Prisons

I have already been pretty much shot down about police and fire....how about prisons, (state, and private)?

Ok I stand corrected, I guess police is included in the cost of government....

A company called 'Mindscape' had created a game called 'balance of power', which was an unqualified success for the time.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, they set about to update the game, and decided to include the United Nations and even some economics in there.
Unfortunately, for them, they used real world statistics; which they quickly decided to change. You see, the original RW statistics they used turned the continent of Africa into a slaughterhouse of destitution and famine. No matter how they played the game, the African death toll was depressing.
So they released the game after cutting the effect of famine by a factor of 10.
Maxis found similar problems with their 'SimCity' game. If they made the game rules totally realistic, every city would collapse under the weight of its own infrastructure.

In real life, many of the most successful first world nations had a period of imperialism when they exploited the people and/or natural resources of 'others'. Indeed, it could be argued that America is the 'greatest nation on Earth' because it exploited the most people and resources for the longest time; and perhaps continues to do so. It could be argued that America is in decline precisely because they're slowly ending their exploitative practices.

If SC tries to build realism into their game, they would learn the same as those who have come before them. The top spots in the game would go to the most brutally exploitative leaders. Each world would be dominated by a handful of psychopathic Stalins. And everyone else would be mired in a morass of chronic debt and poverty made worse by their very efforts to alleviate it.
People always want 'realistic' but never 'realism'.
Schools, prisons, roads, rails, airports, water supplies, supply chains, hospitals, sure... But ONLY if it remains easily playable.
But who wants to deal with crime, the press, human and civil rights, terrorism, corruption, graft, fraud, racial, ethnic and sectarian violence, coups, foreign interventions, Intelligence, spying and their 'dirty deeds' dept.?
Where in this game can a guy 'Putin' a neighboring country?

Personally, I could see police, courts, and prisons dealt separately. And a way of exploiting the prison population as slave labor. Either to directly benefit a country or to rent them out to enterprises to exploit. Perhaps with a certain mortality rate among them, depending on their level of exploitation. We could create a whole 'cost/benefit' calculus to it with a percentage from 'total prison/total slave state' to 'absolute anarchy'.
Is that the kind of realism you would like to see?

jdlech: I should probably know better than to get into a political debate here, but I will anyways.

Put simply, the exploitation theory of international development is ludicrous. Exploitation can build you a system of slaves tilling farm fields really well(this was one of Rome's pillars of power when it was strong), or deck your leadership out in shiny things, but it can't build a modern industrial economy. The US is the most powerful nation in the world because it's the largest developed nation in the world, and it's the largest mostly because of its relative lack of exploitation - the massive waves of immigration that built it up were because it's usually been the freest nation around, and a lot of people fled the oppressive nobility of Europe for a nation that'd let them practice their religion and not lock them into serfdom of one form or another.

In the real world, the nations that try to build themselves up by exploitation look like North Korea or sub-Saharan Africa. The nations that generally allow freedom are the powerful ones. The 20th century was basically dominated by four ideologies of centralized control, all of which favoured the government telling people what to do and how to do it, challenging capitalism's ideology of "Do whatever, we don't much care". Three failed miserably(militarism, fascism, and communism), and the fourth came to a modus vivendi(socialism). Plenty of wise folks thought America was doomed to be overtaken by Germany or Russia or Japan, but it's still #1, and will be for the foreseeable future.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

the massive waves of immigration that built it up were because it's usually been the freest nation around- odd<!-/Quote-!>

if you expand on what happened to every non-english, (and some english speaking,) peoples that have happened their way into america, then you'll discover that you are actually making the opposite point of what you intended.

nation and race, and to a degree gender, are large copies of smaller pecking orders. keeping those that aren't in your "club," contributing more to your dominance, than their own independence.

although i agree with part of your statement, you could go through many aspects of this "free country," and realize, our very thought process is controlled by those that have enough money to express themselves loudest. when you apply this to our economy, you'll discover that we aren't truely free to stand upright like human beings, you have to buy that privilege

It's far from perfect. I prefer my country(Canada) in several important ways, though they have us in a few as well. But it's closer to the ideal than just about anywhere else.

It's all good ODS.
Although I still stand by my original opinion. Even after slavery in America was abolished, we just found another way of enslaving people - without calling it slavery.
Throughout the south during and after the reconstruction period, we threw blacks in jail for all kinds of bogus 'crimes'. Any white guy could say a black man owes him money - no transaction need even be recorded. If the poor guy couldn't pay up, he went straight to prison.
We had a hundred different bogus ways of putting blacks in prison. Because once they were in prison, the state would rent them out to.... former slave owners and newly minted entrepreneurs. Except this time around, they didn't have any ownership - so they didn't feel any need to keep their new 'workers' alive. Forget recidivism; the mortality rate at some of these prisons was as high as 33%. You see, owning slaves meant you paid good money for them. Which means you had some concern for their well being. A dead slave meant a lost investment. But renting them meant you didn't have any such concerns. When one dies, you just rent another.
And finally, to address one of your points, those sla... "convicted workers" were used to build factories; entire industries were built by such labor, all across the south.

Since then, we've found ways to exploit others as well. Itinerant workers, for instance, are exempt from most wage and hours laws in America. The reason why nobody does anything about illegal immigrants in America is not because they are so loved. Rather because it's businesses who hire them... the same businesses who pay for our politicians campaigns. But they do make for great political whipping boys. Publicly claim you will do something to reduce illegal immigrants, but promise your corporate sponsors you'll do nothing to disrupt their low wage/highly exploited labor pool.
Of course, there's always some group campaigning to better the lives of those we exploit. But every time we quit exploiting one group so far, we've always managed to find another group to exploit.
We didn't get rid of all our sweat shops. We merely moved them overseas. And then we demanded they hide their sweat shop practices. We didn't get rid of the exploitation, we simply moved it then hid it.
At this point, you're probably thinking I'm a pretty darned hard boiled cynic. And you might be right. But that doesn't change the facts of the matter.
The trucking industries in both our countries. The "Over the Road" drivers are massively micromanaged. Yet their pay/hour worked violates the wage laws in both our countries. Which is why neither of our countries ever want our OTR truckers to be paid by the hour or wage and hours laws applied to them. This is just another form of modern exploitation in our industrialized civilizations.
Hey, no hard feelings.
We're all friends here.
J

The south - the part that's backwards and poor compared to the rest of the country? Funny how that works. It's almost like exploitation is a shitty way to build a modern economy, and free labour works better.

As for sweatshops, the vast majority of complaints about them are things that I, personally, have experienced in Canadian workplaces. And gone back to work the next day, too. The people who complain about sweatshops are, for the most part, the same people who'd think they'd died and gone to hell if they ever set foot in an actual factory. Anyone who actually has a clue is more likely to refer to it as "good manufacturing jobs".

What about creating an intelligence unit which will be under the military command. It's major functions would be sabotaging enemies corporations,infrastructure etc and intelligence gathering on friends and foes. There would be countermeasures which will enable says to be arrested.

But they did manage to take a lot of jobs from us yanks, (and even a few from you canooks) ;) .
Actually, you have to look at where they started to really appreciate how far they went before we stopped them from ensla... ah, renting out their convicts.
Nowadays we exploit them for the 'common good' like stamping out license plates for couple of dollars a day. At least we keep most of them alive. And those medical experiments we do on them... that's all voluntary.

I always wanted to run my own intelligence 'dirty deeds' dept. Match the unit's Q and resources it's given against the amount of money a nation or enterprise puts into counter intelligence for a chance at either destroying up to six month's worth of production, or getting caught and killed, or even the intelligence unit changing ownership and the responsible nation being discovered.

Not sure if you would like that, though. There's a few long standing enterprises with enough resources to send an army of well heeled intelligence agents at you.

It would only make the game fun.And if enterprises can sabotage countries then they too should should have the disadvantage of being destroyed.If a spy from an enterprise is caught,then all the locations of the said enterprise`s corporations in your world can become legitimate military targets.Just sending a naval expedition or a missle through the roof ought to sought the problem.Or an Israeli-style airstrike