if a basic sustenance program is affordable. I do know that basic sanitation is /totally/ affordable.
Also, I feel compelled to point out that there's a public health interest in making sure everyone has a sanitary place to defecate. Societies that failed to provide this were regularly ravaged by cholera.
In lieu of that I donate to charity (though finding truly effective homeless charities is tricky).
So yes, many societies do use taxes to provide free food (or food-stamps, or a welfare cheque) to those in need, to stop us having to starve in the streets.
Of course you do. You just concat a nice relativizing clause to the end, to not feel like a monster.
Sorry, but in a world where people are starving, because the likes of you want to shirk responsibilities, noone could ever be not on guard. What a nightmare.
To constantly have to live with your back to the wall. And the irony, is that after you paid for the gated community guard, for the area to be exclusive, for the medicine and for the weapons- you paid more then European taxes for a "welfare" state - and got less.
Deleted Comment
Totally agree with that and Japan and many countries in Asia really get that.
Almost certainly, it's a "joke".
Flagged.
Maybe I'll stop using some of those services. I actually have a resolution going on about not buying books off Amazon anymore. I just came across too many authors and bookshop saying that Amazon has the practice of saying "either give us specical/exclusive rights or we won't sell your book". I used to like Amazon, and heck, I also was understanding about them trying to avoid taxes, because most companies start doing that at some point, but extorting authors of books is way too horrible.
Also here there are counter examples. There is many games you can get from the developers, from Steam and from GoG for example, so why can't Amazon not be horrible?
Sorry, got a bit distracted about the Amazon link also being up there.
Calls for boycotting companies somehow aren't as popular anymore, despite having the internet and topics like the NDAP going viral. I think most people agree that in our society money has a lot of power and phrases like "vote with your money" have a point. Yet looking at the 60s till 80s those things were way more popular, which is a bit odd.
Be it Skype, Uber or Amazon. You don't have to hate them, but calling out bad practices and acting upon that information with not using their services seems to be a reasonable way to have a positive impact.
In other words it seems odd that certain minor design improvements can justify paying a lot more for a product or service, while that barely seems to be true for the ethics of a product - outside of the food sector that is.
From what I've seen, his extreme positions are often from him looking further than a lot of other people.
Amazon thinks of themselves as a publisher now, so when you put your book on Amazon without publishing via them they view you as 'the competition' using their hard won resources.
As a publisher, they view asking for exclusive rights to be a normal course of doing business.
The problem is that some people still think they're just a book store.
While this isn't applicable in all areas, a rule of thumb could be "those who making money with the people which have to use toilets".
Anecdotal example: I'm living in an amusement district of a big German City. There are very few public toilets and most of the few are paid ones. So every weekend the whole district is smelling like a big bowl of piss, except in winter when the frozen pee of multiple weekends accumulate until there is the big pee-melt.
Why not making all those bars, clubs and liqor stores pay for the maintanance of free public toilets?
Does anyone know what public toilets cost (in construction and maintenance)?
For the private parts of a city (eg. apartments), they usually include toilets, and you expect your guest to use them instead of shitting in your kitchen or living room.
Similarly, as _owner_ of a share of the common parts of your city, you have the choice of providing public toilets, so that guests, visitors, or just citizen far from their home can be expected to use them, instead of shitting in the public space, thus degrading the bacteriological common space (feces can transmit some bad illnesses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal–oral_route ).
It can be paid for with land value taxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
Indeed, it effectively used to be - they typically are and were paid for with property taxes, which is a proxy for LVT. The political decisions to decline property tax revenue is the reason why many closed.
Landlords' entitlement to an ever larger stream of rental income that includes the value of land which they had no hand in creating or making valuable is largely why state/city budgets are in such a mess, why the 1% steadily gets richer and why property values keep going up.
There are two independent solutions for this: Many countries, like Singapore, have the government directly own public toilets.
In other places, like some states of Germany, the government instead pays restaurants and shops to open their toilets to the public.
Dead Comment
https://psmag.com/why-don-t-we-have-pay-toilets-in-america-2...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...
Can't this be applied to basically anything? Food, water, electricity, pubic transport. Let's refuse to pay for all of these otherwise the poor can't afford it. Is this a parody webpage?
It boggles the mind that rich "western" countries aren't able to keep public infrastructre clean and free.
The name is also a pun on a slang phrase for "see you later!" in Dutch.
Stallman has a point, but it's easily addressable. The government could give the indigent vouchers to use the pay toilets. I'd even be happy to pay more to use the bathrooms to subsidize such a program.
Wouldn't work in Europe - Art. 18 TFEU.
Btw, here in France, we give a lot of free stuff to people in need, and we certainly won't allow this to be prohibited by European treaties. So yeah, providing free tickets for toilet is indeed a solution that can be considered.