I'm not talking about the prisons making money off the government by warehousing people. I'm talking about the prison industry itself being cost neutral if it can figure out how to monetize prisoners BESIDES tax revenue.
The land is taxed on its value and the value is priced at demand and the demand is set in dollars.
If the economy crashes and people don't have money to buy land... then the value of land goes down and the taxes you can levy on that basis go down.
As to needing some money... sure... but it takes less than you'd think in most places. There are some states with very high property taxes. I think New Jersey has some comically high property taxes... but that just means don't live in New Jersey if you're doing this.
There are states and places in the US that have cheap land and very low to no property taxes.
Here people say "well, those places are not near all the amenities I want"... like what? StarSmucks coffee? Like the plays or opera you're probably not going to? Like the museums you've visited three times in the last five years?
For me, I need water, power, Internet, reasonable transport to places I might want to actually go, and access to some kind of market to get things.
That's all I really care about.
We have this renewable power that is best employed to take people off grid entirely. Anyone that drops a well into the ground can get water. But assuming you don't want to do that or can't... there are various methods of recycling water so that mostly what you're losing is to evaporation.
Check out the solar distilleries. I think every 5 square feet of surface area can distill one gallon of water per day. Which is enough drinking water for one person... and that even works on salt water. Here you might say "I want more than a gallon per person"... then have 1000 square feet of surface area for it and generate 200 gallons of distilled water per day... you can literally distill your urine with something like this... into JUST water. Though honestly... gross. Mostly because you have to clean the thing out at intervals and who wants to do that with concentrated pee.
The food thing... I mean, you can grow your own food. Its a chore. But it is totally possible. Growing all your own food is hard. But even supplementing it is a big deal. The most expensive stuff is the fresh produce. If you provide that on your own, then you can cut your bill radically while actually covering a small portion of your caloric intake.
As as to wifi... there are wifi antennas that can transmit 400 mb signals at up to 30km. The antennas aren't even expensive. Its like 200 for each one. So. You can really be out in the boonies and get very solid internet.
Its a day dream I have... the more insane and stupid the world gets. I just want to go live in such a desolate place that the only people that would come upon my property would be people that were lost. The Aleutian islands features in my day dreams. That's a place so desolate that the Japanese invaded it during WW2... then changed their minds and left without a fight.
I don't need so many of the things I'm offered. And I think when this micro manufactury stuff becomes a bigger deal people are going to be able to gain a lot of independence from the industrial infrastructure.
Middle class people go to the store all the time. And keep in mind... they have to wait 48 hours to get the thing they want.
Forty.... Eight.
Now... would a middle class family rather wait 48 hours or simply buy it from a store when they're out and about doing something already.
Yes yes... you don't want to buy the thing RIGHT NOW... but amazon isn't going to give it to you right now either. Are they?
And tomorrow... because you're middle class and have a job... you're going to go to work... and when you are coming back from work... you might stop off at a store to buy some beer, or some wine, or some bell peppers or some nice steak... or something that people buy at stores... and you might think "oh, I also need tooth paste"... and then you'd buy that then and there.
So... hold the opinion you like but I'm not seeing this for the middle class.
The middle class tends to be quite happy to buy things from stores.
The big problem I've noticed with Amazon for these goods is that the prices are not competitive. the middle class does price check. They're not so rich that they don't care if tooth paste costs 50 percent more. And again, there are a lot of rich people that won't pay that either... just cause.
I know a guy with 10 million in the bank that refuses to over pay for anything. The guy haggles and negotiates everything. Its actually fucking obnoxious but he has to do it because he just does... and so the best thing you can do is stare at the ceiling when it starts and count to a thousand. It will eventually end... often in his favor. He frequently pays 20 percent to HALF what things are listed as because he just refuses to pay the list price. He gets the manager out, he talks about what the thing is being billed for at different places, he talks about the quality, the condition, on and on and on... and eventually he gets the fucking discount. Like clockwork.
Its more obnoxious than you can imagine.
The point I'm making though is that even amoungst the people that could be argued to not care about the mark up... lots of them do care. Rich people haggle over shit all the time. Nickle and dime shit. And those are the people that it doesn't really matter to... for the middle class... those nickles and dimes will add up to actual money for them. And so they do it as well.
Look, the concept of this amazon idea is interesting. I would modify it a few different ways.
1. Amazon is restricting who can offer certain types of products to artificially inflate the price of certain goods so they can over charge for their grosery delivery service. I recently looked for some soda stream syrup on there and they were asking for 20 dollars for bottle of syrup that at any retail store costs about 5. But you'll see them do that for everything... flour, detergent, toothpaste... anything you'd go to a grosery store to buy and on amazon its suddenly way way way way more expensive for no reason. And the reason they're doing it is to hide/subsidize the cost of their delivery service. Their delivery service HAS to charge a premium price. They have to. But they don't want the consumer to realize how much they're being charged for it, so they inflate the product costs and then use the profits from that to offset the delivery charges.
This is a price strategy that works on idiots. You don't see companies do this when their primary customers are other businesses... why? Because businesses spread sheet costs and any bullshit in the prices sticks out rather prominently if you actually do the math.
So the first thing Amazon has to do... is stop doing this... starting from the premise that your customers are stupid... is not a good thing to do when you're going after young tech savvy professionals.
2. I don't think they should immediately order whatever so much as add the whatever it is to a shopping list that can be executed later.
3. Given element one and two... just use the fucking website. I'll also point out that a lot of stores like target for example
And... in the north east they beat you and tell you that if you film them you'll go to jail.
twat.
Do you HONESTLY think the police in Baltimore and Philadelphia are a kinder and gentler police officer than what we have out here in Los Angeles? Think again, chump.
when I buy stuff online, I am very happy to go to the website, do a search, check prices, etc.
But even then, I'm not going to buy stuff that way when there is a store RIGHT HERE... that I can get it from... NOW... and often at a lower price.
Why press the button the at all? I'm not getting who this is for really. I don't see the demographic.
If you're poor you don't buy things this way. If you're middle class you're very happy to buy it at the store. If you're rich and are just too busy to even look at a site or care what it costs... then you have a maid or some other servant that buys things for the house.
So i don't get who this is for... Who is well off enough to find the markup acceptable and yet too poor to just have servants?
And that excludes the point that many rich people are appalling cheapskates.
The applicable demographic is so tiny as to be laughable.
They're basically two government agencies... one sending another a bill but both of them ultimately sustained with tax dollars. So... lower the "bill".
its not like the met office needs to make to make a profit or in fact needs to make anything off that fee. What is more, organizations don't have to change every customer the same amount for a given service.
If I'm selling apples, I can sell the same apples to John for 1 pound and to Tim I can change him 1000 pounds.
So... lower the price the met is charging to whatever is less than the competition... "win the contract" in the way that phoney baloney government agencies do... and stop whining.
And if the 1 billion have all the industry, technology, and food.... and the 4 billion are utterly dependent on the 1 billion for everything.
The 1 billion will rule the 4 billion.
And in being ruled, the 1 billion can systemically limit the population of the 4 billion... invest in killer robots.
And if they need human armies... they can hire a tiny fraction of the 4 billion as a professional army... tell them "we'll give you access to all our stuff, in return... kill anyone that tries to threaten us."...
And they'll find plenty of people from the 4 billion willing to do that.
You can't win.
The only hope you have is to be relevant in the new economy. This is what makes freedom work. The reason democracy has thrived is because the economic models changed to make slavery and peasant bondage less economical.
If you don't offer ANYTHING to the economy of value then the models will shift again to favor slave societies or noble/peasant relationships. And this time the nobility won't need you at all. You'll just be fucking animals that shit all over the land, eat food, and cause problems. They'll have no reason to keep you alive or to not kill you.
So unless you're really good at sucking cock... or you want to be a man servant... or you want to be a soldier that will kill for them. You're useless.
Now... there is a way out of this... but you won't like it and it will confuse you.
The way out.. is industrial independence. You're going to have to be able to produce some of the things you need either independently or at least as a community... and you are going to have to be useful to your community in that regard.
This is possible with the new technologies coming on line. We can have factories that fit into studio apartments. Automated farms in warehouses. Biological labs in boxes the size of microwaves.
The output is small but the technology can be ubiquitous.
And here's the really neat thing... when it gets democratized the elites lose control.
You've seen the people printing guns in 3d printers... the ones out of plastic are shit... but there are people that have printed them out of metal... and then of course there are CNC machines that can mill the parts out of metal as well. What that technology means is that it is functionally impossible to ban guns in any country that has that technology.
Because all someone has to do is buy the machine that can make the banned technology... and then instruct it to do so.
its like trying to control internet piracy only instead of bootleg copies of software, you're trying to control the blueprints for machine guns, bombs. killer drones, nuclear reactors, plagues.
You can't control it. The technology trends in this direction.
And here you say "that's scary, I want laws to stop people from doing it." They won't work.
The entire social and economic model for our society was built upon the belief that things could be controlled that there were choke points that could be monitored and if you monitored them you could stop things from going one way or another.
But you can't anymore. Which means if you want to stop people from doing things then you have to stop the PEOPLE not the technology.
Stopping guns from being produced in a certain place would mean controlling the flow of metal ingots to that place. And never mind that whomever could simply import things made out of metal, melt them down into ingots, and then make whatever they wanted anyway.
You can't stop it.
People are worried because the world is changing. It is.... and its not going to ask permission or follow the law or care what any politician thinks about it... there will be no vote.
It will be violent, chaotic, and confusing. But ultimately, I think we'll have freedom, rights, and prosperity. But the price of all that will be centralized control will be functionally impossible witho
your pathetic belief you can psycho analyze me through some internet posts when even a professional in that field couldn't do it with less than several intensive face to face sessions confesses an ignorance on your part as to how little you know about psychology.
In your attempt to high hat me, you basically just said "I'm ignorant"... and the funny thing is that you're so ignorant you don't even realize it.
can you give me any citation on that? My understanding is that FCC basically says no to anyone that asks them. And the pentagon only gets away with it because they don't ask.:D
The incompatibility issues with XP software was a deal breaker for years actually.
There were a lot of other issues but the incompatibility issues were a nightmare for corporations. And to this day, a big reason why so many systems still use XP is because of that compatibility issues.
Over crowding is impossible to avoid when you have that prison population. The economics of it don't provide other options.
As to solitary... you need methods to discipline prisoners.
I think one of the better ones is... I forget what its called... but its a mushy gray food they feed you instead of whatever else is being served. Apparently its entirely healthy but it states like nothing. Its like eating gray mush with all the vitamins and minerals you need... sort of like culinary sensory deprivation. Many prisoners have said it is worse than solitary because food is one of the few enjoyable things in their days and when you're on the mush... you don't even have that.
I think another prison punished some people by putting them in pink outfits instead of orange.
Whatever the method, you need means of disciplining the prisoners. Historically that was tying them to a pole and whipping them. That's not acceptable so we're going with other options.
Here you might say "well, if you legalized drugs the prison population would be smaller"... I generally agree. I think the drug war was a mistake. That said, I don't agree that we should turn prisons into country clubs either. Its supposed to suck.
My concept for reform would be to have the prisoners work. there are jobs we can OFFER them. They would not be MADE to do them. They could refuse with no repercussions. I'd even pay them some nominal amount for working and possibly give them certain perks.
We already employ prisoners as axillary firemen in California. They are used to do the hardest work in the big forest fires. They create fire breaks... they're standing 10 feet from 50 foot high walls of fire with chain saws clearing a 12 foot fire break.
We pay them 2 dollars a day for that. They sign up for it voluntarily. They get some more freedom in the camp than they get in the prison. They feel safer because the prison politics is gone. No gangs. No racial segregation. The self respect of doing good work for a good cause.
And the state of California saves huge sums of money. I think we have something like 6000 prisoners that will participate in these programs at a time. Think of the annual pay 6000 firefighters would cost... pensions and all. We save all that by using the convicts. And again... its consensual.
I'd expand that radically with the idea of getting as many prisoners as possible doing something productive and the lion's share of that money going back to the prison system with an eye to nullifying the cost of running the system. The true ideal here would be to have the prison system operate at a net zero cost. Maybe that isn't possible... but I'd try to get it as close to that as possible. Not by treating the prisoners like shit but by getting them to do something productive. Factory work. Farm labor. Construction. Land management. Sanitation. Name something unpleasant or backbreaking... something you can't pay people to do unless you pay them a lot or you're using illegal immigrants or something. And again... CONSENSUAL. I'm not talking about forcing anyone to do anything. They'll do it because they want to do it. Rewards, pay, etc will be set according to what it takes to get them to say yes. I suspect in most cases it will be the intangibles that will be the most interesting to them. A bit of freedom. A bit of self respect. That's worth a great deal and the price is cheap on the balance sheet of the prison system.
It just doesn't occur to anyone as a possibility. The things you want come from the store in their mind. It doesn't occur to them that all these things came out of a factory and the factory made the thing by making a lot of simple parts, and those parts were assembled, and the assembly was put in a box, and the box was put on a truck, and that truck delivered it to a store, and the store put it on a shelf.
All of that said, people including you are going to be buying a lot of stuff from these stores that got their stuff from a factory for decades... if not always. But the thing is that the robots means that you don't need the giant factories anymore.
Why do we have huge factories? Labor. Big factories lower labor costs. If you remove labor from the equation then much smaller factories become practical. Which means you can see mom and pop factories turning out relatively high volumes of goods.
There's no reason you couldn't have a micro car factory. What does a car cost... 20-80 grand? Well, consider how many cars a small to medium sized business would have to sell per year minus expenses? They might be comfortable on relatively few cars per year. And I'm talking full onsite fabrication of just about everything. A 3d printer can print a metal engine in a day. Assuming that's all that printer did... it could print hundreds of engines every year.
Consider your farming situation. What if you had robotic field hands. Going up and down the rows... squirting water at bugs, tilling soil... whatever.
And what if the robot is a general robot in the sense the fellow in the video discussed it. A robot like the personal computer. Able to do anything. Well then you might have one robot running around and doing all the household choirs... Everything. All the laborious farm labor... done. Milking the cow, turning the milk into cheese... whatever.
The human beings of the future could be sitting on their porches sipping sweat tea in white suites watching the robots work in the fields.
I don't mind drugs for life sentence prisoners. Give them whatever they want. Heroine... PCP... Crocodile... whatever.
The general population doesn't work for that because there is a belief they'll be rehabilitated and can be reintroduced into society after their sentence. If you've drugged them then you're just releasing drug addicts.
As to outlets and boredom... something I'm always a little baffled with from the people that say we shouldn't have a punishment system is that the deterrence wanes if you don't have punishment.
Lets say the prison is a country club where you family can live with you in prison in a suite somewhere. there are prisons that work that way.
Where is the deterrence?
I'm sorry, prison has to suck.
Now that said, we should consider alternative programs. Work programs for example. We use prisoners as axillary fire fighters sometimes for example. Big blaze hits California burning down the forest... and we deploy thousands of immates to fire camps and they cut fire breaks and basically do the worst most back breaking jobs that the professional fire fighters don't want to do. I believe we pay the prisoners 2 dollars a day for their efforts.
THAT is what I would do. More of that. And while you might call it slave labor... these are convicts... not slaves... tried in court. And beyond that, if you actually interview the prisoners they LIKE it better than prison. They are given more freedom, they feel safer, they get a sense of accomplishment, they get some respect from someone besides each other, and they get away from prison politics.... the gangs don't exist in the fire camps... there is no racial segregation.
What would I have prisoners do? Anything anyone would want them to do and the prisoners will consent to do. That's another thing... the work I'm talking about is consensual. No one is forced to do it. You can go back to the prison at any time. So what would I have them do... anything they could do... they could answer phones... do paper work... harvest crops (I'm aware of the optics of having fellows in orange harvesting cotton), possibly doing some factory work... anything at all. Just get them jobs... RIGHT NOW... we could have whole industries pop up around these prisons. And the labor could well off set most of the cost of imprisoning them in the first place thus balancing the scales closer to equal.
As it is, every person we send to prison costs the state which means on top of whatever crime they committed they're wasting our money. If we could get them to do something productive while in prison then our costs would be lower. And for those that care only for the prisoner's well being... this would be consensual and most prisoners seem to prefer having something to do when in prison rather than just be stuck in the toxic zoo that is the prison culture.
how about 1 cm packets of C4 that can be mashed together along with a small detonator that slips through inspections in parts?
You're not letting your inner demon out to really see what worst case scenarios look like.
Maybe its just me, but I don't want to shiv a guy if my intention is to kill him. Shiving a guy is dangerous. And getting away with it means some sort of conspiracy. And I'm not going to trust any of these fucking people with a secret like that especially if they can get time off their sentence by ratting on me.
So explosives or poison would be my go to assassination tools. Then when whomever died... I could say "who me?"
with either method, I'd have to worry about residue. Any killing like that is going to have an investigation. You're going to want to know how to avoid having any of it get on you or anything that belongs to you. You might even want to get residue on some other people to muddy the investigation
Put a timed detonator in the thing or a radio detonator... whatever works for you... then when the time is right... bang.
Or poison... that's tricky though... you'd want a contact poison ideally... or maybe an injectable. Tainted drugs perhaps. But unless you have a contact poison... it gets complicated.
The flow of drugs into prisons is not acceptable. That it happens is a fact but that it is tolerated is a disgrace.
Much of it as I understand comes from corrupt prison guards. that means that the criminals are being guarded by criminals. Those guards shouldn't be guarding the prisoners... they should be serving time with them.
As to people jamming stuff up their ass... I can understand that in a jail. I don't understand it in a prison. The distinction being that a jail is where you go when you await sentencing where as a prison is where you go after you've been sentenced. Getting drugs all the way from the street to the prison through some ass based courier system doesn't seem likely. And then what is left... gifts from friends and family? If anything gets through that, then that is just incompetence. X-ray it and dog sniff it. That's really pretty good at spotting stuff.
A nice thing about the windows community is that we do find these things fairly quickly and knee cap them... just Tonya Harding the shit out of them.:D
I have this giant list of registry hacks that have to be applied to every windows OS to add features, remove features, change features...
The ones where I'm outright just breaking something are the funniest for me though. I mean... just let me turn it off. But no... I have to go in and bust certain associations that just cause the feature to not function.
can you give me another example of where radio signals are scrambled by the government?
Because people have been getting in trouble for doing that INSIDE buildings. A hotel got in trouble for scrambling some signals inside their hotel. Some resturants have done it... a church was blocking cellphones because they didn't want cell phones ringing in the middle of a church service.
So private groups can't seem to do it INSIDE their building.
give me an example of the FCC being cool with scrambling signals? I've not seen it outside of the Pentagon, war games, or literal war zones.
Consider that if everyone has a robot, that you could get your robot to make things for you rather than buy them.
Here you say "but what about chemicals and compounds"... all of that can be automated.
People in cities might be fucked. I don't know... they can live it up with Judge Dredd in Mega City 1. But people with some land might be able to enjoy a modern high tech life style and produce most of what they want and need independently.
3d printers... CNC machines... that magnetic auto refinery/chemical plant/bio sample handler... there are a lot of things you could make with that. And those things you made could make pretty much anything else and so on.
Keep in mind, everything we have today from satellites to submarines was built with human hands... or built with things built by human hands.
We could see a democratization of industry in the same way that computers have democratized a lot of things.
Rather than wondering if you'll have a job... consider if you'll even need one. Why do you have the job? To make the money to get the things you buy with the money. What if you could just skip that middle step and go right to the end?
You might say "this thing I want isn't practical to build that way"... maybe... but also consider that you might build things differently if your industrial model were different.
Consider how things were made 30 thousand years ago. Pretty much all we have from that period are "hand axes"... bits of stone chipped into sharp shapes... or smooth rocks used as hammers.
Look at how things were made in every era from then to now. The way they're made and the way people thought about the things they made changed from one era to the next. That relationship between the thing, what it is meant to do, who made it, and how society sees the person that made it influences the thing that is made.
A skilled craftsman in the 1700s is not going to make something the same way that an assembly line worker will in 1938. And just the same, a person that instructs his machinery to build him a whatever that he wants is not going to build it the same way that assembly line worker would either.
the great take away many people have with this is that we should just get welfare and have the big government or corporations pay us for breathing. The reality is that if the industrial complex doesn't need us then it doesn't need us. You might think you can vote yourself some political power but if you provide nothing the society actually needs... then why does the society need to care what you want? Your vote won't matter.
So you had better hope you're better than just a welfare sink. Because if that's all 80 percent of humanity becomes... then 80 percent of humanity is expendable. I'm not saying I'd kill them off... I'm saying someone will do it though. And when it happens... those that do it will lose nothing when they do it because the people they're killing are of no value at all to the society.
So pray you're not as useless as some would suggest. Because if you are... you might just be the walking dead.
netting is fine. The issue I have with that is that if there are gaps in the net large enough that I could drop something through the net... then why not fly over the yard and drop something through the net?
Imagine a lawn dart full of heroin... or perhaps lots of little golf ball sized bags of drugs that just go right through the netting?
So your netting would have to be really fine. Maybe if you used that netting they use in agriculture to shield some plants from the sun. I think they use it over peppercorn plants in India. The plants naturally live in a jungle so when you cultivate them you need to mimic the canopy. Anyway... if you used that kind of netting... fine. But do keep in mind that anything the contraband could slip through would be ineffective.
There are some prisons that are literally skyscrappers... there is no outside time.
And even if there always were... and there isn't... you could limit the size of that area and remove any grass... so it was a small uniform flat area... and then a guard could inspect it every morning reliably.
As to shutting down anything in the yard that is electrical... how? With magic?
The only thing that makes any sense to me that would work besides enclosing their rec time would be putting out some motion sensing cameras that were very sensitive and would note when where something was dropped in the field prior to the prisoners being released. Then the guards could go out there, pick it up, and let the prisoners out to play.
and if I drop a package full of drugs on the lawn that is literally covered in Sod that was stapled to it so the bag appears to be made of grass and so blends into the lawn... if I do this at 2 AM...
What then? The prisoner then walks over to where ever it is... extracts the drugs or takes whole package or whatever...
Your concept is to have a guard shoot the drone out of the sky.
That works if the drone is active in when the prisoners are there. Wrong. You drop the package off when no one is looking.
Think like an asshole for a minute. Most people I've found are incapable of thinking of security in any fundemental fashion because they just lack the inner asshole to draw upon.
I do not have this deficiency... I am capable of extreme levels of malice.
I'm not trying to sound like an asshole here... its just how I am... Can you reach down inside yourself and find that inner cunt that lives inside us all?
Channel that just to determine how you're going to smuggle a hand grenade into a prison. Its amusing that the Waldon's worst fear was a handgun. Explosives are obviously worse... with a timer or a detonator. Why? Because you could do the killing and get away with it.
See that? I feel like the Emperor telling you about the dark side... LET IT FLOW THROUGH YOU... release your hatred!:D
Seriously though, people are really bad at doing that when estimating how nasty someone can be with this tech. People don't appreciate that someone that is breaking the rules isn't going to follow the rules. They're going to think in terms of what they can get away with. And if the stupid drone is operated beyond the limits of the prison using radio signals or if the damned thing is actually fully automated... the risk to the people putting all this in motion is minimal.
So yeah... explosives is what I'd worry about.
The drone situation is an intolerable risk. The fact that people haven't already exploited this to do really horrible shit is owed more to no one wanting to do it than them not being able to do it. Think of it like the traffic coming at you at 120 miles an hour (60+60) with nothing but a little yellow line separating the two of you. Why don't you collide? Because no one wants to collide. But they can... every time a car passes you someone has a chance to kill you.
Sorry if I've annoyed or offended you or something... I seem to do that constantly... its only intentional when its obvious... otherwise its just what happens. *shrugs*
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I'm not talking about the prisons making money off the government by warehousing people. I'm talking about the prison industry itself being cost neutral if it can figure out how to monetize prisoners BESIDES tax revenue.
The land is taxed on its value and the value is priced at demand and the demand is set in dollars.
If the economy crashes and people don't have money to buy land... then the value of land goes down and the taxes you can levy on that basis go down.
As to needing some money... sure... but it takes less than you'd think in most places. There are some states with very high property taxes. I think New Jersey has some comically high property taxes... but that just means don't live in New Jersey if you're doing this.
There are states and places in the US that have cheap land and very low to no property taxes.
Here people say "well, those places are not near all the amenities I want"... like what? StarSmucks coffee? Like the plays or opera you're probably not going to? Like the museums you've visited three times in the last five years?
For me, I need water, power, Internet, reasonable transport to places I might want to actually go, and access to some kind of market to get things.
That's all I really care about.
We have this renewable power that is best employed to take people off grid entirely. Anyone that drops a well into the ground can get water. But assuming you don't want to do that or can't... there are various methods of recycling water so that mostly what you're losing is to evaporation.
Check out the solar distilleries. I think every 5 square feet of surface area can distill one gallon of water per day. Which is enough drinking water for one person... and that even works on salt water. Here you might say "I want more than a gallon per person"... then have 1000 square feet of surface area for it and generate 200 gallons of distilled water per day... you can literally distill your urine with something like this... into JUST water. Though honestly... gross. Mostly because you have to clean the thing out at intervals and who wants to do that with concentrated pee.
The food thing... I mean, you can grow your own food. Its a chore. But it is totally possible. Growing all your own food is hard. But even supplementing it is a big deal. The most expensive stuff is the fresh produce. If you provide that on your own, then you can cut your bill radically while actually covering a small portion of your caloric intake.
As as to wifi... there are wifi antennas that can transmit 400 mb signals at up to 30km. The antennas aren't even expensive. Its like 200 for each one. So. You can really be out in the boonies and get very solid internet.
Its a day dream I have... the more insane and stupid the world gets. I just want to go live in such a desolate place that the only people that would come upon my property would be people that were lost. The Aleutian islands features in my day dreams. That's a place so desolate that the Japanese invaded it during WW2... then changed their minds and left without a fight.
I don't need so many of the things I'm offered. And I think when this micro manufactury stuff becomes a bigger deal people are going to be able to gain a lot of independence from the industrial infrastructure.
Middle class people go to the store all the time. And keep in mind... they have to wait 48 hours to get the thing they want.
Forty.... Eight.
Now... would a middle class family rather wait 48 hours or simply buy it from a store when they're out and about doing something already.
Yes yes... you don't want to buy the thing RIGHT NOW... but amazon isn't going to give it to you right now either. Are they?
And tomorrow... because you're middle class and have a job... you're going to go to work... and when you are coming back from work... you might stop off at a store to buy some beer, or some wine, or some bell peppers or some nice steak... or something that people buy at stores... and you might think "oh, I also need tooth paste"... and then you'd buy that then and there.
So... hold the opinion you like but I'm not seeing this for the middle class.
The middle class tends to be quite happy to buy things from stores.
The big problem I've noticed with Amazon for these goods is that the prices are not competitive. the middle class does price check. They're not so rich that they don't care if tooth paste costs 50 percent more. And again, there are a lot of rich people that won't pay that either... just cause.
I know a guy with 10 million in the bank that refuses to over pay for anything. The guy haggles and negotiates everything. Its actually fucking obnoxious but he has to do it because he just does... and so the best thing you can do is stare at the ceiling when it starts and count to a thousand. It will eventually end... often in his favor. He frequently pays 20 percent to HALF what things are listed as because he just refuses to pay the list price. He gets the manager out, he talks about what the thing is being billed for at different places, he talks about the quality, the condition, on and on and on... and eventually he gets the fucking discount. Like clockwork.
Its more obnoxious than you can imagine.
The point I'm making though is that even amoungst the people that could be argued to not care about the mark up... lots of them do care. Rich people haggle over shit all the time. Nickle and dime shit. And those are the people that it doesn't really matter to... for the middle class... those nickles and dimes will add up to actual money for them. And so they do it as well.
Look, the concept of this amazon idea is interesting. I would modify it a few different ways.
1. Amazon is restricting who can offer certain types of products to artificially inflate the price of certain goods so they can over charge for their grosery delivery service. I recently looked for some soda stream syrup on there and they were asking for 20 dollars for bottle of syrup that at any retail store costs about 5. But you'll see them do that for everything... flour, detergent, toothpaste... anything you'd go to a grosery store to buy and on amazon its suddenly way way way way more expensive for no reason. And the reason they're doing it is to hide/subsidize the cost of their delivery service. Their delivery service HAS to charge a premium price. They have to. But they don't want the consumer to realize how much they're being charged for it, so they inflate the product costs and then use the profits from that to offset the delivery charges.
This is a price strategy that works on idiots. You don't see companies do this when their primary customers are other businesses... why? Because businesses spread sheet costs and any bullshit in the prices sticks out rather prominently if you actually do the math.
So the first thing Amazon has to do... is stop doing this... starting from the premise that your customers are stupid... is not a good thing to do when you're going after young tech savvy professionals.
2. I don't think they should immediately order whatever so much as add the whatever it is to a shopping list that can be executed later.
3. Given element one and two... just use the fucking website. I'll also point out that a lot of stores like target for example
And... in the north east they beat you and tell you that if you film them you'll go to jail.
twat.
Do you HONESTLY think the police in Baltimore and Philadelphia are a kinder and gentler police officer than what we have out here in Los Angeles? Think again, chump.
when I buy stuff online, I am very happy to go to the website, do a search, check prices, etc.
But even then, I'm not going to buy stuff that way when there is a store RIGHT HERE... that I can get it from... NOW... and often at a lower price.
Why press the button the at all? I'm not getting who this is for really. I don't see the demographic.
If you're poor you don't buy things this way.
If you're middle class you're very happy to buy it at the store.
If you're rich and are just too busy to even look at a site or care what it costs... then you have a maid or some other servant that buys things for the house.
So i don't get who this is for... Who is well off enough to find the markup acceptable and yet too poor to just have servants?
And that excludes the point that many rich people are appalling cheapskates.
The applicable demographic is so tiny as to be laughable.
... haahhahhahahaha... you think explosives are hard to use? Where did you get that idea?
How many f'ing stupid islamists use them all the time? How many soldiers out of basic are handling explosives all the time.
I mean... just wow. An explosive is a firecracker... that has a bigger boom.
Are you smart enough to use a firecracker?
Yes?
Then you're smart enough to use explosives. Safely? Maybe not... but I'm quite certain you could set the fucking thing off if you wanted to.
Oh my god... the people on the internet. *eyes tear up with laughter*
You guys are hilarious.
They're basically two government agencies... one sending another a bill but both of them ultimately sustained with tax dollars. So... lower the "bill".
its not like the met office needs to make to make a profit or in fact needs to make anything off that fee. What is more, organizations don't have to change every customer the same amount for a given service.
If I'm selling apples, I can sell the same apples to John for 1 pound and to Tim I can change him 1000 pounds.
So... lower the price the met is charging to whatever is less than the competition... "win the contract" in the way that phoney baloney government agencies do... and stop whining.
Assuming 5 billion people...
20 percent is 1 billion...
Thus 1 billion versus 4 billion.
And if the 1 billion have all the industry, technology, and food.... and the 4 billion are utterly dependent on the 1 billion for everything.
The 1 billion will rule the 4 billion.
And in being ruled, the 1 billion can systemically limit the population of the 4 billion... invest in killer robots.
And if they need human armies... they can hire a tiny fraction of the 4 billion as a professional army... tell them "we'll give you access to all our stuff, in return... kill anyone that tries to threaten us."...
And they'll find plenty of people from the 4 billion willing to do that.
You can't win.
The only hope you have is to be relevant in the new economy. This is what makes freedom work. The reason democracy has thrived is because the economic models changed to make slavery and peasant bondage less economical.
If you don't offer ANYTHING to the economy of value then the models will shift again to favor slave societies or noble/peasant relationships. And this time the nobility won't need you at all. You'll just be fucking animals that shit all over the land, eat food, and cause problems. They'll have no reason to keep you alive or to not kill you.
So unless you're really good at sucking cock... or you want to be a man servant... or you want to be a soldier that will kill for them. You're useless.
Now... there is a way out of this... but you won't like it and it will confuse you.
The way out.. is industrial independence. You're going to have to be able to produce some of the things you need either independently or at least as a community... and you are going to have to be useful to your community in that regard.
This is possible with the new technologies coming on line. We can have factories that fit into studio apartments. Automated farms in warehouses. Biological labs in boxes the size of microwaves.
The output is small but the technology can be ubiquitous.
And here's the really neat thing... when it gets democratized the elites lose control.
You've seen the people printing guns in 3d printers... the ones out of plastic are shit... but there are people that have printed them out of metal... and then of course there are CNC machines that can mill the parts out of metal as well. What that technology means is that it is functionally impossible to ban guns in any country that has that technology.
Because all someone has to do is buy the machine that can make the banned technology... and then instruct it to do so.
its like trying to control internet piracy only instead of bootleg copies of software, you're trying to control the blueprints for machine guns, bombs. killer drones, nuclear reactors, plagues.
You can't control it. The technology trends in this direction.
And here you say "that's scary, I want laws to stop people from doing it." They won't work.
The entire social and economic model for our society was built upon the belief that things could be controlled that there were choke points that could be monitored and if you monitored them you could stop things from going one way or another.
But you can't anymore. Which means if you want to stop people from doing things then you have to stop the PEOPLE not the technology.
Stopping guns from being produced in a certain place would mean controlling the flow of metal ingots to that place. And never mind that whomever could simply import things made out of metal, melt them down into ingots, and then make whatever they wanted anyway.
You can't stop it.
People are worried because the world is changing. It is.... and its not going to ask permission or follow the law or care what any politician thinks about it... there will be no vote.
It will be violent, chaotic, and confusing. But ultimately, I think we'll have freedom, rights, and prosperity. But the price of all that will be centralized control will be functionally impossible witho
your pathetic belief you can psycho analyze me through some internet posts when even a professional in that field couldn't do it with less than several intensive face to face sessions confesses an ignorance on your part as to how little you know about psychology.
In your attempt to high hat me, you basically just said "I'm ignorant"... and the funny thing is that you're so ignorant you don't even realize it.
can you give me any citation on that? My understanding is that FCC basically says no to anyone that asks them. And the pentagon only gets away with it because they don't ask. :D
So you don't think the Xbox One being 100 dollars more expensive because the kinnect had anything to do with it?
You don't think the always connected to the internet thing had anything to do with it?
You don't think any of a dozen other massive fucking problems were relevant... just a speed difference which... probably no one will even notice?
I'm not buying it.
No sale.
The incompatibility issues with XP software was a deal breaker for years actually.
There were a lot of other issues but the incompatibility issues were a nightmare for corporations. And to this day, a big reason why so many systems still use XP is because of that compatibility issues.
Over crowding is impossible to avoid when you have that prison population. The economics of it don't provide other options.
As to solitary... you need methods to discipline prisoners.
I think one of the better ones is... I forget what its called... but its a mushy gray food they feed you instead of whatever else is being served. Apparently its entirely healthy but it states like nothing. Its like eating gray mush with all the vitamins and minerals you need... sort of like culinary sensory deprivation. Many prisoners have said it is worse than solitary because food is one of the few enjoyable things in their days and when you're on the mush... you don't even have that.
I think another prison punished some people by putting them in pink outfits instead of orange.
Whatever the method, you need means of disciplining the prisoners. Historically that was tying them to a pole and whipping them. That's not acceptable so we're going with other options.
Here you might say "well, if you legalized drugs the prison population would be smaller"... I generally agree. I think the drug war was a mistake. That said, I don't agree that we should turn prisons into country clubs either. Its supposed to suck.
My concept for reform would be to have the prisoners work. there are jobs we can OFFER them. They would not be MADE to do them. They could refuse with no repercussions. I'd even pay them some nominal amount for working and possibly give them certain perks.
We already employ prisoners as axillary firemen in California. They are used to do the hardest work in the big forest fires. They create fire breaks... they're standing 10 feet from 50 foot high walls of fire with chain saws clearing a 12 foot fire break.
We pay them 2 dollars a day for that. They sign up for it voluntarily. They get some more freedom in the camp than they get in the prison. They feel safer because the prison politics is gone. No gangs. No racial segregation. The self respect of doing good work for a good cause.
And the state of California saves huge sums of money. I think we have something like 6000 prisoners that will participate in these programs at a time. Think of the annual pay 6000 firefighters would cost... pensions and all. We save all that by using the convicts. And again... its consensual.
I'd expand that radically with the idea of getting as many prisoners as possible doing something productive and the lion's share of that money going back to the prison system with an eye to nullifying the cost of running the system. The true ideal here would be to have the prison system operate at a net zero cost. Maybe that isn't possible... but I'd try to get it as close to that as possible. Not by treating the prisoners like shit but by getting them to do something productive. Factory work. Farm labor. Construction. Land management. Sanitation. Name something unpleasant or backbreaking... something you can't pay people to do unless you pay them a lot or you're using illegal immigrants or something. And again... CONSENSUAL. I'm not talking about forcing anyone to do anything. They'll do it because they want to do it. Rewards, pay, etc will be set according to what it takes to get them to say yes. I suspect in most cases it will be the intangibles that will be the most interesting to them. A bit of freedom. A bit of self respect. That's worth a great deal and the price is cheap on the balance sheet of the prison system.
It just doesn't occur to anyone as a possibility. The things you want come from the store in their mind. It doesn't occur to them that all these things came out of a factory and the factory made the thing by making a lot of simple parts, and those parts were assembled, and the assembly was put in a box, and the box was put on a truck, and that truck delivered it to a store, and the store put it on a shelf.
All of that said, people including you are going to be buying a lot of stuff from these stores that got their stuff from a factory for decades... if not always. But the thing is that the robots means that you don't need the giant factories anymore.
Why do we have huge factories? Labor. Big factories lower labor costs. If you remove labor from the equation then much smaller factories become practical. Which means you can see mom and pop factories turning out relatively high volumes of goods.
There's no reason you couldn't have a micro car factory. What does a car cost... 20-80 grand? Well, consider how many cars a small to medium sized business would have to sell per year minus expenses? They might be comfortable on relatively few cars per year. And I'm talking full onsite fabrication of just about everything. A 3d printer can print a metal engine in a day. Assuming that's all that printer did... it could print hundreds of engines every year.
Consider your farming situation. What if you had robotic field hands. Going up and down the rows... squirting water at bugs, tilling soil... whatever.
And what if the robot is a general robot in the sense the fellow in the video discussed it. A robot like the personal computer. Able to do anything. Well then you might have one robot running around and doing all the household choirs... Everything. All the laborious farm labor... done. Milking the cow, turning the milk into cheese... whatever.
The human beings of the future could be sitting on their porches sipping sweat tea in white suites watching the robots work in the fields.
I don't mind drugs for life sentence prisoners. Give them whatever they want. Heroine... PCP... Crocodile... whatever.
The general population doesn't work for that because there is a belief they'll be rehabilitated and can be reintroduced into society after their sentence. If you've drugged them then you're just releasing drug addicts.
As to outlets and boredom... something I'm always a little baffled with from the people that say we shouldn't have a punishment system is that the deterrence wanes if you don't have punishment.
Lets say the prison is a country club where you family can live with you in prison in a suite somewhere. there are prisons that work that way.
Where is the deterrence?
I'm sorry, prison has to suck.
Now that said, we should consider alternative programs. Work programs for example. We use prisoners as axillary fire fighters sometimes for example. Big blaze hits California burning down the forest... and we deploy thousands of immates to fire camps and they cut fire breaks and basically do the worst most back breaking jobs that the professional fire fighters don't want to do. I believe we pay the prisoners 2 dollars a day for their efforts.
THAT is what I would do. More of that. And while you might call it slave labor... these are convicts... not slaves... tried in court. And beyond that, if you actually interview the prisoners they LIKE it better than prison. They are given more freedom, they feel safer, they get a sense of accomplishment, they get some respect from someone besides each other, and they get away from prison politics.... the gangs don't exist in the fire camps... there is no racial segregation.
What would I have prisoners do? Anything anyone would want them to do and the prisoners will consent to do. That's another thing... the work I'm talking about is consensual. No one is forced to do it. You can go back to the prison at any time. So what would I have them do... anything they could do... they could answer phones... do paper work... harvest crops (I'm aware of the optics of having fellows in orange harvesting cotton), possibly doing some factory work... anything at all. Just get them jobs... RIGHT NOW... we could have whole industries pop up around these prisons. And the labor could well off set most of the cost of imprisoning them in the first place thus balancing the scales closer to equal.
As it is, every person we send to prison costs the state which means on top of whatever crime they committed they're wasting our money. If we could get them to do something productive while in prison then our costs would be lower. And for those that care only for the prisoner's well being... this would be consensual and most prisoners seem to prefer having something to do when in prison rather than just be stuck in the toxic zoo that is the prison culture.
The net would have to be pretty fine otherwise the drone could drop contraband through it.
I could drop a dart through bird netting... or if you prefer... marble sized heroine packets.
how about 1 cm packets of C4 that can be mashed together along with a small detonator that slips through inspections in parts?
You're not letting your inner demon out to really see what worst case scenarios look like.
Maybe its just me, but I don't want to shiv a guy if my intention is to kill him. Shiving a guy is dangerous. And getting away with it means some sort of conspiracy. And I'm not going to trust any of these fucking people with a secret like that especially if they can get time off their sentence by ratting on me.
So explosives or poison would be my go to assassination tools. Then when whomever died... I could say "who me?"
with either method, I'd have to worry about residue. Any killing like that is going to have an investigation. You're going to want to know how to avoid having any of it get on you or anything that belongs to you. You might even want to get residue on some other people to muddy the investigation
Put a timed detonator in the thing or a radio detonator... whatever works for you... then when the time is right... bang.
Or poison... that's tricky though... you'd want a contact poison ideally... or maybe an injectable. Tainted drugs perhaps. But unless you have a contact poison... it gets complicated.
The flow of drugs into prisons is not acceptable. That it happens is a fact but that it is tolerated is a disgrace.
Much of it as I understand comes from corrupt prison guards. that means that the criminals are being guarded by criminals. Those guards shouldn't be guarding the prisoners... they should be serving time with them.
As to people jamming stuff up their ass... I can understand that in a jail. I don't understand it in a prison. The distinction being that a jail is where you go when you await sentencing where as a prison is where you go after you've been sentenced. Getting drugs all the way from the street to the prison through some ass based courier system doesn't seem likely. And then what is left... gifts from friends and family? If anything gets through that, then that is just incompetence. X-ray it and dog sniff it. That's really pretty good at spotting stuff.
If the package is literally made of grass... then you might not catch it.
A nice thing about the windows community is that we do find these things fairly quickly and knee cap them... just Tonya Harding the shit out of them. :D
I have this giant list of registry hacks that have to be applied to every windows OS to add features, remove features, change features...
The ones where I'm outright just breaking something are the funniest for me though. I mean... just let me turn it off. But no... I have to go in and bust certain associations that just cause the feature to not function.
can you give me another example of where radio signals are scrambled by the government?
Because people have been getting in trouble for doing that INSIDE buildings. A hotel got in trouble for scrambling some signals inside their hotel. Some resturants have done it... a church was blocking cellphones because they didn't want cell phones ringing in the middle of a church service.
So private groups can't seem to do it INSIDE their building.
give me an example of the FCC being cool with scrambling signals? I've not seen it outside of the Pentagon, war games, or literal war zones.
Consider that if everyone has a robot, that you could get your robot to make things for you rather than buy them.
Here you say "but what about chemicals and compounds"... all of that can be automated.
People in cities might be fucked. I don't know... they can live it up with Judge Dredd in Mega City 1. But people with some land might be able to enjoy a modern high tech life style and produce most of what they want and need independently.
3d printers... CNC machines... that magnetic auto refinery/chemical plant/bio sample handler... there are a lot of things you could make with that. And those things you made could make pretty much anything else and so on.
Keep in mind, everything we have today from satellites to submarines was built with human hands... or built with things built by human hands.
We could see a democratization of industry in the same way that computers have democratized a lot of things.
Rather than wondering if you'll have a job... consider if you'll even need one. Why do you have the job? To make the money to get the things you buy with the money. What if you could just skip that middle step and go right to the end?
You might say "this thing I want isn't practical to build that way"... maybe... but also consider that you might build things differently if your industrial model were different.
Consider how things were made 30 thousand years ago. Pretty much all we have from that period are "hand axes"... bits of stone chipped into sharp shapes... or smooth rocks used as hammers.
Look at how things were made in every era from then to now. The way they're made and the way people thought about the things they made changed from one era to the next. That relationship between the thing, what it is meant to do, who made it, and how society sees the person that made it influences the thing that is made.
A skilled craftsman in the 1700s is not going to make something the same way that an assembly line worker will in 1938. And just the same, a person that instructs his machinery to build him a whatever that he wants is not going to build it the same way that assembly line worker would either.
the great take away many people have with this is that we should just get welfare and have the big government or corporations pay us for breathing. The reality is that if the industrial complex doesn't need us then it doesn't need us. You might think you can vote yourself some political power but if you provide nothing the society actually needs... then why does the society need to care what you want? Your vote won't matter.
So you had better hope you're better than just a welfare sink. Because if that's all 80 percent of humanity becomes... then 80 percent of humanity is expendable. I'm not saying I'd kill them off... I'm saying someone will do it though. And when it happens... those that do it will lose nothing when they do it because the people they're killing are of no value at all to the society.
So pray you're not as useless as some would suggest. Because if you are... you might just be the walking dead.
netting is fine. The issue I have with that is that if there are gaps in the net large enough that I could drop something through the net... then why not fly over the yard and drop something through the net?
Imagine a lawn dart full of heroin... or perhaps lots of little golf ball sized bags of drugs that just go right through the netting?
So your netting would have to be really fine. Maybe if you used that netting they use in agriculture to shield some plants from the sun. I think they use it over peppercorn plants in India. The plants naturally live in a jungle so when you cultivate them you need to mimic the canopy. Anyway... if you used that kind of netting... fine. But do keep in mind that anything the contraband could slip through would be ineffective.
There are some prisons that are literally skyscrappers... there is no outside time.
And even if there always were... and there isn't... you could limit the size of that area and remove any grass... so it was a small uniform flat area... and then a guard could inspect it every morning reliably.
As to shutting down anything in the yard that is electrical... how? With magic?
The only thing that makes any sense to me that would work besides enclosing their rec time would be putting out some motion sensing cameras that were very sensitive and would note when where something was dropped in the field prior to the prisoners being released. Then the guards could go out there, pick it up, and let the prisoners out to play.
and if I drop a package full of drugs on the lawn that is literally covered in Sod that was stapled to it so the bag appears to be made of grass and so blends into the lawn... if I do this at 2 AM...
What then? The prisoner then walks over to where ever it is... extracts the drugs or takes whole package or whatever...
Your concept is to have a guard shoot the drone out of the sky.
That works if the drone is active in when the prisoners are there. Wrong. You drop the package off when no one is looking.
Think like an asshole for a minute. Most people I've found are incapable of thinking of security in any fundemental fashion because they just lack the inner asshole to draw upon.
I do not have this deficiency... I am capable of extreme levels of malice.
I'm not trying to sound like an asshole here... its just how I am... Can you reach down inside yourself and find that inner cunt that lives inside us all?
Channel that just to determine how you're going to smuggle a hand grenade into a prison. Its amusing that the Waldon's worst fear was a handgun. Explosives are obviously worse... with a timer or a detonator. Why? Because you could do the killing and get away with it.
See that? I feel like the Emperor telling you about the dark side... LET IT FLOW THROUGH YOU... release your hatred! :D
Seriously though, people are really bad at doing that when estimating how nasty someone can be with this tech. People don't appreciate that someone that is breaking the rules isn't going to follow the rules. They're going to think in terms of what they can get away with. And if the stupid drone is operated beyond the limits of the prison using radio signals or if the damned thing is actually fully automated... the risk to the people putting all this in motion is minimal.
So yeah... explosives is what I'd worry about.
The drone situation is an intolerable risk. The fact that people haven't already exploited this to do really horrible shit is owed more to no one wanting to do it than them not being able to do it. Think of it like the traffic coming at you at 120 miles an hour (60+60) with nothing but a little yellow line separating the two of you. Why don't you collide? Because no one wants to collide. But they can... every time a car passes you someone has a chance to kill you.
Sorry if I've annoyed or offended you or something... I seem to do that constantly... its only intentional when its obvious... otherwise its just what happens. *shrugs*