To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use • Hacker News Board

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#901

Post by jstarfish » Tue, Dec 12, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

avgcorrection wrote: post #743

vineyardmike wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the messaging of “for the actual taxpayers” phrase even if I agree mostly with the sentiment. There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. I think “productive members” has the same phrasing problems. We need to make life better for members of society that contribute and benefit from it, for people that want to be a part of society, regardless of…

We don’t have to get lost in philosophical questions of human worth here. We’re talking about addicts, not stay-at-home moms or other non-tax payers. Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate? In any case: saying that addicts are “non-productive” does not imply that stay at home moms, poor artists, or retirees are unproductive (etc. etc.).

> Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate?

Noble savages?

Loosely, addiction can be useful-- the thrill seekers among us are our pioneers. Everest wasn't Hillary's first climb, it was his tallest.

Think about the implications of that though. Pioneers die...a lot. As a group the addict class are probably meant to be sacrificial.

Pathological addiction subverts that. It's a problem in that they risk their lives for no real benefit to anyone.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#902

Post by botalert » Tue, Dec 12, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

MichaelZuo wrote: post #853

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#903

Post by Mountain_Skies » Tue, Dec 12, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #841

dougmwne wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Scandinavia isn’t uniformly permissive with drugs. Sweden is quite anti-drug.

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.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#904

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 12, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

belkinpower wrote: post #481

BizarreByte wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Canadian who travelled to Seattle recently and I found that city legitimately scary downtown. The addicts were unstable and violent like nothing I'd ever seen, even in some of the worst parts of our country. Walking through downtown Seattle at night with a suitcase trying to find my hotel is the first time in my life I thought I was about to be attacked or robbed, but thankfully I only had stuff thrown at me by…

What part of Canada? I live in the Seattle area and visited Vancouver for the first time recently, and Vancouver was much visibly worse than Seattle in terms of open drug use and general sketchiness. Obviously there’s a lot of potential selection bias there in terms of what neighborhoods I visited there vs where I spend time in Seattle. But I was still surprised at how bad it was.

[deleted]

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#905

Post by bluefirebrand » Tue, Dec 12, 2023, 5:26 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #708

bradleyjg wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are unwilling to lock people up—whether in jail or elsewhere—that’s the only opinion you get to have. Every other “rule” you propose is meaningless. Right now the nyc transit system is on the pay what you wish system because the voters have decided they can’t bear to see people locked up for not paying. You can hem and haw, but that’s the consequence.

I suppose you meant "option" and in general that, the only solution is locking people up? I see lots of other ways, the most simple one: just take away their drugs, if they use drugs in public. If you do this regulary, no junkie will go somewhere, where he will seriously risk loosing his stuff. Locking up people at some point is also possible, but there are lots of other ways before that.

> Just take away their drugs, if they use drugs in public.

Seems short sighted. Do you know how people act when they want to get high and can't? When they're going through serious withdrawal?

Just taking their drugs is going to get people hurt. They will either hurt themselves, or they will hurt other people.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#906

Post by alexey-salmin » Tue, Dec 12, 2023, 5:50 PM UTC

oneshtein wrote: post #715

johnnyanmac wrote: post #604

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>why we limit this to humans only? In my opinion, is a bacteria, virus, ideology, hate, chemicals, drugs, pollution, technical problems, climate change, ecology causes harm to humans, then it should be equal to harm done by a human directly. because when you go that granular it's hard to figure out who to blame. is COVID really any one person's fault, even if we narrow it down to a specific patient 0? is that harm in…

> is COVID really any one person's fault, even if we narrow it down to a specific patient 0? COVID19 was leaked from "Vector" BSL4 lab in Russia. It's leaked, because first responders broke doors (to check for fire) and stole equipment from BSL4 lab without any protective equipment, then China special police, which was in same city for training with Russians, captured the virus and returned back to China. Then Russia…

As someone who spent most of my life in Novosibirsk I was amused to see the Vector lab mentioned in this context. Some googling reveals that indeed there was an explosion in the facility in September 2019.

I still think that this theory is way too convoluted to be true (chinese secret police and stuff), but an entertaining read nevertheless. I wasn't aware of either the explosion or the covid leak allegations.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#907

Post by onetimeuse92304 » Tue, Dec 12, 2023, 5:53 PM UTC

niceguy1827 wrote: post #888

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just find it humorous that in a programmer's forum everything can be wheeled back to microservices.

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.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#908

Post by dinklife » Tue, Dec 12, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #754

taskforcegemini wrote: post #679

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is not a contribution by default?

That sounds very short sighted. You are preconditioned on all of your ancestors having kids. Everything you like, love, care about was created by someone who was first created by their parents. If not for those people there would be nothing. Raising children is the greatest, riskiest, and costliest contribution to the world most of us can make. It should be respected.

HN is so bizarrely blood-and-soil sometimes.

I didn't ask my ancestors to screw, thanks. I mean, good for them, I guess? But I wish people would stop insinuating that having children is the pinnacle of human achievement, when, in fact, it's actually the bare minimum. I wish they would realize that not everyone needs to have children (the math alone simply doesn't work out on a finite planet...), and I wish they wouldn't cast aspersions on those of us who choose to live the way we do. How about we go after the people who had kids but shouldn't have, instead?

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#909

Post by HDThoreaun » Tue, Dec 12, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

bbor wrote: post #893

CydeWeys wrote: post #863

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The question also presumes a fixed number of homeless, which is obviously not true looking at the explosion of them we've had over the past decade. You can meaningfully reduce the number of homeless by (a) building a lot more housing, including especially the lowest rung on the housing ladder (weekly/daily-pay SROs), and (b) simply not tolerating them. When you tolerate something, you get more of it.

Hmmm we should solve poverty by not tolerating it? I have many solutions to poverty, but to be honest, that’s never shown up on the list for me.

The US largely has solved poverty by not tolerating it. The poverty rate has never been lower.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#910

Post by hifreq » Tue, Dec 12, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

dumpHero2 wrote: post #582

hifreq wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that the reduction in the role of religion in the US is partially to blame for the increase in severe cases of drug addition, the idea that we need to bring religion back essentially to control people is extremely patronizing. Basically, we are saying that some people are too stupid to live productively if they are not controlled by fairy tales. This is the same approach as we are seeing in the "far lef…

It's naive to see religion as fairy tales. If used correctly, the tales are a medium of communication to instill values, discipline and morals in the masses.

The fundamental reason and ground for these morals will remain in fairy tales. You don't see how divisive and fragile that is? This is fundamentally wrong, even if it used to work effectively.

Surely there is another way? Stronger families, philosophy, sports, education? Humanism over religion - the only truly universal approach.