Of course there is. Sheriffs and prison administrators make a lot of money from this racket, and they have a lot of lobbyists.

Prison inherently sucks, no matter how nicely they treat the prisoners. This is just torturing them for profit.

I've never heard of prisoners receiving calls anywhere. The usual process is that the all calls must be placed by the prisoner, all collect calls, even to local numbers and charges accepted by a person receiving the call, so no leaving messages in voicemail.
This is a racket run by county sheriffs and prison administrators to steal more funds from the people they are supposed to protect and serve.

So what does this mean? Ice floating on the ocean doesn't affect sea level. It's not generating food for sea life or affecting oxygen or co2 levels. What difference does it make if there's less ice?

Because if they measured in square meters it wouldn't be as scary.

Fortnite wouldn't exist unless other companies had risked millions to develop the systems it runs on. They opened up their systems to outside developers like Epic to create symbiotic systems that see some players buy the game to run on their systems and others buy their systems to play the game. But Epic doesn't want to be a symbiote that contributes to the well-being of the system makers, they want to be a parasite that steals all the benefits for themselves and gives nothing in return.
Sweeney should be grateful to pay the 30% commission to the companies that let him found his company and make his billions.
If he wants to sell his software and pay no commission to the system makers on the sales, he should make his own gaming system and let other game makers use it for free.

That didn't work so well for Al Capone or Martha Stewart or Jeffrey Epstein. None of whom killed themself.

I think it's more likely a scheduling issue. Management was stuck on a delivery date that didn't allow for retesting with the new landing site, only for the changes in the software.
Either way, it's a management issue, not an engineering issue.

How much of this is China sending out yuan, and how much is other countries using it to buy stuff from China?
I suspect most of it is China loaning yuan for BRI projects, which are then immediately returned as payment for the materials and labor that goes into those projects. Is that even international trade when it's China paying itself with loans that will never be repaid?

No, the gap is actually huge, and in the opposite direction from what you think. Windmills kill 10 times as many birds as nukes do, including all the mining and milling of the nuclear fuel but ignoring the mining and processing of the material that goes into the windmills. I even have a reference.
https://energycentral.com/c/ec...

What are they going to do with all the migrating birds this giant field of windmills will kill? Just drop them in the Atlantic to fertilize the algae, or gather them to compost for all the organic farms that will feed the Big Apple?

The other difference between "tax" and "fee" is that if you don't want to pay a fee, you can choose not to use the service. If you don't pay a tax, a bunch of men with guns will come and take you away. Apple doesn't send any men with guns to collect their commissions.

Here you are talking about something that happened two years ago in Texas, when the topic is an event that happened two weeks ago in Tennessee.
But you can't criticize the TVA, since it's a federally-owned electric utility corporation, can you? No ERCOT, no private companies to blame, so ignore the current event and just continue to be mad about something that happened two years ago, and which, by the way, wasn't repeated in Texas this time.

It's $1,200 a year, not a month.

Your kids were safe in school before you banned guns. There have been just as many school shootings there since the ban as there were before it.

Besides, you don't need guns to mass murder kids.

https://www.news.com.au/lifest...