Is anyone actually around? I can't find the spot.
I think your model only applies to some famous cases, but ignored others. Who invented computers? Who invented television networks? Who invented the internet?
Lots of things have inventors and patents only for specific chunks of them, or specific versions, but are as a whole too big to be encompassed. They're not necessarily very well defined technologies, but systems and concepts that can be implemented in many different ways. In these fields, focusing on patents is likely to be a losing strategy anyway as you'll simply stand still to protect your one increasingly obsolete good idea like Homer Simpson in front of his sugar while everyone else runs circles around you with their legally distinct versions of the same thing that they keep iterating and improving on. I think AI and even LLMs fall under this category. It's specifically quite hard to patent algorithms - and good thing too, or it would really have a chilling effect for the whole field. I think you can patent only a specific implementation of them, but that's very limited; you can't patent the concept of a self-attention layer, for example, as that's just math. And that kind of thing is all it takes to build your own spin on an LLM anyway.
Omnicide I can get behind, but patent infringement would be a bridge too far!
I think in general it's mostly 1); obviously "infinite perfect bathroom availability everywhere" isn't a realistic goal, so this is about striking a compromise that is however more practical than the current situation. For things like these honestly I am disinclined to trust private enterprise too much - especially if left completely unregulated - but am willing to concede that it's not my main value. Obviously I wouldn't want the sidewalk to be entirely crowded out by competing paid chemical toilets though, that solves one problem but creates another.
Since the discussion here started around homelessness, and homeless people obviously wouldn't be able to pay for private bathrooms (especially if these did the obvious thing for convenience and forgo coins in exchange for some kind of subscription service, payment via app, or such), I think the best solution would be free public bathrooms, and I think they would "pay themselves" in terms of gains in comfort and cleanliness for the people living in the neighborhood. They should be funded locally of course. Absent that though, sure, I think removing some barriers to private suppliers of paid for bathroom services would still be better than this.
My wife was put on benzodiazepines not long ago for a wisdom tooth extraction, same as the author of that post. She did manifest some of the same behaviours (e.g. asking the same thing repeatedly). But your plan to make people in those conditions take an IQ test has a flaw: she was also obviously high as balls. No way her cognitive abilities weren't cut down to like half of the usual. Not sure if this is a side effect of the loss of short term memory or a different effect of the sedatives, but yeah, this would absolutely impact an experiment IMO.
No, sorry, it's not that I didn't find it clear, but I thought it was kind of an irrelevant aside - it's obviously true (though IMO going to a barista and passing a bill while whispering "you didn't see anything" might not necessarily work that well either), but my original comment was about the absurdity of the lack of systemic solutions, so saying there are individual ones doesn't really address the main claim.
We're discussing whether this is a systemic problem, not whether there are possible individual solutions. We can come up with solutions just fine, in fact most of the times you can just waltz in, go to the bathroom, and no one will notice. But "everyone pays bribes to the barista to go to the bathroom" absolutely makes no sense as a universal rule over "we finally acknowledge this is an issue and thus incorporate it squarely in our ordinary services instead of making up weird and unnecessary work-arounds".
Tipping the barista is not really sticking to the rules of the business, though. It's bribing the watchman to close an eye, and the watchman must take the bribe (and deem it worthy its risks).
Which is probably why there were apparently >50,000 pay bathrooms in the USA before some activists got them outlawed
Oh, I didn't know this story. Seems like a prime example of "be careful what economic incentives you're setting up". All that banning paid toilets has done is... less toilets, not more free toilets.
Though wonder if now you could run a public toilet merely by plastering it with ads.
Yeah, I found it pretty soon after.