Pai is just another in a long list of FCC Chairmen, from both sides of the aisle to come and can from the very companies they are suppose to regulate. 😤

The cable industry’s biggest lobby group, NCTA–The Internet & Television Association, is led by former FCC Chairman Michael Powell. The wireless industry’s biggest lobby group, CTIA, is led by former FCC member Meredith Attwell Baker. Baker also spent time as a lobbyist for Comcast.

Pai isn’t the only former FCC chair to join a private-equity firm shortly after leaving the commission. William Kennard, a Democrat who chaired the FCC during President Bill Clinton’s second term, went to the Carlyle Group investment firm in 2001. Powell joined Providence Equity Partners in 2005. Democrat Julius Genachowski, Obama’s FCC chair from 2009 to 2013, joined the Carlyle Group in 2014.

Those challenges involve lack of accessibility to mobility options, areas underserved by public transit, parking challenges, and terrible drivers with high collision rates. As you might expect, a lot of startups are involved in solving those challenges; Here’s who’s involved and what they bring to the table. 

Every city should be investing in connecting technology and transportation. I would love to take the bus in my area, but they run so infrequently it would take 5x as long to get where I’m going! What are my other options? I don’t know it’s a Where’s Waldo of services that I have to decipher myself. ☹️

calling citizens “customers” implies the only thing that matters is self-interest: What am I paying, and what am I getting for it? Ideally, citizenship involves something beyond self-interest. We all want to benefit from good government, but citizenship should have a collective dimension that transcends narrow cost-benefit calculations.

It doesn’t that sound far off from the tone I feel from a lot of people. Things like, “… the government should do x for me, and should stop doing y for those people.” I have put Ethan Porter’s book on my reading list, and hopefully I’ll get to it before it’s too late.

Consumer Citizen by Ethan Porter

For nearly four decades, we’ve been hearing about the trickle-down economy, which promised that returning our tax money to the investors and job creators would trickle down to the rest of us. And that’s how it was sold to us, as if getting a trickle of the success of this country is something to celebrate. We need to end it and build a trickle-up economy, benefiting our people, families, and communities, on up.

There is so much here that I really really enjoy. Worth a read at least twice.

Although the legal history of creationism in schools is available to anyone with a working Internet connection, the bill passed with 72 representatives, all Republicans, voting in favor. Of the chamber’s 22 Democrats, 21 voted against it, and one other didn’t vote.

It’s not clear whether these legislators are simply unaware of the legal precedents or if they are simply using this bill as an opportunity to signal their cultural affiliations. We’ve contacted its two sponsors to find out. As of publication time, neither had responded.

I know there are more important things that legislators in AK could be working on. 🙄

A man who has been an AT&T customer since 1960 has a message for CEO John Stankey about the company’s failure to upgrade DSL areas to modern Internet service. Aaron Epstein, 90, is so frustrated by his 3Mbps Internet plan that he took out a Wall Street Journal ad in today’s print edition in order to post an open letter to Stankey.

It is both fascinating and ridiculous that this gentleman feels he has to take out an WSJ add to get the attention of his ISP. But I ask, what other choice does he have?

“Across the predominantly rural counties in AT&T’s national footprint, only 5 percent of households (217,284 out of 4,442,675) have access to fiber,” the report said. In urban areas, the situation is better but not problem-free. “Seventy percent of households in urban counties still lack access to fiber from AT&T because the company has made fiber available to only 14.7 million households out of 48.4 million total households in these counties,” the report said.

Just 5% have access to real high speed data.

In today’s report, the CWA and NDIA said that “AT&T should commit to capital investment in fiber deployment that would double the number of households passed by fiber in two years. If AT&T invests one quarter of its annual free cash flow (projected to be more than $25 billion) into rapid fiber deployment, it could deploy to more than 6 million locations per year.” That figure assumes a cost of $1,000 per household, which it said “should be realistic as an average cost, given the widespread fiber backbone already deployed.”

Just a one quarter of it’s annual cash flow can reach 6 million with an “M” every year. It is frustrating that everything is there for this to happen. Customers willing to pay, the technology and workforce to make it happen, but it goes because the profit margin isn’t high enough. Not that it’s not profitable, simply that it isn’t profitable enough for AT&T’s time.

AT&T says it will now offer a prepaid 5G data-only plan with up to 100GB of data for $55 per month — a big upgrade from its previous offering of 40GB for $75

I tend to be hard on ISPs, and for good reason. So I figure I should call out when they do something good too. I’ll leave the argument for data caps on a consumable that is not a finite resource for another day 😉.

While 3 million locations is a substantial buildout, there are tens of millions of homes without fiber in AT&T’s 21-state wireline service area. There were 52.97 million households in AT&T’s home-Internet service area and 14.93 million of them had fiber-to-the-home access, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union told Ars in October 2020 when AT&T announced the discontinuation of legacy DSL services over copper phone lines.

Every house, every adult, every child, everyone has a right to high speed Internet access. In the same way you expect power and clean drinking water to be affordable and readily available, the same for fast internet access on a multitude of devices anywhere.

A good start, but only the beginning Accessible Affordable Internet for All Act

That “commitment to serving entire communities” is important because private providers focus on building in the most profitable areas while municipal providers strive for universal service. City and town governments that build their own networks often take that action because private providers failed to give everyone affordable high-speed service.

Won’t service everyone with high speed, doesn’t want anyone else to either.

“As part of Automattic, Pocket Casts will continue to provide you with the features needed to enjoy your favorite podcasts (or find something new),” the post states. “We will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts.”

A good home for a good app.

rebounding economy is headed for its best year since 1984, according to the International Monetary Fund. The U.S. economy likely expanded in the first quarter at an annual rate of 6 percent and should accelerate in the months ahead, economist Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics told clients this week. More than 1.3 million jobs have been added since the election.

Shocking

Biden’s plan immediately drew opposition from Republicans and private ISPs such as AT&T, which has argued that the US should not subsidize fiber-to-the-home deployment across the US and that rural people should be satisfied with non-fiber Internet service that provides only 10Mbps upload speeds. AT&T John Stankey called Biden’s plan to fund municipal networks “misguided” and said he was confident that Congress would steer legislation in the more “pragmatic” direction that AT&T favors.

So, don’t subsidize fiber-to-the-home, not because the market will take care of it, but because those people should be happy 10Mbps! Who could possibly need more than that? 🤷‍♂️

😤

Among the world’s wealthy countries, the United States is, by many measures, the worst place for parents.

Yep. And I don’t expect that to change anytime soon. It just doesn’t benefit those who are in a position to make a change. They simply don’t see it as a problem.

Built on Binance Smart Chain, a blockchain for developing high-performance DeFi apps, MOUND says Pancake Bunny now has more than 30,000 daily average users, and has accumulated more than $2.1 billion in total value locked (TVL) since its launch in December 2020.

I really want to make something with an awesome name like “Pancake Bunny”.

Also, I’d be hard pressed to find another paragraph stuffed with so many buzzwords.

The California legislature unanimously approved a plan to build a statewide, open-access fiber network yesterday. The legislation was supported by Democrats and Republicans in votes of 78-0 in the California Assembly and 39-0 in the state Senate.

This is just fantastic to see. I really wish every state would get behind publicly available fiber for middle and last mile build outs.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) recently urged the FCC to block Frontier’s new funding, saying that “Frontier has a documented pattern of history demonstrating inability to meet FCC deadlines for completion of Connect America Fund Phase II support in West Virginia.” 

I agree with Senator Moore. Enough is enough. Frontier has shown time and time again with their inaction and inability to complete projects they are incapable of delivering results. Stop any new funding and force them to settle and pay all failed contracts.

Thomas acknowledged that private entities usually aren’t constrained by the First Amendment but added that the First Amendment may apply on a private company’s online platform “if the government coerces or induces it to take action the government itself would not be permitted to do, such as censor expression of a lawful viewpoint.”

This is not even remotely the right point in the stack for content moderation. Twitter, Facebook and other platforms are not public spaces affording guarantees of free speech. People removed from the platform, I would argue are not even censored. They are free to continue to spread whatever message they would like on the Internet. No one can silence your ability to spread your message on the internet. That’s what makes it great, and sometimes terrible. Using a personal domain, or any other service where they have not been removed for violating terms of service or code of conduct, everyone is free to put whatever they’d like out there. No one is entitled to access on another service.

Still, it’s not definitive. Rather, it’s part of a growing body of evidence that, at the moment, can say little about how much coffee people should drink. “It may be good for you,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. “I think we can say with good certainty it’s not bad for you.” (Additives are another story.) Getting more specific will require more research. Last year, Mozaffarian and others called on the National Institutes of Health to establish an institute for nutrition science that could coordinate those efforts and, crucially, help people interpret the results. “We need a well-funded, well-organized, coordinated effort to figure out nutrition,” he says. “No single study gets to the truth.”

The short answer is YES!, more people should drink coffee, it’s delicious.

This is the second time in a year that Comcast’s program is getting a speed bump: it was upgraded from 15Mbps in March of last year.

The cynic in me thinks it’s more expensive for Comcast to run equipment that old and slow then it is to “upgrade it” to 50 / 5Mbps for customers. It simply isn’t out of the kindness of their corporate heart.

My patient died nine days later from a fatal stroke. We, the care team, reconciled this loss by telling ourselves: He made a personal choice not to get vaccinated, not to protect himself or his family. We did everything we could with what we had to save him. This year, this tragedy, this unnecessary, entirely preventable loss, was on him. The burden of this pandemic now rests on the shoulders of the unvaccinated. On those who are eligible to get vaccinated, but choose not to, a decision they defend by declaring, “vaccination is a deeply personal choice.” But perhaps never in history has anyone’s personal choice impacted the world as a whole as it does right now. When hundreds and thousands of people continue to die, when the most vulnerable members of society, our children, cannot be vaccinated — the luxury of choice ceases to exist.

It is not a personal choice when the lives of those around you are at stake, it is a selfish act of cowardice.

I have probably started dozens of projects over the years with the intention of selling it as a product or tutorial. Number of projects that have made it across the finish-line and available for sale? A whomping zero 🥚. ☹️ so when Gumroad put out a 14 day course to get people like me through the process, I jumped at the chance.

Pick a Topic You Already Have Expertise In

1. Web development
2. Testing setup and start with React
3. Next JS Testing
4. React Native Setup
5. NextJS setup
6. TailwindCSS
7. Emotion JS in CSS

Keep Your Scope Small

Those are all pretty good sized topics. I am would like to focus on testing is some shape or form, it’s a matter of what the scope will be to launch in 14 days. 🤔 let’s focus on testing specifically in NextJS, something where I think there is a real need in the community.

staffers were reportedly unable to view train operation diagrams, formulate train sequencing schedules, and arrange shunting plans

Alternative tile includes: “Flash Reaches Out From the Grave 🧟‍♂️”

Some people are complaining, “Well, my freedom is being kind of disturbed here.” Well, I told them, “Screw your freedom.” You have the freedom to wear no mask. But if you exercise that freedom, you’re a schmuck—because you’re supposed to protect your fellow Americans.

I would go further than calling these people schmucks. Selfish, short sighted, willfully ignorant, vial, these people have turned their backs on facts, science, and their community. And for what?

As Americans, we have agreed to vaccinations to eradicate diseases since George Washington mandated the smallpox inoculation for his troops. “Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members,” the Supreme Court said in 1905, in a ruling supporting vaccine mandates.

Physically able to get vaccinated and refuse? Fine. Proof required to fly, no more traveling. Proof required to go to work, you’re out of a job. No public spaces, amenities, or resources. Want to go see your favorite sports club? Nope. You can stay home and watch it on TV. Kids need to go to school? Nope, you’ve chosen home school. You’ve refused to do the minimum to protect others in you community, you are no longer welcome. Feel free to complain about it being unAmerican or fascist, you’ll simply have to do it from the confines of your own home.

But truth is neither liberal nor conservative. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.

Just 90 days or so into the changeover of administration and Congress, it is increasingly clear that we the public did not clear house nearly far enough.