Posts by Kyle Matthews
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And if there was a carrot/stick system implemented (e.g.'$5,000 reward for every prisoner who doesn't reoffend within 5 years')by the government that gives contracts out?
I think you're chronically underestimating the cost of housing a prisoner for a year. The $5,000 wouldn't come close to the money that could be made.
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But unfortunately, you will get various media titans demanding an assurance that this will never happen again...
This discussion is turning towards things that I have been thinking a lot about recently for personal reasons.
If the public and the media is going to demand 100% from the public service, they should be willing to fund it. They're clearly not, and I wish it was more OK to tell them to stop being unrealistic sometimes.
I suspect that a lot of the required service delivery levels in the public service would shock the public (and do) when they hear about them.
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On a semi-related note, does the specter of private prisons mildly worry anyone else? I'm filing them in my "what could possibly go wrong" basket.
I liked that the government dropped that into the Corrections news basket on the same day that the SSC Report came back not saying what they'd built it up to say.
No no, don't look at that! Look over here instead! Privatisation!
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and embrace causes like global warming
I like how global warming is a cause like, I dunno, Save the Whales or Ronald McDonald House.
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Last time I was back in '96 I got to the MaF guy standing there in a lemon squeezer hat who looked at my card and my passport, then on handing them back smiled and said 'welcome home'.
I believe now their contract says they need to sing a couple of lines from the Dave Dobbyn song.
Because we care.
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He certainly sounds depressed -- not getting out of bed, not wanting to move house, not wanting to go to school.
Sounds like a many teenagers. Was he wearing all black and having stupid hair down over his eyes?
Jolisa, I'm not sure if the judgement is so much about her behaviour, though it sounds bad.
To me the judgement is the behaviour, backed up by writing all about it for profit. It seems like her only concern from the little I've heard about it is herself and her publishing. Certainly not her son or their relationship. Why people should profit from bad parenting followed up by crappy publishing tell-alls on their bad parenting I have no idea.
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Hold on. She and her husband were "snooping" around the bedroom of a bright, hardworking child, searching through his CD cases for … what, exactly? He had trust and security issues? No bloody wonder.
And her reaction to finding the cannabis (decided to ignore it, he was doing well at school), doesn't look good next to her claims that he had fallen so deeply into cannabis addiction that he needed to be turfed out.
Hindsight is wonderful, but you don't want to take a little bit more on yourself about where intervention could have helped your son? Isn't that somewhere near the top of the list of parental duties? Even a wee chat about acceptable use of drugs (ie, not providing it to your younger siblings?).
What a cow.
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And why did we consumers put up with uniformly crappy CD cases whose hinges break with normal use?
I think because we were used to the fact that tape cases had done it for many years.
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and on that they are wrong Mark. A physical CD sells for less than it's vinyl equivalent. When the LP was phased out of the mainstream in the mid to late 1980s it retailed for about $18. A CD was $32. The list price of a CD now is about $34 and a chart CD can be found well under $30 which is much less than the 1986 / 7 $18 adjusted for $2009.
That's a dubious argument Simon. There are many factors which have led to the change in price of products over years. The statement "CDs are cheaper than vinyl because they're currently cheaper than Vinyl was in the 1980s after inflation" is waiting to have all the holes picked apart. About as useful as a price comparison between my old commodore 64 and the Mac Pro that currently sits on my desk.
Not the least because, as you note:
Of course the thing costs substantially less to produce too.
Volume, production costs, efficiencies, new markets, changes in the distribution of income from CDs etc, could all be as much of a factor in where the price is now.
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Please do elaborate on why you don't rate the analogy.
I don't rate the analogy because the death of the horse as a primary means of transport largely killed the associated trades. Saddlework, smithing, etc, went from common trades, to being very uncommon. And the people that had done them slowly went out of business and their families took their skills and moved onto similar fields of work, but doing something different.
Which isn't a problem with those trades, they're not needed anymore.
If the world suddenly changes, and we suddenly only provide enough income for 10% of the current number of professional writers, I think we'll have lost a lot of culture.
The analogy doesn't work because 1. people argue that in the 'new world' writers will still have income, that doesn't match up with what happened to the horse industries, and 2. if that's not true, losing the writing industry doesn't compare to losing the saddlemaking industry.