Front page of HN…

The ROI is shit

I would like to visit now. Makes America’s rest stops look even more pathetic and cheap when I see this grandeur.

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I can assure you that as a fellow European, both this amazing jab at the Clown in Chief and the beautiful vistas have renewed my interest in travelling to Norway as soon as I can, so I'm pretty sure it will pay off!

It's also the colours of the Norwegian flag (as well as the US flag). I think the flag is quite literally coloured by the time when the flag was created (1820s, post French revolution).

So there's also all the stuff about the wonders of Japanese toilets with heated seats and bidets etc. and I was amazed at how many of what are really low budget toilets in like mid-tier shopping malls, fast food restaurants and rural train stations had the full deal. And how clean they were. Toilets in those kinds of places here are often a mess and it's not uncommon to find the toilet seat missing entirely, so nobody's installing a expensive fancy seat in a public bathroom.

The flip side is if you go off more rural, you can run into the type of toilet that Japanese people consider a "Japanese toilet". Complete opposite of the tech wonders that the rest of the world pictures when they hear Japanese toilet. Because they're pretty much relegated to toilets without much investment at this point, they're also usually much less maintained than other toilets too.

For a glimpse into public toilets in Japan, do yourself a favour and watch ‘Perfect Days’.

Yet no trash cans. It's a frustrating trade off, especially with all the vending machines. If you don't have a backpack, you're stuck carrying trash. If you do, it gets messy.

Also, this does not hold in Hokkaido. I taught English in Obihiro (well, Makubetsu) and you had to plan your trash and restroom breaks.

No trashcans anywhere though :)

Im always afraid of Japanese toilets, will I sit on it as the robot uprising starts?

> Norway has one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world

There were signs in the article lol

That chilling feeling when an intern in South Asia can freeze your trading account with one click.

Norway has done a great job with what they've been given, but remember that they've had the national equivalent of being born into a rich family - they have had enormous wealth from natural resources in the form of North Sea oil.

Almost definitionally, any amount of money spent on these kinds of washrooms would be a shitload, no?

Examples?

Epstinian rooms on the island have no equal.

My favorite Australian idiom is "built like a brick shithouse" (of a guy being very muscular).

Nope, sorry, Norwegians actually tax mining / energy corporations (so the government has money to spend on... designer dunnies!), instead of just giving away their non-renewable natural resources to billionaires for free. That's un-Australian!

Yep! From the headline, I assumed that Norway had made its own version of https://toiletmap.gov.au/

Same energy as ‘CU in the NT’.

Nominally. Public restrooms along major highways are dire in terms of cleanliness.

Trump's gargantuan adult diapers serve as his portable shithouse.

> Norwegians are honorary Australians apparently LOL, why?

> This is the problem with HN not doing humor. You are always the one who does not grok it...

Rather: many people who are not US citizens or don't live in the USA don't really care about the gossip around Donald Trump's most recent tantrum.

Thank you - I did not understand what was going on / what the tie back was.

Similarly cool reprisal from Trump 1 (made by a Dutch comedian, which was then many countries copied): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELD2AwFN9Nc

Not sure it'd be my cup of tea. I prefer a bit of privacy. This was the one I checked out in Pompeii https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/10/14/47/8e/...

The ones at Sketch near me are funky https://live.staticflickr.com/881/42433327302_280548ddd2_b.j...

Plus, there were persistent stories of terrifying beasts that lived in the sewers and bit people’s bottoms. Of course those stories could have just been invented by people who were waiting on line, to help people get done quicker.

Everyone would meet up later in the vomitorium

Agreed, the website is totally fucked

It's the dumb attempt to use video backgrounds and the varying ways that mobile devices choose to display those videos.

Ro Ro Ro :D

If you can get a job here then that will go quite some way to compensating for the high cost living and housing outside the biggest towns is relatively affordable compared to, say, UK.

In Norway they would be evicted pretty promptly.

Because he is too Trump to realize that Norway has no saying in the award

Maybe more what amazing things you you can achieve for your people when the citizens are the shareholders of the economic benefits of your country’s natural resources?

When you get a dollar bill, you can actually tell whether it's from oil or not? I can't..

What's really amazing are the lengths by which people justify they cannot have a nice society. It's easy to see, mathematically, the willingness to share has no relation to absolute GDP or where it comes from.

btw, Norway is the only country in the world which didn't get Dutch disease.

It's super impressive, isn't it!

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

Generally building public works becomes quite difficult when you have one dominant sector pushing up wages (oil and gas in this case). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

No, it's amazing what you can do with oil money _that you decide to nationalize the oil industry and use it for the public good_.

The US has plenty of oil money too.

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From Hyperion by Dan Simmons:

    My home has thirty-eight rooms on thirty-six worlds. No doors: the arched entrances are farcaster portals, a few opaqued with privacy curtains, most open to observation and entry.

    ...

    The architect, a student of the legendary Millon DeHaVre, has incorporated several small jokes into the house’s design: the steps go down to the tower room, of course, but equally droll is the exit from the eyrie which leads to the exercise room on the lowest level of Lusus’s deepest Hive, or perhaps the guest bathroom which consists of toilet, bidet, sink and shower stall on an open, wall-less raft afloat on the violet seaworld of Mare Infinitus.

I don't wanna absolve any of the evil shits in Trump's circle, or among the MAGA crowd, of blame in this. But I think the biggest issue of all is the anglosphere's love for first past the post electoral systems. There's no excuse for FPTP, and while they often have a positive side effect in giving crazies zero representation, they're vulnerable to crazies taking unchecked control of the system.

Sure, MAGA would've been a large congressional embarrassment in a proportional system. But they wouldn't run the show.

Because people voted a clown

It might be that just your knowledge of history is lacking.

Look for example to America (i mean the continent, there is no country named that). Civilisation brought extinction to various indigenous tribes, but in norther and central america. It brought slavery. In a way, we are over that now, aren't we?

Look for example to Europe (I'm so glad that no european country is so full of it and call itself just "Europe"). They had hundreds of wars in a 10 year period. Some small ... but some like the 30 year long war more devastating than even the 2nd world war.Sure, some people there (look into ex-jugoslavia or look into Russia) still think that mass-killing people is good. Oh, did I mention 2nd world war? Then look there, too. And how one society thought they have the right to extinguish Jews, Gypsies, Jehovas Witnesses, mental ill people and basically any political opponent. I still think we can say that we are over such a thing.

Look for example to Asia. There was a country that waged war on China because China was not buying enough Opium. Or look like the asian golden horde devastated with utter cruelty whole (at the time) mega-cities. And they brough the bubonic plague on top of it ...

Or look at Africa. I mentioned the slaver for America ... but actually african tribes captured people from other tribes and sold them. We can't say that slavery is totally abolished in Africa (I heard the Boko Haram does it) --- but certainly not at the scale it used to be.

If you think that society develops backwards, then just looking at how things used to be 100, 200 or 500 years.

Slowly (GW Bush and Trump 1), then suddenly (Trump 2).

It's a literal shitpost. I think you're being hyperbolic.

Recycled towels?

100% touch free? How does that work?

Are they just peeing now? One of my indelible memories in India from 20 years ago is seeing a rickshaw driver in Connaught Place, the heart of historically respectable Delhi and no isolated slum, crouching behind his rickshaw and defecating right there on the street.

Tell the Germans, they have a word for it: Wildpinkeln.

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> Trump got confused and said shithouse (which makes no sense) instead of shithole, his original term for basically any non-white country.

Is Norway really a non-white country? ;-)

Just came back from a vacation in the UK and I was amazed at how clean everything is. Not a single dog poo or cigarette butt anywhere.

I had the same thought! What do they look actually like in Norway‽ Unfortunately, because of the thing we're commenting on, Google image search has been taken over by those kinds of pictures, and none of the actual toilet and sinks!

I had to disable my adblock

Valuable perspective.

That said, our public restrooms in big American cities are, in many cases, a disgrace. Vandalized, disgusting, and sparse/inacessible

But outside of cities (and even in some cities) it’s totally fine

A detail or two would be welcome so that we could either agree or disagree on firm ground.

I'll grant you it's not perfect, primary education is a bit lacklustre, preparation for an oil free economy is not given enough effort, etc. What were your "structurally pathetic", etc. things?

As an American, this says more about the American people than it does about a single loser.

I cant believe 50% of the "free world" (umerca) put him in that place, THATs the scary part

As an American it is pure hell. Every day I feel like Marty McFly waking up in the nightmare timeline where Biff controls things. And my own brother voted for Trump 3 times yet absolutely refuses to talk about him under any circumstances.

This is probably inevitable once you combine winner-takes-all voting systems with the organized hysteria that is social networks.

Given that many of us here have helped the latter emerge and dominate the entire societal discourse, we should meditate somberly upon the law of unintended consequences. It certainly did not look this way when it started, but social networks are a major channel for hate and allow the worst of the worst to set standards for everyone else.

Frankly if AI can mitigate this, it would be a positive development and I would tolerate all the sickly-sweet sycophancy if it also steered people away from hating one another with passion.

I don't mean to bring low value demagougue, I can't help but ask myself, when Hitler rose to power, then being jailed and then rose to power even more, did the normal people who wanted nothing to do with his bs felt the same?

I used to think that the (2018) book "The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States", which ridicules Donald Trump quite a bit, was overdoing it for dramatic effect...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2020_Commission_Report_on_...

Just because you can't understand it doesn't mean it's not real.

Have you ever taken into account that perhaps it's you who has failed to understand anything about what is actually going on?

Ah yes, the timeline where the US president is a convicted sex offender, 34 times convicted felon, tried to overtake a democratically elected president, stored top secret nuclear secrets in his toilet, orchestrated a cover up of the biggest pedophile ring in history, is an active russian agent, and all we talk about is ...his tantrums....

It is like satire. I wonder if he can try bullying the olympics into giving him a 100m gold medal next.

What has this got to do with a post about Norwegian public toilets? Did you comment on the wrong post? Am I missing something?

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To be fair it's in the website itself. I agree though.

There's a good number of differences between "shithouse countries" and countries that care enough about the wellbeing of their citizens to have good, clean, and free public toilets.

We should definitely make not using that phrase one of them.

Nah. Making things great again will continue till greatness improves.

>us all

you do realize that half your country had voted for the guy three times?

You're missing a bit of political context.

After being confronted over and over by the notorious US, I think that would be peanuts for them.

Finland?

(I assume you mean Russia, but given that it’s only barely holding it together in Ukraine, it probably won’t be invading _Norway_ anytime soon).

Last I checked Norway doesn't have a border with the US ;)

I think the hundred of thousands of tourists packing the roads all summer didn't get your memo.

You can do expensive vacation or cheap vacation, and both are possible in Norway. You can get a cheap flight and sleep in a tent, or you can drive your car through Sweden.

Or you can fly in and stay on expensive hotels.

Norway has everyman's right, so for some holidaymakers that means no accommodation costs. It is also popular to do one's grocery shopping on the Swedish side of the border, or even drive up from Germany with a full load of food for the length of the holiday.

Almost everybody can afford it if they really want to.

Not thinking something is worth what it cost doesn't mean you can't afford it.