I don't think you have that right; BEAD funds were not originally allowed to be awarded for technologies other than Fiber. No one had been awarded in 2020. Many ISPs had been awarded for Fiber projects by 2025, but under this administration, the NTIA changed the rules so LEO could get the funds and rug pulled the original awardees. States had to start the bidding process over under the new rules. SpaceX took home something like a billion dollars at that point (it pays to make large campaign donations, I guess!). Projects should finally get underway later this fall in most states.
I've known enough librarians to come to a belief that, in general, their curation decisions are more motivated by a love of books and learning than they are by the more divisive political issues of the day.
Of course, none of us can completely escape our own biases. That said, librarians aren't airdropped in to small towns from San Francisco; generally, they're local. If they're in a religious conservative community, it's pretty darn likely they are also religious and conservative. They have probably also had some education that helped them understand biases and how to practice avoiding them.
I find your implicit suggestion that there is some underground network of Leftys descending on small town America to become librarians and put LGBTQ books on the shelves laughably unserious. If you want to influence kids, go on tiktok or become a youth pastor or something. It's hard enough to get kids to read books they're actually interested in, you're not gonna get far as a librarian.
Note that children do become adults while in (high) school. It's common for book-banners to imply that they are removing books from elementary school kids when they are actually removing them from adults and almost-adults in high schools.
Personally, I am OK with the library making their own curation decisions. That's part of how a library functions, I understand that they can't carry everything. I have a problem when zealous parents try to override those decisions, especially when they are motivated by political or religious worldviews.
I think the Bible should be in school libraries (and it always has been), but if you're keeping it while removing other books for sex, violence, genocide, pedophilia, rape, homosexuality, or other objectionable things that are also included in the Bible, I think you're being inconsistent and overzealous.
> schools are making these decisions on a neutral, apolitical basis - but this is not really possible, is it?
Well, sure, but it's not possible for the religious parent groups to be apolitical either (nor do they make any attempt at even ostensible neutrality). Teachers and administrators are well trained, often have or have had children, and are generally a part of the community where they work and teach. It's not like they are 'coastal elites' making lefty decisions for the community; by and large, they share similar worldviews to the kids and their parents. I think we should give them more of our trust in making these decisions.
That type of media was never in schools to begin with. The problem here is that schools and districts made their own, informed curation decisions, and those decisions are being overridden by zealous parents informed only by their religious and political persuasions.
Authoritarian is an adjective. A thing can be authoritarian without all things being so. Yes, authoritarian things have always existed, and yes, a powerful religious group joining forces to make sure kids continue to hate themselves for being gay or trans is authoritarian.
On the other hand, there is a persistent idea that schools are just making curation decisions for the children in their district, and people are calling that book banning. That's what you seem to be suggesting here. In all cases I'm aware of, that's not what's happening either; it's generally a parent, or a small group of parents, generally all from the same religious group and political party, bullying the library or school district into reversing curation decisions they had already made. A small, vocal group ultimately makes decisions about what all the kids in the district can read at school, based on their own religious and political affiliation. That comes much closer to your "banned book mental association" than I think you give it credit for.
It's a way to create constructive interference in an RF signal in a certain direction (the signal gets stronger in one direction and weaker in others without changing the hardware). It's commonly used in LTE and Wi-Fi as a way to increase SNR directionally for clients.
Oof, that's a bad day. I've had cable stolen from a tower site like that, but it was cable we had spooled out for installation the day before, not in active use.
We had a meteor 15 years ago or so. I happened to open the side door just as it was overhead. It looked like late afternoon by the light, but it was long after dark by the clock. I had just a moment to question both my watch and my sanity before it went dark again.
I'm fairly sure that Android requires parent permission to reset a device if it's a managed child device. Overall, the parental controls on Android have been sufficient for what my family has needed.
You can do a lot with existing devices in a medium to decent gaming PC (or probably phone/laptop, I haven't tried.) I think HN tends to skew toward only thinking of LLM as useful for coding, but they are very useful for many non-coding things, and existing local LLMs are quite capable. I imagine it won't be long before apps with LLM-based features will try to run locally first and fall back to cloud LLMs just to save token costs. Actually I'd be surprised if some apps aren't doing this already.
I think I just took issue with what seemed like trite advice about what it takes to win at life or whatever. Your other comment on the thread cleared it up well enough:
> I'm absolutely not saying this alone is sufficient - particularly if you're unemployed or your job truly doesn't pay a living wage.
and I agree with that completely. I can definitely get behind not buying the hat (or buying a cheaper hat) but at some point it's not a hat, it's a vehicle that you need to get to work or a home repair or medical bill or something and your options become a) buy the cheap thing (and buy it again in six months when it breaks and is now more expensive) or b) walk away and suffer the consequences. I've done both, and neither really feels like winning.
Trying to be gentle here but this is pretty out of touch.
- I have bought a new car exactly once in my life, and likely never will again. This is the same as pretty much every other person I know personally. The last vehicle I bought had over 300k miles on it.
- Does anyone buy a new phone every year? I've never met them.
- Do you really need the fancy clothes from Target when the ones from Walmart or Goodwill are much cheaper?
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