I’ve seen so much bullshit speculation online about why Verizon and Comcast are unable to provide unimpeded access to Netflix content that it has been just fucking ridiculous reading all the uninformed gibberish and utter malarkey spewed out by people who have no clue or worse have some political agenda.

So it’s nice to see an actual Level 3 technical expert explain that it’s exactly as easy as I already said it was (since, duh, I’ve done work in commercial datacenters for years and kinda know) to provide the bandwidth.

Verizon has confirmed that everything between that router in their network and their subscribers is uncongested – in fact has plenty of capacity sitting there waiting to be used. Above, I confirmed exactly the same thing for the Level 3 network. So in fact, we could fix this congestion in about five minutes simply by connecting up more 10Gbps ports on those routers. Simple. Something we’ve been asking Verizon to do for many, many months, and something other providers regularly do in similar circumstances. But Verizon has refused. So Verizon, not Level 3 or Netflix, causes the congestion. Why is that? Maybe they can’t afford a new port card because they’ve run out – even though these cards are very cheap, just a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more. If that’s the case, we’ll buy one for them. Maybe they can’t afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that’s the case, we’ll provide it. Heck, we’ll even install it.

There is no bandwidth shortage. Repeat after me, kids: THERE IS NO BANDWIDTH SHORTAGE. It does not exist. Never has.

That is a lie promulgated by ISPs hoping to squeeze money out of content providers and any others they can.

As I said in previous posts including this one, it’s a simple matter of connecting two routers together. Just as the Level 3 expert says. Just as any infrastructure type knows.

Anyone who says anything else is a liar. It really is that simple, and something done routinely by non-extortionate entities.

Reading about genetics tonight, I realized that mRNA sequences are much like TCP/IP packets, which is not surprising as DNA/RNA has already solved many of the same problems that TCP/IP was designed to solve.

Photos are already lies, or at the least a very incomplete truth as Molly Crabapple points out.

But fuck Photoshop. Photos are already lies.

I’m a former model and current artist. I’ve learned this every second I’ve stared into the camera’s insect eye.

Anyone who’s been at a photo shoot knows that even untouched photos bear only the scantest resemblance to a subject. A photo is frozen. A model sweats and bloats, ages, and dies. Framing is a lie. Lighting is a lie. Cropping is a lie. When you suck in your stomach, or turn your head so the light washes out your laugh lines, you’re lying as much as any liquefy tool. Untruth is baked into the process: Photographer Syreeta McFadden writes how the chemical makeup of some films is biased against dark skin tones. Even snapshots often don’t look like you, because you are not static. You are a three-dimensional being, torn by time. Photos are pixel ghosts.

When I used to take portraits and photograph models, I’d often hear them say to me, “I’m not all that pretty but you make me look so beautiful.”

The thing is, though, I only photographed models I knew and liked. It was easy to make them look great because I already knew they were great people. Showing what’s there is easier if you already know how to find it, if it’s already apparent to you. Capturing a moment in time where someone is at their best is just what good photographers do.

It has less to do with finding physically beautiful people but rather finding the best moments of the ordinary. Gracie Hagen illustrates exactly this with her photography.

Photoshop like any other tool can be and is abused. I too also dislike the magazine covers that do not seem to be populated by actual humans. However, the way many feminists and others go about critiquing and resisting this and other related facts is most often antithetical to their actual goals.

And god, this is a great line. I wish I’d written it.

To get a “true” photo, you need to remove artifice. This means removing art. Art’s opposite is bulk surveillance.

And to further Molly’s points, here is one of my favorite photo sets: twenty-year-old model Eniko Mihalik, photographed as if she were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 years old. No Photoshop. Only make-up. And not even all that much make-up at that. Lighting can do amazing things, as any cinematographer knows.

All of those photos of Mihalik are “true.” And all of them are a “lie.” Both at the same time.