• @ReallyActuallyFrankenstein
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    1774 months ago

    I’m confused, isn’t this a better spot for the drain hole? When you sit facing the wall? So you have a shelf for your comic books and chocolate milk?

    • @[email protected]
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      4 months ago

      It looks like it’s designed to soak your balls if you flush mid-poop. I’m not into this.

      I understand the Dutch may have different tastes, though.

      Edit: if you go about things butters style, you’ll get an unhealthy butthole douching.

    • @[email protected]
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      64 months ago

      We had these here as well and i have no idea. The only thing i ever heard that made sense was it was easier to take stool samples. That makes some sense, but why would every household need them?

      • @[email protected]
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        4 months ago

        I’ve blasted this all over Reddit back in the day and now I’ll blast it here: HOW OFTEN ARE THE DUTCH COLLECTING THEIR STOOLS THAT THEY NEED THIS KIND OF TOILET IN EVERY HOUSEHOLD? THEY USE IT EVERY DAY AND NOT JUST AT A DOCTOR’S OFFICE OR A HOSPITAL WHERE YOU WOULD THINK THAT STOOL SAMPLES WOULD BE COLLECTED OFTEN.

        To this day no one has ever given me a reasonable believable explanation that makes sense. I’d be happy to hear that “all the greedy corporate toilet makers didn’t want to change their design to save money and now we’re all stuck with this dumb toilet blah blah blah” or “we Dutch folk have a special device to sit on that you don’t see in this picture that makes the design of this toilet sensible” or even “we simply love looking at a big stinky pile of s*** every time we take a dump you wouldn’t understand we’re Dutch”

        I stayed in hotels and motels in the Netherlands and they all had the stupid toilet and it stanks so bad and they don’t believe in ventilated bathroom so you just have to open a window and smell it and your wife and kids have to smell it too. it’s so dumb. I ended up flushing every single turd one by one just to survive.

  • @[email protected]
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    1394 months ago

    Apparently this design was popular in Germany a hundred years or so ago. Its key advantage was allowing the user to examine their stools for signs of digestive health problems.

  • Diplomjodler
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    4 months ago

    Story time: I once briefly lived in a place that had an old toilet bowl like this. You can still find them in older houses. One day I took a massive shit and then found out that the flush wasn’t strong enough to get it down from there. And there wasn’t a brush. Yikes. Just wanted to share that with you guys.

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)
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      1054 months ago

      I have some experience with these. The only problem is that as the vertically standing excrement begins to collapse forwards, there is a chace for it to keep contact and drag its top portion across, from your anus towards the front. You can avoid this with a maneuver, pulling yourself up and slightly forward, right after the singular vertical log begins losing contact with the excretion area.

      This is not a joke

      • @[email protected]
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        374 months ago

        Give this person an honorary degree in Turd Dynamics. Have you considered publishing your findings in the journal Nature?

        • ALoafOfBread
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          4 months ago

          Males need 37g of fiber daily for optimum health. That’s the equivalent of 568g of raspberries or 657g of green peas or 1,154g of broccoli. Might wanna start taking some psyllium husk so you don’t get ass cancer.

          • Liz
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            44 months ago

            If your diet is so lacking in fiber that you need to take pills to make up for it, fix your damn diet.

            • ALoafOfBread
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              4 months ago

              Don’t take the pills - the serving size on them is very misleading. You have to take a ton of them to have any effect. Gotta go with the powder.

              Nothing wrong with supplementation! It’s hard to eat that much fiber (even if your diet is good) due to the relatively low fiber density of most foods. We adapted to our food sources, not so much the other way around, and when we did adapt our food sources to us we were not thinking of maximizing fiber content - and we don’t spend all day chewing on fibrous, foraged plants anymore. Plus, psyllium husk is a food. It’d be the same as eating a shitload of flax or something but with fewer calories.

              For instance, raspberries are one of the most fiber dense foods at 8g fiber/100g of berries. You’d need to eat 568g to get your RDA of fiber. The avg person eats around 1.85kg of food daily - 30% of your diet by weight would need to be raspberries (one of the most fiber dense foods) to get enough fiber. Even moreso with other fiber-rich foods, like broccoli. You’d need 1.1kg of broccoli each day (8kg/week). The sheer bulk of that amount of food would be challenging for most people and just isn’t practical.

              • Liz
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                24 months ago

                So you eat half a kilo of raspberries, and then the rest of your diet is a juice cleanse? Here an example diet: oats for breakfast (6 g), a sandwich loaded with greens for lunch (4 g), chili for dinner (15 g). Throw in an apple for a snack (5 g). It’s really not that hard.

                The National Academy of Medicine recommends:

                • Women 51 and older: 21 grams of fiber per day
                • Men 51 and older: 30 grams of fiber per day

                Now your numbers go with 45 g per day, but honestly that example diet would leave me hungry. I’d probably also have a peanut butter and banana sandwich (7 g). Throw in a small amount of berries or raisins into the breakfast oats and we’ve hit your higher target.

                • ALoafOfBread
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                  4 months ago

                  Fair enough! It can be a little harder to hit consistently in practice depending on the level of variety in your diet, if you go out occasionally, etc. In my opinion and personal experience, anyway. But that is a solid and reasonable meal plan without a doubt.

                  The raspberries example was more an example of if one were to “fibermax” as the kids will be saying in 20yrs. Trying to most efficiently achieve the RDA with the most fiber dense foods possible - not intended as an actual, reasonable diet.

            • ALoafOfBread
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              4 months ago

              Looks like they are 3.8g per 2 biscuit serving? So like 19.5 biscuits or around 370g.

      • @[email protected]
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        4 months ago

        Haven’t you thought of shitting in a backwards sitting position?

        I prefer the kiss of poseidon over the casualities of deforestation

    • @TheRisingApe
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      434 months ago

      We referred to it as the poop shelf on our last visit.

      • @[email protected]
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        314 months ago

        You’ve clearly never seen an American eat. 3 triple burgers, a large fry, and a milkshake is the standard dinner while dieting.

            • @[email protected]
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              14 months ago

              Fools! My family did that and now I’ve grown up to have a food stuffing fetish

              (That is, deriving pleasure in eating about as much food as I can in one sitting)

              Not necessarily sexual, just… satisfying

    • @[email protected]
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      144 months ago

      The real problem is your turds are exposed to open air the whole time, so the smell fucking awful the whole time.

    • @[email protected]
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      424 months ago

      Did you have the light switch outside the bathroom too? That way your friends can make you poop in the dark

      • DefederateLemmyMl
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        174 months ago

        Still better than a light sensor in a communal bathroom… outside of the stalls. That’s how it is at my workplace. If I spend a bit too long pooping, and nobody else comes in to poop at the same time, I end up in the dark. Then when I have to wipe, I have to either risk opening the stall door and wave into the room, with my dirty ass hanging out, hoping nobody happens to enter the bathroom at that time, or wait patiently for someone to come in and reactivate the light. Makes me wonder how blind people check their wiping: do they go on flavor or smell?

      • @[email protected]
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        104 months ago

        Oh, is that not a thing some places? I think the majority are outside here in the UK, generally electricals are not allowed inside the bathroom (although I’m not sure this actually covers light switches as I’m sure some of them are in there…)

        • @[email protected]
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          24 months ago

          In the US, it’s extremely rare to have a light switch outside if yhe room with the light. Usually there’s a lights witch and a couple sockets in the bathroom by the mirror.

      • @[email protected]
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        84 months ago

        Lol I’m in the states, but one of my friends houses had this “feature” growing up. I definitely turned the light off on him a few times. To top it off, this bathroom had no windows so it got fucking dark in there. It wouldn’t even work today, everyone has phones w them now n would just use that after you turned it off. Kids these days…

        • @[email protected]
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          74 months ago

          I’ve never had to deal with this, but I always plug in those blue glow night lights in the bathroom so they don’t crash into things when I go to take a piss in the middle of night.

  • @[email protected]
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    4 months ago

    American toilets gave me culture shock

    They’re so shallow that you can’t even sit down without your balls touching the bowl or the water

    • The Menemen!
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      4 months ago

      I hated them, they made me anxious. But much worse were the low stall walls. Why america, why? When I take a shit I want a wall that actually serves the purpose of not having people see me taking a shit.

      On another note, the Dutch style toilets were very common in Germany up until the 90s. Rare nowadays. I think they are actually superior. You see it, if you have a problem with your shit and even the largest shit doesn’t splash water all over your intimate parts. On the other hand, you have to protect your balls from the large shit, when it goes “timber”.

      • @[email protected]
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        194 months ago

        I’ve always known that our stall walls in the US were shit, but then I visited Sweden and saw how truly horrible we were.

        Over there, there are no men’s rooms or women’s rooms. There are just several doors each to a private bathroom and so it doesn’t matter who uses which one.

        I’m sure our “single room with flimsy stall dividers” design is the cheapest, plus it’s not as convenient for all the drug addicts and homeless people our society creates, so it will never change.

      • @[email protected]
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        24 months ago

        I think you mean high stall walls and not low. You’re talking about the huge gap so the janitors can sweep and mop easier.

        • The Menemen!
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          4 months ago

          No, I meant that I literally could see people taking a shit when walking in the restrooms at several places, because the walls were just ~180cm high (and I am taller than 180cm).

          • @[email protected]
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            14 months ago

            I’ve never seen stall walls that short but usually when I’m sitting, I would not be able to see over it. Generally the giant gaps between panels are enough to let someone see you from the door.

  • @[email protected]
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    424 months ago

    They had these in Germany, too. If you took a particularly massive shit sometimes the water pressure wasn’t enough to shove it into the hole.

      • Jesus
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        34 months ago

        Problem has more to do with the streaks. There are many.

          • @[email protected]
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            24 months ago

            Just saying you have a process for dealing with the problem is not as good as solving the problem.

            Is there some other problem being solved by the shelf? Like do they have really terrible water pressure and need to rely on gravity and a slope?

            • @[email protected]
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              14 months ago

              In my experience, the shelf helps avoid having water splash your nethers, which happens to me more often than leaving streaks, so I prefer it over having my urine splash back up at me.

      • @[email protected]
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        24 months ago

        I mean, you flush it down regardless, so I never noticed a difference as far as that goes.

        • @[email protected]
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          24 months ago

          If it drops right in water it’s much less smelly. I’ve used em all over different times, if you’ve got a real bad smelling poo you don’t want that on no shelf!

  • Lord Wiggle
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    424 months ago

    Those are actually French toilets. They were designed like this so you can check for blood and other abnormalities. British toilets were designed so the poop would fall in the water, reducing the stench. The British design proved more popular, yet the French design is better with less splashing and for checking. It’s important to check, to find out if there’s something wrong with your intestines like cancer (black blood) or a tapeworm. The British didn’t find this important, just like washing hands after pooping.

    • @[email protected]
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      124 months ago

      It’s important to check, to find out if there’s something wrong with your intestines like cancer (black blood) or a tapeworm.

      Hungarian here, many in this country prefer the “betegvécé” (French), yet cannot say anything about what they should check for. It’s just virtue signaling, no matter how much people have been abusing that term.

    • @[email protected]
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      4 months ago

      reducing the stench splashing your testicles with the urine shit surface cleaner mixture

    • Fogle
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      74 months ago

      Are you unable to see blood if it falls in the water?

      • @[email protected]
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        124 months ago

        You can absolutely see your poop in the water and the water would turn red or a darker color if there was blood which is probably more obvious lol

        • Lord Wiggle
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          24 months ago

          If you don’t wipe so it isn’t covered with toilet paper, sure.

          • Fogle
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            34 months ago

            You can look before you throw toilet paper. How does a poop shelf act any different when you throw toilet paper on it

  • @[email protected]
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    4 months ago

    Pedophiles in the olympics, our strange toilets with the “poop shelf”; I just can’t win today.

    Edit: it’s so you can inspect it. How is everyone else inspecting their poo?

    • @[email protected]
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      124 months ago

      I think for most people it’s kinda a shit n forget situation. As soon as I have dropped the load I want to disown it and forget it faster than you can say “shit”. You know just like pa did it.

  • @[email protected]
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    4 months ago

    Comments on toilets of France, England, and Germany by Slavoj Zizek: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8mtZmBvat4k

    Another good bit (not in the video) is that Zizek thinks that’s why Germans can endure great pain and sacrifices for an ideal…if you are strong enough to observe your shit for health reasons, there’s nothing you can’t do!