EPTedit: and I'm out. Spending too much time poking at this little screen. Gonna go work on becoming less ig orant. Peace comrades
US Politics Mega-thread - Page 440
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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please. In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
edit: and I'm out. Spending too much time poking at this little screen. Gonna go work on becoming less ig orant. Peace comrades | ||
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Leporello
United States2845 Posts
Most prisons are de-facto privatized. The food service, the utility management, even the phone-systems which often operate on a collect-call-only basis through a small, private carrier. Regardless, the point is we can't actually fix the problem of over-incarceration, because we have created too much incentive for it to exist. edit: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-prison-phones-20130808,0,4232243.story Things like this. Public prison full of private enterprises. There's so many comparisons to make here. Like war. Our military is certainly not a private enterprise, but it sure as hell is laced with the stuff. A public function that doles out contracts to the private sector is creating incentive in places where maybe incentive shouldn't really exist. | ||
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JonnyBNoHo
United States6277 Posts
On September 16 2013 09:10 Leporello wrote: Most prisons are de-facto privatized. The food service, the utility management, even the phone-systems which operate on a collect-call-only basis. Does that differ from other countries? My understanding is that private prisons started becoming more prevalent as prison populations grew. Not that private prisons started cropping up before prison populations. Edit: Most things governments around the world do rely on private enterprises. Public schools buy supplies from private businesses. It doesn't mean that public schools are really private schools. | ||
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Shiragaku
Hong Kong4308 Posts
On September 16 2013 09:10 PineapplePizza wrote: I'm new to the whole collegiate finance universe. If tomorrow the whole world decided to implement and enforce some sort-of universal minimum wage (say, US$12.00 / hr or something not completely awful), what would things look like? Keynesian would love it because that would give consumers more money, hence more consumerism which runs the economy in their view. But I am not a Keynesian so don't ask me for the fine details :/ | ||
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Danglars
United States12133 Posts
Those public functions that don't dole out things to the private sector--sometimes does things worse than if a department been created and public employees hired. If the goal is to get things done right at low cost and on time, there's very little incentive to seek solutions within the public sector. That's where you look for solutions that are double the cost and take twice the time projected to complete. | ||
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Sermokala
United States14104 Posts
On September 16 2013 09:10 PineapplePizza wrote: I'm new to the whole collegiate finance universe. If tomorrow the whole world decided to implement and enforce some sort-of universal minimum wage (say, US$12.00 / hr or something not completely awful), what would things look like? Mass chaos and rioting in the streets. A lot of companies would lay off their workers and they would burn down the company store beacuse they can't get jobs anymore. there are a ton of people livieng just on the line right now with sub 30 hour part time jobs thanks to obamacare. if the min wage went up now a lot of those jobs would just disappear. Would probably make a lot more full time jobs at the cost of a ton of part time jobs. But then again I'm a college student that doesn't know what hes talking about and is spewing bs on a forum about dat esports and ponies. | ||
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Leporello
United States2845 Posts
On September 16 2013 09:16 JonnyBNoHo wrote: Does that differ from other countries? My understanding is that private prisons started becoming more prevalent as prison populations grew. Not that private prisons started cropping up before prison populations. Edit: Most things governments around the world do rely on private enterprises. Public schools buy supplies from private businesses. It doesn't mean that public schools are really private schools. Oh I agree. We need the military industry too. These are necessities, but not all the time. Using the phone-prison example, there is no need for these families to be paying over $1 a minute to make a phone-call. There is no choice for them, as "consumers", in how to talk to their imprisoned family member, they have to pay this private company whatever they charge. It's a government-run private-monopoly. Our military is full of these as well. No-bid contracts, or contracts that when fulfilled, incentivize waste and price-gouging. It's just that with schools, on the other hand, they get a lot of attention and a lot of oversight. Despite all the hand-wringing conservatives make over waste in public education, it doesn't really exist in comparison. Most schools operate on reasonable budgets. And any incentive we can create from private industry towards education is a good thing, everyone would agree. Meanwhile, we're creating incentive for prisons and war-machines, but not giving that same level of oversight, sometimes much less. edit: and just to be clear, this is not an isolated case. http://www.mytelewest.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCIC_Operator_Services http://www.gtl.net/ All these companies work in multiple states, nationwide. Some operate on a larger scale than just phones. These are private, nationwide industries that are in the business of providing prisoner-family phone-calls at exorbitant rates. How the hell are we punishing the families of inmates, by monopolizing their phone-conversations for the sake of private industry? Is our government really not capable of providing its prisons with its own phone service? I'll gladly pay the nickel in extra taxes to not have these families being ****ed over. | ||
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Leporello
United States2845 Posts
Why does it seem that we only do stuff like that with government programs that are designed to actually help people? We want to test what kind of food people buy with their food stamps and drug-test them, because we don't want to waste any money on welfare-recipients. But meanwhile we let Halliburton charge us $100 for filling up a sandbag with sand. | ||
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Sermokala
United States14104 Posts
We also decided that everyone deserves a high school education for some reason and can't just jettison half our population out after middle school like other countries. | ||
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farvacola
United States18855 Posts
On September 16 2013 09:55 Sermokala wrote: The problem with making schools better is that teachers don't want schools to get better in any measurable way. We also decided that everyone deserves a high school education for some reason and can't just jettison half our population out after middle school like other countries. You mean unions. | ||
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Roe
Canada6002 Posts
On September 16 2013 09:55 Sermokala wrote: The problem with making schools better is that teachers don't want schools to get better in any measurable way. Prove it? | ||
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JonnyBNoHo
United States6277 Posts
On September 16 2013 09:42 Leporello wrote: Oh I agree. We need the military industry too. These are necessities, but not all the time. Using the phone-prison example, there is no need for these families to be paying over $1 a minute to make a phone-call. There is no choice for them, as "consumers", in how to talk to their imprisoned family member, they have to pay this private company whatever they charge. It's a government-run private-monopoly. Our military is full of these as well. No-bid contracts, or contracts that when fulfilled, incentivize waste and price-gouging. It's just that with schools, on the other hand, they get a lot of attention and a lot of oversight. Despite all the hand-wringing conservatives make over waste in public education, it doesn't really exist in comparison. Most schools operate on reasonable budgets. And any incentive we can create from private industry towards education is a good thing, everyone would agree. Meanwhile, we're creating incentive for prisons and war-machines, but not giving that same level of oversight, sometimes much less. The prison phone example is certainly a good example of BS. There's a lot of blame to go around there though. The phone company is making big bucks, but so is the government. Everyone involved would probably describe the situation as a good source of public revenue and so good public policy. | ||
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
Anyway, let's do the education thing then. We didn't have to get far before we got Sermokala showing horrible contempt for teachers. Yay conservatives! (Oh and teachers are workers. So that kind of goes with my previous theme of Republicans showing contempt for workers, women, and minorities.) | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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Dapper_Cad
United Kingdom964 Posts
On September 16 2013 09:42 Leporello wrote: Oh I agree. We need the military industry too. These are necessities, but not all the time. Using the phone-prison example, there is no need for these families to be paying over $1 a minute to make a phone-call. There is no choice for them, as "consumers", in how to talk to their imprisoned family member, they have to pay this private company whatever they charge. It's a government-run private-monopoly. Our military is full of these as well. No-bid contracts, or contracts that when fulfilled, incentivize waste and price-gouging. It's just that with schools, on the other hand, they get a lot of attention and a lot of oversight. Despite all the hand-wringing conservatives make over waste in public education, it doesn't really exist in comparison. Most schools operate on reasonable budgets. And any incentive we can create from private industry towards education is a good thing, everyone would agree. Meanwhile, we're creating incentive for prisons and war-machines, but not giving that same level of oversight, sometimes much less. I don't think you even needed to concede the first point. From what I can see, and I might have misread the data I've been able to scrounge up, about 1 in 2 prisoners in the U.S. is being held in a private prison. In 2006 there were a little under 250,000 incarcerated americans. Source In 2011 130,000 American's were incarcerated by for-profit companies. Source I think Jonny is right though in that I'm not sure there's a clear cause and effect at work here where prison populations rise as a result of prison privatisation. However I also think that Leporello is right that there is an incentive at work here which is counter to anything you might describe as a social good. Regardless of the exact cause the graphs in the wikipedia entry make grim viewing: ![[image loading]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/US_incarceration_timeline-clean-fixed-timescale.svg) | ||
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
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Dapper_Cad
United Kingdom964 Posts
On September 16 2013 09:55 Sermokala wrote: The problem with making schools better is that teachers don't want schools to get better in any measurable way. We also decided that everyone deserves a high school education for some reason and can't just jettison half our population out after middle school like other countries. Which other countries? | ||
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Dapper_Cad
United Kingdom964 Posts
On September 16 2013 10:40 DoubleReed wrote: That's a bad graph. I would attribute most of that to simply rising population. Really? REALLY? I MEAN. REALLY? really... really? Really? Seriously? Really? Did you start dosing the water with rohypnol and Viagra in 1980? | ||
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Sermokala
United States14104 Posts
The strike that chicago teachers went on turning down a 10% raise because having some way to hold them accountable for whats going inside of a classroom is unacceptable. | ||
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Sermokala
United States14104 Posts
I'm color blind so I don't know what that graph means but I am going to assume that it proves my point. | ||
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