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Comment by cjoh | Hacker News Reader

Is it me, or is this website subtly paying homage to Sen. Ted Stevens' famous "Series of Tubes" anti-net-neutrality speech.

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People talked about Internet "pipes" for many years, but somehow Stevens was a moron for saying "tubes".

He wasn't a moron for saying "tubes". We was a moron for the extended, stammering, rambling and incomprehensible context he used that word in.

The rest all seems reasonable to me, but you think he's a moron for stammering? I have a noticeable problem with stammering myself, and so do a few of the cleverest people I know. Stammering is an involuntary speech disorder, not a sign of low intelligence. That's simply not accurate.

Stevens' whole quote:

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially...

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

This doesn't strike me as someone who knows what they're talking about.

> I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday.

See, this is the funny part, not the "tubes". His staff sent him an internet? Yeah, I can see why that might take a while to deliver.

I'm pretty sure he meant "email" and misspoke. The overall point that the people regulating things often don't know as much about them as a specialist would, but it seems rude to laugh at a small mistake like that.

The point is that he is trying to convince people to regulate the internet. His rhetoric includes nonsense analogies that he doesn't even get straight. It's ridiculous.

Far better to simply say "I've consulted with experts so-and-so, and their conclusion was [reads a quote from expert]"

The underappreciated brilliance of this quote is that it's not clear what regulated industry he doesn't understand from his quote. Is it the Internet? Transportation? Waste removal? Plumbing?

Also worth pointing out that if his staff (house.gov) sent him an email (house.gov) and they all presumably use the same mail server (they do, House IT is all in house), then the tubes he's referring to were literal wires going from the basement of the capitol building into his office. I suspect it'd be pretty hard for the "commercial" stuff to get caught up in that.

Sounds like House IT was bad at administering a mailserver (they are -- when I was at the Sunlight Foundation, we linked to them and they called us accusing us of a DDoS), and decided to blame it on "the commercial internet."

It's a not-terrible but very basic metaphor applied to an area of engineering which about 99% of his audience did not need explained to them with a very basic metaphor. People assumed that it was he who needed the metaphor, and... hilarity ensued.

Maybe they used that imagery because a series of tubes is an apt metaphor for internet bandwidth.

Yeah, I immediately thought series of tubes.

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