politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
Also, technically, the actual infrastructure that allows the internet to exist is very much akin to a series of tubes.
Barring satellite internet connections (which are still fairly rare for household usage outside of remote areas), the internet traveled along first phone lines, then coax cables, and now in some places in the US, fiber lines... most of which were and still are underground for all but the proverbial last mile. The internet even crosses seas through giant undersea cables.
If you think of data centers and dns servers as something akin to pumping stations, the analogy of tubes is a fairly decent, simplified metaphor for the actual physical infrastructure of it all. It also allows for a reasonable surface level analogy of water flow through pipes as comparable to bandwidth throughput.
... Though with data cap usage metering, the analogy begins to fall apart at a slightly more technical level, as there is no real... actual 'thing', no resource being 'pumped', beyond encoded electricity itself, which only has a real per unit cost to an ISP in terms of the actual power costs of routing your requests, maybe the maintenance costs of the cable/fiber lines... the former of which is infinitesimally less costly than with water, and said cost is further distributed around the country or world's DNS servers and data server centers.
The only thing that it makes sense to charge for is speeds, and even then, every ISP I've ever used in any location I've ever lived rarely operates at the advertised speed, but technically your contract with the ISP says they don't actually have any real obligation to provide that anyway, and this is apparently legal.
Anyway, only really with the advent of 5g can it really be said that the internet is moving away from being fairly comparable to a vast series of tubes.