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  •  Your point about the yellows is perfectly sound (1+ / 0-)

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    Delta Overdue

    it is a significant safety issue, and also offers great potential for financially-motivated misuse.  

    In other areas, I guess I don't understand the distinction between outsourced and privatized.  Maybe it's a continuum? The examples that come to mind are ...

    Janitorial services in schools have been "outsourced", and gone is the in-house custodian who took a personal interest in every broken waterfountain or graffitied wall (and earned a pension from the school district).  

    Running prisons has definitely been "privatized", which seems to result in an ever-greater percentage of people being locked up.

    "The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to EMOTIONALLY comprehend the exponential function." -- Edward Teller

    by lgmcp on Wed Apr 19, 2006 at 10:47:35 AM PDT

    [ Parent ]

    •  What is the distinction? (1+ / 0-)

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      lgmcp

      Chalk it up to laziness--my dictionary defines neither "outsource" nor "privatize", and I didn't look further.  

      I think I assumed that outsourcing dealt more with procurement from a non-governmental source, in other words with obtaining equipment or services, and that privatizing meant turning the entire governmental function over to corporations.  Maybe it's a question of a partial or an entire delegation.  Maybe there's no real distinction.

      We're all in this together.

      by JTML on Wed Apr 19, 2006 at 11:45:13 AM PDT

      [ Parent ]

    •  Privatization is outsourcing (2+ / 0-)

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      Gegner, lgmcp

      a function previously carried out by a public agency.

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