The number of people in US prisons has risen 8x since 1970, with little impact on crime but at great cost to taxpayers and society.
this tough on crime nonsense likely stems from misguided religious beliefs, as per usual.
Tag: us
Bush Consequences
When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things. The damage to the economy does not make headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.
US Department of State Blog
with comments.
Defense Earmarks
One of Sunlight’s resident creative geniuses have taken all the Defense Appropriations Earmarks and made them available for viewing within Google Earth.
i think i was in contact with these guys after my farm subsidies map
US visitor drop
costing America $94b in lost visitor spending, nearly 200k jobs and $16b in lost tax revenue
feeling safe now, assholes?
Buffalo
The truth is, the federal government has already spent vast sums of taxpayer money over the past 50 years to revitalize Buffalo, only to watch the city continue to decay. Future federal spending that tries to revive the city will likely prove equally futile. The federal government should instead pursue policies that help Buffalo’s citizens, not the city as a geographical place. The best scenario would be for Buffalo to become a much smaller but more vibrant community—shrinking to greatness, in effect.
Buffalo had past glory? why wasting money to ‘revitalize’ a place as opposed to helping people directly is a failed cause. I concluded after my visit that it is a basket case and best dismantled.
Internet as a romantic partner
While most Americans don’t want the Internet implanted in their brain, they are more willing to insert a chip into a child 13 or younger
Turing Manufacturing
What’s needed today is an analogy to the Turing Machine for design, automation and manufacturing. Recent developments in computing and information science have now made it possible to model and reason about physical manufacturing processes, setting the stage for us to “put the Turing into Manufacturing”. The result, as was the case with databases and computers, would be higher quality, more reliable products, reduced costs, and faster delivery.
Outsourcing Politics
Connect2Elect is a new website that lets users add candidate attributes and issue positions that are important to them, and see who they should vote on. Issues are broken down by social (abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research), political (Iraq war, taxes, immigration) and core beliefs (welfare, gun rights). Clearly there is some overlap and room to argue over categorization, but the basic idea is that you click on issues that matter to you and order them. You then see a results screen with candidate values mapped to your own. Voila! You know who to vote for.
completely retarded. with attributes like “married”, “never divorced” they disqualify themselves from taking them seriously
Selective enforcement
how society slowly kills old laws without actually taking them off the books
Our parents and grandparents banned drugs, but the current generation is re-legalizing them. That’s why Rush Limbaugh, as a drug user, is in a sense a symbol of our times.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 