falk

Ask and you shall receive.

"Ohio's deal requires the state to maintain a 90% occupancy rate, but Janes said that provision remains in effect for 18 months — not 20 years — before it can be renegotiated. As part of the deal, Ohio pays the company a monthly fee, totaling $3.8 million per year." [1]

Another big problem with private prisons and juvenile centers is that judges get greased to send kids to specific centers. [2]

[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-03-01/...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

Maybe. Maybe not. If any of those things did happen I most likely wouldn't be thinking logically, so I'm not sure how much weight my opinion should carry. My thought process right now is that it does absolutely no good treating prisoners inhumane. As soon as they get out and they can't find a job because they have a criminal record and no current job experience they will turn directly back to crime. Now we have to waste money and resources on them again. Not to mention that they could cause more harm to other people. It really does no one any good.

Going to prison shouldn't be about punishment. It should be about rehabilitation.

Or private prisons that have minimum guaranteed occupancy rates with the State. What the hell.

To be honest, I don't know. This is an interesting problem. I do know that a lot of people get hooked on Oxycotin and then turn to heroin for a variety of reasons. Though if heroin was legal it could be manufactured in a sterile environment where you could probably get like 99% purity or something ridiculous like that. It's relatively easy to get a prescription for whatever you want. Especially in States like Florida that don't check if you're doctor shopping.

There are also legal drugs that have similar effects to things like Adderall. A lot of people don't know about them or use them because they haven't been researched as much and come in powder form.

At the very least I think that you shouldn't be put in prison for carrying pills without a prescription.

You might find this Vice article interesting. It talks about how Oxycotin is essentially legal heroin.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-big-pharma-hooked-ameri...

I say we should take it slow when it comes to legalization. Perhaps start with things that are found in nature. Marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, being legally able to harvest the opium from poppy seed plants, etc.

You're welcome. I agree. Since the dawn of time humans have wanted to alter their consciousness.

Glenn Greenwald has a great paper about drug decriminalization in Portugal. Lots of shocking graphs and statistics. The digital version is legally available online for free.

http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminal...

http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/greenwa...

Unfortunately that's about the only resource I can think of when it comes to drug legalization/decriminalization in an actual real world environment. I'm hoping to see some papers in the next couple years about marijuana legalization in Washington and Colorado.

This is only semi-related, but Vangard has a really fascinating documentary on prescription drug abuse/doctor shopping in Florida you might find interesting. It's called the Oxycontin Express. Basically people go down to Florida, get a whole bunch of prescriptions for Oxycontin and then resell the pills in Kentucky and other States at a ridiculous profit. Here's a link to an online copy of it.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/oxycontin-express/

"Lets be frank here, Political limitations are the only thing stopping government agencies from shooting Laser Microphones half-a-mile away listening to your entire house. (4th Amendment, Illegal Search)"

Why go through all the trouble when they can turn our cellphones into listening devices?

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB1000142412788732399700...

"We know that anything pulled out of the NSA system is recorded and checked by the FISA courts, to ensure that Americans were not part of the targets."

That is absolute bullshit! Have you not payed attention to the latest leaks on XKeyscore?

Because the U.S. government secretly loves to profit off of both the direct selling/transportation/etc of drugs and the prison industrial complex.

I recommend you read the following for more details and proof:

The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade

http://www.amazon.com/The-Politics-Heroin-Complicity-Global/...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_South...

Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond

http://www.amazon.com/Acid-Dreams-Complete-History-Sixties/d...

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1595586431

After hearing all of this stuff, I feel like the television show The Wire was either way ahead of its time or had really great law enforcement consultants. I'm leaning toward the latter.

The operative word being "generally". Political limitations are worthless. If they have the capability, they will abuse it. We already know they don't care about the constitution and that they have secret interpretations of laws.

I'd say corporations have way more power here in the U.S. than unions. For Heaven's sake we don't even have a national healthcare program. Proper healthcare is typically one of the bigger union fights from my experience.

Union is definitely a dirty word here. The people who are most against the unions tend to be the people who would benefit the most. Unfortunately they've been tricked into thinking otherwise. It's not uncommon for you to take a job at Target or Walmart and have to watch an anti-union video or two.

The Taft–Hartley Act really restricts union behavior. It makes it so you can't do things like solitary strikes, you have no typically notify your employer 80 days ahead of time if you plan to go on strike, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Management_Relations_Act...

At the end of the day it's all about striking a balance between labor and management. My plan is for all the companies I run to be ethnical especially in regards to treating my employees well.

Hey OP, I've got a couple design tips for you.

- Work on the typography. You need more leading aka the line-height property in CSS. If you only fix one thing, this should be it.

- Everything is squished together. White space is your friend. Use lots of padding. I recommend a grid system of some sort. 960.gs is good for non-responsive websites and easy to use and understand. If you wanna to responsive check out Foundation or Bootstrap's grid system. Though I really don't think that's necessary.

- The colors aren't working. Especially the border colors on the box. Way too harsh with the mellow background. I'd look at a site like ColorLovers or Adobe Kuler to get nice pallets.

Useful resources:

http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/a-practical-guide-to...

http://nicewebtype.com/

http://alistapart.com/article/more-meaningful-typography

http://webtypography.net/

http://alistapart.com/article/on-web-typography

http://colorlovers.com

http://kuler.adobe.com

If you don't want your employees to unionize, don't treat them like shit.

No. There's a reason why they are two different words. Socialism is after capitalism but before communism in terms of Marxist theory. From my understanding the big difference is there is still competition in socialism and things are privately owned by the workers, where as everything is publicly owned in communism. Remember that during Marx's time it was unusual to have the boss down on the production line working with his employees. Now a days people have become what Seth Godin like to call linchpins. It's not rare to have your boss coding or designing with you if you work at a start-up.

It doesn't help that there are varying definitions of all these words. I have always understood socialism in the Marx sense. It's the stage after capitalism but before communism where the workers control the means of production. There are still markets, but things are run as cooperatives. I'm not saying if it's right or wrong, just that a lot of people get the definitions confused and what not.

Yep. There's a great article by the Atlantic called The Secret History of Guns. [1] I'll go over a couple of interesting points.

- Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit after his house was bombed in 1956. After that he had armed supporters stand guard outside his house. King's house was described as "an arsenal."

- The co-founder of the Black Panthers found a law on the books allowing them to open carry in California. Blacks were getting no protection by the police so this was pretty pivotal. The Panthers started arming themselves and had a picnic outside the State's Capital building. After this happened the racist California legislature pushed through a law banning open carry. It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. Funny enough, he was the first president endorsed by the NRA.

- "After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities."

- "In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control"

[1] http://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-h...

"A big breakthrough would be if Congress, as a cost-saving measure, allowed Medicare payments for out-of-country treatment."

If Congress cared about saving money when it comes to Medicare they wouldn't have passed Medicare Part D, which by design doesn't allow for the negotiation of lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies like the Department of Vererans Affairs is allowed to do. The fact of the matter is that a lot of palms are getting greased in Washington when it comes to healthcare. Thus why Obamacare doesn't have a public option.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Part_D

Get away from the computer screen.

Eric Holder admitted that he can't do his job. He needs to be fired.

This is why: "Education in South Korea is viewed as being crucial for success and competition is, consequently, very heated and fierce."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_South_Korea

I'm so happy the President can take the time to address the patent system when it's in regards to giving protectionism to multi-national corporations while small businesses are drowning in frivolous patent lawsuits.

"Education is never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got." - George Carlin

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kJ4SSvVbhLw

At around 1:30 in their Indiegogo video they show what I assume is the user-interface of the app. Looks nice.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-bac...

Whenever the CIA gets brought up I can't help but mention their complacency in the global drug trade.

In the 70s we learned that the CIA was trafficking heroin from Southeast Asia via Air America, an airliner they covertly owned and operated. [1]

We also learned from programs like Project MKUltra that the CIA was forcibly administering LSD on American citizens. [2]

Operation Midnight Climax was a sub-project of MKUltra. The CIA hired prostitutes who were instructed to lure back clients to government safe houses in San Francisco, New York City, and Marin. There they would be injected with a wide range of substances such as LSD and watched behind a one-way glass.

These are not conspiracy theories. They are well-documented facts that everyone seems to forget about. If your interested in this stuff I suggest you read the books The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade [4] and Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond [5].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_South...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Midnight_Climax

[4] http://www.amazon.com/The-Politics-Heroin-Complicity-Global/...

[5] http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0802130623

You're missing his point. You could have all the guns in the world but that isn't going to change the fact that Americans don't care they are being monitored and spied on. Including the vast majority of ardent supporters of the 2nd amendment.

I admire the progress your country has made thus far, but it seems so silly to limit the quantity you can buy. Especially considering you can overdose on alcohol and kill yourself, where you can't with marijuana.

I'd recommend you get her going on something like Corona SDK which is an iPhone gaming framework based off of Lua.

http://www.coronalabs.com/products/corona-sdk/

"There will be a monthly limit of 40 grams per person and all consumers will have to register."

Does your government limit the amount of alcohol you can purchase per month and do you have to register to buy said alcohol? Because if not, that's rather ridiculous. I personally would not want to be on any sort of registry like that.

People might take you a bit more seriously if you would stop minimizing every Snowden leak.

He specifically pointed out Booze Allen which is known for their NSA spying. It's not like you can walk into the organization and say, "Hey, I'd like a job. You guys don't spy on Americans, right?".