http://www.newschannel5.com/category/211433/nc5-investigates-policing-for-profit
I'm a little confused. The implicatin seems ot be that our current police are non-profit. Am I missing something?0
Quote from: tnu on December 28, 2012, 09:47:48 PM
I'm a little confused. The implicatin seems ot be that our current police are non-profit. Am I missing something?0
No, it's about police stopping people with cash and taking the cash when there's nothing illegal about doing so, just to pad their coffers.
Quote from: MrBogosity on December 28, 2012, 10:42:56 PM
No, it's about police stopping people with cash and taking the cash when there's nothing illegal about doing so, just to pad their coffers.
In other words, it's basically flat out robbery, and the police get away with it because they're cops and no one wants to stop them.
Quote from: D on December 28, 2012, 10:45:02 PM
In other words, it's basically flat out robbery, and the police get away with it because they're cops and no one wants to stop them.
Not that it's anything new.
It's been decades since the LAPD (IIRC) was actually caught selecting properties for drug raids (and subsequent civil forfeiture) on the basis of their sale value.
Quote from: MrBogosity on December 28, 2012, 10:42:56 PM
No, it's about police stopping people with cash and taking the cash when there's nothing illegal about doing so, just to pad their coffers.
Kind of reminds me of the actual Robber Barons at the beginning of Feudalism and not the incorrect usage that was a slur at early American industrialists.
Quote from: Goaticus on January 07, 2013, 04:06:31 PM
Kind of reminds me of the actual Robber Barons at the beginning of Feudalism and not the incorrect usage that was a slur at early American industrialists.
Actually, that was really directed at the Government cronies who got all their money from various grants and things of similar nature. O particular note are the railway guys, who arranged to get half the best land (that is, the land on either side of the railway lines) for free, on top of getting money to build the actual lines, regardless of whether they made any sort of sense or not (and people wonder why it turned into a bubble).
The late 19th century railway bubble was much like the relatively poorly known optical fiber portion of the tech bubble.
In the railway bubble, it eventually reached the stage where people were laying track to justify selling stock, to finance laying more track, to justify selling more stock...
In the fiber bubble, it got to the point where companies were laying fiber, to justify selling stock, to finance laying more fiber, to justify selling more stock...
Any time you see companies doing things to justify their financing arrangements rather than their business activities, you know the bubble is about to burst.
Fortunately, there's a difference in a key aspect of the two: Railways need substantial ongoing maintenance to remain usable, while fiber lines require (if they were laid properly in the first place) very little maintenance, which gets carried by any lit fibers in the bundle. We've got oodles of backbone bandwidth available, and no real idea what to do with it all. Out of 32 pairs of fibers in a lot of bundles here in Canada, often only 1 pair is lit. The highest capacity links on fiber at the moment are made with OC192's, but development work on the OC256 (with 1/3 more capacity than the OC192) was completed before the manufacturer realized that they couldn't move the OC192's like they were hoping, never mind something with even more capacity, so we can massively up the bandwidth on existing fibers as well. And, since THOSE companies were generally allowed to fold, all the ownership issues on those fibers were sorted out long ago.
(Amusing fact: Cable TV companies usually have MUCH better crews for splicing optical fiber than phone companies. The reason is practice: Cable TV system use optical fiber these days for most of the distribution system, and it needs to be spliced at every single node and every time a fiber line is brought down by a storm or a car crashing into a pole [or, as once happened to the company I used to work for, a large truck takes out pretty much all the poles on a whole block, in front of the building housing the head end equipment, taking down the whole damn CITY].)