I thought the Oregon Trail was a pretty standard part of US history curriculum.

People have been saying “As long as no [disliked social group] exists in the Middle East, there will be no peace” for the entirety of history.

If we allow the least populous state, Wyoming, to have three representatives, then that gives about 192,000 constituents per representative. So the House of Representatives would have about 1,720 members. Some substantial remodelling of the Capitol may have to be done. This would be enough people to fill a concert hall, but that’s not undoable.

Fill the standing body by collecting nominations. Each member can nominate exactly one member to the standing body. A member who collects exactly ten nominations will sit in the standing body. This means the standing body has 172 members.

A praesidium would be elected by the standing body’s political groups consisting of a president and several vice-presidents. In a proposed American system, they would probably have the title “speaker” and “deputy speaker”. In China, the praesidium consists of 178 people which is far too many. Nine is a more manageable number—one speaker and eight deputy speakers. The praesidium is an administrative body responsible for scheduling votes and establishing the rules of debate. It’s likely that the standing body is the only place where legislation can be introduced and debated, and then it is presented to the larger body for ratification.

The speaker is the presiding officer of the entire assembly, but the members of the praesidium can rotate presiding over the standing body. This is intended to ensure the political neutrality of the praesidium (useless in China’s case because everyone is a Communist but probably more effective in a hypothetical American adaptation).

In China, the standing body is plenipotentiary (has full legislative powers) when the entire Congress is not in session. This could also be the case under the American adaptation but the US Congress is almost always in session anyway. The standing body is in permanent session.

In essence, this creates a tricameral legislature.

There are some other powers that China’s Standing Committee has that the American version wouldn’t. Under the Communist principle of unified power, the Standing Committee also has the power to interpret the constitution. This is incompatible with the Western concept of separation of powers so it would be left out.

The fact that Musk and friends are always complaining about it seems to indicate that they are.

It isn’t a big concern as none of them represent any constituents in any meaningful way. Their job is to smile, wave, and clap. And wear an ethnic costume if you’re a designated token minority. Each member of the National People’s Congress represents zero citizens.

What I am trying to do here is not necessarily save $15 a day on labour costs, but also avoid creating a perverse incentive for people to get themselves imprisoned by committing crimes.

It’s not to say that the average person would rather be in prison than free, but if room and board is provided at no cost and no labour is expected, for a great deal of people that’s worth giving up their freedom for. Even if this line of thinking is not rational, people don’t necessarily make the most rational decisions. Particularly stupid ones will just think “prison = free room and board and no work” and then dream up a plan to commit some petty crime to get themselves imprisoned.

Some people are crazy enough to do this already in the US because they want free healthcare (despite the fact that prison healthcare is not always free). They will grab a kitchen knife and rob a bank for $1 and then wait in the lobby for the police to arrest them. I don’t think the fact that prison labour is now abolished hitting the news will do much to discourage even more people from trying it. This really is a case where the perception is stronger than the reality.

It costs the State a lot of money to arrest someone, put them on trial, pay the lawyers and judges, transportation and remand, and, of course pay for their costs of imprisonment. Even when the sobering reality has hit them that prison isn’t as great as they thought it was, they’ve already committed the crime that led them there and cost the State tens of thousands of dollars in the process. I think an aspect that must not be forgotten is that even requiring nominal work from prisoners serves to discourage people from looking at a prison as free room and board.

Of course, this raises the related question that if people are considering getting themselves thrown in prison for the food and housing, that says a lot about the state of social services in that country and maybe something else needs fixing more badly.

Why don’t the more populous states, the larger of the two groups, simply eat the small states?

China has a system where you have an obscenely large legislative body (almost 3,000 members) select a standing committee of a more reasonable size which actually does the bulk of the legislative work on a day-to-day basis. I think this is a good system to copy or take ideas from.

Or at least, that is how it is supposed to work on paper. In reality the standing committee is staffed with the most loyal and powerful Government cronies and the National People’s Congress is a rubber-stamping body rather than a venue for genuine political debate and expression.

Fuel and eggs, my friend. Fuel and eggs. And guns.

I gave it some thought and I think that the other people here actually do make a compelling argument for why domestic labour should be paid and optional as well.

That being said, I’m sure it isn’t controversial that free room and board for prisoners seems somewhat… unfair? On the part of the taxpayer, that is. Yes, it’s true that the State is already depriving a person of their freedom, but the status of imprisonment is also not intended to be an equal trade. It is intended to separate a person from society for rehabilitation (by giving them the skills and resources they need to succeed and re-integrate after release), to prevent further offences from being committed during the term of imprisonment, to repair the damage caused by the offence, and to punish the offender.

While I agree that the US places too much emphasis on the aspect of punishment, that isn’t to say that it should be eliminated. While it doesn’t stop all criminals (obviously), it’s still true that the fear of going to prison does stop a good number of rational-thinking people from committing minor crimes. The problem arises when the system relies on deterrence as the only way to prevent crime.

Prisoners are a subset of the working class. I am advocating for giving them jobs and paying them a reasonable hourly wage for those jobs (measured in dollars and not cents) so that they can gain work experience that is useful when they are released, and so that the fruits of their labour can also be used to offset the cost of their incarceration, compensate the victims of their crime, and build up a nest egg that can be used to help them re-integrate back into society.

And these jobs are not typically those that the free working class are willing to do anyway. That’s why the companies offering these kinds of jobs always get busted hiring undocumented workers paying them next to nothing with no paid breaks, days off, overtime pay, and in horrendous working conditions.

Well, Trump seemingly had the time to send out a hundred tweets a week while still being president of the United States so I wouldn’t discount it.

I never presented this as a dichotomy. You know, people prefer things in a certain order, right? I prefer Flatpaks and native packages over snaps and I prefer snaps to building from source.

Nothing useful for me. Given the choice I will usually pick the flatpak.

Unpopular opinion: snap is not so bad and genuinely useful for many things

I would rather have a snap than building from source or use some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script

It seems Donald Trump has assembled a crack[pot] team of the most [in]competent people to run this country

There has not been peace in the Middle East since the Ottoman Empire and there probably never will be peace in the Middle East for at least several decades more.

I’m somewhat confident that the social punishment will be enough to prevent it from getting to that point, and there will still be housekeeping work assignments, just not “do it or we throw you in the hole for a week”. More likely, refusal to do the housekeeping work will result in loss of the ability to perform paid work. In the worst-case scenario, if someone refuses to do it, administration can find a willing volunteer, pay them, and then charge whoever was supposed to do it for the cost of paying another prisoner to do it.

And there is also the possibility of offering a carrot as well. Well-behaved prisoners are more likely to earn parole or early release; that much is already true and known. But it could be supplemented with some minor incentives of insignificant cost, like saying that if the chores are all done then there will be popcorn and a movie at the end of the week or they’ll put an Xbox in the day room for an afternoon, and anyone who decided to skip out can’t participate.

At least from what I’ve heard about former prisoners posting online after their release, most are happy to work anyway, especially if there is a monetary incentive, since after a while the boredom of doing nothing all day will apparently get to you. It’s not like they have a gaming PC to use if they’re not working.

Regarding the problem of gangs, it seems to be the case that administration is always aware but chooses to tolerate them because it would require more manpower and… administrative integrity than is available to stop.

The Nordic model is definitely the most successful but there doesn’t seem to be enough political appetite to get it implemented so it isn’t a realistic suggestion.

I guess I’ll put my personal opinion on the record here. I think that penal labour is generally an exploitative industry, if you want to call it that. And I do think that prisoners who perform work should be paid for that work. At the same time, I’m also sensitive to the fact that it costs a great deal of money to pay for room and board and security for prisoners, and that it’s also fair that their labour be used to offset some of the cost of their own imprisonment rather than laying the burden entirely on the public purse.

So while I don’t support solitary confinement as a punishment (for anything), I do think that prisoners should have to at a minimum cook and clean for themselves. If they don’t want to cook, then nobody else should have to do it; they just won’t have dinner that night if they don’t cook and serve it themselves. If nobody wants to wash the dishes, then it’s not the administration’s problem if there aren’t any clean plates to use for the next meal. If nobody wants to clean the shower, then it’s not the administration’s problem if grime starts to build up on it. The State should not force the prisoners to work, but it also shouldn’t be the State’s responsibility to provide janitors or cooks to look after them.

Which means I agree that “extra” work beyond what’s necessary to maintain the basic needs of the prisoners should be paid and optional. “Optional” meaning there’s no punishment if you choose not to do it, but if you don’t, you won’t have money to pay for services like postage stamps, extra phone calls, or the prison commissary. Even if prisoners are only paid half of minimum wage, that’s still an improvement, because it recognises that their labour has value and this money can also be used to pay for fines and restitution. A pretty common problem among the newly-released is that they are saddled with an obscene amount of debt because the State makes them pay court costs, room and board, fines, parole monitoring fees, and restitution but only pays them fifty cents an hour for their work, meaning they leave prison thousands of dollars in debt with the threat of parole revocation if they can’t pay. That just drives people to resort to crime in order to find the money.

Let me rephrase: would the proposition, if it had passed, prohibited prisons from requiring prisoners to perform domestic duties within the prison?