#rural governance

[townpostin]

Love Affair Leads to Impromptu Wedding in Badakhurshi Village in Galudih

Villagers catch widow and lover in compromising situation, arrange immediate marriage Secret romance turns into legitimate union as community intervenes to uphold social norms and prevent scandal. JAMSHEDPUR – A clandestine romance in Badakhurshi village under Galudih police station took an unexpected turn when villagers caught a widow and her lover together on Sunday night. A Mahato (25), a…

[nando161mando]

[nordfjording]

i think the biggest problem facing democracy is lack of understanding of the system. and i think that's why norway will end up taking a right turn in the next election as well, even though this government has been okayish navigating a frankly brutal int economy that the opposition definitely would have very different priorities in.

[lovestory]

the rich and property investors get "free shit" and "handouts" beyond comprehension ESPECIALLY when it comes to taxes but whenever someone mentions wanting some kind of benefit for the lower/middle class that will assist them into living comfortably we get told to "work harder/work more" get the fuck outttttt lol

[betty-bourgeoisie]

Probably my most unpopular Alfred headcanon is that he didn't participate in the roaring 20's at all because he was busy being a farmer in Oklahoma that decade

[wat3rm370n]

Congress needs to ensure telehealth access continues for Medicare patients.

Telehealth for Medicare is going to expire at the end of December 2024. Private insurers tend to follow Medicare on things like this. So this can and will affect everyone’s ability to get telehealth services.

It will force disabled, terminal, high risk, immunocompromised, into in-person visits for things that absolutely don’t require in-person exams. They will force terminally ill and high risk and immunocompromised people to get mental health services in person. This will shut out many rural patients who have trouble traveling for appointments, and need telehealth access.

This will also lead to patients with highly contagious diseases such as covid to be forced to go into the doctors offices at the same time you’re there for preventative or chronic illness care. Bonus, most of these healthcare providers do not require masks at all, and may never do so again for many years as we slide backwards, no matter how bad things get, or how many serious diseases circulate. The best hope for many people is protecting access to telehealth.

✏️ My letter to reps (congressperson and us senators):

Telehealth services via Medicare must not expire. Telehealth service should be a permanent option for all patients, and covered by all insurance, including Medicare and Medicaid.

Please feel free to repurpose for your own letters to reps.

MarketWatch - 67 million Medicare recipients face ‘chaos’ if Congress cuts telehealth benefits Elderly and disabled patients could miss out on healthcare services unless an extension is passed before the end of the year By Jessica Hall Last Updated: Sept. 25, 2024 Medicare beneficiaries’ access to telehealth services will expire at the end of the year unless Congress acts, and public-health experts say that doing away with video-enabled medical care would lead to “chaos” in the healthcare system relied on by 67.4 million Americans. About 5% of Medicare’s overall outpatient visits are currently conducted via telehealth, according to Ateev Mehrotra, a professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health. Telehealth usage was as high as 42% during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he added. The types of medical appointments carried out via telehealth include mental-health visits, dermatological screenings and conversations with a primary-care doctor about cold or flu symptoms or about getting physical therapy. “If the rules were to expire, many people would be devastated. People are going to be frantic,” Mehrotra told MarketWatch in an interview. “Anxiety is increasing by the day because the year-end is approaching and Congress hasn’t passed these extensions.”

American Physical Therapy Association - Congress Must Act on Telehealth Flexibility Before Provisions Expire - Without action, PTs and PTAs will no longer be eligible for the provisions that have allowed them to be paid for telehealth services. Date: Friday, November 22, 2024 For PTs, PTAs, and their Medicare patients, extension of these telehealth flexibilities is critical to maintaining continuity of care. To that end, APTA and other therapy provider associations are urging Congress to extend the pandemic-era Medicare telehealth policies. We need your help in these advocacy efforts: Ask your members of Congress to pass a year-end legislative package and support extending telehealth via APTA's Patient Action Center.

KFF - What to Know About Medicare Coverage of Telehealth - Alex Cottrill, Juliette Cubanski, and Tricia Neuman - Published: Oct 02, 2024 Prior to the declaration of the COVID-19 public health emergency, Medicare coverage of telehealth was largely restricted to beneficiaries in rural areas and to certain types of providers, facilities, and services. At the time, beneficiaries were typically required to travel from their homes to approved clinical sites where they could receive care from providers at other locations. To make it easier and safer for beneficiaries to seek medical care during the pandemic, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) waived many of these restrictions in March 2020, enabling broader use of telehealth services for all Medicare beneficiaries.

[hideyseek]

i think weilan xfiles au is going to turn into a story about the immigrant experience. why do i think this? I DON'T FUCKING KNOW. but i feel like i keep being led around to it with the premise's emphasis of shen wei's alien-ness, the way case one is already set in stone as being about a creature from dixing that fled to haixing and -- lives the rest of its life / meets its end there. there's something too about this being an au of a show set in the united states with the backdrop of the view of government that the united states has, that makes me go: hmmmm i think i need to read up on the chinese immigrant experience in the united states in like, the 1880s. i dont know why i feel this urge! i can't quite connect these dots! but every time i think about the final case in this fic i kind of go: i think it has to do with the place that dixingren land when they come to haixing in this version of the world and im pretty sure i want to listen to that instinct

[justinspoliticalcorner]

George Chidi at The Guardian:

Elon Musk, named by Donald Trump to co-lead a commission aimed at reducing the size of the federal government, is poised to undermine funding for rural broadband services to benefit his satellite internet services company, Starlink. Musk has long been a critic of the Biden administration’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (Bead) Program, which provides $42.45bn through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill to expand high-speed internet access in rural communities. Starlink, the satellite internet services subsidiary of SpaceX, has largely been shut out of this funding after government agencies deemed it too slow to qualify. But with Trump’s election, and the deference Trump appears poised to give to Musk’s desired reforms, the world’s richest man could re-prioritize how the federal government provides high-speed internet to rural America, creating an immense conflict of interest. If Musk recommends cuts to government spending on rural fiber optic broadband – as he has repeatedly suggested – it directly increases the value of Starlink’s satellite internet services.

“We have never had a situation where the leading shareholder of a communications company has both a position – both in terms of influencing the president, but also having an assignment to drive efficiency in government – with so many government contracts,” said Blair Levin, a telecommunications industry analyst with New Street Research and the Brookings Institution. “That is an extraordinary situation. That is unprecedented.” Levin suggested that Trump could order Bead funding to be withheld indefinitely as soon as he takes office, even though Congress has authorized the funding. Doing so would violate the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, a law Trump fell afoul of in his first term that ultimately resulted in one impeachment. But Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will co-lead the commission to reduce the size of the federal government, argued in a Wall Street Journal editorial last week that Trump should pursue impoundment when he deems it necessary.

“Mr Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current supreme court would likely side with him on this question,” they wrote. Any move like this would tie the program in legal knots as lawsuits abound, Levin said. But the delay is the point. “While states and others could file legal actions to stop such a pause, we think most courts would be reluctant to enjoin or otherwise stop the administration from reconsidering some elements of the program. Even actions of dubious legality can benefit Starlink through delay or through litigation.” Musk had set his sights on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) long before Trump’s victory. The NTIA administers federal grant funding for the Bead program. Without a government subsidy, rolling fiber optic lines down country roads to serve a handful of houses at a time is usually too cost-prohibitive for an internet service provider. But to companies like AT&T or Verizon, a government subsidy to a local internet service provider also looks like the government funding the competition.

Big telecom companies and the FCC argued long and loud about what parts of the country had access to high-speed service, and thus didn’t need government money. But the definition of “high speed” used by industry and the government was often slow by many standards. After years of negotiation, lawsuits and politicking, the FCC and the NTIA settled on a modern definition for broadband service: 100 megabits per second (Mbps) download speeds, 20Mbps upload speeds, with less than 100 milliseconds of latency. Right now, Starlink doesn’t meet that standard. It has been getting slightly slower over time even as more people sign up for service, according to internet performance testing service Ookla’s speed tests. In 2022, the FCC rescinded a $900m grant from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to Starlink to connect rural communities to the internet, citing��its failure to meet the speed and latency standards and declining network performance.

Musk erupted on an X post. “Starlink is the only company actually solving rural broadband at scale! They should arguably dissolve the program and return funds to taxpayers, but definitely not send it those who aren’t getting the job done,” Musk wrote. ”What actually happened is that the companies that lobbied for this massive earmark (not us) thought they would win, but instead were outperformed by Starlink, so now they’re changing the rules to prevent SpaceX from competing.” In June, Musk described the Bead program, which began rolling out grants to states this year, as “an outrageous waste of taxpayer money and is utterly failing to serve people in need”. A month later, Musk endorsed Trump and began a $100m spending campaign in support of his candidacy.

After Musk started to gain Trump’s ear – and particularly after Musk’s endorsement and Starlink’s deployment of satellite terminals to areas hit by Hurricane Helene, which Trump praised regularly on the campaign trail – Trump’s language about rural broadband began to shift in Musk’s direction. Trump described Starlink as “better than the wires”, when talking with Joe Rogan in the much-watched podcast interview. “We’re spending a trillion dollars to get cables all over the country, right, up to upstate areas where you have like two farms … They haven’t hooked up one person.” Over the last year, the FCC commissioner – and Trump’s newly named FCC chair – Brendan Carr has also echoed Musk’s position, arguing that the public might be better off by subsidizing the cost of Starlink terminals instead of fiber optic broadband. After Trump’s election, Carr said the FCC is unlikely to revisit its rescission of Starlink’s grant, citing procedural hurdles. But Carr, who authored the FCC chapter of Project 2025, has suggested that as much as a third of Bead funding could go to satellite internet providers.

The “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)” co-headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy is just another self-enrichment scam.

[roguekhajiit]

Storytime.

Keeping with the trend of avoiding politics right now, I wanna talk about a conversation I had at work.

As some of you may know, I'm a contracted mail carrier for the USPS. The routes I deliver on are very rural, too rural, even for the NRLCA (National Rural Letter Carriers' Association.

HC (highway contracted) routes look like this:

So, it can often be hard to tell that there is a house or houses located behind those trees, and oftentimes Google will be half a mile off on where an address is located.

So, last week, I was trying to find a house on my route to deliver a certified letter, I couldn't locate them, and Google was directing me to another street.

So, I had to leave them a notice in their mailbox telling them they needed to put their house number at the end of their driveway. Let me add here that the mailboxes on these routes are sometimes as far as a mile and a half from their door.

They showed up at the post office on Monday with the notice in hand, confused about why they had to make their house number visible from the street. The clerk kept trying to explain to them why, but they just weren't getting the picture. Eventually, the clerk approached me, frustrated, and asked me to please talk with them.

So, I go to talk to them and I tell them exactly why; because I couldn't find their house.

Where was 150 Main Street? The addresses on that road started at 170 Main Street. There wasn't another section of Main Street and it T-d with First Street. (All streets and addresses are generic and made up.) They told me that their address was 150 Main Street, but their driveway and front door were at the corner of First and Second Streets. (Um, what?!) They then told me that the EMTs also had a hard time finding their house. So, you already had a medical emergency that required an ambulance to be dispatched to your house, and you still didn't think to make it easier for first responders to find you? If emergency personnel can't find you, how can your mail carrier find you?

It took 3 people explaining this to them for 15 minutes for them to understand, "I need to put my address at the start of my driveway."

So yeah... make your address visible from the road people. It could be the difference between living to see another day or laying dead on your kitchen floor until your adult children finally decide to pay you a visit.

[dni-iftherearedogsonyourblog]

why do I see posts like "why didn't schools teach us about the Blair mountain coal miner riots!" because you live in fucking Dover, Utah and in the only high school for miles the US history teacher was also the global history teacher.

[lunar-fey]

ohhhh my god. okay. so. my aunt does like, she buys random junk in bulk from retail wholesalers and then resells it on like, facebook marketplace and ebay and stuff. whatever. so my mom works for her. makes a flat $50 a day, regardless of the fact that shes disabled and doing hard labor for at least 8 hours a day, often 10+. and min wage here is $10 an hour but mom argued that $50 a day is still more than what she would make working the same hours at an actual job because of taxes...like girl that would be 50% taxes. you do not pay that fucking much. so thats already Bad.

but today mom shows me a video of a knife theyre gonna sell, and i watch 2 seconds and i realize its an automatic knife, and i tell her hey. thats illegal to possess in this state. let alone sell! and mom is like ohhh [aunt] knows what shes doing itll be fine.... we sell knives on there all the time she just doesnt put pictures and calls them something else on the listing to get around fb/ebays policies :)

LIKE. HELLO. THATS NOT BETTER. YOURE COMMITTING MULTIPLE CRIMES. *AS YOUR JOB.* and she was just like "its not a big deal she knows what shes doing." folks, this is the same aunt that, very illegally, paid me to sort through her clients confidential tax documents and bank records and stuff. because she works for a bank. and took the records home to sort them. i dont think she DOES know what shes doing, actually!

[oopsl]

BREAKING UP by Rural Internet, 2021

[medicinemane]

Mike johnson has so god damn much blood on his hands, obviously Ukrainian blood, but also plenty of American blood

Refusing to renew something that helps vets exposed to atomic blast and Americans who were downwind of the fall out... it's just sick. I can't fucking stand mike johnson, he's one of the worst scum to ever be in congress, and that's fucking saying something

"Johnson refused to allow House members to vote on bipartisan legislation to renew and improve the program"

Fucking quivering little pimple seems to have a real MO for just wringing his hands while insisting it's not his fault, he just can't do the one fucking part of his job of putting shit up to a vote... oh boo hoo, so sad, he'll just have to unilaterally let funding expire on things instead of literally just putting it up to our elected representatives to see if they want to vote yay or nay

Single handedly make the choices but it's not his fault when they work out how they do

Murderer

[besnouted]

i always get so defensive when people make college is a waste of money jokes because i'm always like what do you mean learning stuff in a structured environment while being surrounded by easily accessible food/resources/libraries/social circles that allow you to make friends regardless of normally marginalizing factors (for the most part) is a WASTE!!! because i would do literally anything to be in that kind of environment again lol but then i remember most people actually have to pay back their students loans

[bluemoonrabbit]

Feeling really bad about the US tonight friends. Between dealing with the healthcare system and our continued baffling support for ongoing genocide, I feel so deeply hopeless and angry toward this country.

[calling-the-angels]

Americans!

If you go to this handy little site (Find my Representative .gov) and look up your address, you find out who your representative is. :)

In light of recent world events, I've decided to stop being so politically sedative (i.e. "it doesn't really affect me") and was curious 1. who my rep even is?? and 2. how they vote.

Turns out my area is hella conservative (shocker) and that my rep is Republican and supporting Isn'treal. He also voted 'Yea' to censuring Rashida Tlaib and 'Yea' to providing more weapons to further the genocide of Palestinians. Are there things he is sponsoring that I support? Yeah, nothing is black and white, folks. Rural issues are still issues he has to work on. However, how else is he to know how his constituents feel about current affairs if no one is letting him know? :)) Him and his staffers are getting messages from me. Might call his team once the office opens Monday as well!

What I'm trying to get at here is that we - as Americans - have gotten really comfortable with voting in a representative and forgetting about them. That's selfish and short-sighted... as our reps have power in global problems we don't as individuals.

I've decided that my rep doesn't get to vote on bills without wondering whether anyone even realizes what he's doing. He'll know, because I'll let him know! :)