Discussion
This is the right thing to do!
NBC Los Angeles: "...A Los Angeles City Council committee will consider a motion on Tuesday calling for a citywide plan to expand hygiene infrastructure, including more public toilets, hand-washing stations and permanent water spigots....."
@photoncollector Quite true, can't have civilization for people who aren't making millions of dollars!
We should give the USA some credit though.
They managed to create a Hyperviolent Dystopia in only 250 years!
@akkana @bosquebill @ai6yr Well, I drank from both and didn't get sick, so they were good enough. The first, was absolutely for drinking, as that sort of pipe coming out of a wall or pillar was common in the area.
@drdirtbag @akkana @bosquebill Yeah, I was surprised how many free running fountains with drinkable water there are in Europe, myself. (I guess a holdover from the past!)
@ai6yr this stuff is so simple and should be a universal human right but it's increasingly controversial which is just wild.
It's like people think we're not all connected so people in an out group can get sick and not impact people in the in group. Bruh it doesn't work that way.
I was involved 20 years ago in basic sanitation work in El Salvador. No idea how it is there now but where we were working up in the campos on the ridgetops, pretty much everyone wanted better sanitation and was working to improve their situations but they didn't have the money to make it happen. While we helped with some of the technical aspects (we were focused on drinking water access including getting water and filtering it while other NGOs focused on waste sanitation, hand washing, cooking fires, public health and vaccination campaigns, and the like), much of what we were actually doing was providing money.
If only people buying coffee paid a tiny bit more for that coffee and that money got back to the people actually growing and picking the coffee, we wouldn't have had any reason to do work there.
I am not associated with that NGO anymore so I don't know how it's been going in those communities. The plan though was always to get the infrastructure to a state where they could maintain it themselves including pay for the maintenance. That required some careful engineering to ensure they could afford the maintenance and repair costs. And to help the community establish a bank account where they were depositing a few cents per household per month (basically a local tax) so that when it was time to replace elements of the systems, they would have the money to do that.
Anyway that was a good experience for me to have in my formative engineering years to understand that we need to be engineering things for everyone and not just rich people. And that stuff that I took for granted such as safe tap water is not even close to universal.
@douglasvb Ooh, that sounds like a neat, yet challenging project!
@ai6yr it definitely was. I think a lot of us went into that project with the typical white savior complex but at least some of us came out the other end with an appreciation of other people.
@ai6yr What is it with America's aversion to public water spigots? Pretty much everywhere I've traveled in Europe, rich and poor countries alike, towns are at least generous with, and sometimes even proud of, their public water. Here are some exemplary public spigots in the Dolomites:
@drdirtbag @ai6yr It's because we went with public drinking fountains instead, which are installed in pretty much every public establishment, usually near the restroom. It is a perhaps more boring and less elegant but no less effective solution to the same problem.
*I write this based on my personal experience that it's extremely rare I go somewhere public that doesn't have one.
@drdirtbag @ai6yr This includes but is not limited to public parks, malls, department stores, grocery stores, airports, restaurants, businesses, rest stops, etc
@shad0wdragon @drdirtbag This is getting significantly better, especially in California (particularly, the water bottle refill stations are fabulous)
@drdirtbag America's aversion is to the homeless and the poor. As bathrooms and water spigots enable people to live in decency, they do not want it. Instead, they remove those as an attempt to drive the homeless... somewhere else. And then use public defecation as a way to criminalize existence, instead of offering up alternatives. America just wants the homeless to "go away" and not be visible, vs. actually figuring out how to resolve the myriad of issues which make it a problem here. (ranging from purely economic reasons like rent and lack of jobs to the much, much harder mental and substance abuse issues for some).
@ai6yr @drdirtbag I know of *one* public water source that looks like one of these - there's a single drinking fountain in Dunsmuir, CA next to the weird little fountain the donation of which named the town.
I think a caste model of America is useful to understand our deplorable situation...
Oligarchs: those with the most wealth, capital, power, impunity, connections, and an overwhelming say in how our life happens.
Technocrats: who serve the elite and keep their machines running. Techies. Managers.
Precariate: workaday joes who always struggle and fall behind.
Untouchables: homeless, prisoners, sick, elderly, undocumented. To which so much cruelty is directed!
@ai6yr @drdirtbag We hate poor people more than almost any country on earth. Ignoring for a moment how being poor is criminalized, here, look at shanytowns. In Brazil people put up makeshift houses, which become informal neighborhoods, which eventually get utilities and services and become formalized. In the US we just bulldoze them.
@ai6yr it’s terrible for all of those reasons but they are also shooting the rest of us in the foot. I’d like public bathrooms and water fountains and park benches.
@ai6yr
Are they proposing Civilisation?
I'm not sure that would be welcome in the USA.