There are many challenges. Broadband maps, for instance, notoriously overcount how many households have access. If an internet service provider such as Charter or AT&T reaches just one home in a census block, the entire block appears connected on federal maps, even when all homes aren’t given the option of broadband.
Hopefully just the beginning.
“We all knew we were getting fired today,” Bridges told the AP. “We knew unless we took that shot to come back, we were getting fired today. There was no ifs, ands, or buts.”
Still, the small faction of vaccine holdouts is vocal—and feisty—about its objections to the mandate. Dozens of people, including hospital staffers and supporters, gathered outside of Houston Methodist Baytown campus Monday evening to protest the mandate as some unvaccinated employees completed what could be their final shifts at the facility. People held signs reading “Vaxx is Venom,” “Don’t Lose Sight of Our Rights,” and “No Forced Vaccines.”
The safety of the general public is not now, or ever, eclipsed by your personal rights.
PCMag recently named Chattanooga, Tennessee, the best work-from-home city in the nation, citing in part the city’s “widely available broadband Internet” provided by the Chattanooga Electric Power Board. Comcast initially tried to block that public network from being built but eventually upgraded its own service to better compete against the public option.
Literally the best way to push the market of ISP’s forward is for cities and other municipalities to build a better option. 🤔
Where are all the houses?
Restrictions like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and other prohibitions on multi-family housing that Biden’s plan references have the effect of reducing the supply of housing. For example, if there is a requirement that for every unit a developer has to provide two parking spaces, that ensures they have to set aside land for parking that could otherwise have been used for building more homes. Frequently, this leads developers to build fewer units — and more expensive ones at that.
According to the Urban Institute, by the end of 2020, there was only 2.5 months’ supply left of housing, meaning “at the current sales pace, the inventory of homes nationwide will be exhausted.”
Make no mistake about it. These restrictions are not in place on accident. They are purposely enacted to be exclusionary.
As FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel wrote for The Verge last March, as many as one in three US households doesn’t have broadband internet access, currently defined as just 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up — which feels like the bare minimum for a remote learning family these days. Even before the pandemic, that statistic might have been shocking; now, it’s the difference between whether millions of schoolchildren can attend classes and do their homework or not. Nearly 12 million children don’t have a broadband connection at home, the Senate Joint Economic Committee reported in 2017. And the “homework gap” hits harder if you’re poor, of course: only 56 percent of households with incomes under $30,000 had broadband as of last February, according to the Pew Research Center.
What would it actually take to get viable, affordable internet to each and every household in America? 5 billion? 10 billion? Great. I say pay it. ISP’s are required utility like clean water and electricity, they should be treated as such, rather than for profit companies hiding, lobbies, and defeating efforts for access at every turn.
I know that science itself is not a substitute for morality or public policy. It is a method for us to understand the choices we might have to make.
The United States is the world leader in incarceration, despite the national incarceration rate being at its lowest in 20 years, with about 25% of the world’s prison population being in the US. The United States currently has over 2.1 million total prisoners. The prison population in 1972 was 200,000, almost 2 million less than it is today. The prison populations in each state vary in each state, with the highest rates in Louisiana and Oklahoma.
Between the constant mass shootings and the rate of incarceration we need a fundamental change in federal policy not bandaid laws, anyone’s “hopes and prayers”, or debate on how your personal rights outweigh the common good.
Not only are few US airports among the world’s best, but overall, they are in bad shape: In 2021, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave America’s aviation system a D+, largely because airports’ basic inefficiencies and lack of space lead to problems like delays and overcrowding. The airport grade was worse than those of other, oft-maligned parts of US transportation infrastructure, like bridges, which earned a C, and roads, which were given a D.
Just how far behind are we in keeping up with the rising rate of air travel? There’s been plenty of small renovations and expansions to existing airports over the years. Mere budget bandaids that barely put a dent in actual needs. And this:
The only major US airport to open in the last 30 years is Denver International Airport, a mega project in which the Denver Regional Council of Governments had the luxury of selecting a space in the 1980s rather than the 1940s. The result, which cost $8.2 billion by today’s standards, was North America’s largest airport by land area, with far more space for terminals and concourses than is typical.
Wow.
At the time of their union drive in 2020, Instacart manager ran a union-busting campaign, circulating anti-union literature and memos intended to convince workers to vote down the union.
The company reported profitability for the first time in 2020, is preparing to IPO at some point this year, and is estimated to be valued at up to $30 billion, CNBC reported.
More union-busting tactics from high valued, ready to IPO, Bullshit company.
While incumbent ISPs are wary of the new competition from Starlink’s low Earth orbit satellites, traditional wireline telcos are no guarantee to meet FCC deployment requirements. CenturyLink and Frontier recently missed FCC deployment deadlines in dozens of states, and both of them are slated to get more money from the new RDOF program.
I understand as a business you want to take advantage of every opportunity over your competition. But it is a really tough sell when current ISPs continually fail to meet deadlines, over charge, under delivery, and provide the worst customer service of any industry out there.
Meanwhile Comcast Data Cap
The state has seen a 400 percent spike in cases since March 5, when state officials eased restrictions on residential gatherings and occupancy limits for bars, restaurants, venues, and stores.
A reminder it’s not over. 😔
US District Judge Lynn Hughes called that argument “reprehensible” and issued sweeping rejections of their other claims that the mandate violates state and federal laws. In the five-page ruling filed Saturday, Judge Hughes wrote that the lawsuit by the 117 employees—led by coronavirus-unit nurse Jennifer Bridges—contained false statements, misconstrued legal provisions, wrongly claimed coercion, and made otherwise invalid arguments.
Judge Hughes also noted that on May 28, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determined that employers can mandate COVID-19 vaccination, given reasonable accommodations.
Good.
Puerto Rico has been a US territory for 122 years. It’s the world’s oldest colony. And on Election Day, it’s holding its sixth nonbinding referendum on the issue of statehood.
I had no idea that Puerto Rico had been a territory for a 100 plus years?!? It’s just just that it isn’t a state. My vote is hell yes, about time.
Ultimately, Green’s big fundraising haul is a reminder that gaining notoriety on conservative media — rather than making efforts to pass meaningful legislation — is what holds real value in the modern Republican Party.
No longer the party of Lincoln.
He was chosen in part based on his track record in pushing Connecticut schools to reopen for in-person learning. In his confirmation hearing before the Senate education panel, he said he approached the job with a spirit of cooperation.
We were open and transparent with what we knew, and we made sure that we partnered with our health experts to put out very clear guidance early on to make sure that the mitigation strategies were very clear,” he said. “I look forward to, if I’m fortunate enough to serve as secretary of education, to bring that same mentality of partnership and clear communication to help recover our public education and reopen our schools.
I have said many times that I believe our national government has been based on two strong political parties competing for votes in the marketplace of ideas. I still believe that is the strongest manifestation of our political system. But I recognize that is not what we have now. The only way we can restore that order is to figure out how to foster action in government. And for now, the desire for action rests within the Democratic Party. The Republicans want power, to be sure, but to what end? It doesn’t seem in service to the needs of the nation.
I most certainly agree it’s not in the service of the people, but to what end indeed.
curl and embedded comment giving a shoutout for developers ❤️
Just as there are good and bad Catalyst apps, there are good and bad Electron apps. I’m sure that the very best Electron app isn’t as good a Mac app as one written using Apple’s AppKit frameworks
This, to me, is the main problem I have with this argument. An Electron app, web app, PWA, or cli app can be every bit has good as AppKit.
I appreciate that AgileBits was originally planning two separate Mac implementations. That’s a sign that the company cared enough to expend extra resources to have a good experience on the Mac, rather than doing what it did to Windows users in deciding Electron was good enough.
Again. Electron apps aren’t just good enough, they can be great.
Lawmakers apparently relented to public pressure from supporters of municipal broadband and cities and towns that operate the networks. People and businesses from Fairlawn, where the city-run FairlawnGig network offers fiber Internet, played a significant role in the protests. FairlawnGig itself asked users to put pressure on lawmakers, and the subscribers did so in great numbers.
I’m still salty that we even have to have this conversation as previously noted
It’s not even clear who proposed the new law. “The language, inserted without prior public discussion during recent state Senate deliberations on Ohio’s two-year budget, is drawing condemnation from numerous sources. Officials have not said who put the language in the Senate budget document, only that they learned of it for the first time last week,” the Akron Beacon Journal wrote on June 13.
Really? We can’t even verify who added this restriction to the current bill ??
Gun enthusiasts often protest: Cars kill about as many people as guns, and we don’t ban them! No, but automobiles are actually a model for the public health approach I’m suggesting.
We don’t ban cars, but we work hard to regulate them — and limit access to them — so as to reduce the death toll they cause. This has been spectacularly successful, reducing the death rate per 100 million miles driven by 95 percent since 1921.
It is pretty clear how to do it. It is just a matter of public will to get it accomplished.
Free Press, one of the FCC’s opponents in the net neutrality court case, criticized Pai for claiming that the repeal spurred new broadband development. “Approximately 92 percent of the fiber deployments made during Pai’s chairmanship were actually planned and announced during the last few years of the Obama administration, when Title II was securely in place,” Floberg said. “Chairman Pai is trading away critical public protections for a bag of magic beans, and a wink and a nod from cable lobbyists. We need public servants who will actually listen to people, consider the data and serve community needs instead of long-debunked ideologies.”
Once you shine a little bit of light on FCC policy over the last 4 years it becomes very clear that an “open and competitive market” on not remotely their first or even second concern.
It’s enough to bring a parent to tears, except that every parent I know ran out a long time ago—I know I did. Ran out of tears, ran out of energy, ran out of patience. Through these grinding 18 months, we’ve managed our kids’ lives as best we could while abandoning our own.
I am out of tears. I am out of anger. I am out of sympathy. I am out of empathy.
Today I had to look this up for the X number time, so I thought I’d post it and see if it suck.
const { twitter: tweet, facebook: fb } = wes.links.social;
The above code will pull the
wes.links.social.twitterinto a variable called tweet and similarly for facebook.