Yeah we would’ve had it already too if the government didn’t get fleeced. It was about 2010 when the “National Broadband Plan” was unveiled. Part of its goal was 100Mbs to 100M people by 2020.
ISP received $200 Billion in subsidies and tax breaks to run nation wide fiber in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. They didn’t do it, kept the tax breaks, and the government didn’t care.
They’ve been stealing taxpayer dollars for 30 years, constantly stalling and delaying and then saying the plans are now outdated and we need more money for the new plans. Repeat every decade. Everyone knows it’s a monopoly with speed/price fixing yet somehow it never improves.
Can’t speak to Comcast’s evils, but I call my ISP once a year to ask about my speeds and bill. Just got bumped from 200/20 to 1000/?, with a $10 discount. I’m on the edge of town, not technically rural, but close enough.
Not sure the answer to the monopoly thing, but I used to be an internet cable guy, so I can speak to the complexity of having 2 providers where there was only one. The costs are staggering.
make it a publicly owned and operated municipal utility
make the “last mile” publicly owned infrastructure and private service providers can connect to the data center that connects the last mile
require that the company who owns and maintains the last mile can not also be a service provider over that last mile infrastructure
The last one is how Texas handles the power grid, so it would need a real regulatory body making sure the private last mile infrastructure is actually maintained, unlike the Texas power grid.
Currently in Utah with a city that offers municipal fiber. 1gb up, 1gb down for $60 per month. Luckily my city does that and many things right, I wish others would follow. My buddy who lives 10 min away in another city has comcast and whatever century link calls themselves these days.
That’s so unfortunate! If you scroll down and read about Utah, it talks a little bit about the formation of Utopia fiber. That’s what I have and it’s great. It’s kind of interesting because I pay 2 places for my internet service. $30 per month to Utopia Fiber, and then $30 to an isp (I utilize xmission). Not sure if situations like that are normal for municipal internet service or if it’s a loophole to get around the restrictions somehow? No idea.
@Foggyfroggy@BrikoX I really wish someone in the FCC /FTC/Federal government in general would put their foot down and say to the industry, "You WILL build broadband everywhere, you WILL make it 100 Mbps at minimum, and you WILL pay for it out of your own pocket." Nothing less is acceptable.
Mr. Giuliani, insisting that he still had “legal defenses” in the case, said that he continued to believe his accusations about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss were “constitutionally protected” under the First Amendment. He also refused to acknowledge that his statements had caused the women any damage — a key element required to collect a judgment in a defamation case.
It's such obvious bullshit to claim First Amendment protection for slander. His only path to victory is a GOP win and a pardon.
I don’t want to hear shit about biden until he actually sides with striking workers, or actually cancels student debt, or federally legalizes weed, or does literally anything i voted for him for.
I dunno. He certainly didn’t help his cause there when he released that creepy vague cringe vid he did about the accusations in his House of Cards character.
Yes. We need the numbers to be minimum bitrates and we need at least a 90% uptime for that minimum. If you could rely on your bandwidth to be a specific rate all the time you could pay for less and everyone could get more without more infrastructure upgrades.
For those that would bother to read the article, the ‘victim’ flipped off the cop while driving. Sure, maybe the cop is an angry asshole, but the excessive force is just as likely to come from being flipped off as the cop seeing a transgender person.
back in my day the police murdered us for not working, or not working enough, or working too much, or wanting to work, for relaxing, not relaxing, relaxing too much, not relaxing enough, sleeping, not sleeping, sleeping too much, not sleeping enough and walking around existing and we liked it that way
Fuck cops, and fuck you for victim blaming. He has a constitutional right to flip off any cop, any time he wants for any reason, per the Supreme Court.
You seriously think flipping a person off is an act of aggression worthy of being beaten?
Like those are the two things being equated by you. That somehow a person who raises a middle finger at distance from another person might expect to be followed and beaten, that those two things make sense in this context.
It’s that really how you think, or did someone trigger you in the comments and this is your version of being personally butthurt?
If a cop just acts like some random “guy with a gun” who might shoot you at the slightest provocation they probably shouldn’t have a gun.
Or be a cop.
An honest cop should be keeping a close eye on that guy.
I don’t disagree. It’s just also stupid to assume that the cop you flip off WON’T flip out. For all the “all cops are bad” messaging that’s going around, you’d think one would want to play it safe. Two things can be true at once: the cop absolutely escalated this beyond what was called for, and the victim was stupid to instigate anything in the first place.
Problem is, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Cops are constantly letting their spurs jingle-jangle and if they cannot start exhibiting some self-control, they will lose their most prized possession, their guns.
The middle finger is a visual that frighted, scared, meager police would see as a threat. Hence their would also see their response in beating… as penance for doing something they don’t like.
Tldr: fearfully weak cops care about only themselves.
Possibly because it looks confrontational, like attacking someone who is claiming it’s the only place on Earth, even though no one is really saying that?
Thanks, ( I couldn’t figure it out but ) with your help I begin to see it. For me, while “attacks” are bad, “confrontation” is like “constructive criticism”. I believe we need at least some “confrontations” and take those the right way to grow out of mediocrity.
Holy crap. So coral bleaching in that area is basically guaranteed at this point. And some plankton and algae can’t really survive if those temperatures persist.
Also, as temperature rises, water holds less and less dissolved oxygen. At the same time metabolic rates of fish increase, which makes them require even more oxygen. The scary thing about that is at some point they lose the ability to get enough oxygen to sustain life, and then bam — the whole species dies in a day.
Or the 2000 dead penguins washing up on the coast of Uruguay just a few days ago. Apparently starved to death, though the cause is still being investigated.
But yeah the phytoplankton and algae boiling to death is triggering a catastrophic change in the ocean that is going to domino in horrible ways and I feel like I don’t often see a lot of people mentioning it. It’s very scary how the collapse of aquatic ecosystems is playing out.
All of these things are bad, but the effect on phytoplankton is most frightening of all. Diatoms provide 50-85% of our global oxygen supply. Not only are rising temperatures a problem for them, but ocean acidification also eats away at their silica-based shells. But it does it slowly so by the time they die, they are in deep water where no other diatoms are around to reuse the silica.
Luckily, there are other ways of recycling diatom remains. The most notable example is the dried lake bed that used to be part of Lake Chad when that lake was far bigger and held many living diatoms. Due to natural changes in climate, the water dried up and that area is now part of the Sahara Desert. About 100 days a year, winds kick the ancient diatom dust high into the atmosphere where it is carried across the Atlantic Ocean and then it settles across South America.
This is a big reason the Amazon Rainforest is so lush. Diatomaceous fertilizer carried all the way from Africa. And since more plants means more photosynthesis, it causes a lot of water that would have otherwise been locked away in the ground to evaporate through transpiration. All of this excess water is blown westward towards the Andes mountain range. In narrower parts of the Andes, the dense Amazonian clouds overcome the rain shadow effect to precipitate across the west side of the Andes.
This rainwater causes erosion of quartz, which is ground into fine silica dust. As silt, this dust is washed into the Pacific Ocean, where diatoms absorb the silica and use it to reproduce. In a beautiful global balancing act, as diatom-heavy lakes in Africa dry up, the remains of those diatoms cause a chain reaction that ends up causing a huge increase of diatoms on the opposite side of the globe.
Great, right? It would be if we weren’t replacing so much of the Amazon Rainforest with monoculture farms which don’t have nearly the same evapotranspiration effect as the flora of the natural ecosystem. So, not only are we baking the diatoms, not only are we dissolving them with acid, we’re also removing one of their most critical reproductive resources.
It’s like we discovered how resilient the planet is and how hard it is to kill, and humans took that as a challenge.
That’s a great write up, thanks. Haven’t heard about the connection between the Amazon rainforest and African diatoms, that’s fascinating.
I thought lake Chad started to dry up mostly in the 60s. I went to read some more about that and I just can’t not mention that the original lake is apparently called Mega-Chad :)
Anyway, in case anyone else is interested to read about ancient microorganisms fuelling Amazon’s growth, here’s a really interesting paper that describes this system in great detail.
The only realistic way to “lose” O2 is to convert it into CO2. And even if enough CO2 were produced to extinguish humanity forever, there would still be plenty of O2 left over. So “running out” of O2 is not a serious concern.
Yes, in the long term, the planet will be fine. But bear in mind, our entire biology is based on converting O2 into CO2.
I mean, sure, a couple billion years ago, the global ecosystem had the opposite problem and single-celled archaea was suffocating the planet with too much O2. Those are the conditions that allowed animal life to evolve.
So, I take your point that the planet will still have O2 long after we flood the atmosphere with the millions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried deep underground. Plankton will have a comeback even if the vast majority of animal life on the planet dies of asphyxiation first. But at that point, the argument of whether we’ve “run out” of O2 is really semantics, right? If we haven’t “run out” of it, but our supply gets low enough that virtually all of us are dead as a result, I don’t place a lot of value in making that distinction.
Our atmosphere is 21% O2, and less than 0.05% CO2.
If that changed by 1% to 20% O2 and 1.05% CO2, we would all die. But not for asphyxiation or lack of O2, because the slight reduction in O2 would be unnoticeable. The drastic increase in CO2, on the other hand, would be catastrophic.
It’s encouraging, but we shouldn’t rely on it to fix our problems. The good thing is that there are many thousands of varieties of diatoms, each with their own odds of adapting and overcoming the situation we’ve put them in. I have confidence that the planet will survive. But whether enough of these phytoplankton will evolve in time to keep catastrophic extinction events from occurring is still very much in question. We should do everything we can as a species to protect their health.
No, we cant rely on it to fix our problems. Hell if anything it will adapt and then get exploited later on. Humans just ruin everything…
I wish we were better and hope that we will do a 180 and try to preserve what is left, but I wouldnt bet on it.
As much as I’m genuinely fearful of what we are going to endure in the coming years, especially the next generation, part of me feels like we deserve what we get. All we can do is prepare the best we can, cross our fingers, and ride the ride.
It’s pretty shitty that we’re taking everything else down with us, but it does give me hope that maybe nature will surprise us, and not all will be lost, even if it seems that way.
Under the tentative agreement, existing full- and part-time UPS union workers will get $2.75 more per hour in 2023, and $7.50 more per hour over the length of the five-year contract. The agreement also includes a provision to increase starting pay for part-time workers, which the union had called the most at risk in the company’s workforce of being exploited. Starting pay for part-time workers will be $21 per hour, it said, up from $16.20 today.
I agree it’s garbage, but isn’t it average or better than other industries? As a software dev I’ve gotten less than 5% most years (in contrast I’ve gotten >20% every time I’ve switched jobs).
Inflation is below 5% and should keep going lower over 5 years, especially if we dip into recession. If that works out to 2-3% real wage growth guaranteed regardless of a recession that’s pretty decent. Especially because that’s above and beyond any pay increases any individual worker would get for having more experience.
To play devil’s advocate, it is perfectly possible that person genuinely saw it as that. Eyewitnesses in chaotic situations are inherently untrustworthy and prone to misinterpret things and even create false memories when questioned. Especially if it was someone that, naively, still trusted in cops for some reason, it’s easy for the mind to create some assumed aggression by the victim, because only that way their worldview can remain intact (“a police officer wouldn’t have been that brutal without good cause” as an assumption, basically.)
Still, I agree, it is wild. Especially since even the bastard assaulting the driver here didn’t claim that. And I agree, it is also very much possible it was an overzealous fascist that just wanted to cover for the cops in a way more zealous than the cops themselves by consciously lying.
The deputy also claimed that he was punching Brock because Brock was biting him on the hand. The EMTs noted no bite marks, and the only injuries the deputy sustained were fractured knuckles from repeatedly punching Brock in the head. The video also doesn’t show any biting, and the biting claims were quietly dropped when the deputy learned that the whole thing had been captured on security cameras.
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