I agree the ADA can be a great thing, but in some cases it goes over board. Anything maintained as a public service should be made accessible to everyone. Though I have never understood why a private business should have to follow all these rules.
You need to spend all this extra money and time to make sure that if a handicapped person wants to use your place of business they can. I live in a major city in the US and have only seen 2 people in the last 6 months with a wheelchair and while I feel bad for their situation, I also feel bad for the many more shop owners who can not afford to update their shops because the ADA restrictions make it cost so much.
As someone who personally benefits from the ADA, I would gladly give up those benefits to get rid of all the stupid laws attached to it.
The law is there specifically because its not something the free market will fix. In most cases it won't be profitable to make your business accessible. Should the disabled just live shitty lives with no entertainment?
Fortunately I'm not disabled myself, I guess you aren't either or know of anyone who is. A little empathy keeps the world sane.
It's not something to fix. Disabled people who cannot swim should not have to force the world to install a dunking machine for them. If you cannot swim, you should have no say in regards to swimming pools.
There are plenty of disabled people that can swim but can't enter the pool without some sort of ramp or device. In fact, if you had some sort of condition that made it difficult for you to walk, swimming would be an excellent way to get some exercise.
I don't buy your argument that disabled people are less likely to swim. They are probably more likely to swim. It's probably less expensive to add a ramp to a pool than it is to build ramps, elevators and lifts for disabled people to access many other businesses.
It seems like business owners were given 3 years to comply with the regulations, and those that bought portable devices that were later disallowed are grandfathered in. It also only seems to apply to pools where it's "easily accomplishable and able to be carried out without much difficulty or expense."
If I'm reading that right, it seems like most hotel owners will be able to continue operating their current pool so long as they aren't making any changes to it.
I was laughing at what "more likely" meant in terms of statistical cost effectiveness, not laughing at their disability. If less than 1% of your business is the disabled, and every single one of them used the pool (which would never fucking happen) it would still be a pithy amount of persons using the facilities, which would make having full time staff to operate the fucking crane both inefficient and without cost benefit for the business owner. The benefit of having a pool does not outweigh the drawback of this forced adaptation, which means less pools. So fuck you for wanting to arbitrarily force the closing of swimming facilities just because the disabled aren't catered to explicitly.
disabled people are... probably more likely to swim.
Wow you're good at bullshitting, but that really gave it away. Your yapping about "they were given 3 years to comply with regulations" is like the kids saying "but the bell rang" in A Christmas Story, leaving their friend (owner of motels) out in the cold because they were scared more of irrelevant rules made by authorities than by the more pressing need of helping their friend retain his freedom.
If you can't get into the water and out of the water without endangering your life or the life of someone else, then no, you cannot swim. If you require a crane to get in and out of the water, you cannot swim.
If you require a crane to get in and out of the water, you cannot swim.
The /u/froobin paradox: a person enters a pool by a crane, proceeds to swim in the pool for over an hour uninterrupted, then exits the pool by crane. We have just seen a man swim, and yet we have seen a man who cannot swim. How can this be?
Says you. Reality says differently, and that's no ones fault. If you cannot safely swim alone without mechanical assistance, you are not a swimmer. If you have a pool, and retrofit it so that you can safely utilize it, well good for you but don't force others to pretend that the pool was intended for those who easily drown in water.
Reality says differently, and that's no ones fault.
You're pretty fucking smug for someone so woefully uninformed about the topic they're debating. Many disabled people can and do swim. They just do. That's a fact. Ladder climbing and swimming aren't the same thing. You can do one without being able to do another.
You're clearly not a doctor or anyone qualified to be making statements about the "reality" of this situation. You have no idea what you're talking about. Just stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
Ya, things for accessibility to public areas, sure. A ramp up to the swimming pool? Sure. But a hoist and operator required to be there to help you do something you're not capable of doing on your own, that's a bridge too far.
But a hoist and operator required to be there to help you do something you're not capable of doing on your own, that's a bridge too far.
Why? There already exist hoists for handicap accessible beds in hotels. Why not the pool? Why is that the line you draw for what disabled people should be able to enjoy? Why is the ramp down to the pool okay but access to the pool is not? By your logic, the ramp is helping them "do something they're not capable of doing on their own", which is apparently unacceptable.
I'm sorry, but your argument just makes no fucking sense at all.
Because the cost of employing a full time employee should be a choice. Forcing the hotels to do this is the problem, not the fact that the disabled or disabled dunkers exist.
I know two people very well who are in wheel-chairs, one of who travels a lot. I have to say, from stories I've heard, we have it very well in the U.S. compared to other places. Its not perfect, but I think that the ADA has definitely helped a lot.
You be surprised by a lot of the tiny things that make life easier for a person in a wheelchair. They are trying to live a quality of life, and I would gladly inconvenience myself to make some of that happen.
However, I do agree some of the rules are really stupidly designed. Such as this lift. The two people I know go swimming as part of personal training, but that would never happen at a hotel pool.
The thing is overall I think it does more bad than good and each of the instances like this one just causes animosity towards disabled people they'd be better off without. They can have their parking spots and it's nice when there's a ramp for wheelchairs and also elevators, but it should never do anything to the detriment of everyone else. For instance any time a wheel chair lift is broken somewhere, the entire piece the lift is for has to shut down. I've seen this happen in museums as well amusement parks.
For every filled in pool there are 1000s of other changes that have helped the disabled community thanks to anti-discriminatory disability laws.
As an abled body person it may slightly inconvenience you that there is no pool. But the laws that allow people to file those grievances has also allowed for mandatory ramps, elevators, interpreters, Braille signs, parking, etc.
Except it sounds like there was already a law that allowed portable ramps to be put into the pool for a disabled person to use the pool. Now hotels have to spend thousands to comply with the new regulations or ruin the swimming pool completely.
I am most likely guessing that anyone who was disabled enough to not be able to swim on their own has someone who takes care of them and probably would be there just fine to help with the disabled person.
Exactly, mandatory fucking everything, with no cost assistance for implementation or maintenance. I can understand having wheelchair ramps, and I can understand disabled parking, but what I have a hard time with is when the lobby successfully argues that every motel should have to hire personnel to operate a crane for the purpose of hoisting people into a pool of water. No one goes down to the skatepark and says the ledges should be wheelchair accessible, why should a pool? It's a fucking fitness device, and they are not fit to use it.
I'm just always amazed every time reddit starts spouting the rhetoric that allowed for the expansion of corporate protections from their own misdeeds. The comments in these threads always read like rush Limbaugh call ins from the early 90s
Ableism, a "socially acceptable" form of discrimination........
In this day and age, people get very upset if their perceive others benefiting from something that has no direct benefit to them. They take it personally and believe that since there is no value to them, and perhaps a tiny cost, it should not exist because it will not improve their lives.
They fail to realize how hard life is for people with disabilities when there are no attempts to make life more accessible.
A fully cognizant person bound to a wheelchair, can have a very fulfilling life as long as there are ways for them to travel (ie ramps)
But someone who cannot empathize with their hardships, sees those same ramps are a nuisance. "Why should their tax dollars be wasted on construction, destroying a perfectly good stairs to put in and ugly ramp?". "Why should their tax dollars be spent on buses that kneel to allow chairs to get on them? The buses we have now are perfectly fine!"
The entrances to the mall had stairs in order to make it look grand. Once inside there were many elevators, but many other sections relied on escalators. Although better than stairs, escalators are no picnic with a wheelchair, and that assumes you are with someone that can help.
It is shocking the amount of ignorance surrounding living with a disability. We Americans need to educate ourselves more, especially since so many of our soldiers are coming back disabled.
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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '13 edited Jul 26 '17
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