Boing Boing » america fuck yeah

Giant USA sunglasses

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:14:08 +0000

You know what these titanic, $260 map-of-the-continental-USA sunglasses need? An Alaska barrette and a Hawai'i epaulet. Seriously.

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Congress: pizza is a vegetable when it is fed to children

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:22:12 +0000

After intense lobbying from frozen pizza makers, and the potato and salt industry, Congress is poised to pass a spending bill whose riders establish that pizza is a vegetable and can be served in school cafeterias in substitute for actual vegetables.

We’re now facing a policy decision that has replaced science-backed common sense with the assertion that pizza ought to count as a vegetable when it’s served to schoolchildren.
(Side note: we’re not even talking about whole-grain pizza loaded with veggie toppings! We’re talking about frozen cheese pizza with tomato paste.)
If you want to take a look at the bill’s language, go for it, but the main takeaway is this: our Congressional leaders are on a fast track to overrule nutrition science in favor of political expediency. This is a dangerous precedent to set and not good public policy.

Pizza Counts as a Vegetable? How the Spending Bill in Congress Could Unravel Progress on School Nutrition (via Reddit)

(Image: Gryfes frozen pizzas - cooked, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from grongar's photostream)

America's Internet service slips to #25 worldwide

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 18:17:41 +0000

Welcome to America, the country with the 25th fastest Internet service in the world, just behind Romania, and falling fast. The culprit? Hard to say, but maybe it's got something to do with the FCC's abolition of any sort of competitive markets for Internet service in the USA? Well, I'm sure it'll be fine -- after all, why would Internet access have any effect on national competitiveness, industry, jobs, health, education, civic engagement, and so forth?

Under the Bush administration, the FCC tossed out competitive broadband safeguards such as open-access requirements, which opened lines to other providers. In 2002 the agency declared that high-speed cable Internet access would no longer be considered a telecommunications service that opened the network to competitors, but rather an “information service” that did not. Following a 2005 court decision, the FCC also reclassified broadband delivered by the phone companies as an “information service.”
These were radical policy shifts that went against the long-held assumption that open communications in competitive markets were essential to economic growth and innovation.
While the U.S. blindly followed a path of "deregulation," other nations in Europe and Asia beefed up their pro-competitive policies. The results are evident in our free fall from the top of almost every global measure of Internet services, availability and speed.

Welcome to Your Hungarian Internet (Thanks, Cowicide)

(Image: US Mail, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from stephoto's photostream)