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I suppose this means he hates the Rural Electrification Act and wants to retroactively rip out the bumpkins' power lines. I should probably shut my pie hole before I inadvertently give these malicious assholes ideas.
In Canada, we just give them the money, they twiddle their thumbs for a few years then say they're abandoning the project and keep the money. Then we wait a few years, and decide to give them more money for the same thing again.
They’ve already done that here once before in the US, too.
10 billion dollars to redefine 5g as 1/10th it's original bandwidth and then not meet the standards of providing it anyway.
But... but... rural is white Trump country. They need the interweb tubes.
Musk is rolling out a new tier of cheap starlink, lower bandwidth but also zero-tiers certain providers (think Fox News).
I wish I was being sarcastic. They're worried they need to bridge the gap from talk radio.
Does this create communication blund spots? Because that's dangerously good preperation for gulags or something
Have fun watching diabetes commercials on cable while the rest of us enjoy what we want on streaming platforms.
Not even going to bother addressing the veteran stuff. Trump hating the military and its personnel is old news and his voters couldn't give a flying fuck.
Giving rural old white farmers broadband is racist?
let them eat starlink!
This is probably the whole point.
This should be written down for the saying of this time in history
Stupid is as stupid votes.
GodDAMN! This has been getting a shit tonne of mileage lately!
Just a couple weeks ago, with the announcement of orders being opened to the public, people in my (pretty red) area were celebrating the expected arrival of broadband from these grants,
Wonder if its going to happen now. 🤦
It must literally just be the word "equity".
So it went from socialist to racist to offer incentives to companies to put broadband in rural areas. Boy sure I'm glad there's somebody at the top to tell us these things. Here I thought it was just a sensible thing to do all this time. Silly me.
internet access is woke too now 😎
Of course! They might consume something that isn't Fox "News"
This will be just great for the Appalachian region J.D. Vance was playing up as his homeland.
They could have really used that money to get some broadband deployed and a workforce trained up: https://communitynetworks.org/content/connect-humanity-project-aims-bring-broadband-rural-appalachia
A child who has access to internet, might cut their hours at the coal mine.
This is the guy who just recently, through overt, barely coded dog whistles, called Buttigieg a "f@**0t," riding with his husband on a bike, and Crockett a "uppity n1@883r b1%&h" from the Oval Office. I'm a 53 year old white male from the rural South. The message was loud and clear. Believe what I'm telling you. I've heard this garbage my entire life, and hear the shit that's said when it's just us white males. The real hateful shit.
This is real. This is serious. They're starting with "Illegal Immigrants," and to them, deviant "Transsexuals." RFK Jr. is reported to be compiling a database of Autistic people. Before that, it was the homeless. Remember what the Nazis did to those "Undesirables."
Just like the Nazis of 80 years ago, they're starting with the defenseless, and the poorest.
They’re starting with “Illegal Immigrants,” and to them, deviant “Transsexuals.”
Once they get rid of all the immigrants and trans people, does anyone really think they're going to dismantle the infrastructure, bulldoze the detention centers, and fire all the excess agents? Or is it more likely that they will just find new out-groups to throw on the pile?
It blows my mind that people see this happening in real time and just go "that'll never happen to me".
Trump dropped a hard-r when it comes to Jasmine Crockett? Honestly, given the good work Crockett has been doing, I kind of love that it's pissing off Trump so much, and making him show his true, obviously racist (and homophobic, etc.) colors.
What I don't like is that this is probably going to make the hard-r "more acceptable to say" for MAGA folk, not that they didn't already say it in more private settings already.
They were talking about subtext
Yeah, I missed the "barely coded dogwhistles" part of the sentence.
The goal seems to be to keep people in rural areas ignorant and/or sell more starlink terminals
Yeah it's 100% just a Starlink scam. The internet does not make people less ignorant, I promise.
I think it's much more likely that they want their base to keep watching cable TV
It's easy to funnel money from the rubes. It was only 2 years ago that I learned some churches will automatically withdraw tithes from your bank account and they encourage you to set up "direct deposit" with them.
The entire economic model of these loons is built on the same principle: anything you use regularly, for "free" or built with taxpayer money, should instead become a subscription service you have to pay for, to a cabal of rich sociopaths. In the meantime, the actual free option is brain rotting propaganda to keep you voting for the rich sociopaths so they can repeat step 1. See: Fox News.
Churches and other religious congregations in the US are NOT funded with taxpayers money (at least, pending Supreme Court decision on the Kansas taxpayer supported Catholic school), and pastor salary and building upkeep are very real costs. If a family values the community having employee(s) and a building, and doesn't want the hassle of other payment options, automatic debits are a good option to have available.
Things that actually are funded with taxpayer money, yes, they should be free. The Project 2025 plan to kill NOAA so weather forecasts will only be available to subscribers of private companies is incredibly destructive to such a huge number of people, and yes, this broadband decision is in that same awful category.
Isn't the fact that they get a tax credit kinda means they get that money through?
I'm not sure what you mean by "tax credit". Religious congregations do not receive payments of any kind from the government. They do not pay taxes on their income (donations/tithes), so each donor's money goes farther, and donors, if they itemize on their tax returns (pretty rare with how generous the standard deduction has become) have tax incentive to give generously. But without donations, there won't be any building or full time officiant.
You misread my comment. I'm relating direct tithing to churches, to things like NOAA. That's actually an incredible example of what I'm talking about. But I'm not saying churches are taxpayer funded no.
That being said... I'm not putting it past religious fundamentalists to convince Trump to issue an executive order garnishing every American's wages in the name of tithing to the church. It would be foul, and fucked, but the last 6 months have given me an ample imagination.
Probably shouldn't have called it Digital Equity Internet. I could see where the confusion comes in.
What would you call working towards rural areas, seniors, and veterans having equal access to digital services as most city dwellers?
The problem isn't the name. The problem is Trump already hates the letters DEI and the word equity. He's declared war on anything that attempts to dismantle institutionalized bigotry. And he doesn't recognize that rural equity isn't about race, hence him declaring it racist.
All those red counties can keep enjoying paying over $100 a month for terrible local cable company "100mbps" (20mbps in reality) download speeds with 56k upload. That's the great America they wanted after all. Meanwhile in my very blue city I pay $60 a month for symmetric gigabit.
I used to have $120/month wireless net (dish aimed at a tower on the mountain) that was 15gbps. Then the city seized the abandoned fibre Comcast ran and abandoned. They brought in another company to run the internet (despite saying they were going to make it a utility run by the city). I suspect my $55/month bill for gigabit net is fixing to at least double now.
How quaint.
I take care of my Mom who has dementia.
She has to have cable. For her "stories." The Comcast bill for her cable and internet access is TWO HUNDRED AND 60 FUCKING UNITED STATES DOLLARS. For dogshit megabyte speeds. Which I pay the majority of.
But hey, for $15 more, we could have "free" Peacock, Spotify, and Apple+!
What a bargain...
And there are literally no competitors except for the town municipal service, which is the same price, since they're buying bandwidth on cable, and internet.
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