That's just untrue. Private for-profit prisons were a multi-billion-dollar industry for too long.
Also, they made enough money to bribe judges to sentence more people to longer terms so they could make more money.
Private prisons promised to be 'more efficient' and cost less per prisoner than public prisons, but typically their pattern of operations was to cut costs as much as possible and still charge the taxpayer more per prisoner than public prisons- and it got so out of hand that at one point it cost the taxpayer more per year to incarcerate a criminal than it would have to send him to Harvard for that year. Also under private prison administration, no effort was made at all to rehabilitate prisoners- their business was really based on recidivism, it was very much in their interest for prisoners to re-offend and end up back in prison.
Convict leasing on top of that is plain slavery, and the prospect of money to be made leasing convictsslaves for labor has corrupted America's justice system, particularly in confederate states, ever since the 13th Amendment was penned.
At this point I honestly think the lesson they've learned is that curb-stomping the progressives and daring them to stay at home gets us all 4 years of punishment under the GOP and in the next election they get 100% of what they wanted in the first place without any actual lefties having power.
When you remember FDR, this is exactly what they did then- FDR, scion of privilege, ran on a progressive platform for an electorate thirsty for lefty policy. He surrounded himself with other left-leaning bluebloods interested in progressive politics but dead set against actual leftists gaining power. They doled out progressive policies as political favors but strictly kept the rabble out of actual power.
Likewise, in the waning years of the Prussian Empire, Otto von Bismarck (a staunch monarchist, facing an uprising of social democracy politics he despised) famously undertook socialist-y policies like socialized medicine and old-age insurance/pensions to steal political support from the social democrats while keeping them strictly out of power.
It was infuriating to watch how slowly the wheels of justice worked in Chauvin's case- not only did he commit murder, he did it on camera in front of witnesses and we all saw it on the news over and over and there had to be protests before charges were considered- and even after all that, there was serious debate over whether or not he was guilty.
...and in this situation, charges being brought against his attacker are the news, which illustrates the double-standard of a system that plain didn't want to work on George Floyd's behalf but certainly does seem to want to work on Chauvin's
Hahahaha yesterday during the pie preparations my daughter and I passed each other as I was heading back to the kitchen and she said, apropos of nothing, "I didn't just steal any whipped cream, shut up!"
LOL I didn't know they'd been looting the whipped cream before that point but bless their hearts it was cute
Wilders is another Putin stooge capitalizing on how shitty everything is with immigrants and all that
When you think about that even a little bit, Putin is responsible for a solid amount of the immigration crisis that has Europeans feeling like there's too many immigrants (Syria, Ukraine, etc) and the answer must be less democracy and fewer human rights protections because if refugees don't have human rights they don't matter, right?
It's a bit like how the GOP uses its power to make life objectively worse for people in general, and then turns around and argues that it's proof that democracy doesn't work.
I've seen youtube content on piped I know full well to be 4k video be blurred so badly as to be nearly unwatchable- they honestly decided to spend money to make their content worse as a lever to get you to watch ads or to submit to tracking etc
I hear that a lot, and I get that there's a reason for how it is, but I still don't understand why that means court officials must be made to endure more crimes without reaction or accountability or consequence in order for it to happen.
It's as if saying "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest" is a time-tested means of getting meddlesome priests murdered, and somehow it's still effectively legal for the Trumps of the world to incite that kind of violence.
It's also as if America's justice system plain doesn't want to hold wealthy or powerful people accountable
I wrote test automation for Microsoft for years. My team turned a process that took 6 weeks of a hundred people working full time to produce manual test results into one that could complete in an hour on a couple hundred computers in a lab somewhere. It was a massive breakthrough in productivity on our part. Of course, 90% of the team was laid off when the code they'd written could be maintained by a couple of people.
So yeah, the difference "went to the shareholders", certainly not to the people that did the work
I got tired of seeing my teflon-coated pans wear out like that or lose their non-stickiness, it bothered me to realize that the 'premium cookware' I was buying was temporary trash I'd need to replace every couple of years.
I retired my teflon cookware and now have just steel and cast iron (and ceramic-coated cast iron) and I don't miss teflon-coated cookware at all.
Sure, sometimes I end up with stuff stuck to my pans, but realistically that was true with my 'non-stick' pans as well. The nice thing about cast iron and steel is that with use, they seem to get better, whereas the teflon pans start out nice but deteriorate in the way they work.
When I do end up with stuff stuck to the pan, I can scrub that clean in a few seconds with a steel scrubber or scraper, whereas stuck-on stuff with teflon (the stuff the dishwasher didn't get, anyhow), seemed to demand the extra-soft scrubber (and lots of time, because the soft scrubber doesn't work as well).
Someone should remind the German police that if they're busting on antisemitic hate speech online, they've got a great big backlog of people posting that stuff on Xitter and there's that one billionaire that bought it recently that's a prominent participant in that stuff
It's so exhausting to watch the system pretend not to understand the obvious when it's the likes of Trump brazenly acting out gangster tropes, but when it's a poor or minority person in even a legal gray area it's the taser for them and the same crowd falling over itself to defend Trump will cheer to see it
I worked for Microsoft for a long time, and by far my least-favorite part about it was the way politics from on high turned hard work into a cruel joke- oh, you did awesome work this year, but the c-suite spent all the money so you can't get the bonus or level promotion I want to give you and oh here's this news:
they're laying 18,000 of you off
while hiring H-1b contractors
and buying back shares
and killing off in-house projects because we bought a competitor
Yeah if you wonder why MS employees have opinions about stuff like this, it's because it's genuinely unpleasant to realize that your career depends on not getting fucked by people with every incentive to fuck it
Stop trying to trick people into thinking they want the Dems to weaken their position by officially showing the world that they don’t have full faith in our current president.
What the fuck are you talking about? Where did I say that?
Yeah it looks like they've switched away from the 5-second penalty for having ad blockers to counting down the number of videos you'll be shown, then after 3-2-1 it's 'adblockers violate youtube's toc'
If Finland didn't educate its children to spot media bullshit, it would be overrun by Russian media bullshit, which devotes no small amount of energy to the task of convincing Finns that they'd be better off as a Russian vassal state.
For that matter, if the US did educate its children to spot media bullshit, our voters wouldn't fall for such stupid nonsense on the regular
BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world Posts 24Comments 449Joined 2 yr. ago
That's just untrue. Private for-profit prisons were a multi-billion-dollar industry for too long.
Also, they made enough money to bribe judges to sentence more people to longer terms so they could make more money.
Private prisons promised to be 'more efficient' and cost less per prisoner than public prisons, but typically their pattern of operations was to cut costs as much as possible and still charge the taxpayer more per prisoner than public prisons- and it got so out of hand that at one point it cost the taxpayer more per year to incarcerate a criminal than it would have to send him to Harvard for that year. Also under private prison administration, no effort was made at all to rehabilitate prisoners- their business was really based on recidivism, it was very much in their interest for prisoners to re-offend and end up back in prison.
Convict leasing on top of that is plain slavery, and the prospect of money to be made leasing
convictsslaves for labor has corrupted America's justice system, particularly in confederate states, ever since the 13th Amendment was penned.