(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
From the GNR Newsroom: Its the Monday Good News Roundup [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-09-04
Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, that time of the week where your humble GNR Newsroom gets you the news to start your week off right. Its me, Killer300 and Bhu against the world, and we’re going into overtime baby!
Its Labor day! If Memorial day is the beginning of Summer, then Labor day is the end of it. The days are getting shorter, the air colder, and the smell of pumpkin spice is in the air, and of course everyone is getting their last minute barbecuing in. In personal news I am getting over a sinus infection/head cold (which is bad) But I also watched the DnD Movie (which is good).
But you aren’t here to hear me ramble. You’re here for the good news. And we’ve got a load this week. So lets get into it.
America’s greatest local institution other than schools is the humble Library. These revered institutions are not just a collection of books; they are emblematic of our commitment to education, community, and accessibility for all. While Americans often take free libraries for granted, it can be hard to picture how widespread they are. There are more than 17,000 libraries the the US, more than the total number of Starbucks and McDonald’s combined. The US only has about 19,000 cities in total, so almost every city has a public library. Tracing the history of the American Free Library is like going back to the nation's core values. Rooted in the belief that everyone, irrespective of their status, should have access to knowledge, these libraries have been democratizing information long before the term became popular in tech circles.
Libraries are more important now than ever. Where else are you going to get all those books Ron DeSantis and his ilk don’t want you to read.
Today, I’m going to dive deep into a city that you may have overlooked in the past but is rapidly transforming itself: Buffalo, NY. If you've been keeping your ear to the ground (or your eye on new housing and community developments), you'll know that this Rust Belt city is leading an exciting revolution in land use that prioritizes the people. Let’s chat about it!
Great news from a city I live just a stones throw away from. Buffalo is pretty much the heart and soul of Western New York (And the wings are pretty good too).
The food truck revolution has taken the world by storm, but it’s in cities like Austin that the culture truly thrives. It is widely recognized for it’s rich and diverse street food scenes and many food truck parks. But what sets them apart? What's the secret sauce that makes their street food culture buzz with energy and flavor? Let’s dive in. In many urban areas, food trucks congregate in dedicated areas known as "food truck parks." This allows for variety in a single location, creating a hub of culinary exploration. This not only creates more foot traffic for the vendors but also offers customers a plethora of options, turning a quick bite into a social event. Let’s take a closer look at the municipal codes and compare why food trucks work in one city vs another, in this case Austin, TX vs Round Rock, TX (a nearby suburb north of Austin). Austin has been at the forefront of the food truck movement, with its welcoming regulations and passionate foodie culture. Let’s look at a snippet of Austin's Food Truck Rules (Title 25 - Land Development, Chapter 25-2 - Zoning, Subchapter C - Use of Development Regulation, Article 4 - Additional Requirements for Certain Uses, Division 2 - Commercial Uses, § 25-2-812 - MOBILE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS.)
Something you may not know about me: I like me some food. So hearing news about food trucks doing good is great to me. Hopefully they come visit my little corner of the world.
Like many cities throughout North America, Norman, Oklahoma, faces a problem: They have too much parking. Large swaths of black pavement sit empty, even on the busiest shopping days of the year. And since the 50s, each time a developer wants to create another business, city parking laws have required the developer to contribute more parking to the already abundant lots. Last year, however, those rules changed for Norman. When Councilman Matt Peacock took a look at the city’s parking code, he found a solution to help slow the problem of too much parking…by rewriting just one word. “We found a way to crack the code a little bit, in which there was not a lot of public pushback,” said Peacock. “Basically, all we did in the ordinance was change the word ‘required’ to ‘recommended.’” The city voted a unanimous yes to the change in wording and, within a few short months, Norman’s parking laws became “recommendations” for developers versus a blanket requirement.
The war against NIMBY’s continues, and it is a war we will eventually win. Its time to take cities back and make them places people live.
hile boycott campaigns generally have a mixed record at best, this tactic was used successfully in the recent unionization and first contract victories at Burgerville in Oregon as well as Spot Coffee in western New York, a campaign that set the stage for the subsequent Starbucks upsurge. Raising the slogan “No Contract, No Field Trips,” unionizing workers at Medieval Times in New Jersey and California are now working with K-12 teachers to boycott the company until it stops its alleged union busting. And just last week, after months of student organizing and protest, Cornell University agreed to stop selling and serving Starbucks on campus due to the company’s flagrant violation of federal labor law. This victory is spurring a push to boycott Starbucks at colleges across the country.
I think boycotts should be based on a case by case basis. Mainly depending if the strikers are calling for a boycott.
The California attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit on Monday against the Southern California-based Chino school district over a policy that requires parental notification if their kids change their gender identity. The lawsuit characterizes this policy, which the school board voted to enact last month, as a violation of both civil rights and privacy laws. Per the suit, the parental notification policy puts trans and gender-nonconforming students in “danger of imminent, irreparable harm” by “outing” them at home before they may be ready—even as fewer than one in three trans and nonbinary youths report being accepted by their families. “[T]he district’s policy will force [trans and nonbinary students] to make a choice: either ‘walk back’ their constitutionally and statutorily protected rights to gender identity and gender expression, or face the risk of emotional, physical and psychological harm from non-affirming or unaccepting parents or guardians,” the lawsuit states. Through the suit, California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) is asking the San Bernardino County Superior Court to immediately halt the policy.
Good. Outing trans kids is about as despicable as you can get. It makes me see red to be certain.
On Tuesday, a jury found anti-abortion activist Lauren Handy and four others guilty of violating federal law for blockading a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic in 2020. The defendants—Handy, Heather Idoni, William Goodman, John Hinshaw and Herb Geraghty—were found guilty of two felony counts each for conspiracy against rights and violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a federal law passed in the walk of anti-abortion violence. The jury deliberated for a day and a half before issuing its verdict, per WUSA9. They face up to 11 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $350,000 at sentencing. A second group of defendants faces trial next month.
Okay I take it back, this is as despicable as you can get. What the Hell?
One definition of solarpunk is “an optimistic environmentalist subgenre of speculative fiction, art, and design that envisions future life on Earth transformed by the use of sustainable energy, close co-existence of human beings with nature, and progressive sociopolitical values.” (Grist and Vice also have great explainers on the topic.) AOC continued on the Instagram livestream: “It’s way easier to imagine everything going to hell than it is to imagine things working out and actually getting better. That’s where science fiction [of solarpunk] plays a role. […] You’ll see depictions of what a better future could look like.” Solarpunk has been popping up in my feed over the last few years in various forms, including Grist’s positive climate-fiction contest, a dedicated Reddit community, a number of books and a ton of AI-generated art.
Now this is the future I want to live in.
Redwood Materials needs a lot of money to scale up its plans to supply U.S. demand for lithium-ion batteries with recycled metals and materials. On Tuesday, the startup founded by Tesla co-founder and former CTO JB Straubel got a big chunk of that funding, landing more than $1 billion in venture investment. Tuesday’s Series D round more than doubles the equity raised by Redwood Materials to date to $2 billion and sets the company’s internal valuation at $5 billion, according to news reports. The new round was co-led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Capricorn’s Technology Impact Fund and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates.
Very neat news here.
HONOLULU — In the last three weeks, Hawaii’s electric grid has made headlines for horrifying reasons. Early evidence indicates that power lines owned and maintained by for-profit utility Hawaiian Electric sparked the ferocious brush fire that killed at least 115 people and destroyed the historic town of Lahaina in early August. The fire’s cause has not been determined officially, but the county of Maui and several other groups are suing the company, and its stock price and credit rating have plummeted. That tragedy has understandably eclipsed a quiet but significant anniversary: One year ago, Hawaii shut down its one remaining coal plant, with a plan to replace its electricity only with renewable energy projects. That milestone broke new ground in the clean energy transition because no other state had attempted to eliminate coal without building new fossil gas plants. Hawaii sought to show that renewables and batteries are ready to take over from the most carbon-emitting power plant fuel. It’s worth taking stock of that journey; so far, the seas have been choppy, even before the Maui tragedy. But the undertaking has demonstrated how small-scale clean energy can solve problems when big clean energy projects fall behind.
Hawaii proves we can make the transition from coal to solar. Something we should keep in mind (while also helping Hawaii through their current crisis)
You hear that? In the distance? Its back, the GNR Lightning round!
What could go right? Its a workers world
Pacific coral reef shows resistance to climate change
Equinor opens worlds largest floating wind farm in Norway
South Korea’s composting system has become an inspiration for the world
Geothermal energy: Are we entering a golden age?
Washington state to go 100% clean energy by 2045
Lifeline for endangered insect once considered extinct
Young adults in US drinking less than than in prior decades
Electrified cement could turn houses and roads into batteries
Quite the lightning round to be sure. Now back to normal good news.
Four years after Montreal decided to make a 2.5-kilometre stretch of a busy downtown artery car-free every summer, the transformation continues to receive rave reviews from users and local businesses. Covering more than 30 intersections, the stretch of Mont-Royal Avenue currently given over to pedestrian traffic has been turned into “a daily festival” by Montrealers and out-of-towners, “with thick crowds almost around the clock, shopping, wandering, packing private patios, or sinking into the baby-blue Adirondack chairs laid out for public use,” writes the Globe and Mail.
I don’t drive (And I couldn’t afford a car if I did) so I would love to live in a world where cars were not such an essential part of life. Hopefully this is a step in the right direction.
A Texas judge ruled on Wednesday that a law dubbed by critics as the "Death Star" and championed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is unconstitutional. Signed into law by Abbott in June, the top-down legislation prohibited cities from passing local ordinances that contradict state legislation in eight broad areas like government, finance and labor. The GOP-backed effort was widely seen as a power grab meant to curtail the progress of Democrat-led cities in the Lone Star state.
Once again judges see through GOP BS and once again the GOP decide the best course of action is to just deny reality. Good luck with that.
Laws that ban nonconsensual pelvic exams took effect in Missouri, Montana, and Colorado this week, according to a Rewire report, and lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Ohio are still considering similar legislation as of this spring. The new laws prohibit medical staff from performing pelvic exams on unconscious or sedated patients without prior consent. These laws aren’t the first of their kind—around half of states have them on the books, according to a review by the American Journal of Law & Medicine published last November. California became the first to pass a law prohibiting nonconsensual pelvic exams in 2003 and was later joined by New York, Oregon, Texas, Florida, and Arizona. The same review found 17 states—including Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi—haven’t passed or even introduced any legislation on the issue. But since the review was published last fall, at least a couple of the states included on this list (namely Ohio and Colorado) have passed or introduced legislation to ban nonconsensual pelvic exams.
This feels like a law that should be universal. Luckily it seems people are on the case solving it, which is good at least.
he Republican National Committee (RNC) has a fundraising problem. Amid a range of heavy expenditures, as it gears up for the 2024 run at reclaiming the White House and Senate, RNC fundraising has significantly slumped, leaving the national party with less than $12 million at its disposal. According to The Daily Beast, the RNC had $80.5 million in the bank at the start of the 2022 midterm cycle, but that number has plummeted to $11.8 million — less than half of the Democratic National Committee's $25.4 million — so far this year. One anonymous RNC member told the outlet the committee was "raising record dollars when Donald Trump was president." While Trump is still garnering the most financial interest among Republicans, without the ability to use him to curry favor with donors, in tandem with the array of Republican primary challengers to support, the committee's fundraising has declined. At this time in 2019, one year ahead of the last presidential election, the RNC had $46.6 million — a figure that is four times the current amount in its coffers. "The fundraising has gone in the toilet," the RNC member told the Beast. "They're not raising money."
*Falls over laughing*
Renewable energy already beats fossil fuels on cost globally — and according to analysts, the gap is only going to grow. By 2030, technology improvements could slash today’s prices by a quarter for wind and by half for solar, according to the authors of a recent report from clean energy think tank RMI. (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)
Renewables truly are the key to our future.
Friends, I am still away but on this day of another good jobs report, wanted to share this foundational Hopium graph with you, newly updated and fresh. This single graph tells the story of America since the Cold War ended and a new age of globalization began - with Democrats, things get better. Republicans, on the other hand, have repeatedly failed to do their part, and have now become something dangerous, and illiberal.
The right makes promises they never keep. The Democrats get actual results.
A Florida redistricting plan pushed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis violates the state constitution and is prohibited from being used for any future U.S. congressional elections since it diminishes the ability of Black voters in north Florida to pick a representative of their choice, a state judge ruled Saturday. Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh sent the plan back to the Florida Legislature with instructions that lawmakers should draw a new congressional map that complies with the Florida Constitution. The voting rights groups that challenged the plan in court “have shown that the enacted plan results in the diminishment of Black voters’ ability to elect their candidate of choice in violation of the Florida Constitution,” Marsh wrote.
The latest pie in the face for the human size turd pile brought to life so he could learn to be a real boy (Its never gonna happen).
And because its Labor Day, lets end with a bit of GNR theater
And on that note we are done for this week. Have a happy labor day and a good rest of the week.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/4/2191398/-From-the-GNR-Newsroom-Its-the-Monday-Good-News-Roundup
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
