Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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HUNTSVILLE, AL—Aiming to provide attendees with an authentic glimpse into the nation’s space program, representatives for the U.S. Space & Rocket Center announced Thursday that its newly updated Space Camp will allow children to simulate the anger and mounting frustration experienced by NASA personnel over a continual lack of funding.

djempirical

#oops

THE DIRECTOR of the global coffee company Starbucks has revealed that she was once mistaken for kitchen help while attending a major business meeting in New York.

Mellody Hobson, also the director of DreamWorks Animation and Groupon, had arranged a lunch date with the editorial board of one of the most successful media companies in the world and the black democratic politician Harold Ford back in 2006.

When they arrived to the meeting, both Hobson and Ford, who were dressed in full business attire, were ushered through a series of corridors by the company receptionist and then asked where their “uniforms” were.

Speaking at a recent TED Talks conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, the 45-year-old wife of film director George Lucas said she was initially shocked at being mistaken for kitchen staff, but had to admit that overall, she was not surprised.

"In many ways the moment caught me off guard," she said in the 14-minute video, "but deep, deep down inside, I actually wasn't surprised."

“I wasn’t surprised because of something my mother taught me, she was ruthlessly realistic…at the age of seven she looked me in the eyes and told me ‘they will not always treat you well.”

Hobson continued to explain that talking about race in America is conversational the equivalent of being electrocuted.

“Race is one of those topics in America that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable. You bring it up at a dinner party or work place environment and it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail, there is shock and then a long silence.”

Asking people not to be colour blind, but colour brave, Hobson says diversity in her companies make them one of the most valuable and productive in the world.

she also asked the audience to observe their environment “purposefully and intentionally” in order to learn something new, the business woman went on to joke about her interracial marriage with the Star Wars creator.

“Like my husband, who happens to be white, you might learn that black people, men, women, children, we use body lotion every single day.”

Original Source

Illustration by Bernard Krigstein and color by Marie Severin for the story “Master Race” in “Impact” #1. Scanned from a house ad in “Mad” #21, 1955.

coolchicksfromhistory:

Nakano Takeko

Art by Andy Purviance (tumblr)

Nakano Takeko was a trained warrior who led a battalion of female troops at the Battle of Aizu during the Boshin War.  Takeko killed five or six men with her naginata (Japanese polearm) before she was shot dead by Imperial forces.  Afraid that Takeko’s head would be taken as a trophy by the Imperials, her sister removed Takeko’s head and buried under a tree at Hōkai-ji Temple, a temple dedicated to the souls of samurais.

Today a statue of Takeko marks her final resting place at Hōkai-ji Temple.

Phil Robertson, the Duck Dynasty bigot guy, is addressing the Republican Leadership Conference today, according to Right Wing Watch. But that's pretty much the only constituency that's listening to the Robertsons at this point, because the Robertsons can't speak without dropping crazy shit like this:

Phil’s son Alan Robertson, who at last week’s FRC “Watchmen on the Wall” conference hailed his father as a “21st century prophet” akin to John the Baptist, appeared on American Family Radio last week to claim that his family is in a fight against Satan for influence in the media and culture.

...

After suggesting that God “raised up” his family to combat purported anti-Christian persecution and promote conservative Christians in Hollywood, he said that the Robertson clan is “part of that process of hopefully taking back some territory that Satan has had for far too long.”

Wow. Wow. Wow. I know you have to have a Messiah complex to star in a reality show, but this seems a little extreme even by TV standards.

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shroom vs. gecko - Monster Puroresu aka Monster Pro Wrestling 

(PC Engine - Lenar - 1991) 

lalondes:

It’s been 49 days since the Connecticut Department of Children and Families imprisoned a sixteen-year-old trans girl of colour without a charge or conviction. She remains in solitary confinement in an adult prison indefinitely. The case is only beginning to receive mainstream national coverage in publications like the Advocate, Salon, and CNN, but more awareness and public outcry is desperately needed in order to free Jane.

To learn more, and stay updated about rallies and demonstrations in support of Jane, follow Justice for Jane on Twitter.

To send Jane personal letters of support, email aaronromano@attorneyaaronromano.com.

Also, sign the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project’s petition in support of Jane.

deducecanoe:

republicanidiots:

booooomstrawberries:

Ayn Rand is disgusting.

 Basically the Republican platform right here.

Ugh. Seriously.

NEW PRODUCTS – Adafruit Micro Lipo w/MicroUSB Jack – USB LiIon/LiPoly charger / Adafruit Mini Lipo w/Mini-B USB Jack – USB LiIon/LiPoly charger

Oh so handy, these little lipo chargers are so small and easy to use you can keep them on your desk or mount them easily into any project! Simply plug one in via any MicroUSB or Mini-B (respectively), cable into a USB port and a 3.7V/4.2V lithium polymer or lithium ion rechargeable battery into the JST plug on the other end. There are two LEDs – one red and one green. While charging, the red LED is lit. When the battery is fully charged and ready for use, the green LED turns on. Seriously, it could not get more easy.



Charging is performed in three stages: first a preconditioning charge, then a constant-current fast charge and finally a constant-voltage trickle charge to keep the battery topped-up. The charge current is 100mA by default, so it will work with any size battery and USB port. If you want you can easily change it over to 500mA mode by soldering closed the jumper on the front, for when you’ll only be charging batteries with 500mAh size or larger.

For use with Adafruit LiPoly/LiIon batteries only! Other batteries may have different voltage, chemistry, polarity or pinout.

• Comes assembled and tested with a free bonus JST cable!
• 5V input via Micro-B USB or Mini-B USB connector
• For charging single Lithium Ion/Lithium Polymer 3.7/4.2v batteries (not for older 3.6/4.1v cells)
• 100mA charge current, adjustable to 500mA by soldering a jumper closed

Batteries not included.

Adafruit Micro Lipo w/MicroUSB Jack – USB LiIon/LiPoly charger / Adafruit Mini Lipo w/Mini-B USB Jack – USB LiIon/LiPoly charger

Both in stock and shipping now!

lifeislikeabadrpg:

When you call someone out, you aren’t doing it with unmitigated glee. You do it because you or other people have been hurt, and because you believed and were proven wrong that the person being called out would not succumb to their grosser nature. These things are not celebrated because calling out is pointing to a tragedy, however personal, however small.

But if you do your calling out with smiles and glee, you are doing it not because people are getting hurt but for your own satisfaction. You care nothing about the principles behind calling out. And that is sad.

Dong Minghao.

Intensely colored oil paintings by newcomer Dong Minghao who is based out of Paris.

Dong Minghao: Tumblr

June is going to be a massive month for us. Not only is RPG Maker being featured in a Humble Bundle, but June is also National Game Development Month. To celebrate, we here at RPG Maker, in partnership with Humble Bundle, are holding an Indie Game Maker Contest for the entire month! Here's the best part: there's no restriction on genre or engine! Games will be separated into two categories (RPG and non-RPG) and judged for their presentation, gameplay, and fun factor. Feel free to use any engine you want and make any kind of game you desire (as long as you follow the rules, of course). The games must be complete, though, so be sure to budget your time carefully! We do recommend keeping the play time to under one hour, as the judges will typically stop playing at that point. This is your chance to have a blast and create that short, creative game you always dreamed of and win a huge prize! If you're an aspiring commercial indie developer, this could be a golden opportunity to put your name on the map!

"Let’s face it, anybody who does not believe that gay marriage is going to be the law of the land just hasn’t been observing what’s going on. There is a question whether [the courts] should be able to tell the states what they can or cannot do with something as important as marriage, but the trend right now in the courts is to permit gay marriage and anybody who doesn’t admit that just isn’t living in the real world. We have an excellent federal bench [in Utah]. Other federal judges down there might not have arrived at the same conclusion that these two have. But I think it’s a portent of the future that sooner or later gay marriage is probably going to be approved by the Supreme Court of the United States, certainly as the people in this country move towards it, especially young people. I don’t think that’s the right way to go; on the other hand, I do accept whatever the courts say." - Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), speaking on Utah radio.

RELATED: The Salt Lake Tribune points out that Hatch "played a key role" in the appointment of the judge who overturned Utah's ban on same-sex marriage. They also note that his website continues to back a federal ban.

Last week, I plucked an article from our submission inbox. It was about getting stuck in the “friendzone,” and likened women not wanting to date men to both the Holocaust and terrorism.

It was obviously ridiculous—a terrible article terribly suited to our magazine. I told the author it was sexist, made a joke about it on the ALA Slack channel, and moved on with my life.

We’re A List Apart, after all. We published “Responsive Web Design.” “The Discipline of Content Strategy.” “A Dao of Web Design.” We’re here to help you make better websites and digital products, not get bent out of shape about every stupid example of sexism we see.

And yet. Someone thought that was right for us.

I woke up Saturday morning to news of tragedy, and watched as that tragedy turned into #yesallwomen, a Twitter conversation about sexism and violence against women so large, so powerful, that most of the women I know contributed to it.

The women I know, by and large, work in tech. They’re your designer, your developer, your content strategist, your user researcher. They’re our authors. And more often than any of us wants to believe, they’re getting groped at tech meetups. They’re receiving death and rape threats for speaking at a conference. Their bodies are being made the targets of office jokes.

They’re being talked down to, fired, catcalled, harassed, abused, and raped—and blamed for it, too.

But of course, that’s not our subject matter. A List Apart is about publishing the Next Big Thing in design. It’s about shaping standards. It’s about the business of building websites.

And yet. When I look at those articles that most influenced my career (and probably many of yours), I see our mission, clear as day: to encourage a more thoughtful, curious, and engaged web industry—one that pushes past easy answers and encourages ongoing growth and learning.

Technical skills—and by that I mean everything from JavaScript to typography to taxonomy—will take us part of the way there, but they’re not enough anymore. Not now, not when we’re facing the big, messy problems that come with designing for an increasingly web-connected world.

We need as many brains and hearts as possible to solve these problems. And if we do not make this a welcoming place for people of all kinds of backgrounds—women, as #yesallwomen clearly shows, but also people of color and younger people and older people and people who don’t speak English as a first language and people with disabilities and even people who don’t think gifs are funny—then we, as an industry, will miss out. We’ll miss out on talent, on perspective, on ideas.

So we, the staff of A List Apart, are putting a stake in the ground: we will be part of this conversation, too. Sexism and discrimination and diversity are not fringe issues—not problems that should be relegated only to niche sites or individuals’ blogs. They’re mainstream issues that have found far too comfortable a home in our industry. An industry we’ve worked too damn hard to grow, guide, and collaborate with to watch it falter and flail now.

We’re not going to stop publishing articles about CSS Shapes or Sass mixins, not for a second. But as we do, we’re also going to be thinking about our responsibility to this community. And that means a few things:

• We expect the people we publish to be respectful to their community, and we will not publish those we see doing otherwise.
• We will be vigilant about the voices we choose to amplify, and those we do not.
• We will actively, purposefully seek out diverse contributors.
• We’ll be spending more time talking about sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination, even if it makes some readers uncomfortable.

Most of all, we’re here, and we’re on the record: the web industry has a diversity problem. It’s got a misogyny problem. It’s standing in the way of the web we want, and we are all—every one of us—responsible for changing that.

This week's best all-ages shows. by Morgan Troper WED MAY 28

Black Flag w/Cinema Cinema, the Loss, Clackamas Baby Killers; Hawthorne Theatre, 1507 SE César E. Chávez
Founding guitarist Greg Ginn—AKA the George Lucas of Punk—and classic-era singer Ron Reyes controversially resuscitated the Black Flag band/brand last year, and the results so far haven't exactly been stellar. Actually, they've been movingly underwhelming: Band manager Mike Vallely replaced Reyes last November, effectively making this a reunion in nothing more than name—a name which Ginn is notoriously proprietary of, having taken pretty much all of his ex-bandmates to court at one point or another for alleged trademark infringement. Furthermore, the group's latest record, What the..., occasionally sounds like a Weird Al parody of hardcore. Still, the enormous ego and totally un-punk obsession with legal semantics aside, Ginn is a living legend, and Black Flag is probably the best Black Flag tribute band you'll ever see.

Monnone Alone w/Andrew Kaffer; Red and Black Café, 400 SE 12th
The Lucksmiths' Mark Monnone's solo project is gorgeous power pop from Australia. Monnone Alone's latest LP, Together at Last, is a heavenly synthesis of the Smiths, Jens Lekman, and the Lemonheads.

THURS MAY 29 & FRI MAY 30

The Decemberists w/Laura Veirs (Thurs), Sallie Ford (Fri); Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside
Portland's favorite folk-pop bards the Decemberists play two consecutive nights at the Crystal—Thursday with Laura Veirs and Friday with Sallie Ford—to benefit Victory Academy, a school for children with autism. The group will play its landmark record Castaways and Cutouts in its entirety.

TUES JUNE 3

Bane w/Turnstile, Take Offense, Young Turks; Alhambra Theatre, 4811 SE Hawthorne
Bane is a frighteningly earnest straightedge hardcore band from Worcester, Massachusetts, who just recently released its first album in nearly a decade, the cheekily titled Don't Wait Up. The band has also announced that Don't Wait Up will be their last record, although they purportedly intend to keep touring.

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Seth MacFarlane’s sloggy comic oater, A Million Ways To Die In The West, never wastes a good joke by telling it only once. Two is the minimum; four is better. MacFarlane’s “stoned nerd” shtick can be funny in single doses, but around the movie’s halfway point, it becomes clear that he and his Ted and Family Guy co-writers, Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild, have brought only 30 minutes of material to a two-hour movie. To make up, A Million Ways continually extrapolates on a small set of jokes: the use of cocaine as an ingredient in medicine (two instances); extended, Family Guy-style non-parodies (Back To The Future Part III, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, and Django Unchained); Old West people getting stoned (two instances, plus a drug-trip sequence); the fact that nobody smiles in early photos (four instances); a shooting gallery with “runaway slave” targets ...

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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BP Plc on Wednesday asked Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to allow the company to avoid making payments to businesses demanding compensation for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill while litigation continues. The company acted after the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted an injunction earlier in the day that had prevented payments being made. Last week, the court had decided not to revisit a decision rejecting BP's bid to block payments to businesses that could not trace their economic losses to the disaster. Scalia, who has responsibility for emergency applications arising from the 5th Circuit, can either act on BP's request himself or refer the matter to the nine-member court as a whole. There is no specific deadline by which the court must act.

By cutting off federal funding for research and stymieing data collection and sharing, the National Rifle Association has tried to do to the study of gun violence what climate deniers have done to the science of global warming. No wonder: When it comes to hard numbers, some of the gun lobby's favorite arguments are full of holes.

Myth #1: They're coming for your guns.
Fact-check: No one knows the exact number of guns in America, but it's clear there's no practical way to round them all up (never mind that no one in Washington is proposing this). Yet if you fantasize about rifle-toting citizens facing down the government, you'll rest easy knowing that America's roughly 80 million gun owners already have the feds and cops outgunned by a factor of around 79 to 1.

Sources: Congressional Research Service (PDF), Small Arms Survey

Myth #2: Guns don't kill people—people kill people.
Fact-check: People with more guns tend to kill more people—with guns. The states with the highest gun ownership rates have a gun murder rate 114% higher than those with the lowest gun ownership rates. Also, gun death rates tend to be higher in states with higher rates of gun ownership. Gun death rates are generally lower in states with restrictions such as assault-weapons bans or safe-storage requirements. Update: A recent study looking at 30 years of homicide data in all 50 states found that for every one percent increase in a state's gun ownership rate, there is a nearly one percent increase in its firearm homicide rate.

Sources: Pediatrics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Myth #3: An armed society is a polite society.
Fact-check: Drivers who carry guns are 44% more likely than unarmed drivers to make obscene gestures at other motorists, and 77% more likely to follow them aggressively.
• Among Texans convicted of serious crimes, those with concealed-handgun licenses were sentenced for threatening someone with a firearm 4.8 times more than those without.
• In states with Stand Your Ground and other laws making it easier to shoot in self-defense, those policies have been linked to a 7 to 10% increase in homicides.

Myth #4: More good guys with guns can stop rampaging bad guys.
Fact-check: Mass shootings stopped by armed civilians in the past 30 years: 0
• Chances that a shooting at an ER involves guns taken from guards: 1 in 5

Myth #5: Keeping a gun at home makes you safer.
Fact-check: Owning a gun has been linked to higher risks of homicide, suicide, and accidental death by gun.
• For every time a gun is used in self-defense in the home, there are 7 assaults or murders, 11 suicide attempts, and 4 accidents involving guns in or around a home.
• 43% of homes with guns and kids have at least one unlocked firearm.
• In one experiment, one third of 8-to-12-year-old boys who found a handgun pulled the trigger.

Myth #6: Carrying a gun for self-defense makes you safer.
Fact-check: In 2011, nearly 10 times more people were shot and killed in arguments than by civilians trying to stop a crime.
• In one survey, nearly 1% of Americans reported using guns to defend themselves or their property. However, a closer look at their claims found that more than 50% involved using guns in an aggressive manner, such as escalating an argument.
• A Philadelphia study found that the odds of an assault victim being shot were 4.5 times greater if he carried a gun. His odds of being killed were 4.2 times greater.

Myth #7: Guns make women safer.
Fact-check: In 2010, nearly 6 times more women were shot by husbands, boyfriends, and ex-partners than murdered by male strangers.
• A woman's chances of being killed by her abuser increase more than 7 times if he has access to a gun.
• One study found that women in states with higher gun ownership rates were 4.9 times more likely to be murdered by a gun than women in states with lower gun ownership rates.

Myth #8: "Vicious, violent video games" deserve more blame than guns.
Fact-check: So said NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre after Newtown. So what's up with Japan?

Sources: PricewaterhouseCoopers, Small Arms Survey (PDF), UN Office on Drugs and Crime

Myth #9: More and more Americans are becoming gun owners.
Fact-check: More guns are being sold, but they're owned by a shrinking portion of the population.
• About 50% of Americans said they had a gun in their homes in 1973. Today, about 45% say they do. Overall, 35% of Americans personally own a gun.
• Around 80% of gun owners are men. On average they own 7.9 guns each.

Myth #10: We don't need more gun laws—we just need to enforce the ones we have.
Fact-check: Weak laws and loopholes backed by the gun lobby make it easier to get guns illegally.
• Around 40% of all legal gun sales involve private sellers and don't require background checks. 40% of prison inmates who used guns in their crimes got them this way.
• An investigation found 62% of online gun sellers were willing to sell to buyers who said they couldn't pass a background check.
• 20% of licensed California gun dealers agreed to sell handguns to researchers posing as illegal "straw" buyers.
• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has not had a permanent director for 6 years, due to an NRA-backed requirement that the Senate approve nominees.

Original Source

This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, DC.

As Comcast Corp. tries to convince the federal government to permit it to buy Time Warner Cable Inc. for $45 billion, opponents of the deal will inevitably bring up people like Ed.

Every morning at 8:15, Ed climbs into his red, 1999 Mazda sedan and drives 15 miles down Main Street in Scranton, Pa.  He passes mom-and-pop sandwich shops, a shuttered elementary school and a computerized shooting gallery for archery on his way to a friend’s 86-year-old house where coal miners once lived — and where there’s an Internet connection.

Ed, who comes here because he can’t afford the parking fees at a library six miles away, first reads his email and then turns his attention to job sites such as snapjobsearch, glassdoor, Monster and Craigslist. He’s been following this routine for nearly four years, looking for an opening in the hotel or restaurant business where he’s got some experience, but he has yet to land a job. Without the Internet connection, he’d have no hope.

“You can’t walk into a Wal-Mart without filling out an application online first,” said Ed, who doesn’t want to use his last name because he fears employers may avoid hiring him. “The Internet today is like electricity. If you don’t have it, you’re screwed.”

Ed wouldn’t have to rely on the goodwill of friends and make the daily 30-mile round trip if Comcast, the only fast, wired broadband provider in the Scranton area, offered its low-priced Internet service to people like him. But the $9.95-a-month program, called Internet Essentials, is available only to low-income families with school-age children.

Business investigations in your inbox: Sign up for the Center for Public Integrity’s Watchdog email

Not for everyone

Ed, 53-years-old and single, isn’t eligible, even though he’s living on $169 a month in food stamps and the generosity of family and friends.

Comcast offered Internet Essentials shortly before its last big acquisition, when it bought NBC Universal in 2011. To ease federal approvals of the transaction, the company promised that it would offer low-priced Internet connections and computers to low-income families. But the Federal Communications Commission, which approved the merger, didn’t set any participation requirements, or metrics to define success.

Now the cable and broadband giant, wants to buy Time Warner Cable, and again in an attempt to show regulators the deal is in the public interest, is offering to extend the program indefinitely and offer it to all Time Warner’s customers too. The deal, if approved, will give Comcast control of about 40 percent of U.S. Internet users.

The program makes for good public relations, but its real impact on the persistent problem of low-broadband adoption rates among the poor is negligible and is a weak substitute for a national strategy, advocates say.

Of the 7.2 million low-income people in Comcast’s service area, only 2.6 million are eligible for Internet Essentials, according to data compiled by the Center for Public Integrity. The program requires the participant’s household to include a child who is eligible for the federal school lunch program. Of that 2.6 million, only 300,000, or 12 percent, have signed up since Internet Essentials was launched in 2011.

Note: the map below may not work properly on mobile browsers.

The low participation rate suggests that relying on merger conditions to make private companies provide what has become an essential tool to participate in society may not be the best approach to bridge the digital divide.

“If Comcast offered me Internet for $10 a month, I could afford that. I’d have to,” Ed said. “Having Internet in your home is an absolute necessity.”

President Barack Obama agrees. In his 2011 State of the Union Address, Obama pledged to ensure high-speed wireless would be available to 98 percent of Americans. “It’s about connecting every part of America to the digital age,” he said.

But the government doesn’t own the broadband infrastructure, and the task of closing the digital divide has been outsourced to companies such as Comcast while the work of signing people up is left to underfunded and overwhelmed community groups such as PTAs, church groups and school systems in poor areas. And the program excludes a huge part of those on the wrong side of the digital divide — people like Ed.

Comcast will use the goodwill of Internet Essentials in tandem with its lobbying prowess to make the case that it should be allowed to buy Time Warner. The nation’s largest cable company spent $18.8 million lobbying Congress and federal agencies last year, the seventh-most of any corporation, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The company’s political action committee has raised $2.6 million so far this election cycle. It raised $3.8 million in the 2012 election cycle, the center reported.

David Cohen is Comcast’s executive vice president. He was the force behind the creation of Internet Essentials and is in charge of steering the Time Warner Cable deal through regulatory approvals and political opposition. He calls the 12 percent participation rate “very strong.”

Not all agree.

“As well intentioned and effective as Internet Essentials seems to be, I’d predict sometime in the future local, state and federal governments will realize that government intervention is needed,” said Blair Levin, who oversaw the FCC’s National Broadband Plan 2010, which laid out a road map for providing universal Internet access and reducing the digital divide.

Still divided

Closing the digital divide — the gap between those who have Internet access and those who don’t — has been a priority at the FCC for years. The Internet has become a necessity for individuals to fully participate and function in society, as banking, shopping, education, health care, government services, job searches and socializing have all moved online.

In 2010, the FCC released its National Broadband Plan in hopes of getting more Americans online. It cited a government report showing adoption rates were 35 percent for people earning between $15,000 and $25,000 per year versus 79 percent for those earning between $75,000 and $100,000 per year.

The young were more connected than the elderly (81 percent for 18 to 24 year olds compared with 46 percent for 55 year olds and older). And more whites had Internet service (66 percent) than African Americans (46 percent) and Hispanics (40 percent).

“Absent action, broadband adoption rates will continue to be uneven,” the plan warned.

And progress has been discouraging, according to another report.

In 2013, 52 percent of adults earning less than $30,000 a year had an in-home connection compared with 91 percent of those making $75,000 or more, according to the latest survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project

The gap between haves and have-nots was only 4 percentage points less than it was in 2009, according to Pew, despite the federal government spending $7.2 billion in 2009 economic stimulus money to build out broadband infrastructure, to pay community groups to teach computer skills to low-income families, and to encourage companies to offer discounted Internet access and computers.

Since 2011, the FCC has spent $438 million in its Connect America Fund to better support broadband. The agency created the fund when it reformed its $8.3 billion Universal Service Fund, a program that provides telephone service in areas that are costly to reach. Included in the reforms was changing the $1.8 billion Lifeline program to cover paying for Internet connections.

Other efforts included directing $300 million to expanding advanced mobile wireless service in rural America and $50 million to improving broadband on tribal lands. The commission also has spent $2.2 billion on connecting schools and libraries with high-speed Internet service.

Asked if the FCC has specific metrics for reducing the digital divide and if its strategy is working, a spokesperson replied in an email, “The FCC is charged with ensuring broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.”

States also have created their own programs. Connected Nation, a nonprofit group which includes 13 states, relies on the good intentions of Internet-service companies to convince them to offer lower prices to poorer Americans.

Internet Essentials serves as the iconic program for many of these efforts, but it’s not working, said Susan Crawford, a communications law professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

“So far, the take-up of the program has been surprisingly low, indicating they are not appreciably closing the gap,” she said.

More stories in the Broadband investigation from the Center for Public Integrity

The poor as bargaining chip

No other low-cost broadband program has received as much attention as Internet Essentials, which Comcast’s Cohen boasts is the largest effort to connect low-income families in the nation. Its high profile is the direct result of Cohen linking it to federal approval of two huge corporate purchases.

In 2010, Comcast said it would offer Internet Essentials for three years to help convince the FCC to approve the company’s $30 billion purchase of a controlling interest in NBCUniversal.

Cohen told the Washington Post in a 2012 article that he had conceived of Internet Essentials long before the Comcast-NBC Universal deal but that he “held back” launching the program until it came in handy.

The NBCUniversal purchase presented an opportune time because the program would be “the type of voluntary commitment that would be attractive to the chairman” of the FCC, which would be examining the deal for how it promoted the public interest, according to the article.

Internet policymakers, advocacy groups and even former FCC officials were surprised by Cohen’s remarks.

“Magicians don’t usually reveal their tricks,” one former FCC official said.

The FCC approved the deal in January 2011 and praised Internet Essentials as a socially responsible move by Comcast to close the digital divide.

“I want to take this opportunity to applaud Comcast for their work,” said Julius Genachowski, then FCC chairman, at an event where Comcast unveiled Internet Essentials in September 2011.

Internet Essentials is now back on the negotiating table. In March, less than a month after unveiling its deal for Time Warner Cable, Cohen again made the program part of the bargain, announcing to reporters in a conference call that Comcast would extend it “indefinitely” and offer it to eligible households in Time Warner Cable’s service areas.

Cohen said he has yet to determine how many Time Warner Cable customers would be eligible if the buyout is approved.

A total of 4.6 million households in the company’s service area earn less than the amount that would qualify them for the federal government’s free and reduced-price lunch program. But that number also includes childless couples, individuals living alone and seniors, who would not qualify for Internet Essentials, according to research by the Center for Public Integrity.

If the demographics in Time Warner’s service area are similar to those in Comcast’s current footprint, then about 1.7 million would-be customers would qualify for Internet Essentials after the merger, leaving 2.9 million low-income individuals and childless couples without a chance to sign up for the discounted service.

Using a low-priced Internet package to push through a merger or meet other corporate goals is not a good way to serve the public interest, said Seeta Peña Gangadharan,  a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute.

“When we have corporate programs such as Internet Essentials, there is a fear that the values that drive the program are tied more to a profit motive and expanding markets, rather than public stewardship and social responsibility,” Gangadharan said. “This was not first developed for digital inclusion; the program was attached to the merger conditions.”

Despite his comments in the Post, Cohen insists Internet Essentials was not created for the purpose of getting mergers approved. He dismisses such views as “conspiracy theories” and said his 2012 comment to the newspaper was “taken completely out of context.”

The idea for Internet Essentials was developed years before during his work on a committee advising the FCC on its National Broadband Plan and wasn’t ready to be launched, Cohen said.

“The timing to pursue the program had nothing to do with it,” Cohen said, his voice rising. “That’s got to be the most absurd thing we have ever heard.”

The fine print

In addition to having a child eligible for the national school lunch program, applicants must not owe Comcast any unpaid bills, possess any unreturned equipment, or be current customers.

The current customer restriction is what keeps Audra Traynham out of the program. Traynham lives in West Philadelphia, where 42 percent of the residents are under the poverty level. Residents of the area have a clear view of Comcast’s 58-story headquarters in the city center. It’s where Traynham, 47, is raising her 5-year-old granddaughter, C’Niyah Lee, on a $17-an-hour job as a janitor.

Traynham sits on a couch in her narrow living room. A small desk near a TV is piled high with her granddaughter’s school work and other papers. Traynham said she spends $164 a month on a bundled contract with Comcast, which includes cable and $20 for Internet service.

Traynham said she struggles to pay the bill every month, but she needs it to provide C’Niyah with access to educational programs, entertainment and a connection to school to communicate with teachers, check assignments and follow C’Niyah’s progress. Traynham also pays most of her bills online and uses email and Facebook to keep in touch with family.

“Our Internet is very important to us,” Traynham said. “I really don’t know what I would do without having the Internet.”

Traynham learned about Internet Essentials when C’Niyah brought a letter home from Universal Daroff Charter School, where C’Niyah attends kindergarten. She said the program would cut her Internet bill in half, a savings that would make it easier to pay each month and cover other expenses and “do some things that we can’t really do now,” she said.

Traynham called Comcast to enroll, but she was told she would have to disconnect her service for two months before signing up.

“I said, ‘Miss, what am I going to do for two months without Internet?’” Traynham said. “She told me those are the policies, and I said, ‘Miss, I just cannot live without my Internet for two months.’ So I didn’t get it.”

Comcast officials said the company limits Internet Essentials to non-Comcast subscribers because the program is aimed at decreasing the digital divide, not lowering current customers’ bills.

Unpaid bills were the issue in Chattanooga, Tenn., said Dwight Hunter, president of the PTA in Hamilton County, which includes the city.

When Internet Essentials was launched in 2011, Hunter said the Hamilton County PTA “made a big push” to promote it in newsletters and social media. But despite more than 24 percent of Chattanooga residents living below the poverty line, the program “never really took off” and it eventually died, Hunter said.

“A big problem that tripped up a lot of people was they had a previous balance owed. That prevented a lot of people from doing the program. I’m not sure if anybody signed up,” he said.

Houston school districts had similar problems. In the city’s Alief school district, where 82 percent of the nearly 46,000 students qualify for the school lunch program — one of the highest rates in all of Houston — Internet Essentials is almost non-existent. When contacted for this article, Craig Eichhorn, communications specialist for the district, said he never heard of the program.

After checking into the status of Internet Essentials, Eichhorn said in an email, “The district is not actively working with the Internet Essentials program. There were some flyers passed out a few years back but nothing recently and no active promotions.”

Even in Chicago, which Comcast held up in March as one of 15 cities where Internet Essentials has been the most successful, the superintendent of District 201, which is south of the city and includes schools where 75 percent of the students come from economically disadvantaged families, said the program’s progress was disappointing.

“I am dismayed to find that only one out of every four qualified families in our area has taken advantage of this program,” Superintendent Michael Kuzniewski wrote in his blog.

The mistake

Using mergers to narrow the digital divide has been part of the FCC’s approach to increase broadband adoption. The agency required CenturyLink Inc. and Qwest Communications International Inc. in their 2011 merger approval to offer a program similar to Internet Essentials for five years.

But so far the agreements haven’t worked.

“Requiring Internet Essentials and programs like it as a condition for merger is silly,” said Levin, the architect of the National Broadband Plan and a fellow at the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program.

Levin said “the mistake” he and the FCC made in developing a policy to connect more low-income individuals to the Internet was to focus on ensuring a broadband infrastructure was widely available, rather than  on creating the conditions that would encourage the adoption of it by those who don’t have service.

Most of the government spending on broadband has been targeted at wiring schools and libraries with high-speed Internet service. Under a program Obama announced last year, the FCC will increase its spending on educational broadband by $1 billion, nearly doubling to $2.2 billion.

And the FCC program transitioning subsidized telephone service to the poor to Internet broadband is just moving too slowly, Levin said.

The efforts are worthwhile, but poorer Americans need Internet connections in their homes to fully take advantage of what’s online. Schools and libraries close, forcing students to hang out at a McDonalds to connect to WiFi so they can complete their homework. And if you’re not a student, a high-speed Internet connection in a school doesn’t help.

While schools and libraries help, not having a home connection “will mean a person will have difficulty participating in a productive way with the economy and civic society,” Levin said in an email.

Cities such as Chattanooga, Wilson, N.C., and Glenwood Springs, Colo., have built their own networks to bring high-speed Internet service to their residents. But the giant telecommunications companies, including Comcast and AT&T Inc., have since persuaded 20 states to pass laws restricting or outright banning municipalities from building public networks, even as they don’t provide programs for low-cost connections to all of a cities’ poor residents.

Levin suggested the FCC could allow broadband providers to bid on providing Internet service to low-income neighborhoods, with the business going to the lowest bidder. He also recommends the government pay a portion of qualifying users’ Internet bills if they prove they go online to search for jobs, view educational programs,  apply for government services or other socially beneficial activities.

Expanding computer and Internet training programs by community groups would also help convince elderly people and others who don’t use the Internet of its value and shrink the divide, Levin said.

The Media Mobilizing Project, a community organizer and support group for low-income families in Philadelphia, works to publicize local and state policies that harm low-income residents.

“I’m not saying Comcast is a bad guy, but how do we transform Internet Essentials to let everyone, even if they owe money to Comcast, or have unreturned equipment, or aren’t part of the school lunch program and are 45 years old and out of a job, to get connected so they can change their lives?” asked Hannah Sassaman, policy director at the project and a frequent critic of Comcast. “One thing we’ve learned, broadband adoption is not accomplished through public relations ploys. It’s accomplished through working with people every day, in their day-to-day lives, to show they can get online for reasons they think are important.”

That also means including seniors, said Tom Kamber, executive director of the Older Adults Technology Services, a nonprofit group in New York City that offers digital training courses for seniors, whose broadband adoption rate languishes at 41 percent, “which is a catastrophe,” Kamber said.

“Once they get online to find out they can socialize and save money, they don’t want to give it up,” Kamber said. “It’s a health benefit by keeping them from becoming isolated.”

Kamber added, “I genuinely believe Comcast is going to take the next step to do something. Internet Essentials is extremely promising, but I would like to see more and I know they can do more.”

Kamber may be waiting for a while. For now, Cohen said, Comcast will keep Internet Essentials as is.

“There is always more that we can do,” Cohen acknowledged. “But we don’t want to lose the focus on the population who we started with.”

As it stands, the FCC is reviewing whether a Comcast takeover of Time Warner is in the public interest. If greater Internet adoption for a wider range of people, like Ed, becomes a condition, Internet Essentials may be in for a few changes.

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