#alt-a

The FCC’s New Broadband Explainers Just Make It More Complicated

Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revealed new labels to help people cut through the bullshit when they’re buying home internet or mobile data plans. The labels are meant to combat hidden fees and blatantly misleading advertising that many consumers complain about when purchasing internet. Although these type of labels are completely necessary—we all know the nightmare of…

Highway Infrastructure And Racial Politics

Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx has a unique perspective on how our nation’s infrastructure of highways, bridges, and tunnels provides commercial opportunity to some areas but brings cultural devastation to others. Those others are almost always poor neighborhoods whose residents have little political power. According to ThinkProgress, for them, those highways are barriers that wall them…

FCC Privacy Proposal Troubles Broadband Internet Providers

Broadband Internet service providers are wary of a government plan to impose consumer privacy protection regulations on the sector. The Federal Communications Commission likely will issue the proposed regulations by Friday. It will accept public comment on the proposal before taking final action. The program would require ISPs to meet consumer privacy protection standards similar to the…

In report to the state, Con Ed decries property tax system

Con Edison was liable for more than $1.4 billion in property taxes last year and, according to a report filed this week with the Public Service Commission, the utility isn’t planning to accept it passively. Con Ed is among the biggest property taxpayers in the city and each year it submits a report to the state detailing how it is trying to keep the tax burden low for itself and its affiliate,…

Indonesia’s mentally ill: ‘Living in hell’, shackled and confined

This man, photographed in 2011, lived shackled for nine years in a back room in his family’s home in Cianjur, West Java. When he was released, his legs had atrophied from disuse. Almost 19,000 mentally-ill Indonesians are still being shackled or locked up in a confined place – sometimes for years – despite a 1977 ban on the practice, according to Human Rights Watch. A report released on Monday…