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Comment by vaadu | Hacker News Reader

Good. The private prison industry has a financial interest in putting more and more people behind bars. To that end it lobbies legislatures to make more things a criminal offense and to have longer prison sentences.

This is counter-productive in a free and open society, which should have the goal of zero inmates. To THIS end prison management needs to be in the hands of those with no profit motive.

This along with for profit law enforcement activities(red light and speed cameras) should be abolished.

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"The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them."

-- Corrections Corporation of America SEC filing.

Who says crime doesn't pay? Sad...

This is why I very much expect a "War on Piracy" or some other war to ignite domestically, if the war on drugs is ended. There are too many people profiting from arresting and putting others in prison, and they will fight to keep that status quo, one way or another. That, combined with NSA, and other agencies increasing desire for collecting all sorts of data domestically, on everyone, could make for a pretty terrifying future. Then they could just fish for crimes through spying, and then send the SWAT teams to people's homes.

I like to think that most people are moral (perhaps I'm foolish). If you take away the war on drugs, and perhaps other ~victimless crimes (prostitution, gambling), then there aren't going to be that many crimes left.

In other words "Our customers may conclude that we offer a poor value for money and decide to stop buying our product."

It seems like you could keep financial penalties for traffic violations and avoid the corruption that seems to go with them by simply forwarding the revenue on elsewhere - infrastructure, health care, what-have-you. I suppose there may be jurisdictional issues there that I'm not familiar with though.

Separate subject though I suppose.

The red light/speed camera issue is not that one-sided. While there are a lot of those with questionable motives behind their setup, a couple of them actually are needed to reduce accidents.

I agree. However I wonder if they mask the real issue of bad design. Median barriers on busy roads, bike lanes that are separate, good pedestrian walkways and streets that make speeding hard and wrong feeling. Changing what is already built is hard, but once it is done it presumably not too different to maintaining normal infrastructure.

You're making the assumption that speed causes accidents. It does not, or bullet trains would be crashing left and right. Lack of perception causes accidents, such as road designs where cars can make sudden turns with no additional lanes, lack of fences along roads near wildlife, etc. Freeways usually have the lowest number of accidents per mile driven despite far higher speed.

Where's your citations for your statements? You can't go making up facts without backing them up.

Bullet trains travel on a track, they do not travel freely with other bullet trains in crowded roadways. Pretty much anyone with a pulse can get a driver's licence and many people don't take driving seriously as "I am putting my life and other's at risk when I step into my car." Most people don't own a bullet train. The comparison is useless.

Plus speeding trains do kill when they go past the posted speed limit, which is posted for safety reasons, example: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/nyregion/metro-north-train... - by the way that train crashed on a Sunday, if it was a weekday there would have been hundreds dead as it is a major commuter line. Instead there was only 4 dead.

Here's some research that says speeding contributes to crashes. However, a car travelling much faster than the rest of the cars on the road are the most dangerous.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457598...

http://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=712279

http://www.nsc.org/safety_road/DriverSafety/Pages/Speeding.a...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457505...

We have a problem when people post random speed limits without actually studying and taking into consideration safety.

Bullet trains are designed to go fast safely. When the parent talked about speeding they were talking about going past the posted speed limit, which for argument we will assume was posted for safety considerations. Of course, the faster one is travelling if there is an accident, the more deadly the accident becomes. This is simple physics. Bullet trains also have a speed limit, just a much higher one, and I don't know if they are physically built to travel past the safe max speed.

One of the more interesting books I've read recently: http://tomvanderbilt.com/traffic/the-book/

makes the assertion that just about everything done to make roads safer, like barriers, rumble strips, separate bike lines, traffic calming etc. gets negated by people driving faster because they have a greater sense of security.

"Negated" is certainly overstating things, traffic deaths have been going down for decades in the US and European countries, so the combination of safety features in roads and cars, driver education work well enough to offset any worsening of driver culture (alleged increase of speeding, more cell phone use, etc.)

As it turns out, the very LAST thing you want is "a government that's run like a business".

Running a city or state for (ever growing) profit is a fast trail to hell.

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