Guard Dog

OK THAT I can get behind! He did steal the show.

Of course contractors make a profit on their services. No matter that service that is. If a private company is running a SP for a State DOC they are making money on doing it. So yes you could say they are making money on incarceration but that dies not rise to the level you seem to want to take it. They are not "incentivized" to lock people up for a better profit. They don't lock people up. The State does that. All the contractors are doing is maintaining the facility, making sure the prisoners are fed, secured, and otherwise provided for. It is no different than a state run CP. The only ones I'm familiar with are done in Florida and they were all minimum security/work camps. White collar or non violent with short sentences. Medium and maximum security in Florida was not contracted last I heard. The scenario you are imagining just does not exist that I've ever heard of.

Don't know about that. The plot made no sense. But then again it WAS a Schwarzenegger movie.

AFAIK no state has "private prisons". There ARE states that contract the administration of prisons but those contractors work for and are accountable to the state government just as state employees would be.

The running Man novella was so much better than the movie. But of course Schwarzenegger would not have fit the starring role if they had been faithful

Heavy weapons it has to be a MK-19 for me. Have you ever seen anything do so much damage so quickly? Light weapons I’d say the M-249. The US had nothing close to it. The Thompson and BAR were short range only and had limited ammo capacity. The German MGs and British Bren were comparable in firepower but were much heavier and could not be carried or operated by just one man like the SAW can.

On a lighter note Don’t California up my Portugal

Like I always said, buying crypto is buying nothing

LOL no they get to oversee the s--t details. That's a Corporal's s--t detail. Believe it or not Corporal is a pretty good rank in the Marines. There are three ranks that. once you make them, your quality of life improves noticeably; Corporal, Staff Sergeant, and Major. In the other three services (not counting the Space Force because it's stupid) E-4 is pretty meaningless. In Navy you get your rating at E-4 so there is that. But in the Corps E-4 is where you start to be exempted from some of the petty BS

It's called a s--t detail in the USMC

Yesterday G & I were talking about the "collapse" of crypto and the economy in general. Then she starts laughing. She told me I had the perfect "prepper castle" to ride out the economic apocalypse and sold it. Zing.... that wasn't funny! I told the worst part is the cash I received for the sale is worth 13% less than it was just six months ago! Oh well. We're all dead in the long run no matter what. In 30 years it won't matter.

A ballistic vest will stop penetration by most pistol rounds and some rifle rounds. But you've still been hit by an object travelling 2k fps. That will take all the fight out of anyone

Not funny but still funny

You really have to pity the Reds at this point:

I have been a huge fan of Stellaris and have bought all the DLC on the day of release. They have all been worth the cost. Overlord is no exception but it is a bug infested mess. Nothing that crashes the game or anything terrible. More like features that don't work right or petty annoyances. It's still worth buying but I'd advise waiting for a patch. Paradox is pretty good about post release fixes so I doubt it will be long

This show is freaking FUNNY! Two thumbs up Killing it

The laugh wasn't what you said, it was that is was YOU saying it. Also, you are wrong in thinking I don't draw distinctions between different levels of villainy. One being better than another doesn't make them good however.

So, in other words they were all bad?

The image on the left is the Magellenic Cloud taken by the now retired Spitzer Space Telescope. The one on the right is the same thing captured by the James Webb telescope: Webb telescope's sharp views of the universe will change astronomy

That was supposed to be sarcastic. It DID make him a bad guy even by the standards of the time.

Well, he did completely ruin the 20th Century. No small feat considering it was fewer than 20 years old at that point. Of course I could just as well blame Roosevelt because if he'd stayed out of it Taft would have bee re-elected and Wilson would have f----d back off to New Jersey and never be heard from again. The US doesn't (probably) enter WW1. The war (probably) ends in a more equitable peace deal that doesn't completely destroy the Central Powers, and the conditions for the ascension of the Nazi Party (possibly) don't exist. Hard to say on that last one because the Great Depression was pretty much inevitable. But no Nazis means (possibly) no holocaust. No WW2 as we know it so no Israel in the post war years. THAT is a game changer in the ME and the different culturally Arab regimes will fight each other more than the traditional Sunni/Shia rivalries we had in our timeline. The British would exploit regional rivalries and likely still have a lot more influence in the ME than they did in reality. Possibly even into modern times. Would all that be better? Who knows. Wilson wasn't a bad guy other than being a eugenics believer and more than a little racist. But his intentions were not bad. I guess. He also couldn't predict the future.

Blasting out Earth’s location with the hope of reaching aliens is a controversial idea – two teams of scientists are doing it anyway Probably a bad idea. But, by the time the radio messages actual get where they are going and if there are aliens there, and if they are able to receive it and decide to do something about it it will be at LEAST 20k years and that is assuming they can travel FTL. Y'know that was a pretty neat problem from the novel Forever War. Two races of roughly equal technology fighting an interstellar war. Because of time dilation the ships that travelled less time were more technologically advanced.

Meh, I'm still holding out hope the anti-Christ is actually a giant meteor rather than a man. I'd rather the whole 1k years of darkness thing to be literal rather than figurative.

Oh good, this s--t has to come to an end sooner or later. Might as well be sooner.

This was a very good (if long) read: What did Medieval peasants know As I written here a hundred time I get annoyed when actual history is subverted or outright misrepresented for modern political ends. The "dark ages" following the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the beginning of the "high Middle Ages" period are good fodder for that because there is very little in the way of preserved history or writing. Also I've had a subscription to The Atlantic about 10 years ago and let it lapse. But it seems like they have upped their game in the past decade and are doing some interesting writing again. I may have to buy back in.