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The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

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Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#181

Post by ams6110 »

Avshalom wrote: post #28
Someone1234 wrote: post #6

I don't understand why the Republicans voted against. Look, I get it, you support private industry. But let's remember context, you support capitalism where COMPETITION exists, in this situation it is an artificially created monopoly of one company. Now if they had an alternative proposal that required prisons to have two or more vendors, I'd be totally onboard with not setting an artificial price restriction. Since…

>>I don't understand why the Republicans voted against. >>Look, I get it, you support private industry. So in the 60's the Republicans launched a thing called The Southern Strategy that was literally the Republican Party courting white racists. They never stopped. Now that openly calling for segregation is frowned upon making the criminal justice system as punitive as possible is one of the ways they keep that strate…

You do know that it was southern democrats that supported segregation.

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#182

Post by cossatot »

ams6110 wrote: post #181
Avshalom wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I don't understand why the Republicans voted against. >>Look, I get it, you support private industry. So in the 60's the Republicans launched a thing called The Southern Strategy that was literally the Republican Party courting white racists. They never stopped. Now that openly calling for segregation is frowned upon making the criminal justice system as punitive as possible is one of the ways they keep that strate…

You do know that it was southern democrats that supported segregation.

The strategy was a way of party 'realignment', i.e. of getting southern Democrats to red rover on over to the Republicans.

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#183

Post by nsxwolf »

task_queue wrote: post #170
dangerlibrary wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liberal in the Milton Friedman sense, not the Bernie Sanders sense.

Laissez-faire liberals might denounce Friedman as not being liberal enough. He supported social welfare and a basic income because he recognized that the market failed in those arenas. He supported a progressive tax system as well. Suggesting any of those to today's classical liberal would cause them to froth at the mouth and denounce him as a socialist.

I always remember Milton Friedman characterizing his negative income tax as simply being "less bad" than welfare.

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#184

Post by arcticbull »

ams6110 wrote: post #180
smt88 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying states shouldn't be able to determine certain things. But the federal government should be able to overrule asinine state policies after public debate (still subject to testing in court). When that testing happens, as it does now, the determining factor shouldn't be "states vs federal rights". It should be, "Does this state have a good reason to differ from the rest of the country?" In this case, where…

You seem to misunderstand the entire notion of limited federal government as defined in the constitution. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Don't you think that ship has sailed? That's simply not true anymore, and it might be time to recognize that. Just look at the way federal funds set speed limits nationwide. Turns out if you set the right incentive structure, it just doesn't matter as rights are set aside in exchange for compensation.

I think ultimately the federal government gets what it wants because it holds the biggest purse-strings and that's all that matters at the end of the day.

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#185

Post by bzbarsky »

jimrandomh wrote: post #105
claar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's without getting creative -- think Morse code via the refresh button, or specific-time-of-day page loads to specific links.

Most prisoners are allowed phone calls. If it's reasonable to let them do that, then it's unreasonable to worry about refresh-button-morse-code messages.

They're allowed phone calls, but not unmonitored ones. As in, there is someone listening to what they say on the phone.

That's part of the argument for why those phone calls are so expensive...

Monitoring what someone does on the web would be possible too, of course. At least if you only let them do it for a few minutes at a time like a phone call. Monitoring someone for an hour or more of web browsing is likely to be deathly boring for the one doing the monitoring.

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#186

Post by Hydraulix989 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #9
Someone1234 wrote: post #6

I don't understand why the Republicans voted against. Look, I get it, you support private industry. But let's remember context, you support capitalism where COMPETITION exists, in this situation it is an artificially created monopoly of one company. Now if they had an alternative proposal that required prisons to have two or more vendors, I'd be totally onboard with not setting an artificial price restriction. Since…

> The whole private prison thing makes me want to vomit. Muckrock (shoutout to @morisey) is doing an investigative piece on private prisons. If possible, please think about contributing $10-20 on it. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/sep/18/justice-s...

What's your affiliation with MuckRock? The founder went to the same school as me.

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#187

Post by copsarebastards »

Someone1234 wrote: post #6

I don't understand why the Republicans voted against. Look, I get it, you support private industry. But let's remember context, you support capitalism where COMPETITION exists, in this situation it is an artificially created monopoly of one company. Now if they had an alternative proposal that required prisons to have two or more vendors, I'd be totally onboard with not setting an artificial price restriction. Since…

> But let's remember context, you support capitalism where COMPETITION exists, in this situation it is an artificially created monopoly of one company.

That's not what Republicans, or almost any politicians, support. Politicians are mostly addicted to power and support keeping power, even if that means screwing the ideals they supposedly espouse. And keeping power in a democratic republic involves keeping funding for the next election cycle. Regardless of their stated ideals, politicians are de facto slaves of the corporations whose interests they serve, unless laws exist to limit this effect. In short, laissez faire capitalism and democracy are incompatible.

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#189

Post by runako »

ams6110 wrote: post #181
Avshalom wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I don't understand why the Republicans voted against. >>Look, I get it, you support private industry. So in the 60's the Republicans launched a thing called The Southern Strategy that was literally the Republican Party courting white racists. They never stopped. Now that openly calling for segregation is frowned upon making the criminal justice system as punitive as possible is one of the ways they keep that strate…

You do know that it was southern democrats that supported segregation.

What the other commenter said. Southern Democrats switched parties as part of the Southern Strategy ('realignment'). This wasn't backroom stuff, it's well-documented in lots of history books using contemporaneous resources.

Wikipedia is as good a place as any to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#190

Post by danieltillett »

jessaustin wrote: post #132
smt88 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, it's a mixed bag. For example, the EPA is working (though not enough) to prevent the end of human life on earth. That's something I wouldn't trust Congress to do, since they seem to be gridlocked forever on all common sense issues. But then there are agencies like the USDA, which fed "pink slime" to children for years in order to help out the cattle industry[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime

There's nothing wrong with pink slime. If you want to eat cheap nutritious beef, it's a good thing. If you're a meat-packer trying to be less wasteful, it's a good thing. If you think the best pretext on which to wage class war is the content of various school lunches, apparently it's golden. Pink slime is only a marginally-bad thing for cattle ranchers like me. I would benefit if people decided to only eat ribeye, b…

While I think you have made a plausible argument, I am none too keen on eating pink slime if I have a choice.
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