inclementimmigrantTrump kills broadband grants, calls digital equity program “racist and illegal”
besseljThe goal seems to be to keep people in rural areas ignorant and/or sell more starlink terminals
HarkMahlbergIt'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.
So you see exactly what I mean. They get to not pay taxes. That’s money in their pockets instead of the government. Ergo, that’s a grant.
queermunist she/herYeah 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
Deny social security
ding, ding, ding! close rural offices, make phone support unworkable with additional staff cuts and deadend “AI” phone IVR and finally ensure that online interactions are impossible.
hundreds of billions will be saved on the bodies of dead Americans to help pay for those trillionaire tax cuts.
Probably shouldn’t have called it Digital Equity Internet. I could see where the confusion comes in.
JessicaThey need to keep their base stupid.
Doesn’t seem like they need to work very hard at it tbh.
Fair point
They already are, but they want the future generations illiterate, and absolutely desperate, via no education.
What would you call making sure rural areas, seniors, and veterans have equal access to digital services as most city dwellers?
PoikThe 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.
TheReturnOfPEBI really hope that someone is collecting all the laws that Trump is making up on the fly so that we can compare at least do a word count of Trump’s laws vs the Constitution.
ScrubblesAll 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.
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.
nocturneI 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 double now.
Racist? His main voter base are right winged fucks in the rural areas
“At least he’s hurtin’ Them People worserer! Git me another beer, Darla!”
CheemsAnd they’d happily get starlink.
Internet access is racist and illegal! Thanks conservatives!
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.
Yeah and it’s hard to get people to believe you. I go to a church made of immigrants. Like the whole congregation except me and children. They are solid Trump supporters. When I tell them what I hear being said it’s dismissed as ‘will never happen’ , ‘that’s not what was meant’,‘it’s only gong to be the bad ones.’
They really think that they are in the ‘in’ group; being represented and that a 50 ish year old white man raised ‘conservative’ just doesn’t get it.
What gets me is the other poor white people I know.
They think they’re “Special.” They’re on “The Team.” Trump would have a beer with them. He’s looking out for them.
The truly dumbest, deluded, ignorant, and just irredeemable humans on the planet.
RhaedasAnd maybe most importantly, lacking any empathy for others. Even if they were right and they were on The Team while others suffered... to be happy about that with no compassion at all towards other human beings is a terrible way to live a life.
At least in my case, they are truly caring people. They actually care when others are doing bad. There are very different sets of messages being sent
Call ICE. If just a few get deported, the rest will get the message.
This is so fucked but also probably true
That’s pretty cruel. They are getting a completely different message than I am getting. I have to say that I’m in a bubble because the things that they are being told are moderate and reasonable. Language barriers play a big part in keeping the messages separate.
I go to a church made of immigrants.
Sounds like a rough job, even when the weather is good.
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 dogwhisles” part of the sentence.
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”.
Getting a lot of mileage out of these Run the Jewels lyrics recently
Funny fact about a cage, they’re never built for just one group
So when that cage is done with them and you still poor, it come for you
The newest lowest on the totem, well golly gee, you have been used
You helped to fuel the death machine that down the line will kill you too
Run The Jewels - walking in the snow (Art Video)
This will be just great for the Appalachian region J.D. Vance was playing up as his homeland.
They were using that program there: communitynetworks.org/…/connect-humanity-project-…
Connect Humanity Project Aims To Bring Broadband To Rural Appalachia | Welcome to Community Networks
Connect Humanity and the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) have struck a new $7.9 million coalition partnership they say will help deliver affordable, next-generation broadband networks to more than 50 communities across 12 Appalachian states. ARC has already been awarded $6.3 million via its new Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies (ARISE) program, which aims to solve the connectivity crisis in a region that lags well behind the national average.
A child who has access to internet, might cut their hours at the coal mine.
Gsus4internet access is woke too now 😎
Of course! They might consume something that isn’t Fox “News”
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.
Vanilla_PuddinFudgeGiving rural old white farmers broadband is racist?
let them eat starlink!
Null User ObjectThis is probably the whole point.
This should be written down for the saying of this time in history
Stupid is as stupid votes.
SturgistGodDAMN! This has been getting a shit tonne of mileage lately!
It must literally just be the word “equity”.
DarkFutureHave 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.
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.
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. 🤦
Does this create communication blund spots? Because that’s dangerously good preperation for gulags or something
In Canada, we just give them the money, they twiddle their thumbs for a few years, 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.
RememberTheApollo_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.
Heh, and here I thought it was just the 5g in my town that was wonky