This makes no sense at all. Is it just a bad summary? Waxman is citing testimony that internet fast lanes inevitably and necessarily degrade internet service for "non-premium" users, and Wheeler responds that the proposed regulation enables the FCC to prohibit that inevitable consequence of the system it creates?

"Yes, this regulation will degrade service, unavoidably. BUT! The regulation also says that we will make sure that this unavoidable consequence is prohibited, so it's all good!"

I don't think you understand how monopolies work. The majority of Comcast's customers have no alternatives. Where are they going to go? Back to dial-up? There are at best one or two other providers in any given market for internet service, and *none* for cable television. So, Google, Facebook, et al say they won't accept connections from Comcast servers, then ... what? Comcast's customers stop using those companies' services, but don't switch providers. In retaliation, the peering providers that used to trade back all that traffic that those sites were generating stop doing that, so those companies lose even more traffic.

This is the point of a monopoly: they control access, and so they can control how the market functions.

I don't mean the ISPs, I mean the rest of us. Wheeler is a cable lobbyist; I suspect the court striking down the Open Internet Order was exactly the excuse to scuttle the net neutrality that all his buddies hate so much. Besides: the court has been very clear on this matter. The only way the FCC could force net neutrality would be by declaring ISPs common carriers. The Republican Party -- and Wheeler himself -- is adamantly opposed to such an action, and so it will not happen.

This smacks very much of the Obama administration responding to all the illegal wiretapping the NSA and FBI et al were doing not by arresting the perpetrators, but by writing the laws to give them authority to go right on doing it.

your math is a bit wonky. "weight/kg) / height(m) * height(m)" is just "weight(kg)." Perhaps you meant "height(m)^2" ? Extra parentheses help clarify terms.

Here's a thought. Maybe the sport as a whole -- and the PGA in particular -- could take a look at the many many country clubs that are still whites-only, and think about whether tolerating overt racism in your sport is the best way to market it.

Don't get me wrong, I have no issues with people celebrating human sexuality or whatever, but isn't it a bit ... overindulgent to be treating a former Playboy Playmate as an authority on much of anything, or really caring at all what she says? I get that debunking anti-vaxxers is a good cause and all, but why are we bothering with this anti-vaxxer?

The problem lies, in part, with what I guess you could call the aesthetic of multitasking. We love to think that we're good at it, but -- as research has proven over and over [warning: first link is a pdf download] -- we are actually really shitty at it. The same is true of driving. I remember as a kid riding in my dad's car, how he would try to change the channel on the radio, or do something with the A/C, and immediately start veering the car off the road. At stoplights, the minute he stopped thinking about it, his foot came off the brake and the car would roll out into the intersection.

I don't think fixing cars or cell phones is going to get to the root of the problem. The root is that people think they can do more than one thing at a time and not trip over their own damn feet. Since changing the culture seems out of the question, no amount of technological fixes is going to save us from trying to do more than we're cognitively equipped to do.

Actually, you are slightly incorrect about motives, though the end result may be more scientifically accurate. "Climate change" and related terms were created by Frank Luntz specifically in order to make the phenomenon less scary-sounding, and thus to blunt action -- almost entirely by Democrats -- to respond to the problem.
In so doing, he created decades of thumb-twiddling inaction by the US government, leading to the problem becoming much more severe and intractable than it might otherwise have been.
But, yes, technically "climate change" more accurately describes what's happening, though "climate disruption" or something similar would probably be a better choice.

"Valuing knowledge, we preposterize the idea and say everybody shall produce written research in order to live, and it shall be decreed a knowledge explosion."

Someone explain to me again how GMO crops are the only possible way human beings are going to solve all our agriculture problems, and people opposed to them are Luddites? Did they not think that natural selection more or less negates any gains reached through GM within a few generations?

I'm surprised the free-marketeers haven't trolled this article yet, so I guess I'll do it for them. Here goes...

SEE?? This just proves that government bureaucrats can't do anything!!!1 If they'd just gotten those stupid regulators to get their boots of the throats of the job-creators, the guiding hand of free-market capitalism would have fixed this by now! This is why we need to cut capital-gains taxes and destroy the EPA!!!1

THANKS OBAMA WHERZ TEH BIRF CERTIFICATE BENGHRZGGG etc

Right. Because citizen activists publicizing how big powerful entities do horrible things when the government is too chickenshit to stop them really worked wonders in the case of the NSA's mass-surveillance program. Not to mention extraordinary renditions, offshore torture, firing DAs for not investigating bullshit "voter fraud," lying to Congress, lying to the UN, to the American public, etc etc.

I think companies who insist on putting copyright/trademark/registration symbols into their marketing should be required, in every verbal exchange with media, at every speaking engagement, and in ever recorded advertisement, to compel their representatives to speak the terms out loud.

So, for example, should one of their sockpuppets be reading their press material at a conference, it would sound like this: "In addition to the revolutionary remote replacement, HAL *COPYRIGHTED!!* is also introducing wearable technologies such as their HAL *COPYRIGHTED!!* Watch HAL *COPYRIGHTED!!* Ring, and HAL *COPYRIGHTED!! Glasses, etc etc" like a bad case of Tourette's Syndrome.

This should be modded up. A lot of the OP's stuff seems pretty garden-variety college overload, but THIS. If he's in his mid-30s, and can't do simple multiplication, there is something dysfunctional in his cognitive processes. And yes: if he's suffering learning disabilities like this, maybe college isn't the right move. A trade school, sure. But I would steer him away from any four-year degree. I wonder what his major is...

So, if I'm reading this summary correctly, the only real problem is that our chickenshit congress never tripped over its own feet in a rush to hand the executive branch these exact powers in some most-assuredly extra-patriotic piece of legislation? All the issues with this law will go away if it gets a stamp of approval?
On a second note, why is it that nobody seems to mind (or make laws against) treating the inhabitants of other countries to police-state surveillance, including the heads of sovereign states?