If the unskilled labor market is completely "free market" then you have a high risk of exploitation. You can bet that if there was no minimum wage that many low-skilled workers would be paid a lot less than $7.25/hour. While there would be more total jobs available at the low end and the teen/young-adult unemployment rate would probably be lower, there would be a lot more "working poor" who had to rely on public assistance in order to survive (or they would be living in 3rd-world conditions because that is all they could afford to do). This is not good for an economy or a nation.
On the other hand if labor is so highly regulated that investors thinking about starting new companies avoid creating jobs that are unskilled just to avoid the regulation, you will have a shortage of work for those who are not-yet-skilled (i.e. teenagers and adult who could be trained but haven't been yet) and those who will be perpetually unskilled due to intellectual and/or physical limits or due to choice (there are a few people who simply do not want to learn new job skills). This isn't good for an economy or country either.
Striking the "right balance" of regulation and the "right form" of that regulation (e.g. direct government regulation or laws that make it easy to unionize or a combination of the two) is not easy and it's typically a moving target: The ideal regulations in given country and industry will change as the industry changes and as the country's economy changes. About the best we can hope for is to be "close enough" to having the "right balance" that the economy functions reasonably well, the short- and long-term unemployment rate and discouraged-worker-rate overall and the rates for specific sectors (e.g. young adults without any college education) aren't so high as to be considered uncivilized, and the actual wages for almost all workers isn't so low as to not cover a very basic standard of living.
Carry a Faraday cage with you, put your phone in it, reboot, and once it's rebooted, unlock the phone and turn off the WiFi.
You'll need to make it big enough to cover your hand and phone and transparent enough to see what you are doing.
It won't be complete because unless the Faraday cage covers your entire body (including your feet), the malicious WiFi signal could theoretically come through where your arm is. But unless the signal is really strong or bouncing off the wall behind you, you should be able to orient yourself so that the signal is too weak to be picked up by your phone.
In 1998 the Copyright Law was changed so just about everything that was under "normal" "75 years" or "life + 50 years" got extended by 20 years.
The only things that might have come into the public domain since then were those things covered by less-commonly-used provisions. For example, one of the new provisions was that corporate words expire after 120 years even if they were published less than 95 years ago (i.e. even if their copyright was less than 95 years old). It's possible that at least one such work entered the public domain in the last few years in the USA.
There are some other "oddball" copyright provisions that weren't extended by 20 years or which would allow something to fall into the public domain that was previously under copyright.
Also, there was at least one court case where a work believed to be under copyright was found to have fallen into the public domain long ago due to someone forgetting to renew the copyright.
In fact, there is strong evidence that works still under long copyright are supressed until they become public domain.
More importantly, it suppresses derivative works until the underlying original falls into the public domain.
If I were to create a fictional story, it's very likely that the things I have read in my life will subconsciously influence what I write.
To protect myself legally, I have two things that can protect me: 1) Don't publish my work until after all works that exist today are out of copyright, or 2) Base my work on something that is in the public domain (Shakespeare and ancient myths are common sources for writers, but anything published in the US prior to 1923 should be fine). If someone claims I stole from them, I can say "no, I stole from another source, and you probably did as well."
#2 won't protect me if I unintentionally/sub-consciously steal details like the names of characters or specific modern settings. In other words, if I redo Romeo and Juliet, it should not involve two street gangs or be set in a late-20th-century major Western City or the copyright-owners of West Side Story might come after me. But if West Side Story had been a nearly-completely-original work (i.e. neither Romeo and Juliet nor any other opposite-culture-therefore-forbidden teen romance had ever been written) if I would risk being sued if I wrote about two star-crossed lovers who lived 500 years ago.
It's that the owners retain the exclusive right to distribution - and if they decide to stop making the material available it's lost.
Spot on in general, but not for music. Thanks to "mandatory licensing" systems in the United States and possibly other countries, anyone willing to pay the statutory fee can reproduce it under limited circumstances. I don't think mandatory licensing covers wholesale physical reproductions or digital downloads, but it does cover sampling and it does cover playing the complete work over the airwaves (you (the radio station operator) do have to have a copy to play of course).
This is Canada. Canada has "moral rights" which allow creators to block the use of their creations in ways that disparage the creator (and possibly "disparage the work itself" - I'm not fully fluent in Canadian law). These rights are not transferable.
An example would be if a person spewing hate later repudiated his previous writings. He could use the "moral rights" clause to enjoin any publication of his works if they had the effect of implying that he, the author, still held those views, even if someone else held the copyright.
I see no problem in vesting "moral rights" to the author for the life or the author, provided that it is only used to 1) get an injunction, 2) sue to recover actual harm done to the author by the disparaging use (this would be separate from any copyright-related damages if the copyright were still in effect).
Personally, I wish the United States had a reasonable, limited "moral rights" rule.
If I'm young and I write something today and I die 80 years later, the copyright term will outlast everyone alive today and is therefore longer than any reasonable definition of "for a limited period of time."
When the time comes I hope someone sues to declare all works in the public domain as soon as there is nobody left alive who was around when that work fell under copyright.
Unfortunately nobody can make this challenge until the 2030s at the earliest, since everything put under copyright before 1923 is already in the public domain and there are hundreds if not thousands of Americans over 110 years old.
Personally, I wish the courts would define "a limited period of time" as something like "the expected lifespan of a newborn child in the United States if the child survives to age 5" (e.g. excluding infant/early-childhood mortality) - somewhere in the 75-80 year range. But I very much doubt the Supreme Court would accept this, given that they already allow "95 years" for corporate copyrights.
This is a good idea but it will be broken (and fixed), repeatedly.
However, it will make malware writers work harder/spend more money and reduce their reach, which should knock many bad actors out of the game.
Unlike Apple, this will be something most users will have to turn on manually or at least be something they can turn off if the manufacturer has it turned on "out of the box".
I'm more worried about Windows 10+1 - by that time people may be so used to the "safety" of walled-garden "app stores" that a computer you actually own (that is, control) will be a niche market.
Prior to the US Constitution there was no actual Federal government, there was a late-18th-century version
I guess that depend on what the definition of "actual... government" is. On the flip side, some people consider the U. N. an "actual government." In both cases, it depends on how the person making the aguement that the Confederation Congress or the U. N. is or is not an actual government defines the tem "actual government." Both are "edge cases" and there is wiggle room on how to define the term.
I don't screen my customers againt watch-lists and I don't refuse to sell to customers who wear t-shirts spoiting hate or anti-patriotic messages.
I guess this makes me a technology vendor who is friendly to people who might be terrorists.
-- The above is hypothetical - or is it? I'm not and office-supply vendor but most office-suppu vendors could've written what is avove and be telling the truth.
Too late. Throughout much of history including in parts of the United States up through the 20th century, it was legal for young teens or even pre-teens to marry. Of course, back then if you went to school beyond 8th grade you were considered fortunate, especially if you were a girl.
In some historical cultures it was legal to marry kids to each other or even to adults, with the understanding that the things that sex would wait until pregnancy was possible.
I for one am glad that the days where daughters (and to a lesser extent, sons) were treated as pawns by parents for political/economic purposes when it comes to marriage are for the most part over with, at least in the United States.
The judicial action could force institutions in New York State to funnel their primate research through 3rd parties that are located in other states or countries or abdicate such research to out-of-state or out-of-USA institutions.
Of course there may be innocent people on death row from time to time. If we could magically know for certain that everyone on death row was guilty of a capital offense and that there were no mitigating circumstances that would make the death penalty unjust, we could clear out death row in a matter of weeks (assuming the drugs/bullets/nitrogen gas/whatever was available).
The key to getting the death penalty "right" (setting aside arguments that it is inherently unjust) is to make sure that only people who deserve to die are actually executed and to make the execution process itself as quick, painless, and clean as possible.
By the way, there are people in prison for non-death-penalty crimes who are innocent, and there are people who have been released or who never went to jail who have criminal records they didn't earn. Our justice system is far from perfect and I doubt it will ever be perfect. I'm willing to live with the small chance that I will be falsely arrested and locked up for life in exchange for having a functioning justice system, but I'm not willing to be arrested, tried, condemned, and executed for a crime I never committed. If this means throwing out the death penalty for even the most heinous of criminals in favor of life-without-parole, I can live with that.
This may be true under the legal codes of some countries
Sorry, but after that statement I really cannot see you as anything but a monster.
When I said "[Your previous comment "that some people have truly lost the right to be considered human any more"] may be true under the legal codes of some countries" I was conceding to you that I do not know the laws of every country and it is conceivable that at least one country's laws may say that people are no longer people in the eyes of the law if they commit certain criminal acts. Or maybe no country does. I simply do not know.
I don't see how admitting my ignorance of foreign law makes me a monster.
I also don't see how the fact that, for now at least (until/unless the Supreme Court says otherwise), Treason is a death-penalty offense in America is related to any of the comments I made in this post.
The Bible says "Do not kill". Anyone arguing for death penalty is against God and will go to hell.
You really should read the Bible. In many places in the Old Testament where God himself tells the Israelites (and their predecessors) to kill people who are guilty of certain crimes, including but not limited to murder, rape, and certain idolatry-related practices.
Also, you should read your New Testament. According to the Bible, whether we go to hell or not is a function of God's grace, not our actions or inactions other than the action of accepting or rejecting that grace.
t's strange that everyone who says it's 'too expensive' to exceute criminals are all the people who make money keeping them locked up forever...
The high cost of the death penalty in the United States is largely due the high cost of making sure we don't execute an innocent person. Assuming that the cost of executing an innocent person is "infinite" then even spending $1M in legal cost prosecuting (and defending - the state typically pays for expensive defense lawyers at trial and appeal) death penalty cases and keeping the condemned person locked up for the typically 5-15 years (sometimes more, sometimes less) in a maximum-or-supermax-level prison during that time is the expensive part.
If prosecutors choose to go for "life without parole" the trial is cheaper, the appeal is not necessarily automatic (it might be in some states), and the state may not be on the hook for the appellate defense lawyer. After the condemned prisoner spends a few years in a maximum-security prison he will likely "mellow out"/"become institutionalized" and he can be moved to a cheaper lower-security facility.
If you want to execute people on the cheap, remove some of the due process and accept that you will occasionally condemn and execute an innocent man.
The average cost of incarcerating an inmate in America is on the order of $30-$40K/year, not $100K/year. Those who need to be in SuperMax or equivalent (including "death row" inmates in most states) and those who are medically fragile cost more. I would expect most "lifers" would require Maximum- or higher-level security during the first few years and during those years the cost could be $100K or more, but I would also expect that your average "lifer" who has adjusted to prison life and given up on trying to maintain contact with the outside would have an average- or below-average incarceration cost until he got old and his medical condition deteriorated. In other words, your 20-year-old murderer would be relatively expensive during the first and last 5 years of his incarceration and relatively cheap for the middle decades.
What you overlook is that some people have truly lost the right to be considered human any more,
This may be true under the legal codes of some countries and it may be true under your moral code and perhaps even the moral code of a majority of Americans, but it is not true under the United States Constitution. All human beings who could ever be convicted of a crime are considered "persons" under the law, and being convicted and condemned does not and, barring a constitutional amendment, cannot change that status.
Furthermore, it's almost impossible for a person who is born a US citizen to involuntarily lose their citizenship under the US Constitution, particularly if they never leave the country, never indicate any allegiance to any foreign power, and never act on behalf of another country against the interest of the United States (and even then, it is probably impossible). For naturalized citizens whose naturalization did not involve any fraud and who never do any of the other things listed above, it's also almost impossible to strip them of their citizenship.
Anyone entering that facility as a prisoner should be effectively dead to the world.
I assume you would give them the same access to lawyers and religious counselors that condemned prisoners routinely have today (at least in some countries).
Do you mean "re-legalized"? Leaving deformed infants or just-plain-unwanted-children in the wilderness "for the Gods to take care of" or something similar has been legally acceptable at times during human history.
If the only option to not killing a killer is to let them kill the innocent, then it's right to kill them.
I can think of several alternatives, the most obvious one being to incarcerate them (with special administrative segregation so they can't order hits from behind bars and special in-prison segregation so they can't kill guards or fellow inmates) until such time as their risk of killing others is zero. This may mean keeping them locked up this way until they die of natural causes.
Oh, if you are referring to the innocent person they killed that earned them the death penalty in the first place, even being executed won't be able to bring that person back, and the deterrent effect of the death penalty vs. life-in-prison-without-parole isn't strong enough in the US at least to justify the death penalty all by itself.
The people in favor, tend to think shooting or hanging are fine.
This isn't entirely correct.
1) Hangings and firing squads aren't error-proof and that bothers some who favor the death penalty.
2) There is something to be said for sanitary: The condemned prisoner's family didn't do anything wrong. Denying them a decent-looking body to bury is something that the state should avoid if possible. However, if the only legal (as determined by the SCOTUS) methods of execution result in a body that needs a lot of cleanup by the undertaker, that's tough cookies for the family.
Having said all of this, I'm generally against the death penalty as it is applied in the United States:
* Too many US states allow people to be condemned under the "law of parties," "murder during the commission of another felony," and for murders by people with no previous convictions for crimes that could have gotten them long prison terms. In almost all if not all of these cases, life-without-parole is a much more civilized punishment than death.
* Too many US states also don't disallow the death penalty if there were mitigating circumstances like an IQ only slightly higher than that of a mentally retarded person, a person who is young or immature but legally an adult, a person who is under the undue influence of someone else, mild- to-moderate mental impairments that would clearly benefit from the help of a mental health professional but which do not rise to the level of legal insanity, and the like.
When a jury condemns someone to die, they are basically saying "we give up on you as a human being." I'm almost never willing to do this. In the few cases where I am, it says that I am less civilized than I would like to be.
Assuming the guilty person has no extenuating circumstances, I am willing to recognize my lack of civility and recommend a death sentence for the principal actors (i.e. ringleader, top-lieutenants, and if they were truly free agents, the trigger-men) for things like large-scale "crimes against humanity" (dare I invoke Godwin's Law?) and for premeditated murder for the purpose of corrupting justice, such as to kill or intimidate a witness in a criminal case or intimidate other police (the ones who weren't killed) into resigning or looking the other way. I can also see it for people who commit (or arrange for) a murder while serving a life-without-parole sentence or while "on the run" after escaping prison while they are serving a life-without-parole sentence, on the grounds that without the threat of the death penalty they would be "free" to murder under the theory that "if you are willing to do the time, you are free to do the crime."
Slashdot Mirror
Ditch the corn syrup - it just isn't same as sucrose.
If it did, there wouldn't be a market for the occasionally-available "throwback" version that does have sucrose.
Off-topic:
If the unskilled labor market is completely "free market" then you have a high risk of exploitation. You can bet that if there was no minimum wage that many low-skilled workers would be paid a lot less than $7.25/hour. While there would be more total jobs available at the low end and the teen/young-adult unemployment rate would probably be lower, there would be a lot more "working poor" who had to rely on public assistance in order to survive (or they would be living in 3rd-world conditions because that is all they could afford to do). This is not good for an economy or a nation.
On the other hand if labor is so highly regulated that investors thinking about starting new companies avoid creating jobs that are unskilled just to avoid the regulation, you will have a shortage of work for those who are not-yet-skilled (i.e. teenagers and adult who could be trained but haven't been yet) and those who will be perpetually unskilled due to intellectual and/or physical limits or due to choice (there are a few people who simply do not want to learn new job skills). This isn't good for an economy or country either.
Striking the "right balance" of regulation and the "right form" of that regulation (e.g. direct government regulation or laws that make it easy to unionize or a combination of the two) is not easy and it's typically a moving target: The ideal regulations in given country and industry will change as the industry changes and as the country's economy changes. About the best we can hope for is to be "close enough" to having the "right balance" that the economy functions reasonably well, the short- and long-term unemployment rate and discouraged-worker-rate overall and the rates for specific sectors (e.g. young adults without any college education) aren't so high as to be considered uncivilized, and the actual wages for almost all workers isn't so low as to not cover a very basic standard of living.
Carry a Faraday cage with you, put your phone in it, reboot, and once it's rebooted, unlock the phone and turn off the WiFi.
You'll need to make it big enough to cover your hand and phone and transparent enough to see what you are doing.
It won't be complete because unless the Faraday cage covers your entire body (including your feet), the malicious WiFi signal could theoretically come through where your arm is. But unless the signal is really strong or bouncing off the wall behind you, you should be able to orient yourself so that the signal is too weak to be picked up by your phone.
... but not as we know it.
In 1998 the Copyright Law was changed so just about everything that was under "normal" "75 years" or "life + 50 years" got extended by 20 years.
The only things that might have come into the public domain since then were those things covered by less-commonly-used provisions. For example, one of the new provisions was that corporate words expire after 120 years even if they were published less than 95 years ago (i.e. even if their copyright was less than 95 years old). It's possible that at least one such work entered the public domain in the last few years in the USA.
There are some other "oddball" copyright provisions that weren't extended by 20 years or which would allow something to fall into the public domain that was previously under copyright.
Also, there was at least one court case where a work believed to be under copyright was found to have fallen into the public domain long ago due to someone forgetting to renew the copyright.
In fact, there is strong evidence that works still under long copyright are supressed until they become public domain.
More importantly, it suppresses derivative works until the underlying original falls into the public domain.
If I were to create a fictional story, it's very likely that the things I have read in my life will subconsciously influence what I write.
To protect myself legally, I have two things that can protect me:
1) Don't publish my work until after all works that exist today are out of copyright, or
2) Base my work on something that is in the public domain (Shakespeare and ancient myths are common sources for writers, but anything published in the US prior to 1923 should be fine). If someone claims I stole from them, I can say "no, I stole from another source, and you probably did as well."
#2 won't protect me if I unintentionally/sub-consciously steal details like the names of characters or specific modern settings. In other words, if I redo Romeo and Juliet, it should not involve two street gangs or be set in a late-20th-century major Western City or the copyright-owners of West Side Story might come after me. But if West Side Story had been a nearly-completely-original work (i.e. neither Romeo and Juliet nor any other opposite-culture-therefore-forbidden teen romance had ever been written) if I would risk being sued if I wrote about two star-crossed lovers who lived 500 years ago.
It's that the owners retain the exclusive right to distribution - and if they decide to stop making the material available it's lost.
Spot on in general, but not for music. Thanks to "mandatory licensing" systems in the United States and possibly other countries, anyone willing to pay the statutory fee can reproduce it under limited circumstances. I don't think mandatory licensing covers wholesale physical reproductions or digital downloads, but it does cover sampling and it does cover playing the complete work over the airwaves (you (the radio station operator) do have to have a copy to play of course).
This is Canada. Canada has "moral rights" which allow creators to block the use of their creations in ways that disparage the creator (and possibly "disparage the work itself" - I'm not fully fluent in Canadian law). These rights are not transferable.
An example would be if a person spewing hate later repudiated his previous writings. He could use the "moral rights" clause to enjoin any publication of his works if they had the effect of implying that he, the author, still held those views, even if someone else held the copyright.
I see no problem in vesting "moral rights" to the author for the life or the author, provided that it is only used to 1) get an injunction, 2) sue to recover actual harm done to the author by the disparaging use (this would be separate from any copyright-related damages if the copyright were still in effect).
Personally, I wish the United States had a reasonable, limited "moral rights" rule.
If I'm young and I write something today and I die 80 years later, the copyright term will outlast everyone alive today and is therefore longer than any reasonable definition of "for a limited period of time."
When the time comes I hope someone sues to declare all works in the public domain as soon as there is nobody left alive who was around when that work fell under copyright.
Unfortunately nobody can make this challenge until the 2030s at the earliest, since everything put under copyright before 1923 is already in the public domain and there are hundreds if not thousands of Americans over 110 years old.
Personally, I wish the courts would define "a limited period of time" as something like "the expected lifespan of a newborn child in the United States if the child survives to age 5" (e.g. excluding infant/early-childhood mortality) - somewhere in the 75-80 year range. But I very much doubt the Supreme Court would accept this, given that they already allow "95 years" for corporate copyrights.
This is a good idea but it will be broken (and fixed), repeatedly.
However, it will make malware writers work harder/spend more money and reduce their reach, which should knock many bad actors out of the game.
Unlike Apple, this will be something most users will have to turn on manually or at least be something they can turn off if the manufacturer has it turned on "out of the box".
I'm more worried about Windows 10+1 - by that time people may be so used to the "safety" of walled-garden "app stores" that a computer you actually own (that is, control) will be a niche market.
Prior to the US Constitution there was no actual Federal government, there was a late-18th-century version
I guess that depend on what the definition of "actual ... government" is. On the flip side, some people consider the U. N. an "actual government." In both cases, it depends on how the person making the aguement that the Confederation Congress or the U. N. is or is not an actual government defines the tem "actual government." Both are "edge cases" and there is wiggle room on how to define the term.
I don't screen my customers againt watch-lists and I don't refuse to sell to customers who wear t-shirts spoiting hate or anti-patriotic messages.
I guess this makes me a technology vendor who is friendly to people who might be terrorists.
--
The above is hypothetical - or is it? I'm not and office-supply vendor but most office-suppu vendors could've written what is avove and be telling the truth.
Or a child!
Too late. Throughout much of history including in parts of the United States up through the 20th century, it was legal for young teens or even pre-teens to marry. Of course, back then if you went to school beyond 8th grade you were considered fortunate, especially if you were a girl.
In some historical cultures it was legal to marry kids to each other or even to adults, with the understanding that the things that sex would wait until pregnancy was possible.
I for one am glad that the days where daughters (and to a lesser extent, sons) were treated as pawns by parents for political/economic purposes when it comes to marriage are for the most part over with, at least in the United States.
The judicial action could force institutions in New York State to funnel their primate research through 3rd parties that are located in other states or countries or abdicate such research to out-of-state or out-of-USA institutions.
There, fixed that for you.
Of course there may be innocent people on death row from time to time. If we could magically know for certain that everyone on death row was guilty of a capital offense and that there were no mitigating circumstances that would make the death penalty unjust, we could clear out death row in a matter of weeks (assuming the drugs/bullets/nitrogen gas/whatever was available).
The key to getting the death penalty "right" (setting aside arguments that it is inherently unjust) is to make sure that only people who deserve to die are actually executed and to make the execution process itself as quick, painless, and clean as possible.
By the way, there are people in prison for non-death-penalty crimes who are innocent, and there are people who have been released or who never went to jail who have criminal records they didn't earn. Our justice system is far from perfect and I doubt it will ever be perfect. I'm willing to live with the small chance that I will be falsely arrested and locked up for life in exchange for having a functioning justice system, but I'm not willing to be arrested, tried, condemned, and executed for a crime I never committed. If this means throwing out the death penalty for even the most heinous of criminals in favor of life-without-parole, I can live with that.
This may be true under the legal codes of some countries
Sorry, but after that statement I really cannot see you as anything but a monster.
When I said "[Your previous comment "that some people have truly lost the right to be considered human any more"] may be true under the legal codes of some countries" I was conceding to you that I do not know the laws of every country and it is conceivable that at least one country's laws may say that people are no longer people in the eyes of the law if they commit certain criminal acts. Or maybe no country does. I simply do not know.
I don't see how admitting my ignorance of foreign law makes me a monster.
I also don't see how the fact that, for now at least (until/unless the Supreme Court says otherwise), Treason is a death-penalty offense in America is related to any of the comments I made in this post.
Odd, I thought they put a bullet through your brain stem. Did they change it recently or was the bullet thing just for drug dealers?
The Bible says "Do not kill".
Anyone arguing for death penalty is against God and will go to hell.
You really should read the Bible. In many places in the Old Testament where God himself tells the Israelites (and their predecessors) to kill people who are guilty of certain crimes, including but not limited to murder, rape, and certain idolatry-related practices.
Also, you should read your New Testament. According to the Bible, whether we go to hell or not is a function of God's grace, not our actions or inactions other than the action of accepting or rejecting that grace.
t's strange that everyone who says it's 'too expensive' to exceute criminals are all the people who make money keeping them locked up forever...
The high cost of the death penalty in the United States is largely due the high cost of making sure we don't execute an innocent person. Assuming that the cost of executing an innocent person is "infinite" then even spending $1M in legal cost prosecuting (and defending - the state typically pays for expensive defense lawyers at trial and appeal) death penalty cases and keeping the condemned person locked up for the typically 5-15 years (sometimes more, sometimes less) in a maximum-or-supermax-level prison during that time is the expensive part.
If prosecutors choose to go for "life without parole" the trial is cheaper, the appeal is not necessarily automatic (it might be in some states), and the state may not be on the hook for the appellate defense lawyer. After the condemned prisoner spends a few years in a maximum-security prison he will likely "mellow out"/"become institutionalized" and he can be moved to a cheaper lower-security facility.
If you want to execute people on the cheap, remove some of the due process and accept that you will occasionally condemn and execute an innocent man.
$100,000???? Where do you get that number from?
The average cost of incarcerating an inmate in America is on the order of $30-$40K/year, not $100K/year. Those who need to be in SuperMax or equivalent (including "death row" inmates in most states) and those who are medically fragile cost more. I would expect most "lifers" would require Maximum- or higher-level security during the first few years and during those years the cost could be $100K or more, but I would also expect that your average "lifer" who has adjusted to prison life and given up on trying to maintain contact with the outside would have an average- or below-average incarceration cost until he got old and his medical condition deteriorated. In other words, your 20-year-old murderer would be relatively expensive during the first and last 5 years of his incarceration and relatively cheap for the middle decades.
What you overlook is that some people have truly lost the right to be considered human any more,
This may be true under the legal codes of some countries and it may be true under your moral code and perhaps even the moral code of a majority of Americans, but it is not true under the United States Constitution. All human beings who could ever be convicted of a crime are considered "persons" under the law, and being convicted and condemned does not and, barring a constitutional amendment, cannot change that status.
Furthermore, it's almost impossible for a person who is born a US citizen to involuntarily lose their citizenship under the US Constitution, particularly if they never leave the country, never indicate any allegiance to any foreign power, and never act on behalf of another country against the interest of the United States (and even then, it is probably impossible). For naturalized citizens whose naturalization did not involve any fraud and who never do any of the other things listed above, it's also almost impossible to strip them of their citizenship.
Anyone entering that facility as a prisoner should be effectively dead to the world.
I assume you would give them the same access to lawyers and religious counselors that condemned prisoners routinely have today (at least in some countries).
I expect after-birth abortion will be legalized.
Do you mean "re-legalized"? Leaving deformed infants or just-plain-unwanted-children in the wilderness "for the Gods to take care of" or something similar has been legally acceptable at times during human history.
If the only option to not killing a killer is to let them kill the innocent, then it's right to kill them.
I can think of several alternatives, the most obvious one being to incarcerate them (with special administrative segregation so they can't order hits from behind bars and special in-prison segregation so they can't kill guards or fellow inmates) until such time as their risk of killing others is zero. This may mean keeping them locked up this way until they die of natural causes.
Oh, if you are referring to the innocent person they killed that earned them the death penalty in the first place, even being executed won't be able to bring that person back, and the deterrent effect of the death penalty vs. life-in-prison-without-parole isn't strong enough in the US at least to justify the death penalty all by itself.
The people in favor, tend to think shooting or hanging are fine.
This isn't entirely correct.
1) Hangings and firing squads aren't error-proof and that bothers some who favor the death penalty.
2) There is something to be said for sanitary: The condemned prisoner's family didn't do anything wrong. Denying them a decent-looking body to bury is something that the state should avoid if possible. However, if the only legal (as determined by the SCOTUS) methods of execution result in a body that needs a lot of cleanup by the undertaker, that's tough cookies for the family.
Having said all of this, I'm generally against the death penalty as it is applied in the United States:
* Too many US states allow people to be condemned under the "law of parties," "murder during the commission of another felony," and for murders by people with no previous convictions for crimes that could have gotten them long prison terms. In almost all if not all of these cases, life-without-parole is a much more civilized punishment than death.
* Too many US states also don't disallow the death penalty if there were mitigating circumstances like an IQ only slightly higher than that of a mentally retarded person, a person who is young or immature but legally an adult, a person who is under the undue influence of someone else, mild- to-moderate mental impairments that would clearly benefit from the help of a mental health professional but which do not rise to the level of legal insanity, and the like.
When a jury condemns someone to die, they are basically saying "we give up on you as a human being." I'm almost never willing to do this. In the few cases where I am, it says that I am less civilized than I would like to be.
Assuming the guilty person has no extenuating circumstances, I am willing to recognize my lack of civility and recommend a death sentence for the principal actors (i.e. ringleader, top-lieutenants, and if they were truly free agents, the trigger-men) for things like large-scale "crimes against humanity" (dare I invoke Godwin's Law?) and for premeditated murder for the purpose of corrupting justice, such as to kill or intimidate a witness in a criminal case or intimidate other police (the ones who weren't killed) into resigning or looking the other way. I can also see it for people who commit (or arrange for) a murder while serving a life-without-parole sentence or while "on the run" after escaping prison while they are serving a life-without-parole sentence, on the grounds that without the threat of the death penalty they would be "free" to murder under the theory that "if you are willing to do the time, you are free to do the crime."