Tetracube posted:

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

"But lord, is it not easy for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, since it is a big gate designed for camels to go through it?"

"Yes, my child. The rich worked for their wealth. Vote republican"

--the bible

Memento posted:

someone remind me what the guillotine emote is

quote:

In the outside world there are numerous companies offering free email accounts—Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Mail.com—but inside prisons companies charge a fee, a token JPay calls a “stamp,” to send each message. Each “stamp” covers only one page of writing. Want to send photos of a nephew’s graduation, a niece’s prom dress or a new baby? Each picture costs an additional stamp. A short video clip? That’ll be three stamps. With the postal service, stamp prices are fixed, but JPay’s stamp prices fluctuate. Shortly before Mother’s Day, for instance, a stamp cost 35 cents; the price rose to 47 cents the following week. For a few hundred dollars, prisoners can skip kiosk lines by buying a tablet—a relatively expensive purchase that tends to lock them into JPay’s services.

Inside prisons, e-messaging companies are quietly building a money-making machine virtually unhindered by competition—a monopoly that would be intolerable in the outside world. It’s based in a simple formula: Whatever it costs to send a message, prisoners and their loved ones will find a way to pay it. And, the more ways prisoners are cut off from communicating with their families, the better it is for business. Which means that stamp by stamp, companies like JPay—and the prisons that accept a commission with each message— are profiting from isolation of one of the most vulnerable groups in the country. And, with prisoners typically earning 20 cents to 95 cents an hour in jobs behind bars, the cost of keeping in touch most likely falls to family members and friends.

Time_pants posted:

My wife is having a baby in three months and the amount of medical debt we're going to rack up is going to be staggering.

I work as a fraud investigator for one of the largest banks in the US and the health insurance we get here is absolutely loving atrocious. It's incredibly expensive and covers gently caress all. Absolutely no one here thinks it's even slightly good. But God forbid our shareholders be deprived of the slightest shred of value by providing decent health insurance.

GuitarJunkie posted:

https://www.wired.com/story/jpay-securus-prison-email-charging-millions/

Outrail posted:

Most of it is a lack of money to address broken windows issues in my ignorant opinion.

comedyblissoption posted:

Money is just ultimately numbers in a computer. Money gives those who have it the power to tell everyone else what to do. The only way material wealth is ever generated is by laborers working. If we have giant swaths of the country not working, underemployed, or doing bullshit jobs, we are intentionally depriving ourselves of our own capacity to generate wealth.

Outrail posted:

Yeah, I'm sure deliberately isolating prisioners won't have a deleterious effect on their rehabilitation and reintroduction to society at aaaaaallllll.

The concept of American exceptionalism is baldly laughable if you've travelled even a little bit.

I remember driving through large swaths of LA thinking 'gently caress, this is supposed to be one of the biggest, most important and prestigious cities in the most powerful country in the world and it honestly looks like a mid tier South American country'. And don't blame the Mexicans because it's similar in parts of Chicago too.

Most of it is a lack of money to address broken windows issues in my ignorant opinion.

quote:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted

Pirate Radar posted:

Isn’t that actually an incredible part of capitalism because it basically does nothing but you get to charge rich assholes a bunch of money for it? I mean, ideally the bunch of money should go to the young blood donors

quote:

As earnings season is upon us, it’s worth asking: Does business create value these days the way it once did?

One sign it doesn’t is a significant decline in the formation rate of U.S. firms over the past few decades. Economists Peter Orszag and Jason Furman have argued that investment and innovation have taken a back seat to profits derived from economic rents. Political factors also increasingly appear to play a major role in driving corporate profits, as new regulations help incumbent firms, another strike against economic efficiency.

What’s going on? Surprisingly, one of the more convincing explanations comes from an anthropologist who has looked beyond narrow economic reasoning to examine the actual social or psychological functions served by many of the jobs in today’s service and knowledge economy. David Graeber of the London School of Economics argues in a recent book that the prevailing myths about the efficiency of capitalism blind us to the fact that much of economic reality is shaped by jockeying for power and status and serves no economic function at all.

Much of the supposedly sophisticated financial engineering only served to hide risk, or dump it on unsuspecting investors, and often acted to amplify risks overall though it was advertised as doing the opposite. A 2012 review of financial markets funded by the U.K. government concluded that lots of finance is senseless zero-sum activity that drains investment away from useful enterprise.

But even outside of finance, a lot of today’s business seems to aim less to produce economic value than to grab a bigger share of existing wealth. MIT economist Xavier Gabaix has shown that the wealthiest individuals in recent years really have skewed the playing field in their favor, finding ways — such as access to better information, legal or tax planning services — to capture more of the profits coming from productive work. Luigi Zingales has argued that the behavior of businesses has changed as corporations have grown so large. Large corporations now see wielding political influence through campaign donations or lobbying as a major part of securing their economic advantage.

Much within the modern corporation is less about making things or solving problems and more about the political process of gaining control over the flows of resources. The result is a proliferation of jobs that actually serve very little if any economic function, and only make sense from the perspective of rent seeking and power relations. Many like to laugh at the absurd inefficiencies of the Soviet Union, where so many people only pretended to do useful work, yet this may be significantly true in Western economies as well (only in the West they actually get paid for it).

Outrail posted:

Yeah, I'm sure deliberately isolating prisioners won't have a deleterious effect on their rehabilitation and reintroduction to society at aaaaaallllll.

The concept of American exceptionalism is baldly laughable if you've travelled even a little bit.

I remember driving through large swaths of LA thinking 'gently caress, this is supposed to be one of the biggest, most important and prestigious cities in the most powerful country in the world and it honestly looks like a mid tier South American country'. And don't blame the Mexicans because it's similar in parts of Chicago too.

Most of it is a lack of money to address broken windows issues in my ignorant opinion.

Pirate Radar posted:

People like to believe that you get out of the economy what you put in—that people largely get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work—but the reality we keep seeing is that when it comes to giving people a fair wage for their labor, unfettered free-market capitalism is the absolute worst system.

Outrail posted:

Okay, it's a lack of material wealth generated by laborers working because that material wealth is being syphoned off by rich assholes instead of being put back into communities.

Moridin920 posted:

*more black people are incarcerated today than there were slaves during the height of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade*

ekuNNN posted:

Marenghi posted:

How is it percentage wise because the population of America is way bigger than it was then.

Senor Dog posted:

ahh okay our prison pop is fine then i guess

Senor Dog posted:

ahh okay our prison pop is fine then i guess

DorkusMalorkus posted:

Millennials!

DorkusMalorkus posted:

Millennials!

popewiles posted:

He didn't say that. You can be against our insane prison population and still be able to point out when a statistic is used moreso for it's ability to emotionally manipulate than its actual utility in expressing the size of our prison population. Honestly, the side against our absurdly high black incarceration rate shouldn't have to resort to that kind of intellectual dishonesty, leave that kind of thing to the people who try to justify it.

Outrail posted:

Yeah, I'm sure deliberately isolating prisioners won't have a deleterious effect on their rehabilitation and reintroduction to society at aaaaaallllll.

DorkusMalorkus posted:

Millennials!