One of the reasons this toilet is so expensive no doubt, is that the new SF public toilets are self cleaning and will have attendants on duty to try to prevent this. The one on golden gate park and Haight closes after each visitor to spray the inside down like a dishwasher, and has an attendant on duty to make sure no one is inside while it does that (and to generally discourage people from shady stuff). It's not perfect but they have been clean every time I used it.
It's not some startups self cleaning sensor, this is old technology that is in several other cities without attendants, and is basically idiot proof. The attendant hopefully makes it american-idiot proof too.
All the toilets in Paris self-clean between users. You don't need the sensor to work not to get sprayed, just to exit the toilet when a voice says "EXIT THE TOILET NOW, THE SELF CLEANING PROCESS IS ABOUT TO BEGIN.
I used one of these and the self clean cycle started without warning while I was washing my hands. I couldn’t have been in there more than 4-5 minutes. Luckily the door didn’t lock so I was able to escape before getting “cleaned”.
Even self flushing toilets are often broken. A certain building I worked at I had to jump off quickly and out of the way so it didn't spray up with a trigger happy mega flush.
They’d be injecting hard drugs, especially fentanyl, constantly in this toilet, so signs and disclosures won’t mean much. SF is a rather “special” place, you can’t easily compare to other international cities.
These were the type of public toilets in France, it was actually very interesting to see and a bit confusing as I couldn't figure out why I couldn't go in right after another person...
Absolutely, but you're reducing the risk of communicating with people who may be using the roman suffix without writing in Roman numerals. In that situation, you'd see 2M rather than MM.
The British billion went out in 1974/5 (Wilson/Healy). One billion is 1,000,000,000 and you shouldn't expect ambiguity there.
In practical terms, it doesn't matter. It'd be extremely unusual to be at the scale of the old billion (1,000,000,000,000)
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This is similar to a justification of using `i` as the variable for an iterator, or `x` and `xs` for head & tail. There are logical reasons, but it's mostly convention.
Well you're gonna be really disappointed to find out lots of people do use "mm" particularly in finance, and that Roman numerals have been used far longer than the SI system has existed.
Just because you don't use them, or aren't aware they are used, does not make it unnecessary.
By unnecessary I meant the second M in MM is redundant (since M = Mega = 1e6 is enough). And yes I am disappointed, probably just as much as people's use of imperial units :)
Edit:...
>Roman numerals have been used far longer than the SI system has existed
Indeed it has. But has its use as a suffix existed for just as long? BTW I am also disappointed that the people still use Roman numerals :) (also completely unnecessary, the Indo-Arabic number system is "better").
> An expense of $60,000 could be written as $60M. Internet advertisers are familiar with CPM which is the cost per thousand impressions.
> The letter k is also used represent one thousand. For example, an annual salary of $60,000 might appear as $60k instead of $60M. [0]
k and MM are unambiguous. You don't want to stop & think, and you definitely don't want to be off by a factor of 1000. So it makes sense to avoid typing 'M' if you have any risk of being misinterpreted.
It's mostly about the reduction of risk, it's VERY rare to see M used in this way.
This is infeasible, and what does it mean to reject something in a written document?
I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish here: you're arguing against an established convention in a sector of the market which you don't have experience with.
The upside if you're successful is that I don't need to type an additional 'M'.
The downside is that it requires enforcing a blanket standard on an industry, rather than letting it converge over time to an unambiguous standard.
Help the convergence along by objecting to the use of M=1000 wherever you see it. We already have an unambiguous standard (it is the SI system of units and suffixes if you are unsure). People should be using it.
why not have a full time janitor who cleans after each visit? much cheaper than a self cleaning toilet. even if you pay $100k to the janitor in annual salary, it will take 10+yrs to reach 1.7M and who knows what kind of issues these self cleaning toilets will have in that 10yrs.
Because a human who can afford to live in San Francisco almost certainly costs more than this machine over 10 years (the 1.7 million is for the whole project, not just the self cleaning portion), and drugged out crazies can make a mess that would be a very hard and unpleasant job to give a human.
Sure, substitute live in San Francisco with live in commuting distance of San Francisco. It's not like Daly city or Oakland are cheap either.
Even when we focus on the fiscal aspect of it, I don't think a machine is a bad idea compared to a plan of "find some willing to clean up after addicts and the mentally ill at all hours" - how much would you need to be paid to take that job and show up to outcompete the toilet-dishwasher-machine every day? California has tons of other jobs and generous social programs.
And that's ignoring the angle that we're allocating a human life to this extremely unpleasant and automatable task.
How does it work? I mean in France I saw many self-cleaning toilets (you can find some in Paris) and they don't need an attendant to function; they just wait for people to leave before the cleaning start and if you get sprayed it's just on you.
