08:56 – Barbara continues her recovery. She’s doing very well according to the physical therapist, but she’s frustrated because she’s not yet back to her normal abilities and forced to sit around much of the time. At least I have kit stuff for her to work on.
I see that the FCC is moving toward enforcing net neutrality, which is a good thing. Foxnews is screaming about new “burdensome regulations”, but then Foxnews always favors the interests of big corporations against the people. Just to be clear here, this isn’t about free enterprise and capitalism. Broadband providers in most of the country operate under government-granted monopolies or duopolies, so it’s only reasonable that the government enforce regulations to control their pricing and behavior. Treating broadband providers as common carriers like the phone company is perfectly reasonable.
The morning paper reports that the Triad region is now at “full employment”, which is completely bogus. As usual, the official unemployment figures exclude anyone who’s given up looking for work and completely ignore the quality of the jobs in question. A Ph.D. engineer who’s serving coffee at Starbucks part-time is counted the same as a Ph.D. engineer working full-time as an engineer at $150,000 per year. What actually matters isn’t the unemployment rate; it’s the full-time non-government employment rate, which is now at historic lows. Working part-time shouldn’t count, and “working” for the government certainly shouldn’t.