Cost. That's most likely the driving force. It's hard to find accurate numbers on a federal level but I stumbled across, what I think is, small town coverage of a local special election which included some data:
The Senate election cost Lewis County approximately $22,000
State regulations require each precinct to have at least four workers on election day. Workers in Lewis County receive $115 for their work, including mileage and training costs, according to Lewis County Clerk Glenda Himes.
That salary varies from county to county. The state mandates a minimum pay of a $60 salary for election workers.
In addition to the four required workers per precinct, two additional people work in Lewis County's Tollesboro precinct because it is the largest precinct in the county, according to Himes.
That adds up to approximately $6,670 just to pay workers the day of the election in Lewis County.
Carter County is required to have 92 workers for its 23 precincts but also hires a few extras. Each worker receives $25 for attending the mandatory training session as well as $125 for working election day, totaling $150 per worker. That's a minimum cost of $13,800 for the county.
Now apply those kinds of figures on a larger scale - perhaps to NY or even on the federal level. Being able to cut the staff requirements in half by using computers is a tempting goal for cash-strapped areas. Throw in an obsession with the appearance of relevence, a need to differentiate the current administration from those previous, the desire to appear at the front of the technological wave, a lack of transparency from the involved companies, budgetary pressure, and some genuine well-meaners and you have your reason right there.
Election delivery activities, including fees to election workers and poll officials, printing lists of electors, and renting offices of returning officers and polling sites:$108 million
. Then you've got the expensive of printing the ballots, packaging, delivery, counting...it adds up.
Blame the internet! Or at least blame the internet browsing habits of wankers of every description. There's an interesting NYTimes article on the changing nature of porn, specifically the significant shrinkage of already under-endowed narrative. A relevent snippet reads
The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.
“On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes,” said Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment. “We have to cater to that.”
and
But interest in DVDs has fallen sharply, Mr. Fishbein said, because the Internet has made it easy to watch snippets of video.
Mr. Fishbein estimated that pornographic DVD sales and rentals in the United States generated $3.62 billion in 2006 but had fallen as much as 50 percent since then. He says the slump has made some companies reluctant to share sales figures, so his estimates are getting rougher.
I don't know about the rest of you but that sounds about right - I haven't sat through a pizza-delivery scenario in it's entirety in ages.
Ah my anonymous friend in some ways condoms are more interesting than sex, at least when considered from a purely academic point of view. Think about all the controversy linked to contraceptives, the evolution of condom technology over the years, the constant shift in identity from disease-control to pregnancy control to disease control, the way in which we sell them, the way in which they're marketed, the politics of advertising, the problem of accurate representation, notions of propriety and sexual manner - there's a wealth of really fascinating topics buried in that there joke matey.
I've always been fascinated by maps and the curious space they occupy in the construction of personal and societal identities. What we map, how we illustrate it, how it's presented, where it's placed, each reveals an aspect of something culturally significant. I wonder if the shifting nature of mapping, as influenced by the demands of mobile devices and almost limitless storage capacity, will have as profound a cultural effect as other mapping technological shifts.
For those interested in mapping - Strange Maps has some awesome examples.
Buddy I'm with you there but I have to point out...this article. The best quote from the thing
That's right: I'm 47 years old, I'm a good 30 pounds overweight, and I make my living by taking care of men who come to Las Vegas hoping for some skin time with other men -- for a fee. And in case you're ready to dismiss me as someone clinging onto the last shreds of his faded beauty, you should know that I was well into my 40s before I started hooking.
Sorry, that was a bad joke and I feel as guilty about it as I should. That article I linked to has a section where they interview an escort who was on $500 an hour and they note that when she was considering raising her prices from $300
she began to wonder if one hour of her time was more valuable to her than another $300. As it was, a 15-hour workload generated more than $200,000 a year in cash.
So yeah, there is a lot of money to be made if you're up for it.
Happened to me during the great University Downloading times of yesteryear. Let me tell you there is nothing quite as uncomfortable as sitting with your elderly dean - the one who's writing your grad school reccomendations - the head of the IT department - your current boss - and the vice-president of the university - the parent of your current sweetheart - and trying to explain just why the university has been contacted by legal representatives of certain firms asserting a copyright claim over such colorfully titled files as "chick takes three massive cocks hard," or "college girl getz raped XXXX very hot" or the ever favorite "gay orgy huge dicks download now." That was about the same time I became a whole lot more interested in streaming instead of downloading.
Yup, and frankly I imagine using sex slaves is far more work than it's worth when you're in a country where it's fine to just slap a job ad in the local paper.
Uh buddy....if you're paying a couple hundred you're the one getting fucked
It turns out that the typical street prostitute in Chicago works 13 hours a week, performing 10 sex acts during that period, and earns an hourly wage of approximately $27. So her weekly take-home pay is roughly $350. This includes an average of $20 that a prostitute steals from her customers and drugs accepted in lieu of cash.
Thats from the Superfreakenomics article exerpt I cited before.
I'm not sure you're right there, at least in part. Prostitution is legal and regulated in a fair number of countries - Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Germany, The Netherlands, Canada for instance - and treated in a somewhat more complicated manner in many more - most of the rest of Europe, India, a smattering of Central American states, and so on. The sheer scale of the sexual industry in countries that have legal protections in place - which have reduced financial incentives for what would otherwise be illicit trades - suggests that a decent number of men and woman deliberately choose prostitution as a rational employment route. Superfreakenomics has an interesting chapter online which covers the basic topic.
That of course leaves the question of trafficking which is the usual problem raised i.e. does the prostitution industry provide a prime motivation for human trafficing. However there seems to be a significant lack of data supporting this. The Guardian ran an interesting piece covering this topic. I'm going to quote just the opening paragraph but its well worth a read if you find yourself with a free 10 minutes.
There is something familiar about the tide of misinformation which has swept through the subject of sex trafficking in the UK: it flows through exactly the same channels as the now notorious torrent about Saddam Hussein's weapons.
In the story of UK sex trafficking, the conclusions of academics who study the sex trade have been subjected to the same treatment as the restrained reports of intelligence analysts who studied Iraqi weapons – stripped of caution, stretched to their most alarming possible meaning and tossed into the public domain. There, they have been picked up by the media who have stretched them even further in stories which have then been treated as reliable sources by politicians, who in turn provided quotes for more misleading stories.
Yes, that doesn't prove that sex workers necessarily enjoy their work. It doesn't prove that other forms of coercion don't exist.But it does frame the issue somewhat differently.
Huh, you know the really sad thing? I didn't even notice the heading there - when I was reading through everything was out in the open and the eyes just slid from the original post on down.
Of course now I feel like a complete dickhead, so *spoiler alert* sorry 'bout that.
Perfect case in point there, cheers for spoiling it for everyone else. Either that was some damn impressive meta-commentary about the incredible difficulty of avoiding spoilers, especially when someone takes a special joy in ruining a surprise, or....well we all know what the alternative is.
Is there? I've spent a frustration 30 minutes bouncing from link to link looking for some actual details without much luck. It's pretty much all cut 'n paste, most of what's out there looks to be word for word repetition, and no-one seems to have bothered to provide the actual basis for the decision or the avenues for review. I was all ready to blast the summary for linking to some gaming site but sadly enough their content was equal to all the rest I could find.
So much for the internet creating a space for human creativity unbound and nuanced reporting. Maybe it's just the bitterness of a failed search talking but from where I'm sitting, it's all page-hits and no actual content.
To be fair, it's me and the Justice Department and that's not really bad company to be keeping.
I'm not okay with criminals being on the street, and I'm not preaching some social utopia, but if we're going to be legislating then we should be doing so with actual information. That same report actually breaks re-offenders down further, and may give you some small comfort - Table 10 on Page 9 shows that, in the case of rapists
overall 46.0% were rearrested for a
new crime within 3 years
18.6% were rearrested for a new
violent offense
2.5% were rearrested for another rape
8.7% were rearrested for a new
non-sexual assault
11.2% were rearrested for a drug
offense.
And while I'm not completely sure about the use throughout the report, you should note that certain tables note that "homicide" refers to a braod range of murder charges.
That's not quite supported by the figures. Although recidivism rates are high when considered overall, the Justice Department figures for 1994 (I couldn't get the more recent pdf's to open)show that
Released prisoners with the lowest
rearrest rates were those in prison for
homicide (40.7%), rape (46.0%), other
sexual assault (41.4%), and driving
under the influence (51.5%).
Within 3 years, 2.5% of released
rapists were arrested for another rape,
and 1.2% of those who had served
time for homicide were arrested for
homicide.
The report specifically notes that although violent prisoners reoffend, the vast majority are not being arrested for another violent offence.
Just so we have some numbers to discuss - the summary cites 50k per prisoner per year and I found
California leads the nation in GPS monitored parolees -- 6,500 -- at a cost of $60 million a year. Depending on arrests, there are typically about 250 sex offender parolees on GPS in Kern County
The quick math shows that's almost 10k per prisoner per year in California. Consider that California seems to be an extreme outlier, I only cited their numbers because of their large prison population, with the Justice Department's most recent (2001 sadly) data showing
the average annual operating cost per state inmate in 2001 was $22,650, or $62.05 per day; among facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it was $22,632 per inmate, or $62.01 per day.
A few articles point to the hidden costs of GPS - the significant increase in workload for local police forces being primarily responsible - the lack of actual real-time monitoring, the fact that serious crimes have been committed whilst the offender was being tracked using GPS, and the legal and ethic questions raised.
They already do this. Check out the NPR story which notes that
Several years ago, the federal prison system started offering customer-service calling centers.
and also points to "new recycling centers, printing facilities and industrial laundry rooms." The Nation seems to think BP is paying prisoners to clean up oil damage, and theres always number-plate production. You should note that
in the 1930s, Congress began allowing the bureau of prisons to put prisoners to work making products — part of an effort to rehabilitate them. But there was a catch. Because its labor costs are so cheap — prisoners make less than a dollar an hour — Federal Prison Industries was not allowed to sell products to anyone but government agencies and non-profits.
If you're interested in the topic both Forbes and USAToday ran some pretty good stories on the rise of prison call centers a couple of months back.
I sometimes feel bad for the guys in charge, it's apparently impossible to please people. We're normally clamouring for more information, operate our markets with the assumption of perfectly informed agents, run democracies that were conceived presuming some degree of voter knowledge, and heap disdain on the apparently ignorant. But a government agency tries to help consumers make decent choices by undermining the ability of companies to easily obscure certain basic information and they're told people want less info of a specific type. We’re a capricious lot.
I had a look at the two proposed sheets and thought they were nicely thorough, explained the basic assumptions, and presented the info in an easily comparable fashion. Guess it takes all sorts.
Damn, I apologize for that. When I was looking for the text of the legislation I noticed that there were stories from July and August and thought I'd been careful to only use the August sources. Tab hopping was probably a bad idea.
Hopefully what I posted provided a general idea of what Chile is trying to do, added something to the conversation despite being somewhat out of date, and wasn't misleading.
I was under the impression that it means the story is "hot off the presses" as it were, somehow attached to seeing stories a little earlier than everyone else if you're a subscriber (maybe having an account ticks the right box too?). I've seen it a few times and as far as I can remember it's only ever happened to stories that have just been added, with few comments, and the colour changes given a little time.
Google and I have joined forces to provide the following description of what the law seems to cover:
1Prohibition for ISPs (those that provide Internet access) to interfere with, discriminate or interfere in any way the content, applications or services unless measures to ensure the privacy of users, virus protection and security the network;
2.It requires ISPs to provide parental control services;
3.Forces to provide clients with a series of written evidence for it to correctly identify the contracted service;
4.Forces to ensure the privacy of users, virus protection and network security, and
5.Forces to ensure access to all types of content, services or applications available on the network and offer a service that does not distinguish content, applications or services, based on the source of it or their property. Also prohibits activities that restrict users' freedom to use the content or services unless the specific request of users.
One of my biggest culture-shocks was waking up to UK morning TV and being confronted by a guy with his trousers around his ankles, his balls the subject of the morning discussion. It's covered in this BBC story but the long and short of it is that it was a testicular awareness drive in the model of previously successful breast cancer awareness programs.It was the kind of early morning suprise that lets you skip your morning coffee and, more importantly, was one of the first times I've felt like television actually treated me like a thinking adult. Actually learned a few things that morning too. There's something to be said for the value of broadcasters approaching nudity, the body, and all that with a degree of maturity - its certainly one of the first steps towards a cultural shift.
Slashdot Mirror
So now I can honestly tell the ladies I regularly have 7'' in hand
Now apply those kinds of figures on a larger scale - perhaps to NY or even on the federal level. Being able to cut the staff requirements in half by using computers is a tempting goal for cash-strapped areas. Throw in an obsession with the appearance of relevence, a need to differentiate the current administration from those previous, the desire to appear at the front of the technological wave, a lack of transparency from the involved companies, budgetary pressure, and some genuine well-meaners and you have your reason right there.
In Canada the cost of their 2004 election included
. Then you've got the expensive of printing the ballots, packaging, delivery, counting...it adds up.
That's just one of many ways to know that you're not a pornstar.
and
I don't know about the rest of you but that sounds about right - I haven't sat through a pizza-delivery scenario in it's entirety in ages.
Ah my anonymous friend in some ways condoms are more interesting than sex, at least when considered from a purely academic point of view. Think about all the controversy linked to contraceptives, the evolution of condom technology over the years, the constant shift in identity from disease-control to pregnancy control to disease control, the way in which we sell them, the way in which they're marketed, the politics of advertising, the problem of accurate representation, notions of propriety and sexual manner - there's a wealth of really fascinating topics buried in that there joke matey.
I've always been fascinated by maps and the curious space they occupy in the construction of personal and societal identities. What we map, how we illustrate it, how it's presented, where it's placed, each reveals an aspect of something culturally significant. I wonder if the shifting nature of mapping, as influenced by the demands of mobile devices and almost limitless storage capacity, will have as profound a cultural effect as other mapping technological shifts.
For those interested in mapping - Strange Maps has some awesome examples.
Variety is the spice of life...and somewhat important for the over-porn'ed.
Takes all sorts apparently.
So yeah, there is a lot of money to be made if you're up for it.
Happened to me during the great University Downloading times of yesteryear. Let me tell you there is nothing quite as uncomfortable as sitting with your elderly dean - the one who's writing your grad school reccomendations - the head of the IT department - your current boss - and the vice-president of the university - the parent of your current sweetheart - and trying to explain just why the university has been contacted by legal representatives of certain firms asserting a copyright claim over such colorfully titled files as "chick takes three massive cocks hard," or "college girl getz raped XXXX very hot" or the ever favorite "gay orgy huge dicks download now." That was about the same time I became a whole lot more interested in streaming instead of downloading.
Yup, and frankly I imagine using sex slaves is far more work than it's worth when you're in a country where it's fine to just slap a job ad in the local paper.
Thats from the Superfreakenomics article exerpt I cited before.
That of course leaves the question of trafficking which is the usual problem raised i.e. does the prostitution industry provide a prime motivation for human trafficing. However there seems to be a significant lack of data supporting this. The Guardian ran an interesting piece covering this topic. I'm going to quote just the opening paragraph but its well worth a read if you find yourself with a free 10 minutes.
Yes, that doesn't prove that sex workers necessarily enjoy their work. It doesn't prove that other forms of coercion don't exist.But it does frame the issue somewhat differently.
Huh, you know the really sad thing? I didn't even notice the heading there - when I was reading through everything was out in the open and the eyes just slid from the original post on down.
Of course now I feel like a complete dickhead, so *spoiler alert* sorry 'bout that.
Perfect case in point there, cheers for spoiling it for everyone else. Either that was some damn impressive meta-commentary about the incredible difficulty of avoiding spoilers, especially when someone takes a special joy in ruining a surprise, or....well we all know what the alternative is.
Is there? I've spent a frustration 30 minutes bouncing from link to link looking for some actual details without much luck. It's pretty much all cut 'n paste, most of what's out there looks to be word for word repetition, and no-one seems to have bothered to provide the actual basis for the decision or the avenues for review. I was all ready to blast the summary for linking to some gaming site but sadly enough their content was equal to all the rest I could find.
So much for the internet creating a space for human creativity unbound and nuanced reporting. Maybe it's just the bitterness of a failed search talking but from where I'm sitting, it's all page-hits and no actual content.
I'm not okay with criminals being on the street, and I'm not preaching some social utopia, but if we're going to be legislating then we should be doing so with actual information. That same report actually breaks re-offenders down further, and may give you some small comfort - Table 10 on Page 9 shows that, in the case of rapists
And while I'm not completely sure about the use throughout the report, you should note that certain tables note that "homicide" refers to a braod range of murder charges.
The report specifically notes that although violent prisoners reoffend, the vast majority are not being arrested for another violent offence.
The quick math shows that's almost 10k per prisoner per year in California. Consider that California seems to be an extreme outlier, I only cited their numbers because of their large prison population, with the Justice Department's most recent (2001 sadly) data showing
A few articles point to the hidden costs of GPS - the significant increase in workload for local police forces being primarily responsible - the lack of actual real-time monitoring, the fact that serious crimes have been committed whilst the offender was being tracked using GPS, and the legal and ethic questions raised.
So have at it oh learned ones.
and also points to "new recycling centers, printing facilities and industrial laundry rooms." The Nation seems to think BP is paying prisoners to clean up oil damage, and theres always number-plate production. You should note that
If you're interested in the topic both Forbes and USAToday ran some pretty good stories on the rise of prison call centers a couple of months back.
I sometimes feel bad for the guys in charge, it's apparently impossible to please people. We're normally clamouring for more information, operate our markets with the assumption of perfectly informed agents, run democracies that were conceived presuming some degree of voter knowledge, and heap disdain on the apparently ignorant. But a government agency tries to help consumers make decent choices by undermining the ability of companies to easily obscure certain basic information and they're told people want less info of a specific type. We’re a capricious lot.
I had a look at the two proposed sheets and thought they were nicely thorough, explained the basic assumptions, and presented the info in an easily comparable fashion. Guess it takes all sorts.
Damn, I apologize for that. When I was looking for the text of the legislation I noticed that there were stories from July and August and thought I'd been careful to only use the August sources. Tab hopping was probably a bad idea.
Hopefully what I posted provided a general idea of what Chile is trying to do, added something to the conversation despite being somewhat out of date, and wasn't misleading.
Again, my bad.
I was under the impression that it means the story is "hot off the presses" as it were, somehow attached to seeing stories a little earlier than everyone else if you're a subscriber (maybe having an account ticks the right box too?). I've seen it a few times and as far as I can remember it's only ever happened to stories that have just been added, with few comments, and the colour changes given a little time.
One of my biggest culture-shocks was waking up to UK morning TV and being confronted by a guy with his trousers around his ankles, his balls the subject of the morning discussion. It's covered in this BBC story but the long and short of it is that it was a testicular awareness drive in the model of previously successful breast cancer awareness programs.It was the kind of early morning suprise that lets you skip your morning coffee and, more importantly, was one of the first times I've felt like television actually treated me like a thinking adult. Actually learned a few things that morning too. There's something to be said for the value of broadcasters approaching nudity, the body, and all that with a degree of maturity - its certainly one of the first steps towards a cultural shift.