Verizon on today's FCC vote:

There is no doubt that the policies put in place by the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration to jumpstart innovation and the spread of broadband worked. As a result, America’s broadband and Internet marketplace is intensely competitive and an engine of economic growth, job creation and multibillion-dollar investment. Today’s decision, however, unnecessarily departs from these successful policies.

I'm sure on Verizon's planet there's no lack of healthy competition, but back at nulamihaus we have no competitive alternative to Comcast. My brother-in-law's complex is served exclusively by AT&T. And then there's the Woz:

I have owned four homes in my life. None of these had cable TV, even though one was a new development where the law required cable. None of these had DSL, including my current home, which is only .8 miles up a hill from the populous town I live in. I pay for a T1 line, which costs many times what DSL runs for about 1/10 the bandwidth. That's as close as I can come to broadband where I live. The local phone providers don't have any obligation to serve all of their phone customers with DSL. They also have no requirement to service everyone living in the geographic area for which they have a monopoly. This is what has happened without regulatory control, despite every politician and president and CEO and PR person since the beginning of the Internet boon saying how important it was to ensure that everyone be provided broadband access.

Wired ISPs are local monopolies. An alternative that comes at twice the cost and half the speed is not "intensely competitive". Consider a car analogy: residents of California can only buy Chevrolet vehicles—if you want Ford you'll have to move to Montana. Don't like it? You can buy a bicycle for twice the price. People accept their choice of one decent broadband option because they liken it to their one choice of power or sewer company, and the market accepts the existence of multiple ISPs as proof of a competitive marketplace.

If the marketplace were as fierce as Verizon describes I'd be willing to yield to market forces—and today's FCC ruling gives more leeway to wireless providers, who are arguably heavily competitive—but wired ISPs today aren't competing, they're sharing the spoils of what amounts to industrial gerrymandering.

In any publicly-accessible forum, spam and trolling are a huge issue, consuming most administrator-hours and requiring a larger staff than would otherwise be required to run a large site. In comparison, sites that charge for admission, and sites that cannot be joined without an invitation have close to no administration overhead beyond maintaining the code, servers, and resetting forgotten passwords.

Some public sites (Stack Overflow, Slashdot, and Reddit come immediately to mind) have implemented a form of reputation. This allows other users to know at-a-glance if the person they're dealing with is stupid, full of shit, or fuckin' nuts. The goal is usually to keep track of troublemakers, but this system can also be used to find the best users on your site. These are people who probably want to help you, given the opportunity.

Here's an idea: pair the "report" function of a site with another reputation, one that is a ratio of number of posts this user has reported to how many of them were valid¹. For users that frequently spot problems with a high level of accuracy, it's safe to take action when a few of these high-reputation users flag the same issue independently instead of making the issue wait in a queue until a moderator can get around to it.

This sort of merit-based promotion of volunteer moderators could be automated and invisible to non-administrators, the high-reputation users not knowing their own augmented abilities, just that the site is a better place for their effort.

My point being, I’m saying God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.Ricky Gervais via h3h

I'm a better agnostic than atheist at this point¹, but I resonate strongly with the sentiment that wishing really hard doesn't make something true.

going through some old things, we found this map of Canada from 1904.

when Milami got photorefractive keratectomy on Thursday, they let me into the operating room with my camera gear.