Get a membership at one of the science centers that is part of ASTC (most of them in NA seem to be) and you can get free admission in essentially all of the other ASTC member institutions via their "passport program". The ASTC also lists their members:
Get a membership at one of the science centers that is part of ASTC (most of them in NA seem to be) and you can get free admission in essentially all of the other ASTC member institutions via their "passport program". The ASTC also lists their members:
The government isn't allowed to just read Google's mail without following due process, same as if you hosted it yourself.
I think the idea is that (for the most part) the government is not allowed to read your email with your lawyer AT ALL, since lawyer communications (and some doctor, priest, etc.) are privileged. If you "break privilege" then those communications might be easier to obtain from the "prosecution" point of view. Similar rules are in place for non-criminal legal stuff to protect some of your private communication from the person suing you (or being sued by you).
For most parking meters I have seen, the default position when they are non-functional is "do not park", so they can just ticket people who break them to avoid parking (the old style where you needed to turn a crank when inserting the coin would pop up a "parking violation" flag as the crank was turned and only poke up the clock-timer when you turned it back - if you stuck it with a bad coin, the parking violation flag would prevent you from parking there without getting a ticket).
One would think the same could be done for fancier systems.
I've got 5 juicy mod points that I'd love to use but I'll just throw this in the mix. I'm 28 and never in 13 years of state schooling was I taught what nouns, verbs or *any* traditional grammar are for.
I guess you are just not old enough. Back in the 1970s those lessons were outsourced to ABC's "Schoolhouse Rock!" - I guess they didn't make it back to the curriculum when the television station canceled the segments - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoolhouse_Rock!
The advantage of cursive over printing is that it is faster and less fatiguing to the hand.
Citation needed?
I think there is a good argument to be made that spending huge amounts of class time to teach and learn a system with potentially minimal benefit is counter productive. Learning how to read and print neatly and efficiently is useful - spending time in grade 2-5 to make fancy joined up lettering, much less so. Teach calligraphy in art class or to those with an interest - along with roman numeral multiplication and buggy whip braiding for example.
The problem with imperial is not what it is based upon (actually, these days the US units are all defined by reference to the SI units anyway - since 1959 an inch is defined as 2.54 cm - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch ) the problem with the imperial system is the arbitrariness and inconsistency of the relationships between the units. The SI system has a consistent relationship between all of the units, and a consistent naming system and a consistent abbreviation system. In the imperial system, the relationships between units are not only arbitrary, but they are also inconsistent, there are multiple uses of the same word (ounces for example) used to describe different measurements (weight as well as volume) or dry vs liquid volumes.
Can someone tell me how many bicycles in a toyota?
Which Toyota? Which bicycle?
The Toyota price is probably somewhere between $15000 and $40000, which is about a factor of 3 uncertainty - maybe giving a dollar amount would have been better and then followed that with something like "$xxx is about the cost of the average Toyota sold in the USA".
The bike price could range from $100 to maybe as high as $10000, which is about a factor of 100, so seems a particularly poor choice for a unit of cost.
But if he just departed without telling anyone, how would anyone have officially known that he had overstayed his visa? None of the times I have exited the USA have I ever encountered a US official, at either the land border or the airport.
I got a copy of the first BAC edition of 2006: http://bestamericancomics.com/2006 for Christmas last year. It was pretty fun. They draw from Canada, the USA, and Mexico, so really it should be "North American" rather than "American".
I recall some software that would play (crappy) music on an AM radio within a few feet of the TRS-80 Model 1 - the software just went through loops of various calculations that would cause RF interference that produced the desired tone on the radio.
I believe the Model 1 did not require FCC certification of being free of FR interference since it was classified as a low volume hobby device or something like that. Nope, Wikipedia and oldcomputers.net say it got caught by a change in FCC regulations.
"My interest is whether or not it is even possible to pay for health care for every American citizen, without going into debt and without having a lot higher taxes."
Of course it is not. Health care takes up some huge fraction of the public spending in Canada and probably every other "modern" nation. I seem to recall, but cannot find, information that the provinces use about 40% of their tax money for health care (it is funded at the provincial level, not the federal level, though there are federal rules about what sorts of things have to be covered by the provincial plans). So if the US was to go with a similar model of course there would need to be an increase in taxes somehow. A point made by most proponents of universal public health care is that if everyone was to pay the costs through taxes, there would be a huge savings in reduction of administrative/advertising/etc costs over the current hodgepodge, the risk of catastrophic expenses would be spread over the entire population rather than one insurer's pool of customers, and for the vast majority of the population (and the vast majority of businesses) their net costs would decrease (higher taxes, but lower payments to the insurance companies).
I have little hope however that any of this will come to pass - the political will necessary to stand against all of the special interests in this case, combined with the overall unpopularity of any sort of new or extra taxes would seem to make real change a non-starter. It seems as though the US is doomed to continue with this inefficient, burdensome health care issue for long into the future. In Canada it grew out of a provincial movement, which perhaps is easier to envision - maybe some state will manage to do it and then the other states could follow - but it seems unlikely.
"it could mean that Canada is going into more debt for health care than the United States."
Canada is spending less per capita, and might somehow be going into more debt? Um, no. I suppose it is possible if Canada did not tax their population enough, but they seem to be doing so - through most of the 1990s and early 2000s Canada's debt was actually falling. Today it seems to be at about $13,800 per person (Canadian dollars are worth something like $0.84 according to http://www.xe.com/ so that comes out to about $11,560 US per person ) while the US debt seems to be about $36,600 per person. They are both growing, but since the Canadian one is less than 1/3 of the US one, I think Canada is clearly in a better position to the US from a national debt point of view.
I do not know about dept per GNP, but the GNP per capita of the US seems to be $43,743, while Canada is $32,546 according to http://www.studentsoftheworld.info/infopays/rank/PNBH2.html so the US is ahead by a factor of 1.344036, so dept per GNP (the "per capitas" will cancel out) of the US is ($36,600/$43,743 =) 0.8367053 and for Canada it is ($11,560/$32,546 =) 0.3551895.
"Given that almost nobody's mailbox is actually marked "US Mail", practically, you CAN run a competitive service. "
I'm not so sure about the availability of ones without such markings. My father in law up in Canada was recently complaining about not being able to buy a mailbox, in Canada, that was not marked "US Mail". A quick search of google to try to find a place selling mailboxes did not turn up any that are not marked "US Mail". Heck, it may be that the US Mail will not be delivered to any box without such a designation.
Actually, it looks like a few of the offerings at http://www.mailboxixchange.com/ do not say "US Mail", but the vast majority seem to.
If the city can do it cheaper because they own the rights-of-way or the land or has the manpower, I think they should be allowed to do so, and if the city wants to subsidize it too, good for them. There is no "natural right" to any particular business model. If the citizens feel that a services is important enough for them to take care of via the local government, so be it.
That might be convenient, but I am not sure it is necessarily such a good thing in general. I suppose the PCB, Lead, and Mercury plant next door might be good for the local economy, but many not the local life expectancy, eh?
It also sounds like the legislation won't allow the town to profit from the service, so they would not be able to take any of the profits to offset costs in other area like shiny new police cars. This might not impact Greenlight, since they are already well started up I guess, but it would be a huge disincentive to any other municipality doing the same type of thing - why go through the hassle of setting up a system like this if the only benefits possible are going to be secondary ones like happier citizens?
Heck, I do not see any problem with a municipality deciding through duly elected representatives to provide ANY service to the pubic. If we all in Hole-in-the-wall USA decide that we want to create a subsidized car wash, paid for entirely out of tax dollars, then why the heck should we not be able to? Sure, "Chuck's Wash and Ride" might go out of business, but if the community agrees that car washing is to important to be left to the purely profit-driven world - why not? Chuck can compete with the other applicants for the "CitiWash" manager job. Sucks to be Chuck I guess, but why should Chuck be more important than all the voters with dirty cars?
I can see where we want to prevent the city from prohibiting Chuck from continuing to operate, if "CitiWash" sucks (or is inconvenient for some other reasons), maybe he can stay in business, but why should the citizens be stopped from entering any business they want?
[Let's try not to get into the whole "The Mayer hates Chuck because he ran off with his spouse and wants to drive him out of town." type of argument, we will assume that the voters are all making rational informed decisions, to the same extent that we will not need to assume undue greed or malice on the part of Chuck, the citizens just feel that their city would be better if they used some of their resources for car washes.]
[Pronouns are fun. Even if we assume "Chuck" is male, is the Mayor? Did Chuck do the running? Did the Mayor? I do not know if the "him" refers to Chuck, or the spouse - Hole-in-the-wall is obviously a very tolerant city.]
Except for the fact that the described system is not taxing everybody for something only some want.
Granted, it is using the local government to float the bonds, so that is a bit "liberal-asshole" I suppose, but it doesn't seem completely fiscally irresponsible. Heck, how much money is the local government expected to save for it own network access costs? Isn't that the same type of argument advanced for an entity to use Open Source software? Rather than paying for some proprietary application, funding local development of Open Source software can be cheaper and better. Rather than the whole city paying all of this money to a non-local company, creating your own local public utility provides a bunch of local jobs (increased tax base), keeps more money in the local economy (increased tax base), makes the local area more attractive and affordable to residents (increased tax base, more disposable income to suck more tax dollars out of), provides for more control over future expenses and capabilities (stability is worth a lot for both businesses and governments). All of these seem like things that we WANT our local governments to work towards - if they can do all of these things (or really any few of these things) for the cost of floating a few low risk bonds, then I would think any "conservative" would be all for it too.
This article http://www.cbpp.org/5-11-07health.pdf seems to indicate that Medicaid is about 10% less expensive for kids and 30% less expensive for adult patients in delivering health care compared to private insurance - the Medicaid administration expenses (about 7%) are about half those of of private insurance (about 14%). Any health care comparison in general between the USA and a country with a "socialized" system will show even larger differences; the US has one of the highest health care costs per delivery of any nation.
To blindly think that any one system is "superior" to another system without carefully specifying what the system goals are and how differing goals rank in importance is a problem all of us tend to have. Recognizing that for different purposes, different systems might be preferable. Socializing sock manufacturing PROBABLY is not the way to go, but "socializing" (through outright ownership, highly regulated monopolies, or some other system) for water delivery has a lot going for it.
In many sectors, a public system has some natural efficiency advantages in terms of scale, access to capitol, need for marketing, etc. There are also some obvious tendencies towards inefficiency due to in general less competition influences and the tendency of any large organization to have bureaucratic growth. Private concerns however have some negative-efficiency tendencies as well, many of which are exacerbated by the desire to increase profit, both at the company level (charging whatever the customer can pay) and at the individual employee level (thus the spiraling CEO salary effect).
In both cases, good management and planning and regulatory oversight CAN (but does not always actually DO) foster the natural advantages and hold back the natural disadvantages. Private concerns can also have the forces of competition provide incentives against some of the negative tendencies (and for that matter some competitive forces impact public systems too), but all competitive forces do not always provide societal positive benefits - for example universal standards are strongly discouraged by competitive forces to the determent of the public at large (how many different chargers do I own?), and things like pollution and energy use are often exacerbated by the "free market" in its most simple forms.
Personally, I tend to be more "socialist" in my thinking than the US average - I think that fairly strong oversight and careful design of regulatory environments and fiscal policy are the best way of providing for the whole of society, though I do have some strong desire for the utopia envisioned by the pure libertarian and recognize the potential power of enlightened self-interest to do wonderful things.
"I am joking but please there is no correlation between being offended and torture which all this amounts to, not humiliation."
I guess I am a bit confused. When has it ever been ok to FORCE prisoners to do anything? Particularly prisoners who are being held before the trial that is meant to prove their guilt? Saying "you must read this book" or "you must watch this movie" does not seem at all justified in this case. Perhaps making a prisoner clean up a mess they made, or some sort of punishment for missbehaviour while in custody can be justified, but such punishment should take the form of "you lose your TV privileges" rather than "we are going to force you to watch offensive material". And of course it should not be "the guards" deciding on this type of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
"But seriously, I anthropomorphize all my devices. We get along a lot better that way."
You really shouldn't anthropomorphize electronics - they HATE it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Science-Technology_Centers
Get a membership at one of the science centers that is part of ASTC (most of them in NA seem to be) and you can get free admission in essentially all of the other ASTC member institutions via their "passport program". The ASTC also lists their members:
http://www.astc.org/members/passlist_about.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Science-Technology_Centers
Get a membership at one of the science centers that is part of ASTC (most of them in NA seem to be) and you can get free admission in essentially all of the other ASTC member institutions via their "passport program". The ASTC also lists their members:
http://www.astc.org/members/passlist_about.htm
The government isn't allowed to just read Google's mail without following due process, same as if you hosted it yourself.
I think the idea is that (for the most part) the government is not allowed to read your email with your lawyer AT ALL, since lawyer communications (and some doctor, priest, etc.) are privileged. If you "break privilege" then those communications might be easier to obtain from the "prosecution" point of view. Similar rules are in place for non-criminal legal stuff to protect some of your private communication from the person suing you (or being sued by you).
For most parking meters I have seen, the default position when they are non-functional is "do not park", so they can just ticket people who break them to avoid parking (the old style where you needed to turn a crank when inserting the coin would pop up a "parking violation" flag as the crank was turned and only poke up the clock-timer when you turned it back - if you stuck it with a bad coin, the parking violation flag would prevent you from parking there without getting a ticket).
One would think the same could be done for fancier systems.
I've got 5 juicy mod points that I'd love to use but I'll just throw this in the mix. I'm 28 and never in 13 years of state schooling was I taught what nouns, verbs or *any* traditional grammar are for.
I guess you are just not old enough. Back in the 1970s those lessons were outsourced to ABC's "Schoolhouse Rock!" - I guess they didn't make it back to the curriculum when the television station canceled the segments - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoolhouse_Rock!
The advantage of cursive over printing is that it is faster and less fatiguing to the hand.
Citation needed?
I think there is a good argument to be made that spending huge amounts of class time to teach and learn a system with potentially minimal benefit is counter productive. Learning how to read and print neatly and efficiently is useful - spending time in grade 2-5 to make fancy joined up lettering, much less so. Teach calligraphy in art class or to those with an interest - along with roman numeral multiplication and buggy whip braiding for example.
Is there a downside?
If each player in the market is not treated the same as the others (if some get the info sooner) than most would view that as unfair, and a downside.
If the early info is being sold by the exchange, then it seems like a rule prohibiting that would be appropriate.
I am not positive, but you can probably still buy sextants.
This one is only $25 new: http://celestaire.com/catalog/Marine_Sextants/Cheap_Sextant/
OK, it is only accurate to 8 minutes (about 8 miles), but it looks like a neat device. Plastic ones are under $200, metal ones as high as $1500.
"fit to the last detail"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordial_dwarf has descriptions of various forms of PD, none of which seem to match very well.
Additionally, one needs to pay taxes on investment gains, while the money you don't spend on electricity is essentially a tax-free income.
The problem with imperial is not what it is based upon (actually, these days the US units are all defined by reference to the SI units anyway - since 1959 an inch is defined as 2.54 cm - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch ) the problem with the imperial system is the arbitrariness and inconsistency of the relationships between the units. The SI system has a consistent relationship between all of the units, and a consistent naming system and a consistent abbreviation system. In the imperial system, the relationships between units are not only arbitrary, but they are also inconsistent, there are multiple uses of the same word (ounces for example) used to describe different measurements (weight as well as volume) or dry vs liquid volumes.
Can someone tell me how many bicycles in a toyota?
Which Toyota? Which bicycle?
The Toyota price is probably somewhere between $15000 and $40000, which is about a factor of 3 uncertainty - maybe giving a dollar amount would have been better and then followed that with something like "$xxx is about the cost of the average Toyota sold in the USA".
The bike price could range from $100 to maybe as high as $10000, which is about a factor of 100, so seems a particularly poor choice for a unit of cost.
But if he just departed without telling anyone, how would anyone have officially known that he had overstayed his visa? None of the times I have exited the USA have I ever encountered a US official, at either the land border or the airport.
I got a copy of the first BAC edition of 2006: http://bestamericancomics.com/2006 for Christmas last year. It was pretty fun. They draw from Canada, the USA, and Mexico, so really it should be "North American" rather than "American".
I recall some software that would play (crappy) music on an AM radio within a few feet of the TRS-80 Model 1 - the software just went through loops of various calculations that would cause RF interference that produced the desired tone on the radio.
I believe the Model 1 did not require FCC certification of being free of FR interference since it was classified as a low volume hobby device or something like that. Nope, Wikipedia and oldcomputers.net say it got caught by a change in FCC regulations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
http://oldcomputers.net/trs80i.html
Now can we emulate that in the latest systems?
"My interest is whether or not it is even possible to pay for health care for every American citizen, without going into debt and without having a lot higher taxes." Of course it is not. Health care takes up some huge fraction of the public spending in Canada and probably every other "modern" nation. I seem to recall, but cannot find, information that the provinces use about 40% of their tax money for health care (it is funded at the provincial level, not the federal level, though there are federal rules about what sorts of things have to be covered by the provincial plans). So if the US was to go with a similar model of course there would need to be an increase in taxes somehow. A point made by most proponents of universal public health care is that if everyone was to pay the costs through taxes, there would be a huge savings in reduction of administrative/advertising/etc costs over the current hodgepodge, the risk of catastrophic expenses would be spread over the entire population rather than one insurer's pool of customers, and for the vast majority of the population (and the vast majority of businesses) their net costs would decrease (higher taxes, but lower payments to the insurance companies). I have little hope however that any of this will come to pass - the political will necessary to stand against all of the special interests in this case, combined with the overall unpopularity of any sort of new or extra taxes would seem to make real change a non-starter. It seems as though the US is doomed to continue with this inefficient, burdensome health care issue for long into the future. In Canada it grew out of a provincial movement, which perhaps is easier to envision - maybe some state will manage to do it and then the other states could follow - but it seems unlikely.
"it could mean that Canada is going into more debt for health care than the United States."
Canada is spending less per capita, and might somehow be going into more debt? Um, no. I suppose it is possible if Canada did not tax their population enough, but they seem to be doing so - through most of the 1990s and early 2000s Canada's debt was actually falling. Today it seems to be at about $13,800 per person (Canadian dollars are worth something like $0.84 according to http://www.xe.com/ so that comes out to about $11,560 US per person ) while the US debt seems to be about $36,600 per person. They are both growing, but since the Canadian one is less than 1/3 of the US one, I think Canada is clearly in a better position to the US from a national debt point of view.
I do not know about dept per GNP, but the GNP per capita of the US seems to be $43,743, while Canada is $32,546 according to http://www.studentsoftheworld.info/infopays/rank/PNBH2.html so the US is ahead by a factor of 1.344036, so dept per GNP (the "per capitas" will cancel out) of the US is ($36,600/$43,743 =) 0.8367053 and for Canada it is ($11,560/$32,546 =) 0.3551895.
The US national dept: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
The Canadian national dept: http://www.debtclock.ca/
Here is a Wikipedia entry that lists Canada as ahead of the US, but not by as much as my numbers above - maybe their numbers are a bit older?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt
"Given that almost nobody's mailbox is actually marked "US Mail", practically, you CAN run a competitive service. "
I'm not so sure about the availability of ones without such markings. My father in law up in Canada was recently complaining about not being able to buy a mailbox, in Canada, that was not marked "US Mail". A quick search of google to try to find a place selling mailboxes did not turn up any that are not marked "US Mail". Heck, it may be that the US Mail will not be delivered to any box without such a designation.
Actually, it looks like a few of the offerings at http://www.mailboxixchange.com/ do not say "US Mail", but the vast majority seem to.
If the city can do it cheaper because they own the rights-of-way or the land or has the manpower, I think they should be allowed to do so, and if the city wants to subsidize it too, good for them. There is no "natural right" to any particular business model. If the citizens feel that a services is important enough for them to take care of via the local government, so be it.
"I can throw anything away."
That might be convenient, but I am not sure it is necessarily such a good thing in general. I suppose the PCB, Lead, and Mercury plant next door might be good for the local economy, but many not the local life expectancy, eh?
It also sounds like the legislation won't allow the town to profit from the service, so they would not be able to take any of the profits to offset costs in other area like shiny new police cars. This might not impact Greenlight, since they are already well started up I guess, but it would be a huge disincentive to any other municipality doing the same type of thing - why go through the hassle of setting up a system like this if the only benefits possible are going to be secondary ones like happier citizens?
Heck, I do not see any problem with a municipality deciding through duly elected representatives to provide ANY service to the pubic. If we all in Hole-in-the-wall USA decide that we want to create a subsidized car wash, paid for entirely out of tax dollars, then why the heck should we not be able to? Sure, "Chuck's Wash and Ride" might go out of business, but if the community agrees that car washing is to important to be left to the purely profit-driven world - why not? Chuck can compete with the other applicants for the "CitiWash" manager job. Sucks to be Chuck I guess, but why should Chuck be more important than all the voters with dirty cars?
I can see where we want to prevent the city from prohibiting Chuck from continuing to operate, if "CitiWash" sucks (or is inconvenient for some other reasons), maybe he can stay in business, but why should the citizens be stopped from entering any business they want?
[Let's try not to get into the whole "The Mayer hates Chuck because he ran off with his spouse and wants to drive him out of town." type of argument, we will assume that the voters are all making rational informed decisions, to the same extent that we will not need to assume undue greed or malice on the part of Chuck, the citizens just feel that their city would be better if they used some of their resources for car washes.]
[Pronouns are fun. Even if we assume "Chuck" is male, is the Mayor? Did Chuck do the running? Did the Mayor? I do not know if the "him" refers to Chuck, or the spouse - Hole-in-the-wall is obviously a very tolerant city.]
Except for the fact that the described system is not taxing everybody for something only some want.
Granted, it is using the local government to float the bonds, so that is a bit "liberal-asshole" I suppose, but it doesn't seem completely fiscally irresponsible. Heck, how much money is the local government expected to save for it own network access costs? Isn't that the same type of argument advanced for an entity to use Open Source software? Rather than paying for some proprietary application, funding local development of Open Source software can be cheaper and better. Rather than the whole city paying all of this money to a non-local company, creating your own local public utility provides a bunch of local jobs (increased tax base), keeps more money in the local economy (increased tax base), makes the local area more attractive and affordable to residents (increased tax base, more disposable income to suck more tax dollars out of), provides for more control over future expenses and capabilities (stability is worth a lot for both businesses and governments). All of these seem like things that we WANT our local governments to work towards - if they can do all of these things (or really any few of these things) for the cost of floating a few low risk bonds, then I would think any "conservative" would be all for it too.
This article http://www.cbpp.org/5-11-07health.pdf seems to indicate that Medicaid is about 10% less expensive for kids and 30% less expensive for adult patients in delivering health care compared to private insurance - the Medicaid administration expenses (about 7%) are about half those of of private insurance (about 14%). Any health care comparison in general between the USA and a country with a "socialized" system will show even larger differences; the US has one of the highest health care costs per delivery of any nation.
To blindly think that any one system is "superior" to another system without carefully specifying what the system goals are and how differing goals rank in importance is a problem all of us tend to have. Recognizing that for different purposes, different systems might be preferable. Socializing sock manufacturing PROBABLY is not the way to go, but "socializing" (through outright ownership, highly regulated monopolies, or some other system) for water delivery has a lot going for it.
In many sectors, a public system has some natural efficiency advantages in terms of scale, access to capitol, need for marketing, etc. There are also some obvious tendencies towards inefficiency due to in general less competition influences and the tendency of any large organization to have bureaucratic growth. Private concerns however have some negative-efficiency tendencies as well, many of which are exacerbated by the desire to increase profit, both at the company level (charging whatever the customer can pay) and at the individual employee level (thus the spiraling CEO salary effect).
In both cases, good management and planning and regulatory oversight CAN (but does not always actually DO) foster the natural advantages and hold back the natural disadvantages. Private concerns can also have the forces of competition provide incentives against some of the negative tendencies (and for that matter some competitive forces impact public systems too), but all competitive forces do not always provide societal positive benefits - for example universal standards are strongly discouraged by competitive forces to the determent of the public at large (how many different chargers do I own?), and things like pollution and energy use are often exacerbated by the "free market" in its most simple forms.
Personally, I tend to be more "socialist" in my thinking than the US average - I think that fairly strong oversight and careful design of regulatory environments and fiscal policy are the best way of providing for the whole of society, though I do have some strong desire for the utopia envisioned by the pure libertarian and recognize the potential power of enlightened self-interest to do wonderful things.
I guess I am a bit confused. When has it ever been ok to FORCE prisoners to do anything? Particularly prisoners who are being held before the trial that is meant to prove their guilt? Saying "you must read this book" or "you must watch this movie" does not seem at all justified in this case. Perhaps making a prisoner clean up a mess they made, or some sort of punishment for missbehaviour while in custody can be justified, but such punishment should take the form of "you lose your TV privileges" rather than "we are going to force you to watch offensive material". And of course it should not be "the guards" deciding on this type of thing.