251–260 of 660 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
USSR did that. USSR collapsed. 250M of people suffered, more than 30M died. Rinse and repeat.
You would never apply this attitude to programming. "Well, I got a segfault, better never touch this C language again..."
Really? 30 million deaths wouldn't give you pause? Therac-25 killed or injured 6 people and we still talk about that.
Communism doesn't deserve another chance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what he's pointing out is that the traditional meaning of "privatization" is linked to going to a for-profit organization rather than a non-profit-government one. In this sense, the fact that this was delegated to non-profit organizations, which have the same objectives as the state (provide help, rather than profit) makes some difference. So the issue here seem more the funding cuts rather than who manages t…
Smaller, disjointed entities have, by definition, higher overheads: if before you had 1 payroll accountant for 100 state employees, then you split duties over 5 nonprofits, now you have 5 payroll accountants. The counter-argument is that the 5 orgs can be somewhat more efficient than the one monolith, but the key is the conditional: they can , but there is no guarantee, whereas the 4 extra overheads are guaranteed .…
Because, as organizations scale up and enough time passes, the usual outcome is a gigantic web of inscrutable policies and procedures. And lots of people to write and enforce them. Getting something done that in a small organization can trivially be handled by the person originally seeing the need for it, will in a large organization often involve five other people in a messy chain of emails. Or it can't be done at all, unless one is willing and able to play politics to get it done.
Example: I work at a school/university with some 30 thousand students, that is the merger product of many smaller schools, each targeting different professions. These mergers were done for efficiency reasons. I'd estimate the teacher/support head count overhead for these originals schools to be somewhere between 30 and 50%. Currently, we're well over 100% overhead. So we employ more non-teachers than we employ teachers. (And on top of that, teachers handle a lot of non-teaching-related work, of course.) Somehow, the merger is seen as a success.
Small organizations are awesome. It's a shame that government rules and regulations often make them unsustainable.
/rant
Talk about burying the lede, 11 years ago they privatized their drug oversight operation and cut funding by over 80%. Gee, I wonder if that could have an impact? > After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by th…
Whoever approved the cut in funding by 80% needs to be in prison for the harm they have caused.
Talk about burying the lede, 11 years ago they privatized their drug oversight operation and cut funding by over 80%. Gee, I wonder if that could have an impact? > After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by th…
Same sort of thing happened with mental illness in california, probably a leading cause of homelessness problems. Years ago, the law was changed to allow mentally-ill but benign or even non-ill people to escape the "snake pits", mental institutions that kept people incarcerated and drugged. This allowed lots of people to recover. But then Ronald Reagan (as governor of california) cut state mental illness funding. Now…
> Now clearly mentally ill people - who needed help - were turned away unless they were clearly "a danger to themselves and others".
It's been 50 years between then and now, so... why has no other politician increased it if the funding cut was the problem?
Talk about burying the lede, 11 years ago they privatized their drug oversight operation and cut funding by over 80%. Gee, I wonder if that could have an impact? > After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by th…
> nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.
You mean like a west-coast American city?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. They slashed funding to successful parts of the strategy and now claim the strategy failed. A convenient narrative for politicians, but hardly truth.
Portuguese politicians are doing the same with the public healthcare system there (deliberately underfunding it to be able to claim that it "failed"). They want to follow the "good" example of the US, like most other EU member states are now doing.
For example, the UK's public healthcare funding has increased from below 3% of GDP to over 7% from the 1950s until 2018/2019 (so just before covid).[0] And yet the perception is that the NHS is always underfunded.
The UK's budget in 2018-19 was £842 billion and almost £160 billion went to essentially the NHS. I think that we will eventually have to settle into a reality of always underfunded public healthcare and it's going to get worse, because these problems plague essentially all European countries (and many others in the world).
[0] https://www.health.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/full_wi...
“When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well. Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.” There's the Singapore solution. "Singapore executes man for tra…
The opposite of this is the UK where you can go to a festival and have any drugs you bought tested to make sure they are genuine and then handed back to you, no questions asked. Obviously, the solution is somewhere between these two extremes. The softer end seems to be loosing though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah gosh, like, wow, you can't arrest someone without a jolly good reason... I can see the sad-faces all around, as journo's at the Oligarch's Daily Tribue lament that human rights are completely out of control now that cops can't roust people and smack them around for the crime of making their own personal choices, harming nobody. "B..b..but what about property values?!"
"B..b..but what about property values?!" You mean that thing around which the entire economies of the western world revolve around?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get it. Someone smoking something doesn't bother me, unless maybe if I can smell it, then it bothers me very, very slightly. The same way someone drinking a beer in public doesn't bother me. How could it? If sleeping on the street is a crime, enforce that crime. Don't pretend that if we magically banned all of the hypothetical reasons people might commit that crime that it will eliminate that crime. We can't…
The world is full of things that can't be eliminated, but we benefit greatly from reducing their occurrence.
“When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well. Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.” There's the Singapore solution. "Singapore executes man for tra…
The opposite of this is the UK where you can go to a festival and have any drugs you bought tested to make sure they are genuine and then handed back to you, no questions asked. Obviously, the solution is somewhere between these two extremes. The softer end seems to be loosing though.
