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From the GNR Newsroom: Its the Monday Good News Roundup [1]
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Date: 2023-01-16
Its that time once again my friends, Happy Monday to you all and a Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day as well from the Monday GNR team. Lets commemorate the memory of a true inspiration and hero by talking about the good news of the day. Special thanks as usual to my associates Bhu and Killer300 for curating this weeks good news articles.
Now, consider the method they employ to achieve this goal: They propose to make the strikes illegal. They propose terrifying penalties if the strikes continue. Okay. Let’s play this out. Suppose the striking workers reasonably say “fuck off” to a government that tries to bully them back to work, rather than solving the actual problems that made the workers upset enough to strike in the first place. Suppose they defy these laws and carry on with illegal strikes. Suppose the government responds as promised, by firing all the striking workers. Then what? The government then finds itself less able to restore services than it was before. It will take even more time to hire and train thousands of new workers than it would have taken to settle the strike at the bargaining table. The public will be more outraged at the greater chaos and the government will get more unpopular as a result. The very goal of passing laws against strikes, in other words, is unlikely to be achieved by passing laws against strikes. It’s a bluff! Outlawing a strike is like telling a roomful of people that if they don’t become your friends, you will beat them up. It is a tactic that is fundamentally incompatible with its goal. On top of that, the bigger a strike wave is, the more impervious it is to this sort of government oppression. Ronald Reagan could flex his muscles by firing 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, but if they had been accompanied by striking pilots and TSA agents and flight attendants, he could not have fired them all. The idea of a government winning a labor battle by firing all of its teachers or nurses or people qualified to operate railroads is patently absurd. It cannot happen. The very act would represent the ultimate failure of the government itself. A president might as well set off a nuclear bomb in the capital and stand on top of the rubble while declaring that all problems have been solved.
We have the power the people, and corrupt governments hate that and try and take it away, but we always beat them.
"Our minds are wired to look out for threats," she says. "The more time we spend scrolling, the more we find those dangers, the more we get sucked into them, the more anxious we get." That grim content can then throw a dark filter how you see the world, says Aldao. "Now you look around yourself, and everything feels gloomy, everything makes you anxious. So you go back to look for more information." The cycle continues. Aldao, the director of Together CBT, a clinic that specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy, has worked with her patients to cut back on doomscrolling. Here's some of her advice on how to temper the doom:
I was doom scrolling a lot in 2016 and it contributed to messing me up when Trump won, that’s why I try to avoid political news these days (I also deleted my twitter but that’s unrelated).
A leak from the European Data Protection Board reveals that the EU's top privacy regulator is about to overrule the Irish Data Protection Commission and declare Facebook's business model illegal, banning surveillance-based ads without explicit consent:
Facebook really is the worst. Glad to see its getting taken down a peg.
As I type these words, a mass exodus is underway from Twitter and Facebook. After decades of eye-popping growth, these social media sites are contracting at an alarming rate. In some ways, this shouldn’t surprise us. All the social networks that preceded the current generation experienced this pattern: SixDegrees, Friendster, MySpace, and Bebo all exploded onto the scene. One day, they were sparsely populated fringe services, the next day, everyone you knew was using them and you had to sign up to stay in touch. Then, just as quickly, they imploded, turning into ghost towns, then punchlines, then forgotten ruins. This didn’t happen to Facebook and Twitter. Both attained a scale and durability that exceeded the networks that preceded them. For many people, it seemed like the operators of these services had cracked the nut of making eternal social media. Maybe it was their access to the capital markets, which let them hire better engineering teams? Maybe it was the singular genius of their founders and leaders? Maybe it was luck? Today, it’s getting harder to believe that these networks will last forever. In the blink of an eye, they’ve gone from unassailable eternal mountains to shifting sands that might blow away at any time. Users are scrambling to download their data and tell their friends where they can be found if (when?) the service disappears.
Yeah, as I said I deleted my twitter, and I don’t use Facebook anymore, the only social media thing I use is Tumblr.
In rare good news for the planet, Earth’s ozone layer is on track to recover completely within decades, as ozone-depleting chemicals are phased out across the world, according to a new United Nations-backed assessment. The ozone layer protects the planet from harmful ultraviolet rays. But since the late 1980s, scientists have sounded the alarm about a hole in this shield, caused by ozone-depleting substances including chlorofluorocarbons, dubbed CFCs, often found in refrigerators, aerosols and solvents.
The recovery of the Ozone layer really is a environmental success story. And if we could save that, we can deal with climate change as well.
Tennessee-based Silicon Ranch just raised another $600 million in equity investment to expand its unusually holistic brand of solar development. The company launched in 2011 and built up a portfolio initially in the Southeast, a tricky region for early solar development given the paucity of open markets and the prevalence of grids dominated by historically solar-averse utilities. Silicon Ranch nonetheless built and operates more than 2.3 gigawatts of solar, and has signed contracts to bring the total north of 5 gigawatts nationwide. It also acquired Clearloop, a startup that connects corporate carbon offsets to clean-energy construction. Silicon Ranch stands out from the crowd of solar developers in that it remains independent when the industry has gone through a wave of consolidation; it owns every project it develops and builds; and it has pioneered a holistic approach to sustainable development, incorporating regenerative land practices and recycling old solar panels.
This sounds like a neat idea, glad they are getting money for it.
Democrats flipped a state senate seat in a Virginia special election Tuesday night, likely scuttling Republican plans for a stricter abortion law in the state. While the race has not officially been called, Virginia Beach Councilman Aaron Rouse declared victory over Navy veteran Kevin Adams, filling a seat vacated after Republican Jen Kiggans won her bid for the U.S. House in November. The win gives Democrats a 22-18 edge in the chamber, decreasing the chances Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin will be able to pass his proposed 15-week abortion ban this year. Rouse, who previously played in the NFL after earning all-conference honors at Virginia Tech, ran on abortion rights while Adams tried to frame him as soft on crime, a common juxtaposition in many of last year’s key midterm races.
Once again, Abortion proves to be an albatross around the GOP’s neck.
But there is still lots of room for improvement. Academic labs and companies alike are hunting for ways to improve the technology—boosting capacity, speeding charging time, and cutting costs. The goal is even cheaper batteries that will provide cheap storage for the grid and allow EVs to travel far greater distances on a charge. At the same time, concerns about supplies of key battery materials like cobalt and lithium are pushing a search for alternatives to the standard lithium-ion chemistry. In the midst of the soaring demand for EVs and renewable power and an explosion in battery development, one thing is certain: batteries will play a key role in the transition to renewable energy. Here’s what to expect in 2023.
Always exciting to hear news about new batteries.
A new app can detect whether your essay was written by ChatGPT, as researchers look to combat AI plagiarism. Edward Tian, a computer science student at Princeton, said he spent the holiday period building GPTZero. He shared two videos comparing the app's analysis of a New Yorker article and a letter written by ChatGPT. It correctly identified that they were respectively written by a human and AI.
I know a lot of people are worried about the AI created art thing, but as you can see we are already getting ahead of it.
The number of populist leaders around the world has fallen to a 20-year low after a series of victories for progressives and centrists over the past year, according to analysis from the Tony Blair Institute showing the number of people living under populist rule has fallen by 800 million in two years. The research claims 2023 could be an equally decisive year for populism, with critical elections in Turkey and Poland. Those two elections could see two of the most influential populist governments in the world fall, though that may yet require divided opposition parties in both countries to form clearer coalition programmes than they have managed so far.
Yeah for a while it seemed like populism was making a big comeback, but then it was like “Oh wait no this is awful isn’t it?” and people rejected them en masse. Hopefully that trend continues.
The U.S. labor market is extraordinarily strong, despite gloom-and-doom economic forecasts and high-profile layoffs — that is the takeaway from the December jobs report, out Friday, that was outstanding in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Why it matters: If America's economy is going to come in for a soft-landing — inflation dissipating without mass unemployment — you would expect to see numbers that look a lot like last month's. The economy continues to add a healthy number of new jobs, though the pace is moderating. Wages are rising, but not so quickly as to alarm economic policymakers. And more workers are entering the labor force, which — if sustained — could heal labor shortages.
The data has positive developments both for American workers — who continue to have abundant job opportunities — and for Fed officials seeking evidence that their inflation-fighting efforts are starting to cool job creation and wage growth to more sustainable rates.
Some good economic news for a change.
nnual inflation across the eurozone fell back to the single-digit territory and stood at 9.2% at the end of December, according to a flash estimate released by Eurostat on Friday morning. Inflation started easing in November but still stood at 10.1%. It comes as gas prices, one of the main drivers behind last year's record-breaking inflation, returned to pre-war levels amid unusually warm weather.
And some more good news, as Inflation continues to ease off.
Over 7,000 nurses across two hospitals in New York City went on strike early Monday morning after contract negotiations broke down over the hospitals’ refusal to meet nurses’ staffing demands. Nurses at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and Mount Sinai in Manhattan walked out at 6 am, saying they are forced to work long hours with huge workloads that leave them burnt out, which could potentially put patients in danger. The workers “have been put in the unfortunate position of having no other choice than to strike,” said Mario Cilento, president of the New York AFL-CIO, of which the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) is an affiliate.
I hope things go well for them. Nurses deserve more credit than we give them.
Their operation is an exception to the sprawling corn and bean fields that dominate the landscape. Shannon and Eve work to feed people, not livestock or cars. Shannon wears her politics on her coveralls. Her favorite jean jacket includes patches that declare “End monoculture” and “Save the Earth. Bankrupt a corporation.” The Mingalones are among a multitude of LGBTQ farmers who draw connections between their identities and agriculture, including their adoption of sustainable practices. “We’re not just raising food,” Shannon said. “We are creating safe spaces for people.” Like many, they used to have a specific image of a “typical farmer”: white, male, heterosexual, Christian and conservative. Excluded from that vision — or perhaps myth — is a space for them. So they are creating one. The presence of LGBTQ people in agriculture challenges stereotypes of who can, or should be, interested in farming. But the community is not a monolith, interviews with 16 Midwestern LGBTQ producers indicate. Some use restorative techniques in hopes of reducing environmental destruction and social inequity. Others run conventional operations, which industry representatives and policymakers say are key to feeding the world’s growing population.
This is really cool and I hope this catches on with more people.
And on that note I think its time to draw this weeks GNR to a close. Everyone have a good week, and Rest in Power Dr. King.
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