The Daily Populous

Friday October 20th, 2017 day edition

image for The FCC is actively working against consumers

30 seconds of talk about rural broadband deployments and spectrum allocation is enough to send most people running from the room.

But don’t be fooled: the FCC wields a huge amount of power over one of the nation’s most critical pieces of infrastructure, and right now, it’s a mess.

The hot-topic issue in the FCC is net neutrality.

Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, claims (falsely) that net neutrality hurts investment by ISPs, and that the magic free hand of capitalism will protect consumers anyway (it won’t).

Expect President Trump to crow about how more Americans than ever before have access to high-speed internet in the coming days.

The FCC is supposed to regulate those services and ensure that our scarce resources are being used optimally, not work out how to best maximise profits for a handful of gargantuan corporations.

You can guess which the current FCC is doing. »

Nestlé is extracting water from Canadian towns on expired permits

Authored by news.vice.com

Switzerland-based Nestlé, for its part, says it donates tens of thousands of dollars to community groups in Canadian towns where it operates wells and bottling facilities and that its permits expired because of complicated changes to water management rules imposed by the Ontario government earlier this year.

Nestlé is currently extracting about five million litres per day from the sites where its permits have expired, according to Emma Lui, water campaigner for the Council of Canadians advocacy group.

The Ontario government has imposed a moratorium on new permits for extracting water for bottling until January 2019. »

The US government underestimated solar energy installation in the US by 4,813%

Authored by qz.com

Every two years, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), America’s official source for energy statistics, issues scenarios about how much solar, wind and conventional energy the future holds for the US.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and Statista recently teamed up to analyze the EIA’s predictions for energy usage and production.

It found that the EIA’s ten-year estimates between 2006 to 2016 systematically understated the share of wind, solar and gas. »

CDC: Suicide Rates Increase in US Rural Areas

Authored by mdmag.com

The United States Center for Disease Control (CDC), in a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), published a "Surveillance Summary" revealing surprising data that suicide rates are higher in rural areas compared to urban areas.According to the study, suicide is 1 of the top 10 leading causes of death in the US resulting in 44,193 deaths in 2015 alone. »

The Mac mini isn’t dead yet, says Tim Cook

Authored by arstechnica.com

But in an e-mail to an Apple customer today, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the Mac mini isn't going anywhere.

The customer, who goes by the name Krar, e-mailed Cook to note that the Mac mini hasn't seen an update in three years.

And the mini has long had a very small but passionate fanbase, like the customer who e-mailed Cook about it. »