The one essential story of the day is from Mother Jones: "How Does Chuck Schumer Keep Democrats Together? A Flip Phone."
https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2021/02/how-does-chuck-schumer-keep-democrats-together-a-flip-phone/

Rich - Could you try not freaking the fuck out about new variants? We are doing a good job, vaccines are rolling through, and fatality rates will continue to drop. It's easy to keep wearing a mask in-doors, do it, I always do. But cowering at home for some random shit? Personally, I think those days need to end asap. Get outside.

@3: Viruses aren't random. The take advantage of every opportunity exponentially.

WA State Senators look like they want to be the murderer in Clue.

Feel like getting widely accessible public broadband access could be real big. Totally realistic goal, and would give us yet another example to throw in the faces of those yokels who constantly whine that the public sector doesn't work for them (not that there don't exist countless examples of this already, given the existence of vital municipal infrastructure & the related upkeep thereof.) This would be especially fun though, since so many of those ignorant yokels do so much of their whining on Facebook, twitter, etc, and so would no doubt be relying on those services they're so fervently aligned against to do their whining. It doesn't ever accomplish shit, but it's still fun and satisfying pointing out blatant ideological inconsistency and hypocrisy to idiots.

@2: You... don't really know anything about Catholic Community Services or what they do, do you....

@7 Ha ha ha ha

The PUD's have been providing fiber infrastructure for about a decade I think. But, in true dumb WA state manner, the PUD strings the wire, runs it to your house, and owns the box. But then a third party provider does the internety things.

This is frustrating to me because if there is an outage, the PUD is of no help, and the "provider" is a mom-and-pop where no one answers the phone, so you have no idea if it's a PUD issue, or a provider issue.

But still, it's only $55 a month for very fast internet.

"And anyway, what the fuck is Sen. Yellow Shirt going to do with that wrench?"

The wrench is too small to use on fences, but I think it's not too big to loosen his nuts.