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Ajit Pai Faces Heat Over Proposal To Take Away Poor People's Broadband Plans (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Democratic senators yesterday asked Ajit Pai to abandon a proposal that the senators say would take subsidized broadband plans away from "millions of Americans." The Federal Communications Commission chairman's plan for the Lifeline subsidy program would force most users of the program to find new providers. But such users could have trouble finding replacement plans or similar prices because Pai's proposal would prevent all telecom resellers from offering Lifeline-subsidized service. "Your proposal impacts over 70 percent of current Lifeline-recipient households by eliminating their wireless providers from the program, leaving less affordable and fewer Lifeline options, while making it more difficult for the companies trying to serve Lifeline customers," Senate Democrats wrote in the letter to Pai yesterday. "Instead of cutting the program, we should ensure Lifeline reaches more Americans in need of access to communication services." The letter was written by Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and Cory Booker (D-NJ).
the library is free
C'mon, you commie libtard Miss Mash. You can do better than THAT.
How dare you Slashdot, youâ(TM)re making me LIKE Ajit Pai!!
We're pissing and moaning over losing a $9.25 subsidy? You can go to Wal-Mart right now and buy a monthly plan for $30 that gives unlimited talk, text and 2g data + 3gb LTE. You can get an iPhone SE on that plan for ~$150 all in on the phone.
For those interested in the truth, the reason for the change was because
"A new GAO report found massive fraud within the Federal Communications Commission's Lifeline program, which subsidizes cellular and broadband service for low-income Americans. The agency's three-year audit of the Lifeline program, begun in June 2014 to May 2017, found that more than one-third (36%) of Lifeline customers could not be confirmed as actually eligible for the program. The GAO also found that $1.2 million annually went to fictitious identities or recipients who were dead."
As said by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo, but ignored in this piece of brillent and honest reporting, âoeWeâ(TM)re currently letting phone companies cash a government check every month with little more than the honor system to hold them accountable, and that simply canâ(TM)t continue.â
..on the poor, poor put-upon ISPs, to have to give a discount (yes, I know, such an obscene word, I might get censored for using it!) to people just because they couldn't manage their lives properly and afford full price! Only smart White people really deserve the Internet anyway, what would a bunch of minorities (blacks, latinos, brown people, you know, non-white people) do with it anyway, they couldn't possibly understand it! It's not like it's possible for them to become educated by using the Internet, and since we don't want those people voting in our lilly-white elections anyway, there's no need for them to have any source of information about candidates or ballot issues anyway, it'll just confuse them! Also no need for them to have news sources, either, that'll just get them all upset when the Police and ICE enforce the Law of the Land on non-whites who forget their place in society! Nope, these people don't need Internet anyway, at least not until they learn better (and they never will, LOL!).</sarcasm>
I'd post this under my login, but I know damned well it'll get modded down as (-1, Uncomfortable Truths), and I'll get flamed to ash by the racists, white supremcists, bigots, other Trump supporters not previously mentioned, and so on, so why bother? Anybody with two eyes can see what the play is here: more profits for fat, price-gouging ISPs, and more side-channel attacks on voting rights by way of preventing people from having access to information sources; keep the poor people poor and stupid, so they're easier to control, and keep the best stuff for Rich White People, because they can. Fuck Rich White People (and I AM A MIDDLE-AGED WHITE DUDE so STFU), fuck the ISPs, fuck Ajit Pai, and fuck the entire gods-be-damned Trump Administration for the systematic destruction of everything that's good in this whole damned Country.
there's folks in the rust belt for who that $9.25 subsidy is the difference between eating that week and not. If you're in one of the blasted out cities in America where the manufacturing base moved to Mexico post NAFTA it's not uncommon. If you're lucky you work 20/week at a burger king for just enough money to keep the lights on. Should they have internet? A lot of them do so their kids can do their homework. They skip meals for it.
If anything we ought to be doing more for these people. And to devil with religious objections and let's just give them free birth control already.
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What was his reason for doing this?
Also, does lifeline really have millions of users?
Ajit Pai is saving millions of dollars to US govt so that it can then use trillions of dollars to bailout corporations.
Democrats appear to believe that whenever one of them is in power he or she is fully validated to push MORE "free" stuff and bigger government, and when they lose elections and somebody else is in power ITS UNCONSTITUTIONAL to hand out less "free" stuff or make government smaller. The hubris these politicians show is simply amazing: what they said in response to Ajit Pai is that HE (not one of them, or on their losing team) must actually INCREASE the freebies!!!!!
These people seem to believe in totalitarian marxism - it's the only conclusion available since ever-increasing wealth redistribution and ever-increasing government regulation and control leads to only that singular destination. Ever growing government only leads to totalitarianism. Ever increasinf freebies only leads to maximum wealth redistribution. Any other conclusion is completely irrational.
The masks are finally off; these people are no longer supporters of our Constitutional Republic and the freedoms it offered. They are now the party of "free beer" and NOT "free speech" (notice all their speech codes and boycotts?).
You mean some people are going to have to start paying their own way? Heaven forfend!
They might have to get a job. How can we expect them to find a job when unemployment is at 3.9%?
All the free stuff is getting taken away because the greedy people who work to earn paychecks think they should be able to keep their wages. Why even vote Democrat anymore?
There are a TON of places you can get free wi-fi...just because someone can't afford broadband, why should I have to pay for it? I can't afford a bunch of things, but I'm not asking for anyone else to pay for it. The problem with these programs, the ones that REALLY could benefit from it, aren't the one's TAKING ADVANTAGE of it!
Most of those people are welfare receiving red state trump voters
To quote Lucky Ducky: "GOTCHYA!"
The idea that people must pay for other's broadbad is pretty evil in its nature.
People who promote it have no moral boundaries and are willing to use any sort of force to take what they need without remorse, without regret and with no empathy towards their diffuse group of victims.
The fact thay people who wish to pay for other's broadband, just like donors to schools and colleges, are more then able to freely organize and do exactly that. If it is a popular thing to do they will be well funded and the problem dissappears. Otherwise they will be shown as the anti-social types they all probably are. The existance of the plea to take taxpayer money in support of someone's broadband access hints about their own belief that the current policy is completely unpopular and can not be done without forced collection and redistribution of funds.
Communism sucks ass.
I don't believe it's my responsibility as a taxpayer to give poor people broadband. Seriously.
If they need to watch YouTube that bad, go to the public library.
-Styopa
Fuck Ajit Pai.
Fuck Ajit Pai
Slashdot is full of commies who love the idea of taking other person's hard EARNED money and giving it to others. My compassion stops when one is reaching into my pockets to pay for free stuff for others WITHOUT my consent!
And since you can only really get low level local jobs without the internet, it's a win-win for Republicans.
Slashdot is full of commies who love the idea of taking other person's hard EARNED money and giving it to others. My compassion stops when one is reaching into my pockets to pay for free stuff for others WITHOUT my consent!
Move to Somalia you piece of shit.
Have you ever been out of work and your Unemployment Benefits checks were all that kept you from being homeless? How would you feel if that had been taken away from you because it's 'socialism' or 'communism'? You think you'd be spouting the bullshit you're spouting here if you'd been homeless? Likely not. Now all we're talking about is a few bucks a month to help poor people have internet so maybe they can get a job (try getting a job without internet these days) or maybe their kids get a decent education and are NOT POOR when they're adults. Sound more like an INVESTMENT, now, instead of welfare handouts? Get correct.
to "Progressives protest removal of government interference in telecommunications" Is anyone really surprised? Lets go further and remove government market cornering too so that ISP lobbying can't prevent people in those 'undesirable' areas from building out their own competing infrastructure.
A head shaker and he is seriously out of touch with reality.
Facebook's product is people using the service and the government wants to watch and listen to everything, so they can get together and offer free internet service. Perhaps Amazon can get in on it too. The modem can be an Echo and a wifi access point that forwards everything to the interested parties.
Forget the $9.25 subsidy and go with "free." Everyone likes free, even if it comes with a few strings attached.
The selfish a-holes who take every opportunity to whine about any public money being spent to improve society should realise that the children of poor people deserve the same as the children of rich people and spending a tiny amount of money to level the playing field of life for those children who didn't have the luck of birth will only benefit the whole of society in the long run.
Grandma's DSL is still about 384/3Mb on a good day. Never mind the packet loss. And the phone service is on u-verse. And she's paying too much for catv too from cable one. Her area 75020 seems forgotten, bullied by local affiliates they can no longer get channels from DFW which is only two counties south. Cell service in her neighborhood is unreliable and drops to 2G or 3G with no data at times. This is not a rural market but it is not exactly thriving.
Twc/Spectrum in my neck of the woods has ingress and noise issues from cellular signals disrupting some bonded channels, unburied and unterminated lines on poles flopping in the breeze. This in a city of 275000 and has had too many outages taking out VoIP and TV service. Forget paying for POTS any more. The Telco rolled out FiOS a decade ago yet I've seen some crappy CPE which you might as well use 4G it's so unreliable.
These companies know how to extract the maximum while providing adequate service.
I would be in favor of some FCC quality control. I hate big government but the industry shows us it needs a heavy hand.
You pay into unemployment just for that reason. Really, when you collect unemployment, especially if you have been working a decade or more, they are just giving you your money back.
What an asshole. His twatter photo is probably goatse.
Have you ever been out of work and your Unemployment Benefits checks were all that kept you from being homeless? How would you feel if that had been taken away from you because it's 'socialism' or 'communism'?
Piss poor analogy. Unemployment is an INSURANCE not a HAND OUT. You / employer explicitly pays into when you work.
It would be the same as if my straw hut burnt to the ground and my insurance company refused to pay up because "socialism" or "communism".
Actually you don't understand, EMPLOYERS pay into the Unemployment fund. If they had their way they'd say 'fuck that' and not pay at all, screw you if you're unemployed, they don't care, and that's one more bit of leverage they'd have over you: do as we say, take what we give you, or you'll be HOMELESS and DIE in the streets.
But we don't live in that world do we? Unemployment benefits are insurance, yes; social insurance, because it's good for society as a whole for people to not be homeless, because then they can't get work again, and the viscious cycle continues indefiintely.
A little subsidy so people who are desperately poor can afford Internet? That's also social insurance, guaranteeing that at least their children will have the benefit of the Internet for their education.. and also so that the working adults of the household can have a better chance of getting better work, or work of any kind when they find themselves out of work. Try getting a job these days with no Internet; you basically can't.
It's a small amount of money per household and you're not seeing the big picture. Or do you want more homeless people in your city, actually begging for handouts, so their kids don't starve? Or do you just not give a shit about anyone but yourself?
There are plenty of conservatives and religious types that believe all such things should be banned and you should just be left to starve.
Slashdot is full of commies who love the idea of taking other person's hard EARNED money and giving it to others.
Slashdot is full of lazy zero information fools who think they are smart because they can express a statement of philosophical disposition rather than doing any research or otherwise offering objectively useful evidence to support their positions.
Nobody is citing studies saying access to x leads to y outcomes. Nobody is offering reasoned arguments based on merit. It's all my world view is x therefore y should be done or my world view is x therefore FUCK YOU.
You don't really think things through, do you? They're not taking online classes. They're using smart phones to look up the answers to things they don't understand and that their overworked/underpaid teachers didn't have time to teach them. And yes, that's a huge pain in the neck compared to using a computer to do it. But they can barely afford a $100 smart phone. So they make do.
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are utter BS. Full stop. I live just north of Houston, Texas, the 4th largest city in the US. I work in IT and make a modest salary (IT salaries in TX are very low comparatively). I'm surrounded by people who buy the largest Ram and Chevy trucks and SUVs, designer jeans, high-end sneakers, and eat out several times a week. Their kids all have the latest iPhones or Samsung gadgets. And they all complain about not having enough. What the hell is wrong with America? These people bitch and complain about everything under the sun, all the while living in a 1st world country with plenty of food, clean water, daily showers, and decent-paying jobs. But it's never enough. Never. I'm sick and tired of hearing about it all.
At least they are aborting this fiasco while it's only costing tens to hundreds of millions in fraud and abuse before it grows to social security or welfare-system fraud levels. The telecom industry has been using this to prop up their rates on a fat gubbermint check for too long, they should be reducing their rates instead, as the technology allows. Telecom fraud, welfare fraud, voter fraud -- one can only conclude that the SJW fools are either frauds themselves of the dupes of it.
I spent 6 months unemployed recently. Republican lawmakers in state have made collecting unemployment from a fund I've been paying into for 30 fucking years impossible for someone who wants to continue a career that pays well. Instead of looking for work in my field, I would have to spend all my time looking for menial labor and be able to PROVE it in order to collect benefits. Fortunately, I was able to make it through without doing that.
Fuck the GOP and anyone who supports them sideways with a fucking bandsaw.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
No never. Most white males have worked since they were 10, usually creating their own job. Yep it's hard. Try it. What is yo problem Jackson kan't keep a job? A mamazboi slakker?? A loonsville knacker ?? Do us a B0jangles and quite wrangles.
Public school is like a prison and a church rolled into one. You're forced by law to be there, and when you are there you're indoctrinated to love the government, trust it, worship it (pledge allegiance to the flag), and rely upon it. These indoctrinated serfs then become voters.
What you consider "free" really means someone else, facing the barrel of a gun, is being forced to pay for it. This is called a "tax" to fund a "subsidy."
Do you think your neighbor has the right to come to your door with a rifle, take your money under threat of violence, and use it to feed the homeless? Is that charity? Is it noble?
No, it's armed robbery. And that's what you are endorsing: armed robbery.
So in 2016, the UN Human Rights Council forgot to Cc Ajit Pai on the condemnation of "intentional disruption of internet access by governments", and that "the same rights people have offline must also be protected online" (source).
You are simply recycling fallacious arguments made by Rousseau in the eighteenth century, in which he fabricated the myth of the "social contract."
Read Lysander Spooner's famous essay, "No Treason: the Constitution of No Authority." There is no such thing as a social contract. Where is this mysterious document? Do you have a copy? Did I sign it? Yet somehow it is floating amorphously in space, binding us?
The social contract is a myth created to justify theft (taxation), subjection (national statism), and slavery (conscription / the draft). The government has nothing that it hasn't stolen from rightful property owners through murder and robbery.
You obviously know nothing about how politics actually works. Have you ever known or talked to any electors? It's an almost entirely ceremonial role handed out each election cycle to prominent citizens and party activists. You are just making up a bogus excuse to ignore the fact that approximately half the country voted Trump.
Communism worked so well murdering 94 million people in the 20th century; it almost hit an even 100 million. Wow, those are some IMPRESSIVE numbers. The modern left wants to give it one more go!
http://reason.com/blog/2013/03/13/communism-killed-94m-in-20th-century
"could not be confirmed as eligible" does not mean in my book "are fraud". Sounds to me you interpret it that way when the report does not explicitely state it.
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The fraud skyrocketed when they opened up the program to cellphones. Resellers have only motivation to sell you the phone not actually see if you qualify.
It was a lot harder to lie about who you where or sign up for multiple accounts when lifeline only applied to POTS and DSL.
How did you think they were going to pay for that extra $1.50 a week you earn through the tax break?
The only way to pay for the current budget is to slash expenditures. Every bit of government will be cutting spending and/or going private over the next three to seven years (except the military, of course).
Hope you don't have any parents or grandparents that rely on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. 'cause they're gonna be shit out of luck.
#MAGA*
*Offer applies to rich people and corporations, only. The government reserves the right to terminate, at anytime and without any warning, your personal greatness should you fail to demonstrate unwavering personal loyalty to der Führer.
Believing that a person's misfortune is evidence he/she has done something wrong to anger God is an idea from pagan polytheistic religions, and it is specifically debunked by an ENTIRE BOOK within the Bible. That book is called "Job" (that's after the book of "Esther" and before "Psalms" for people who've never bothered to READ a Bible but like to comment on it.)
In fact, your entire post is so completely wrong that it's quite clear you know nothing of substance about the Bible, Christianity, the Religious Right, etc but, like many millenial snowflakes, you have very high self esteem and confidence and think you can get by in life looking smart while regurgitating crap that was spoon-fed to you by a bunch of losers who were themselves thoroughly steeped in willful ignorance.
Incidentally, all of humanity before the 1990s lacked the internet and yet somehow they were not all "poor, generation after generation". It's also interesting that, all propaganda to the contrary, now that nearly everybody can get on the net, most only use it for porn, facebook, and entertainment; a 12-year-old today with net access is no more likely to lead a better life than a 12-year-old in 1980 without net access was. Access to the internet is NOT a panacea, it's not even all that important for a good life.
Let me guess, you saw a whacko like Creflo Dollar on TV pushing nonesense like the sham-wow guy and you concluded he was a legitimate representative of anything? I remember when idiots who knew little about the so-called religious right assumed that scammers Jim and Tammy Faye were good examples of Christians and were rather shocked to see no grief among the religious right when THOSE television scam artists collapsed.
Prosperity Theology is not theology at all. It's anti-Biblical nonsense that is attractive to desperate people at home late at night worrying about how they are going to get through the next month, just like a lottery ticket or a pull on a one-arm-bandit in Las Vegas seem to offer hope to the down-trodden. It's illusory and it's pushed by scam artists. Just because a scam artist pretends to be religious, that does not make him so any more than a counterfeit artist becomes a legit example of a treasury department engraver.
You want a REAL explanation for what you characterize as an "intensely unchristian position of religious conservatives towards the poor."?
Here it is:
1. Most government programs to "help" the poor do no such thing; they make the poor dependent on handouts (because that makes them a politically-captive population which is valuable to certain politicians) while encouraging all sorts of bad behaviours AND doing it all with money obtained from others by armed robbery.
2. Government has, over the past half century, actively undermined actual Christian charities. Oh, the government has allowed tax deductions for "charitable giving" but it has repeatedly banned and/or regulated a huge amount of activity that used to be routinely carried out across the nation by various Christian charities.
3. Many of what we now call "the poor" are NOT actually poor at all, and most are bringing a lot of their own problems onto themselves by their own bad behaviors. Previous generations of Christian charities would help these people but insist that, as part of the arrangement, they discontinue their bad behaviors. It's unethical and untenable to expect one person to restrain himself and sacrifice to provide the resources to support another person who refuses to restrain himself.
4. Many of the current poor in the US are illegally in the country. Aiding them not only makes one complicit in the lawbreaking and the general collapse of the rule-of-law, but it also encourages further lawbreaking, the import of more illegals AND further strains the systems that are already costing the economy BILLIONS of dollars while failing to provide adequate support for the intended poor beneficiaries.
Jesus famously rescued a prostitute from being stoned to death by saying to the crowd (essentially) "let the guy who has comitted no sin throw the first stone" ... but what many poverty pimps like to ignore is the rest of what he said. Jesus then addressed the prostitute he saved and said "go forth, and sin no more". He clearly knew that as a human being she'd certainly sin again, BUT he was instructing her to clean up her act. Jesus famously fed the hungry, but people also like to ignore that he said that people who do not work should not eat. It's a matter of personal responsibility and true fairness.
It's simply immoral to make one person provide from his own labor for another person who refuses to labor.
Food is not free. Housing is not free. Healthcare is not free. These things can only appear free if somebody is given them while somebody else pays the bill. When governments do this sort of redistribution, they do it by force.
Somebody opposing left-wing, immoral, massive government programs is NOT the same thing as opposing/hating or being "unChristian" to the poor. The Chrisitan way of dealing with the poor is to voluntarily help those who truly need help and that includes helping them to see how they got into a situation where they needed the help and helping them reform so they can eventually not only provide for themselves but be the one to help others.
That "trillion dollar tax reform" lets people KEEP THEIR OWN MONEY.
The damned Obamaphone program STEALS money from taxpayers and gives it to other people who have done nothing to earn it.
STOP confusing letting a person keep his own money, with giving a person somebody else's money! These are two fundamentally different concepts.
When a robber sticks you up in a back alley, he's at least more honest and less intrusive than government.
A robber points a gun at you and plainly states "your money or your life". You hand over your cash and he is gone, probably never again to be seen by you.
A government tells you to fill out a bunch of forms and "voluntarily comply" with a tax system. If you fail to hand over the loot, the government will try to take it through back-handed means (get it from your bank or your employer). If you manage to prevent that theft, the government will send people to take your stuff (like your house) and if you do not cooperate, they will try to toss you into jail. If you refuse to cooperate, they'll pull guns and if you still resist they will kill you. Oh, and assuming you survive THIS tax year, the government will be back next tax year (and the next and the next, etc) and they'll eventually try to rob you further when you die.
Yes, the USA is messed up in a lot of ways and refuses to intelligently discuss anything; maybe in the past, but no longer.
I have a cabin. It's in a rural area that didn't even get cell service until about 8 years ago. There is no internet, just a lousy old noisy phone line. I doubt dial-up would even go full speed. Maybe some slow cell internet is possible up there now but it's not that cheap. The locals seem to have many accidental fires and thefts and I'm beginning to think it's the two primary sources of income up there. (No business goes out of business there, they have a fire.) Seriously, the only jobs up there are tourism related - the farmers are all on corn welfare.
I have also done some online job applications involving session timeouts and rather large downloads. Will internet get them jobs so they can still boink their sisters without being noticed? I think not. But maybe they'll learn something? Me, I'd like access when I'm up there-- but you see, I go up there to ESCAPE like all the tourists.
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