I’ll add another inconvenient truth that I’ve realized. You can copy every law and policy that’s working so well in some other (Scandinavian) place and have it still fail horribly. That’s because it was never the laws that were working, but the society and culture as a whole. You can’t bring good laws to a place with a disintegrating social fabric and expect the same results.
Yes. Exactly same way that trying to transplant ideas like agile or microservices or testing driven development fails so miserably most of the time.
It is not that the ideas are wrong.
It is that they are not the correct moves for a team that is not ready for them.
I know it sounds like a silly parallel. But changing societies is hard, long, unique and not well understood process. It makes sense to try to learn from examples where it is much easier to gather some information.
When I come to meet a team that has trouble (I work as an advisor and help teams that have trouble), I am not coming with a library of good solutions BECAUSE IT IS FUCKING NOT WORKING. Time and time again, I am repairing after previous people who did just that -- they came with a solution thinking they know it all because it worked somewhere. More often than not they have observed something working, they learned elements they could easily understand and they tried to transplant and failed miserably.
So whether you are trying to fix a team or fix a homelessness problem, you have to come with an empty mind and willingness to relentlessly problem solve. And look at those other successful examples as examples to learn from but not necessarily duplicate.
I don't. I mean I do a bit, but the main reason I find it unsurprising and actually logical is that it is easier to talk about stuff we do not know about in terms of things we already do.
A lot of us here have more experience in working or introducing microservices that shaping drug abuse policy. I would be surprised if there was one politician here who actually was responsible for dealing with the problem himself/herself.
There's often not even a serious analysis of the environmental, political, and socio-cultural factors behind and around these ideas to determine if they can even theoretically work on paper, even with very generous assumptions.
Let alone whether they can work in the real world.
In this case I don't think anyone in Portland or Oregon attempted such an analysis.
Not sure they were necessarily referring to drug policy but rather the tendency in other western democracies to try to implement Scandinavian social policies in other countries, often with poor results. In the US, if you go to more than a couple of public meetings, you're bound to hear someone comment "Well, in Norway..." as justification for their support for a particular program or policy.
Absolutely this. A country needs a healthy government and public employees dedicated and honest. A culture of sacrifice for public good. Not "but meeeeee!" culture.
It does not work where the "Deep State" is the enemy and grifters run for Congress to become Twitter trolls.
I don't disagree with you, but I don't think that's the problem here necessarily. I admittedly don't know much about the attitudes of Portland's commission members.
I think more to the point the issue is that you can't legislate morality. Some people will break the law no matter how harsh the penalty, and some people will take advantage of permissiveness no matter how much you try to help. Some problems the government just can't fix.
