For private prisons, the Corrections Corporation of America reportedly spends over $1 million each year on lobbying. [1][2]
Beyond private prisons, there's lobbying from prison guards' unions. For example, the California union appears to have substantial political influence, and in 2008 successfully spent $1.8 million to defeat a ballot initiative that would have reduced the prison population.[3]
Further, in some municipalities, cities use fines as revenue-raising tools, and arrest and jail people who fail to pay. See e.g. the Ferguson DOJ report.[4]
To get someone's (or your own) Google+ ID, you can also click the profile picture and copy the oid parameter out of the URL. (Pulling it out of "View Source" didn't work for some reason.)
There doesn't seem to be much in the way of real intership programs for your age group.
However, your resume is super impressive, and you're clearly gifted. I'm going to bet that there will be people who will want to support your ambitions and create an ad-hoc internship for you. So here's my advice:
Treat your internship search like a job search!
Cold-call and cold-email CEOs of NYC-based startups that use Rails or React. Medium-sized and small companies might have an easier time accommodating, but it can't hurt to try bigger companies too just for kicks.
E.g. try this line for cold-calling: "Hi, this is Lachlan. Are you $CEO_NAME at $STARTUP_NAME? Yes? Cool! I'm a 13-year-old middle school student, and I built a web app with Rails and React last year. I'm looking for an internship this summer. I was wondering if that's something you'd consider."
Regarding child labor laws: Businesses with employees tend to already have a lawyer they regularly talk to (for contracts and compliance). They should be able to run the labor law issues by their lawyer for you - maybe you'll have to wait until your 14th birthday, maybe it's possible to structure it as a "trainee" program that falls under different laws, maybe something else. So I'd just bring this issue to their attention and leave it up to them to figure it out.
Apparently this is a machine learning research project.
It seems that this would be quite useful for looking at the code of closed-source webapps. Would love to see it open-sourced or available as a service (via an API perhaps). Think auto-deminifying browser extension.
Thankfully, it seems fairly unlikely that the trusted proxy thing is going to get anywhere: It serves the interests of Ericsson and AT&T, but not those of the HTTP/2.0 spec authors (who are from Google and Mozilla) or server and browser vendors that will have to implement HTTP/2.0.
These types of agreements might mean that we move from "software patents held by tech giants" to "software patents held by a cartel of tech giants". That would be worse.
An agreement like this might avoid the next high-profile lawsuit, but instead of fixing the patent system it's tapering over the most visible symptom, creating a patent oligopoly in the process.
Maybe I'm seeing things, but I'm just having Google's ongoing anti-poaching scandal fresh in mind.
I'm getting organic search traffic for niche keywords, like 'free solitaire online'. http://sudokuisland.com seems to have a decent amount of keywords already, but perhaps you can think of more. Organic search is probably the only way to get traffic at the scale you need for an ad-monetized game.
My plan is to improve the PageRank and DomainRank, and eventually to make the product better (since Google presumably picks up on that through bounce rates, time on site, sharing). So that'd be the general strategy I recommend.
Another metric you can optimize is the number of times a first-time visitor returns, because it acts as a multiplier on your traffic. Say you get 100 organic first-time visitors per day, if each visitor returns 5 times, you'll have 600 total visits per day.
>> financial incentives to incarcerate...
> Do you have any sources for this?
For private prisons, the Corrections Corporation of America reportedly spends over $1 million each year on lobbying. [1][2]
Beyond private prisons, there's lobbying from prison guards' unions. For example, the California union appears to have substantial political influence, and in 2008 successfully spent $1.8 million to defeat a ballot initiative that would have reduced the prison population.[3]
Further, in some municipalities, cities use fines as revenue-raising tools, and arrest and jail people who fail to pay. See e.g. the Ferguson DOJ report.[4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_Ame...
[2] http://www.diversityinc.com/diversity-management/who-profits...
[3] http://criminology.fsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/volume-10-issu... p. 750 (PDF page 274)
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/0...