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Comment by santaclaus | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a good opportunity to design and distribute plastic bags specifically for people poops (sort of like the bags for dog poops).

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Or maybe fix the low cost housing problem and maybe create better homeless day centers and public bathrooms? Just an idea...

Hang up doggy bag distributers on telephone poles downtown - sure just give me an afternoon.

Also, fix the homeless problem. - https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tasks.png

It's interesting to me that now the "figure out if the picture is of a bird" task is becoming "gimme a few hours"

Anaheim has decent homeless day centers and has actually invested into container-based housing to accommodate the homeless population by the riverbed, but the issue is not as binary. It also has a decent share of large churches doing all sorts of outreach programs to help the poor.

For a variety of reasons - fear of government control, previous negative experience, fear of harassment or violence, conspiracies conjured up by someone with a mental condition - many homeless refuse "the system" and prefer the riverbank.

Unfortunately, the plastic bag ban is only a side effect of the real problem. California has a homeless problem and there aren't enough resources made available in California to address this. The homeless don't have access to resources to readily dispose of waste.

One of the richest and largest polities on earth doesn't have the resources to guarantee basic sanitaion for all residents.

One of the richest and largest polities on earth has a large number of mentally-ill people who would befoul basic sanitation facilities were they given access to them.

The definition of rich is "having a great deal of money or assets", California's tight budget doesn't leave much room for a large reserve - what comes in gets spent the same year, and it's always a mystery whether or not the state will be solvent next year.

Thank prop 13 for that.

Or high-speed rail. Or unreasonable pension obligations.

Just prop 13. If a less well off Europe can handle all 3 so can the richest state in the richest country.

While statutory property tax increases are exclusive to California, homeless populations are not.

Being so spectacularly wealthy and having such a large homelessness problem at the same time is unique to California though.

Hence "wealth distribution" problem, not "not having enough wealth" problem.

Again, what number are you looking at to call California wealthy? California state budget revenues are $4,366 per capita, which is fairly low-end. North Dakota, Wyoming, Washington, Kentucky, Minnesota and Oregon are all in solid five digits a head. California's is richer than Georgia's $2,320 per capita for sure, but if it were a person in a company of 49 other friends, it would be a low-income friend always trying to borrow money.

A GDP of $2.6 trillion, highest in the US and 14% of the US total. Deliberate starvation of state and city budgets doesn't stop California from being the richest state.

from the article, that seems to be exactly what some of the groups are doing. I have to believe there's a better way to deal with this but I'm not sure what it is. I know other places (notably europe) it's more common to have public restrooms but I don't know how they deal with the problems associated with them (perceived or real).

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