Verizon has apparently hatched a plan to get around net neutrality regulations. Long story short: they'd exempt their own data-streaming plan from monthly mobile-user data caps. While such a plan wouldn't slow down or censor data from competing data plans, it's hard to imagine some government agency (even if it's not the FCC) failing to see that as an anti-competitive practice.
Citizens for Tax Justice reminds us that some 20 states are mulling tax reforms right now, and that most of these reforms would push even more of the tax burden onto lower- and middle-class folks. Of course, these are the people who don't contribute buku bucks to politicians. Funny how that works, though not funny, of course, in a humorous way.
A Straight Dope reader wonders if we could feed America without factory farms. The author concludes that we could do that "in theory," since meat production is much less efficient than vegetable/grain production, but probably not in reality, since most people like meat and industrialization tends to make meat cheaper. I do see a lot of straw-man arguing here -- you can oppose factory farms without opposing meat-eating, as I think I've demonstrated repeatedly.
Rural upstate New York town starts a public/private high-speed wireless network using unused UHF TV space. A state grant did much to help get it started (despite the usual Tea Party protests about government doing anything for anybody), and despite unusually big upfront costs (nearly $300 in equipment per household), it'll likely deliver high-speed internet better than the big telecoms -- which aren't rushing to deliver services there anyway.
Finally, the West Virginia government will study the health impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining. Of course, plenty of studies have already connected mountaintop removal mining to birth defects, cardiovascular disease, and lung cancer -- not to mention shortened life expectancy -- but for a Big Coal state government to suggest the science might actually lead to better policy is a big deal, particularly since it took years of citizen organizing to get this far.
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