Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Everybody saw this coming.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

He really is that stupid.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

So many bastards, so little time.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: Is This “Huge”?

Open Thread: Is This “Huge”?

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From the NYTimes:

… The change, the analysts and others say, which has been pushed by President Obama, would give the commission strong legal authority to ensure that no content is blocked and no so-called pay-to-play fast lanes exist — prohibitions that are hallmarks of the net neutrality concept.

But Tom Wheeler, the F.C.C. chairman, will advocate a light-touch approach to Title II, they say, shunning the more intrusive aspects of utility-style regulation, like meddling in pricing decisions. He may also suggest putting wireless data services under Title II and adding regulations for companies that manage the backbone of the Internet…

I mean, yeah, I’m all in favor of net neutrality, but I’m not savvy enough to judge the technological merits, even before we get to the political issues…

Reader Interactions

44Comments

  3. 3.

    Cervantes

    Wheeler is an Obama guy — campaigned for him early on.

    But why not wait until the proposals are presented (on Thursday) before deciding if this is “huge”?

  5. 5.

    opiejeanne

    @JCJ: LOL! That’ll teach him.

    A couple of friends in HS amused themselves and the rest of my class on Groundhog Day when we were all seniors by bringing a largish box to school and setting it up on the Senior Quad, complete with signs that Punxatawney Phil’s little brother was about to make his forecast any minute.
    More than one gullible freshman wondered if they had a real animal inside that box, and they couldn’t get close enough to get a good look because the seniors would chase them off of the path, let alone let them into our presence.

  6. 6.

    Villago Delenda Est

    If this is actual “no pay to play” net neutrality…the telco execs will have kittens.

    They want to meter the internet so badly they can taste it…they want to fuck over the consumer AND the content provider in a vain attempt to satiate their endless greed.

  8. 8.

    Baud

    A year ago, everyone was calling Obama and Wheeler sell out because they believed this was impossible. By all means, let’s wait and see.

  9. 9.

    Jewish Steel

    Contrary to the prevailing viewpoint on this fractious thread, I recommend a steady course of wait and see.

  11. 11.

    srv

    This is just a ploy to declare the intertubes national infrastructure and legalize domestic NSA surveillence under the guise of protecting us from interonebola.

  13. 13.

    srv

    Truthy in Portland:

    Donetsk (Ukraine) (AFP) – Ukraine’s pro-Russian rebel chief on Monday branded the country’s leaders “miserable” Jews in an apparent anti-Semitic jibe.

    Alexander Zakharchenko, leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, claimed that Kiev’s pro-Western leaders were “miserable representatives of the great Jewish people”.

    “I can’t remember a time when Cossacks were led by people who have never held a sword in their hands,” Zakharchenko told a press conference in the eastern rebel stronghold of Donetsk, in a reference to Ukraine’s nationalist forebears, the Cossacks.

    DOG SIZE JACKALOPES:

    https://gma.yahoo.com/dozens-dog-sized-jackrabbits-swarm-development-north-dakota-161612431–abc-news-pets.html

  14. 14.

    burnspbesq

    It’s huge for people who have vacation houses anywhere between Rehoboth Beach and the Outer Banks that they are trying to sell, because the D.C. communications bar is going to be awash in money.

  16. 16.

    burnspbesq

    Devil is in the details, needless to say, but as a general proposition I don’t think I have much of a problem with treating Internet providers (both backbone and last mile) the same way we used to treat POTS, i.e., within a common-carrier framework. If the carriers want to charge more for faster, and can demonstrate that faster costs more to provide, they can do that, but (a) faster has to be available to everyone and (b) they have to sell faster to any customer who shows up with the right amount of money to buy it.

    ETA: POTS = Plain Old Telephone Service

  17. 17.

    Punchy

    This is clear executive overreach. Leave net neutrality to Serena Williams. Bring on the Impeachinistas!

  18. 18.

    Mike J

    Even if Obama nationalizes all the ISPs and delivers free petabit to every household in the US, it will still be wrong.

  19. 19.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    For my fellow punctuation mavens, the good news today was that the tide against the Oxford comma at work finally turned and the division that kept deleting my Oxford commas in copyedit has decided that our new house style includes a comma before the “and” in a list of items.

    The bad news was that I had to review all 400+ records in our project database to make sure they were properly reformatted to include the Oxford comma. But knowing that we had finally won made it sting a little bit less.

  20. 20.

    jl

    @Cervantes:

    ” But why not wait until the proposals are presented (on Thursday) before deciding if this is “huge”? ”

    Can we at least say, in honor of The Donald (below), that This IS Yooooj!

  21. 21.

    jl

    Oh dear me, I have the galloping fantods. I am afeared we mayhaps will never see the precious precious Grand Bargain. Whither the universe now? Who will save humankind from living on roots and berries and everyone dying at 25?
    Looks like Obama getting ready to confront GOP BS on Social Security head-on.

    Which makes sense. I was wondering whether McConnell’s new ‘adult’s only’ GOP would be able to moderate its raving id enough to try another Grand Bargain gambit. It could not, and the GOP House immediately passed a sleazy budget trick to force a crisis.
    So, I guess even if Obama was ever even tempted, he saw that and said “Hell with these jackasses”.

    Obama Throws Down Gauntlet On Social Security In New Budget
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/obama-fy2016-budget-social-security

  23. 23.

    srv

    This is huge:

    The wealthy have lots of good reasons to invest their money in New York’s residential real-estate market, panoramic views and strong returns among them.

    But another perk — incredibly low taxes for some penthouse buyers — have people furious.

    The latest, most egregious example is the penthouse at ultra-luxury highrise One57, which just sold for a record $100.5 million.

    That apartment will receive a 95% tax cut, saving the mystery buyer an estimated $360,000 in taxes annually, according to The New York Times.

  26. 26.

    Cervantes

    @srv:

    That’s the same tax-abatement program the late, lamented Speaker Sheldon Silver was fooling around with. Preet Bharara is … looking into it.

  27. 27.

    mai naem mobile

    OT, have a friend who manages a hotel here. They had a corporate client stay there this w/e(actually a couple using the corporate discount against the rules.but not a big deal).They came back one evening and the front desk lady who does animal rescue saw a dog in distress on a leash in the back of the clients p/u. The front desk brings dog in and leaves a note in the truck for whoever the dog owner is to come in.Clients young kid runs in a little later for the dog. She tells him to get.his parents. She lays into parents about mistreating the dog and they apologize etc etc Now they tell them to pay extra cleaning fee etc.for the dog and client says,oh,no, dog is going to uncles right now etc. Fast forward AM. Go to clean the room and find dog food in ice bucket and 2 pillows.missing. My friend confronts client about dog and they finally agree to pay dog cleaning $$ but deny stealing the pillow. They yell at friend for an hour saying the hotel didn’t put the pillows there. They made a mistake.not putting the pillows there just like voting for Obama was a mistake! I am not kidding about this. The idiot really said this.

  30. 30.

    sharl

    @Major Major Major Major: Hah, I’m just a mere compoooter user – i.e., not an “IT guy” – but when I saw whose tweet was being quoted, I prowled around the innertoobz looking for confirmation. Yep, looks like Manjoo reported the chatter correctly, at least this time.

    What’s the consensus among actual IT folks about him? My impression is that he is regarded as either lazy or frequently clueless (or both?). He seems to be well liked, but not highly respected; this tweet from Rurik Bradbury’s parody account is fairly typical of the ribbing he gets regularly.

  32. 32.

    Major Major Major Major

    @sharl: He bought his first bitcoin the day before it crashed 40%. So I certainly wouldn’t trust him for financial advice.

    He’s usually late to the party. Very late. But in this case, I think it might be a blind pig/acorn moment. This kind of regulation proposal isn’t anything new, and the broad strokes have been known since 1995 or so.

    ETA: But it’s never been proposed before.

  33. 33.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @jl: I’m sure Obummer will sell us out on Social Security with the “Grand Bargain”. He lives to sell us down the river.

  36. 36.

    glasnost

    It’s a pretty big deal, if it’s anything like what they’re telling us that it will be.

    If you want to curl up into a tighter ball of bitter with, I’m already looking forward to its repeal in 2016

  39. 39.

    Cervantes

    @Hunter:

    It’s called the Oxford comma and the Harvard comma by those who consciously (or ostentatiously) follow the style conventions of the respective university presses. Generically it’s often called the serial comma (as someone referred to it above).

  42. 42.

    Raven Onthehill

    One report I’ve heard is that, under the proposal, only services which offer more than 30 Mbits/sec (that is to say, cable internet like Comcast) will be considered “broadband” by the FCC. This means that the various subsidies and the like for providing broadband services will no longer be available to most, perhaps all, DSL providers.

    The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.

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