Before A/C, you opened all the windows to get a good breeze blowing through, and if you could get a good breeze and it wasn't too humid you could also use a wet rag to help cool you off.
Do prisons get good breezes blowing through if you open all the windows?
If released, how likely is a homicide convict likely to repeat?
If we cared about that, our prisons would look more like mental health facilities and we would give people an incentive to rehabilitate quickly by releasing them as soon as they're better instead of releasing them unconditionally when their time is up.
No, our justice system is more about revenge than anything else.
the first amendment only prevents the government from censoring free speech. It doesn't compel them to provide one w/ a listening board.
That's true, but what's happening in this case is that the government is providing a listening board those who agree with them politically, not providing it to their ideological opponents, and not being completely honest and forthcoming about the censorship. Control of information and communication like this is one of Lifton's eight criteria for thought reform which is used judiciously in totalitarian countries to keep the populace under control.
You have very different goals between private corporations and governments.
On this point we agree. For example, a politician thinks the optimal amount of parking is the amount that ensures parking is abundant even when the price is zero. The politician ignores the cost to the business owner and ignores the lost tax revenue from the unproductive land set aside for parking, and creates an unfunded mandate that the business owner must provide this parking at their own expense. By requiring overbuilt parking lots, the politician has thus added an unnecessary law to the books (read on to learn why it is necessary) and must also make up the tax revenue shortfall some other way.
On the other hand, a business owner thinks the optimal amount of parking is when the amortized cost of one additional space equals the revenue it would bring. If the parking lot is unpriced, sometimes it will get completely full and this will turn some customers away, but sometimes that's cheaper than building more parking.
A government run like a business would look something like SFPark where on-street parking is priced according to location, time of day, and day of the week to keep all the parking spaces about 85% full at all times, similar to the way an airline prices seats up and down according to demand. This completely and permanently eliminates the need to force business owners to provide parking, it clears room within city borders for more businesses to help share the tax burden, it provides parking revenue to the city that owns that land, it creates demand for parking garages and transit (which helps make transit less of a drain on the city budget), it keeps the flow of customers to the business relatively constant throughout the day and the week, and it prevents traffic congestion from people looking for parking and from double parked cars.
So you see, wonderful things happen when market forces are allowed to work in government.
Back when I did engineering work, I worked on two separate contracts for very similar projects at roughly the same time. Project A was for a city, while Project B was being paid for by a developer. For Project A, we signed a lump sum contract with the city to do the study and design and then an hourly billing schedule for inspection. For Project B, we had an hourly agreement with the developer to provide the same services... [this] developer was in my office twice a day getting updates, checking on progress and overseeing my work... When he got my bill, he demanded hourly itemization and scrutinized the entire thing, refusing to pay when he thought things shouldn't have taken as long as they did. It was a pain and I remember being annoyed, but I also remember it got done quickly and for a tiny fraction -- [perhaps] 1/3 the cost -- of what a very similar project cost the public client.
This illustrates one way that a government could be run more like a business for the benefit of all taxpayers.
Yes, a Mac Mini Pro with the same specs as the iMac Pro would make a very nice desktop machine. But of course they would charge $3,000 for the base version!
Problems we have with our current welfare system would be exacerbated greatly.
Except that one big problem with our current welfare system is that if you work, you lose welfare benefits, and this creates a disincentive against working. A Universal Basic Income would come with no such restrictions.
An ideal rating system would have a flat histogram across all movies and across all critics, but Rotten Tomatoes' is not flat (see the second graph on that page) and so it's just downright clumsy. It's amazing that it works at all!
And when a critic likes or dislikes two similar movies, I want to see which one he or she likes more, but the fresh/rotten criteria prevents that. Even a 5-star rating system doesn't have enough precision much of the time.
This is why movies should be rated not in isolation but against each other. To rate a movie, you would have to say it is better or worse than another one of the same genre. Software would use these ratings to organize the movies from least to most liked using Condorcet or a similar method, and assign each movie a percentile ranking in order to create a perfectly flat histogram.
On the other hand, you have to prevent some of them from taking the money and blowing it on drugs, alcohol, or gambling in the first 24 hours, and then begging in the streets for the rest of the month.
When everyone knows that all of your financial needs are met and so the only possible reason you're begging is because you blew your money on booze and hookers, will people still give you money if you beg for it?
It's not that a citizen has an explicit right to fly a drone. The 4th amendment protects the citizen against the drone (or any other belongings) being taken from him/her without a really good reason.
Why can't demand be reduced during times of low production in order to prevent blackouts the same way eBay prevents too many people from winning the same auction?
It might be better to let insurance companies decide whether to release a suspect, and to take the financial risk of doing so, and to get rewarded when the released suspect doesn't commit another crime.
States deciding the issue for themselves is exactly the kind of thing Trump expected would happen, so this isn't any kind of resistance.
As a Californian, I hope Trump stays consistent with the state's rights theme and allows my state to continue setting our own auto emissions standards which 13 other states have adopted.
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Before A/C, you opened all the windows to get a good breeze blowing through, and if you could get a good breeze and it wasn't too humid you could also use a wet rag to help cool you off.
Do prisons get good breezes blowing through if you open all the windows?
And you can be sure that many of those prisoners learned from the experience that it's acceptable to make others suffer.
Oops, I meant "extensively" not "judiciously". The word did not mean what I thought it meant!
If we cared about that, our prisons would look more like mental health facilities and we would give people an incentive to rehabilitate quickly by releasing them as soon as they're better instead of releasing them unconditionally when their time is up.
No, our justice system is more about revenge than anything else.
That's true, but what's happening in this case is that the government is providing a listening board those who agree with them politically, not providing it to their ideological opponents, and not being completely honest and forthcoming about the censorship. Control of information and communication like this is one of Lifton's eight criteria for thought reform which is used judiciously in totalitarian countries to keep the populace under control.
I do not think it means what you think it means!
See my answer below for a rebuttal.
On this point we agree. For example, a politician thinks the optimal amount of parking is the amount that ensures parking is abundant even when the price is zero. The politician ignores the cost to the business owner and ignores the lost tax revenue from the unproductive land set aside for parking, and creates an unfunded mandate that the business owner must provide this parking at their own expense. By requiring overbuilt parking lots, the politician has thus added an unnecessary law to the books (read on to learn why it is necessary) and must also make up the tax revenue shortfall some other way.
On the other hand, a business owner thinks the optimal amount of parking is when the amortized cost of one additional space equals the revenue it would bring. If the parking lot is unpriced, sometimes it will get completely full and this will turn some customers away, but sometimes that's cheaper than building more parking.
A government run like a business would look something like SFPark where on-street parking is priced according to location, time of day, and day of the week to keep all the parking spaces about 85% full at all times, similar to the way an airline prices seats up and down according to demand. This completely and permanently eliminates the need to force business owners to provide parking, it clears room within city borders for more businesses to help share the tax burden, it provides parking revenue to the city that owns that land, it creates demand for parking garages and transit (which helps make transit less of a drain on the city budget), it keeps the flow of customers to the business relatively constant throughout the day and the week, and it prevents traffic congestion from people looking for parking and from double parked cars.
So you see, wonderful things happen when market forces are allowed to work in government.
Not the customers?
I beg to differ:
This illustrates one way that a government could be run more like a business for the benefit of all taxpayers.
Yes, a Mac Mini Pro with the same specs as the iMac Pro would make a very nice desktop machine. But of course they would charge $3,000 for the base version!
...usually.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" --Upton Sinclair, 1935
Except that one big problem with our current welfare system is that if you work, you lose welfare benefits, and this creates a disincentive against working. A Universal Basic Income would come with no such restrictions.
An ideal rating system would have a flat histogram across all movies and across all critics, but Rotten Tomatoes' is not flat (see the second graph on that page) and so it's just downright clumsy. It's amazing that it works at all!
And when a critic likes or dislikes two similar movies, I want to see which one he or she likes more, but the fresh/rotten criteria prevents that. Even a 5-star rating system doesn't have enough precision much of the time.
This is why movies should be rated not in isolation but against each other. To rate a movie, you would have to say it is better or worse than another one of the same genre. Software would use these ratings to organize the movies from least to most liked using Condorcet or a similar method, and assign each movie a percentile ranking in order to create a perfectly flat histogram.
When everyone knows that all of your financial needs are met and so the only possible reason you're begging is because you blew your money on booze and hookers, will people still give you money if you beg for it?
It's not that a citizen has an explicit right to fly a drone. The 4th amendment protects the citizen against the drone (or any other belongings) being taken from him/her without a really good reason.
And some stores would locate themselves along rail spurs as they did a century ago so they wouldn't even need a truck, just a forklift.
I wasn't aware that there are 8 billion deaths per year globally.
If the page was incapable of storing passwords, was it phishing?
If mimicking the look and feel of an authentic Google sign-in page is a copyright violation, then Google will come after them.
Or was some other illegal act committed?
Why can't demand be reduced during times of low production in order to prevent blackouts the same way eBay prevents too many people from winning the same auction?
It might be better to let insurance companies decide whether to release a suspect, and to take the financial risk of doing so, and to get rewarded when the released suspect doesn't commit another crime.
States deciding the issue for themselves is exactly the kind of thing Trump expected would happen, so this isn't any kind of resistance.
As a Californian, I hope Trump stays consistent with the state's rights theme and allows my state to continue setting our own auto emissions standards which 13 other states have adopted.
Because anything that's illegal is automatically immoral?
So you're saying we shouldn't tax robots because San Francisco is run by a single party.