SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Crimes against language, annoying words and how not to be #blessed.

Welcome to another mind-expanding installment of SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS, a regular Wednesday feature at NA Confidential.

Around this time each week, wails of self-flagellation and angst begin seeping out of the bunker's down-low ventilation ducts.

Why all these newfangled words?

Why not the old, familiar, comforting words, the ones that sufficed back during the glory days, long before inexplicably naked greed kicked in like a bond-issue-percentage speedball, knocking you back into the turnbuckles but feeling oh so fine, and now, as the Great Elongated and Exasperated Obfuscator of comic book series fame (can Disney World be far behind?) you teach detailed principles of banking to bankers, at least when not otherwise occupied making healthy deposits into your own account?

Thankfully, even if one toils for the Bright Sun of the 21st Century, a healthy vocabulary isn't about intimidation through erudition. 

No, not at all. Rather, it's about selecting the right word and using it correctly, whatever one's pay grade or station in life.

Even municipal corporate attorneys reaping handsome remuneration to suppress information, squelch community dialogue and flee the council chamber before being forced to endure dissenting words uttered by grubby martini-swilling constituents, can benefit from this enlightening expansion of personal horizons, and really, as we contemplate TIFs, CPIs, IUDs and IOUs, all we really have is time -- and the opportunity to learn something, if we're so inclined.

This week, crimes against language -- and no, I'm not speaking about the New Albany City Hall web page.

Totes annoying: words that should be banned, by Justin Myers (The Guardian)

The internet is the source of many crimes against language – and these are among the worst offenders

We all have a watershed word – the word that tells us it’s all over, that the internet has won, and our youth is gone for ever. For me, it was Yolo, or You Only Live Once. It was born, I used it, and rooms fell eerily silent as soon as it left my mouth. Yolo belonged to the others, the younger people; it carbon-dated me and I was envious.

You might call it snobbery but, for me, every delicious new bit of slang reminds me I’m being left behind, along with VHS cassettes, legwarmers and Lady Gaga. Susie Dent, Countdown’s resident lexicographer, tells me I should lighten up. “Slang has always moved this way,” she says. “From Cockney rhyming slang to codes swapped among highwaymen, they’re tribal badges of identity, bonding mechanisms designed to distinguish the initiated, and to keep strangers out.” The linguist and author David Crystal agrees: “Remember the old maxim – the chief use of slang is to show you’re one of the gang.”

Fine: I’m not one of the gang. But surely even the experts would admit there are some words that urgently need to be retired, or at least restricted to people under 25? “If a term becomes too popular, its irritant value is ramped up,” Dent agrees. “The impulse is then to replace it with something else.”

This, then, is my highly subjective glossary of words that should be binned in 2017 – the most annoying, the most misused, the most broken. Is one of these your “Yolo”? It’s a hotly contested field.

"How a failed attempt to get porn off the internet protects Airbnb from the law."

The crux of the Airbnb matter?

It's Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, "a much-maligned law that was decried by free speech advocates, dismissed as a 'departing Senator’s half-baked notions' by the New York Times editorial board, and swiftly struck down by the Supreme Court."

How a failed attempt to get porn off the internet protects Airbnb from the law, by Julia Carrie Wong (The Guardian)

Airbnb, like pornography, is a business based on selling a fantasy. Porn offers the simulacrum of a sexual encounter; Airbnb, that of being “a local” in a city not one’s own. There’s less fuss, less muss, and a much reduced chance of STDs and irritated neighbors.

At least, there’s less fuss for the visitors. Cities around the world, however, are waking up to the headache of hosting transient populations in previously residential neighborhoods, and attempting to crack down.

But while local politicians in Reykjavík, Berlin, and Barcelona are taking a stand against Airbnb, their counterparts in the United States have struggled to come up with regulations that have teeth.

"To issue a City "press release" that simply quotes a monopoly service provider about "increased download speeds," without understanding the claim, allows that monopoly continued control over a vital city service."

The Green Mouse has many friends. One of them submitted this commentary after viewing yesterday's mayoral press release:

Internet Speed Increases Coming to New Albany TWC Customers

Nearly a week ago, Time Warner Cable announced that it was offering a six-fold boost in broadband speed to customers in Louisville and Jeffersonville at no cost to its customers. The City of New Albany is very pleased to announce that those same increases will be brought to customers in New Albany at no cost.

“Since as early as 2013, I have pushed for increased internet speeds, and recognize the economic impact that this infrastructure can bring to a community,” stated Mayor Gahan. “We are very happy that Time Warner Cable will be extending this speed increase to New Albany.”

Not that Gahan even once publicly acknowledged as much during the entirety of his 2015 re-election campaign.

As Frank Zappa once said, "Take it away, Bob."

---

Mayor Gahan hasn't done anything to increase internet speeds in New Albany. Time Warner Cable is "increasing internet speeds at no charge" because so many are cutting their cable TV service, opting instead to stream TWC data and video to their computers, watching downloaded movies instead of cable channels.

But the majority of New Albany residents won't see any difference in the "faster speeds". Why? Most folks in New Albany use old modems that aren't capable of using the new data stream rates.

And that's where Time Warner will clean up. In city after city, where Time Warner has rolled out the "TWC Maxx" service that Mayor Gahan mentions, they are charging up to an additional $ 100 - $ 125 per year for the newly necessary modem. That's not faster internet "at no charge."

Even though Time Warner says "there is no change in the price of Time Warner Cable Internet plans, although speeds have increased," New Albany citizens won't see an increase in their cable download speeds without the new TWC modems. Surprise!

And that's where Mayor Gahan is simply missing the overall point about the importance of internet service to the future of New Albany.

As Mayor, he could demand far greater services from the city's monopoly cable provider (Time Warner Cable) when the franchise comes up for renewal. Progressive cities have made TWC provide a host of services for free in order to keep their franchise in those cities.

Philadelphia recently negotiated with Comcast, that city's cable provider. In a series of hearings before the city council, Comcast commited to providing more funding to Philadelphia schools and taking steps to close the digital divide. This makes Philadelphia’s cable franchise a model for other communities across the nation.

The city has an "Internet Essentials" program that includes low-income seniors. Comcast has also committed to providing resources for technology education in Philadelphia schools and to ensuring basic living-wage protections for all its local employees.

Seattle negotiated its existing cable contract to include

• Discounted Internet for low-income seniors
• Increased grant money from $50,000 for one year, to $500,000 over five years, for digital equity programs to bring Internet service to more people
• Laptops for youth at risk of losing their homes

The existing negotiated contract in Seattle already included benefits that Comcast gives the city:

• 600 free Internet connections to nonprofits
• $8 million to support public, education and government channels
• Free cable to government and schools
• Discounted cable TV for low-income households
• Discounted Internet service for families with children who qualify for free or reduced lunch

Seattle's discounted Internet service is $9.95 per month for very basic speeds.

To issue a City "press release" that simply quotes a monopoly service provider about "increased download speeds" without understanding the claim allows that monopoly continued control over a vital city service. The City Council, working with Mayor Gahan could use their power to hold Time Warner's feet to the fire and make them provide more than the bare minimum, but they aren't.

The City "press release" quotes Time Warner: "We will boost Internet speeds for customers up to six times faster, dramatically improve the TV product…"

They aren't talking about helping businesses in New Albany with data streaming. They're talking about consumers of TV and movies. When Mayor Gahan says that he "recognize(s) the economic impact that this infrastructure (?) can bring to a community," he may well be worried.

Businesses large enough to fill the soon empty Pillsbury plant need reliable, high-speed upload data streams. Clark County has fiber optic internet data streaming now. Large corporations will continue to locate where they can better compete and communicate - Clark County.

This press release doesn't claim there will be a significant boost in upload speeds. TWC claims a 400% increase, but 4 MB per second boosted to 12-16 MB per second doesn't put you in the same league as Clarksville and Jeffersonville. To illustrate the point - downloading movies - a New Albany resident needs 10.5 minutes to download a movie with Time Warner but a Clarksville resident needs only 8 seconds to download the same movie using fiber optic internet.

Cable franchise renewal has been used by many cities in America to make a real difference in their residents' quality of life. New Albany's Mayor and the City Council should do the same.

Chattanooga is kicking ass with hyper speed Internet connections.

“While that’s more bandwidth than you can imagine needing now – it’s an enormous blank slate of possibility for whatever opportunities innovative thinkers can dream up next."

The preceding thought has never occurred to an entire generation of New Albany politicians, whether pertaining to Internet or any other aspect of infrastructure in this city.

A regular reader offers this link (below), and a few thoughts.

10 Gigabit per second is 2,000 times faster than the internet I'm able to obtain in my home in New Albany. The download rate provided by AT&T U-verse in my home is 5.63 megabits per second. My upload rate is a measly 0.69 megabits per second.

What's your internet service allowing you in New Albany? Check it out with this webpage: Speed Test

Why not ask your readers to send in their internet stats?

There won't be any "high-speed" gigabit internet in them there luxury apartments… will there?

My upload rate is 1.14. Feel free to quote yours in comments.

Want fast Internet? Move to Chattanooga, by Mario Trujillo (The Hill)

Chattanooga, Tenn., is rolling out Internet speeds hundreds of times faster than the federal broadband benchmark through its city-owned utility company.

The city announced Thursday that it would allow any of its residents to purchase 10 gigabit per second Internet connections for the price of $299 per month — in what is the largest rollout of those hyper speeds in the country.

The Tennessee town has offered 1 gigabit speeds for the past five years through its fiber network, which was helped along by tens of millions of dollars in federal grants.

To put the speed in context, 10 gigs is 400 times faster than the 25 megabit per second (Mbps) baseline broadband speed the Federal Communications Commission set earlier this year. Many homes, however, have speeds in single-digit Mbps.

Two other cities in North Carolina and Vermont have offered the 10 gig speeds, but to a more limited population. Chatanooga has a population of about 170,000.

Observers say the massive bandwidth is overkill for any traditional household at this point. It is unclear how many residents will take up the offer of speeds usually only needed for large businesses. The city already offers its 1 gig speeds at a fraction of the cost and has attracted about 6,300 customers, according to city officials.

“With 10,000 Mbps of Internet speed, that's enough bandwidth to stream 1,754 online movies all at the same time – in HD – from a single Internet connection without experiencing any buffering or lag time,” the city boasted. “While that’s more bandwidth than you can imagine needing now – it’s an enormous blank slate of possibility for whatever opportunities innovative thinkers can dream up next."

Verizon has recently tested out a 10 gig fiber network. It said the speed would only be attractive to businesses at first but noted that will change with the use of high-definition video and an increasing amount of connected devices in homes.

Other large Internet service providers, such as AT&T and Comcast, have rolled out 1-2 gig speeds in limited areas. And Google Fiber has also expanded its 1 gig network to a number of cities.

Chattanooga has been at the center of a federal fight as the Obama administration and the FCC sought to override state laws that put restrictions on the expansion of city-owned broadband networks, which they allege are being pushed by major Internet providers seeking to cut out competition.

The FCC earlier this year voted to override a Tennessee law that prevented the city from expanding the super-fast Internet service outside the boundaries of its utility service. Tennessee is fighting the move in court.

Will there really be gigabit internet service at the Mayor Gahan Presents One-Way Bocce Ball Domiciles on Spring?

A friend incisively comments below.

If any readers are conversant in exactly what is being proposed at the Coyle site development with respect to internet service, please enlighten us.

Roger,

No one in the area offers gigabit internet services to my knowledge. The lux-ur-eee apartments claim they'll have it. I'm sure they're referring to "gigabit ethernet" which is like a Fiat 500 having a speedometer that shows 150 mph - nice to talk about, but it ain't happening.

Gigabit ethernet just makes you wait more quickly while your internet traffic squeezes into the old twisted pair copper telephone lines that were hung in 1890.

Not from AT&T

Not from Time Warner

Is there a fiber optic trunk line running in New Albany we don't know about or is the administration just full of bullshit?

NAC Reader Comments 3: On Chattanooga's fiber optic internet system.

NAC reader W read our post, On Helsinki and the importance of internet infrastructure, and offered a wonderful counter-example much closer to home.

Imagine a city that provides EVERY home and business with one GIGABIT PER SECOND fiber optic internet access.

That city is Chattanooga, Tennessee. They have already built the system:
http://chattanoogagig.com
The city built the system on it's own, offering iInternet service 200 times faster than the puny "service" offered by Time Warner. 10 times faster than the US FCC Broadband initiative set for 2025.

Chattanooga is a city with a population of just 167,000 people (40% smaller than Louisville) and they are actively seeking business investment, relocation and growth.

Some town around here will do this. That town will win. Other towns will get to the party late, if at all.

On Helsinki and the importance of internet infrastructure.

"Helsinki's Wi-Fi Is Super Fast, City-Wide—and Free."

Of course, there are caveats. Finland is not America, and government works differently there. Still, as our local economic development officials lob the usual blobs of cash at the usual sheetrock walls to see which ones might stick for a bit, is there a topic more consistently neglected than internet infrastructure?

In a city like ours?

Surely this is the single most frustrating aspect of the ongoing economic development discussion. Ideas for progress toward a "new" economy are never seriously considered. City Hall briefly mentioned working with the city's monopolistic cable provider (itself already obsolete, and an arrangement ripe for a rethink) to offer advance internet infrastructure, but that's as far as it has gone.

Apparently, game changing strategies need not apply.

Rather, we'll continue to accommodate heavy industry's use of the urban street network ... persist in erecting scattershot, disconnected capital intensive projects ... and neglect the city's emerging core of independent small business in favor of subsidizing outside interests.

Why not empower the creativity and possibilities inherent in our own people by studying the feasibility of projects like Helsinki's city-wide Wi-Fi? As it pertains to urban infrastructure, isn't this just as essential it today's economy as streets, sidewalks and sewers?

If we're to survive, how long can we wait to start sniffing outside our self-imposed boxes? Swimming holes are nice, but they're not the harbingers of a new economy, are they?

Helsinki's Wi-Fi Is Super Fast, City-Wide—and Free. It will make the Wi-Fi you pay for at home look sluggish, by Leo Mirani (City Lab)

... Helsinki’s excellent internet infrastructure is the result of some forward thinking on the part of the city, says Micah Gland of Helsinki Business Hub, an organization that promotes the city. When Helsinki’s city government was installing Wi-Fi in its offices and other facilities, it decided to concurrently install open networks for public use. According to Petri Otranen, who runs IT for the city administration, it was built in 2006 before the capital hosted a meeting of Asian and European heads of state.

The result is not necessarily blanket coverage, but wherever there is a building or space controlled by the city, there is Wi-Fi coverage. And it isn’t particularly expensive. Otranen says the cost is included in overall maintenance of the city’s internet and is not broken out separately, though Simo Volanen of Helsinki’s IT department estimates that the outside base stations cost some €40,000 to buy and install ($45,000) and have an annual maintenance cost of about €4,000. This does not include the cost of running the network, which Helsinki does for its own purposes in any case.

CJ's Pam Platt: "Discussing civility and the Internet with an expert."

Yesterday I offered a brief satire purloined from the venomous pages of the Freedom to Screech character assassination blog and offered a preview of the first annual "NA Confidential Dissembler Award" for purely atrocious playacting.

THE AWARD GOES TO...AND THE ENVELOPE~PLEASE!

By satirizing the babblings of the purely fictitious Professor Erik, who in real life is an embittered former local government employee who has dedicated her sunset years to singing the praises of a self-styled “citizens advocate” for whom she pines -- who in turn should be openly blogging for herself rather than endorsing trognonymity -- am I merely pointing out the obvious?

Yes, I am.

In the past, some NA Confidential readers have expressed concern that by doing so, I may be stooping to the level of the dysfunctional denizens of the Luddite Bar & Grill, as expressed in varying shades of acrid bile at the FOS blog. Is this assessment accurate?

Yes, probably so, but …

To my contrarian mind, I’m not empowering bad manners so much as engaging in open dialogue in full public view, even if the person or persons espousing the opposing point of view insist on hiding from the sort of scrutiny that accompanies full disclosure. Most readers know by now that I regard Internet anonymity is cowardly, though others -- perhaps even a majority -- do not.

You may agree or disagree that such a state of affairs compromises the efficacy of the Internet as a communications tool, but either way, a piece in today’s Courier-Journal by columnist/ombudswoman Pam Platt should be of interest to all. I’m providing an edited excerpt below, but by all means, peruse at your leisure the whole article at the C-J’s site. Platt's topic, “The rude, crude brood you can find on the Internet, and what, if anything, to do about it and them,” applies to more than just Internet incivility.

Pam Platt: Discussing civility and the Internet with an expert.

… (A) third conversation took place on the Internet, and it featured P.M. Forni, author of Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct and professor at Johns Hopkins University. I had invited him to take questions from Courier-Journal readers, and me, about this issue, and he graciously agreed. Last Thursday morning, he went online with us for an hour …

… I think what he had to say is very important and deserves to have the widest possible airing, because it deals with everything from parenting and teaching, to personal responsibility, to human nature, to democracy.

And in the past several days, like you I've read about a local case of road rage, which included a shoot-out in a grocery store parking lot (who needs a gun for a lettuce run?), and I watched video of an Alabama legislator smacking a fellow solon in the face on the floor of the state senate, and I think everyone ought to be talking about this ...

… Professor Forni on how the anonymity offered by Internet communication fosters a "disinhibition effect":

" . . . Anonymity and stress have long been identified as main causes of uncivil behavior. It is part of our human make-up that we need incentives to be good. We need incentives to be decent, to be considerate, to be kind. Anonymity takes away some of our incentives to behave as decent people.

"Also, since its very beginning, the Internet has projected an image of informality. It has billed itself as a place where maximum democracy could be achieved. Everybody could communicate with plenty of freedom and in very informal ways.

"Now, there is often a thin line between informality and incivility and the communication on the 'net often crosses that line. It seems that as a society we use very often the 'net as a dumping ground of what's least attractive in who we are. However, when we do that, we don't really free ourselves of those unpleasant thoughts, unpleasant traits, social toxins, because that mode of communication ends up bouncing from the online world to the world of bricks and mortar. So the coarse, extremely informal language of the 'net provides the new standard for the communication in the real world, and that is certainly a cause of concern."