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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

As awful as North Korea is, I am _really_ impressed at the cleanliness of the subway station in the photos.

Not a scrap of litter, no graffiti, no sketchy people and probably doesn't even smell like piss. Floors are obviously meticulously scrubbed.

Kudos to North Korea! (OK, I know its an oppressive hellhole, but goddamn the subways are clean).

Meanwhile, in NYC, we have viral video of a rat dragging Pizza down stairs in a subway.

View on HN

If NYC decided to punish littering by imprisoning you, your entire family, and all of your descendants in perpetuity in some of the world's worst labor/torture/starvation camps....NYC would be pretty spotless too.

Yeah, I get what you're saying. But what would it take to keep folks in NYC from littering? Is that the only way people stop littering-- when they're threatened with imprisonment, flogging, or worse?

Ask Singapore? A combination of fines for littering, huge city clean-up crews, and the "Broken Window" theory [1]

[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Broken_windows_theory

This was also true in the not quite as oppressive (but still oppressive by Western standards) Eastern European dictatorships pre-1989. It's from a combination of reasons -- fear that graffiti/litter would get you in trouble and the fact that in order to approach full employment, many more people were involved in cleaning than under capitalism.

Higher employment achieved by keeping public services at a higher standard doesn't sound like such a horrible idea to borrow from those regimes.

It's not affordable unless you're an oppressive totalitarian regime.

[Citation needed]

We're already running huge deficits... No citation is needed to understand that hiring a massive number of people to pick up litter is unaffordable.

You say that like we're not running huge deficits by design, on purpose, and with the approval of those most empowered to effect change.

> We're already running huge deficits...

In large part due to massive governmental inefficiencies, massive defence spending, and because the richest individuals and corporations hardly pay any tax on their (real) earnings...

Isn't it weird how it's not affordable to pay for a new public service but as soon that job is being done you're told not to get too attached because a robot will be along promptly to replace you?

This is very true; some years ago a friend who works for the Foreign Office was posted to Tunisia, and we went to visit her there. She pointed out a guy at a traffic intersection in a splendid uniform with white gloves, waving on and halting the traffic, basically doing the job of a set of traffic lights. This would have been derided in Europe or the US, and yet here was a guy with a purpose to his life rather than sitting around unemployed. Even the uniform seemed designed to imbue the job with kudos.

> in order to approach full employment

Maybe Cameron could get some ideas from good ol' Kim

Or may be some people don't litter not because of fear of trouble but because they know how to behave?

Also about more cleaning: there is a proverb that sounds something like "It's clean not where a lot of cleaning has place but where people are not littering"

The New York subway could make almost anywhere look clean. Certainly every subway I've been on in Europe was spotless by comparison, and even the ones elsewhere in the US were pretty good.

It's quite horrible. I've moved to NYC recently and had to get an apartment close to work to make sure I don't have to use the subway system.

DPRK's subway system is clean because the punishment for littering is so severe.

if someone gets a ticket for littering in NYC people on HN are all up in arms. I don't have a link for it now but take a look at the comments for the story about the policing slowdown in New York when they stopped writing tickets for parking, turnstile jumping, and other minor offenses. People were all like "yeah, we don't need parking tickets! Society works fine without them, they are just for revenue! Punishment does nothing to effect behavior!"

Yes, and the trains run on time, too.

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