President Obama has come out in support of reclassifying internet service as a utility, a move that would allow the Federal Communications Commission to enforce more robust regulations and protect net neutrality. "To put these protections in place, I'm asking the FCC to reclassifying internet service under Title II of a law known as the Telecommunications Act," Obama says in a statement this morning. "In plain English, I'm asking [the FCC] to recognize that for most Americans, the internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life."

There's been a growing battle around protecting net neutrality — the principle that all internet traffic, no matter what it is or where it comes from, should be treated equally — ever since the FCC's original protections were struck down in court earlier this year. Those protections were able to be struck down because the commission didn't make the rules in a way that it actually had authority over, so it's been trying to create new rules that it will definitely be able to enforce. It hasn't chosen to use Title II so far, but net neutrality advocates, now including President Obama, have been pushing for its use.

Regulating internet service under Title II would mean reclassifying it as a utility, like water. This means that internet providers would just be pumping internet back and forth through pipes and not actually making any decisions about where the internet goes. For the most part, that's a controversial idea in the eyes of service providers alone. It means that they're losing some control over what they sell, and that they can't favor certain services to benefit their own business. Instead, providers would be stuck allowing consumers to use the internet as they want to, using whatever services they like without any penalty. If that sounds pretty great, it's because that's basically how the internet has worked up until now.

A shopper at a Colma store said she was punched in the face by mother after telling her to quiet down her child, who was throwing a tantrum.
Natalie Bree Hajek-Richardson told KPIX 5 that she was in the checkout line of the Nordstrom Rack when a child between the age of 4 and 6 began throwing a loud tantrum.
“It didn’t bother me that the child was throwing the tantrum, but the volume was very loud, it was hurting my ears,” Hajek-Richardson said.
The shopper said she asked the child’s mother to quiet the child down, but nicely. That’s when things began going sideways.
"She came to the side of me and told me not to tell her child what to do. And I told her that I didn’t ask your child what to do, I asked you very nicely to calm down your child just a little bit,” Hajek-Richardson recalled.
Hajek-Richardson said she then told the mom off. “I told her to go to hell and she told me I’ll see you there,” she said.
When Hajek-Richardson left the store, she said the mom followed her to her car. “Was asking me, ‘Where’d you tell me to go?’ So I repeated again what I said to her, and I told her that I told her to go to hell,” she said.
Video shows a woman in a red shirt walking toward Hajek-Richardson before they both end up on the asphalt. The victim said she was punched twice in the face.

But all those attempts to reduce your carbon footprint might be for naught if you decide to have kids.


A 2009 University of Oregon study found that having children obliterates any emission reductions from altered behavior, like driving less and using energy-efficient light bulbs. The average American is responsible for 20 tons of carbon dioxide per year. MIT researchers discovered that even the lowest-consuming Americans (young children and homeless people, according to researchers) generated an average of 8.5 tons of CO2 per year, more than double the global average.


Population specialists agree that just a half-child-per-woman decrease in the global fertility rate could bring global population back to 6 billion by the end of the century (we’re at 7 billion, hurtling toward 9 billion at current fertility rates). And half a child in the other direction could take us to 16 billion in the same time frame, which would be catastrophic, according to many. As Alan Weisman puts it in his bestseller, Countdown, “We would never get there, because we would collapse over multiple thresholds first, possibly never to crawl back.”