Also, yeah, prisons do not really have "slave labor"; the prisoners vounteer for these work details and they are 'compensated' something like $0.05 a day or whatever. They have to earn the right to do these details as well. They also only work on public projects, public lands. They do have something like slave labor in military prisons, though, turning big rocks into little rocks, so don't commit any warcrimes, ok?
What part of this isn't slave labor? That's like saying internships aren't slave labor. They are. O you *cough* "volunteered" *cough* OK.... Whatever someone has to tell themselves to sleep better at night.... Only in prison, you can't leave, so even more slavey.
No country was ever ruined because it gave individuals too much freedom.
Have you read "Brave New World?" Compare it to "1984." The later we get censored, and we have no information. The former, we get too much information and it becomes meaningless.
This is the same "deregulation" line of thinking that lead to the current banking collapse. It doesn't work in practice. Rather, it works for a little bit until reality catches up and kicks everyone in the ass for ignoring it....
Mmm yeah. Not a good idea to fire people based on piss tests. Fire them if they show up high the same way you'd fire them if they showed up drunk.
Poppy seed bagels, let me tell you about them. They show up as all kids of lovely drugs in your system, like heroine. The sale of those poppy seed products shall skyrocket the moment someplace institutes urine analysis tests.
I'm also going to add that I think copyright law, as it stands, is completely outdated. The Japanese model as I understand it, which uses fanworks as advertisements and draws on carefully cultivated personal relationships + high-quality tie-ins to keep creators fed and lively, seems like it will be a lot better in the digital distribution era than more and more arcane attempts to keep people from pirating by force.
The problem with the internets lately is that we've essentially given the message that creative thought/writing has $0 value. Maybe when you have a rabid fan base, some of whom base a good part of their live around things like Anime in Japan, that might work. Unfortunately, we're dealing with our country which has an, "I don't care and won't pay for anything until and unless completely forced to do so," way of thinking.
In a Perfect World, Napster would've just inserted a 5 second Pepsi Ad into the beginning every song that couldn't be removed (and if you try to remove it, the song file gets automatically deleted) and paid the artists. It'd be repetitive, but free.... Pepsi, would pay a fortune for it, many fortunes actually, and everyone would get paid with no legal problems....
Police are trained to act the way they do for a reason. It is really too dangerous of a job to have police acting like Barney Fife anymore. They are trained to react to novel situations by pressing forward with the attack. They tend to cultivate a "us vs them" mentality with the public. They also interact with the dregs of society day in and out and it tends to muddy their interactions with your average more-or-less law abiding citizen. They also get burned out and pissy like any other human being.\
Police are like everyone else, there are good, bad, and ugly. The problem is that in the past decade or so they have lowered the bar across the board for what police can and cannot do. There is shit being done now that would've gotten people unconditionally fired 20 years ago. No, the world is not different, at all. It's always been this screwed up, but we just had our heads in the sand saying no one would dare attack us etc. There's something called the constitution, and it's getting harder and harder to enforce it with a straight face these days.