(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: 2023-11-13
Wow, what a week huh?
Welcome back to the Monday Good News roundup, where your humble GNR newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) bring you the good news stories to get your week off to a great start. Last week was a pretty amazing one for us all things considered, so lets not waste any time and get to talking about it.
The first patient to receive a spinal implant to treat advanced Parkinson’s disease has described experiencing “a rebirth” after the treatment allowed him to walk again without falling over. Marc, 63, from Bordeaux, France, was diagnosed with the degenerative disease more than 20 years ago and had developed severe mobility problems, including balance impairments and freezing of gait. After receiving the implant, which aims to restore normal signalling to the leg muscles from the spine, he has been able to walk more normally and regained his independence.
Its something I say a lot, but I will keep saying it as long as it holds true: I love living in the future.
Restrictive local zoning and minimum parking requirements are well-documented impediments to building more missing-middle housing. A lesser-known, but equally influential, factor is the International Building Code (IBC), under which four-unit residential construction faces many of the same expensive safety requirements as much larger commercial facilities. Aaron Lubeck, a North Carolina-based developer, frames this problem starkly: “The exact same codebook in America governs a triplex and an airport.” The state of North Carolina has taken legislative action to address the issue. Under a new provision in HB488, any dwelling with three or four housing units would be subject to the less-restrictive International Residential Code (IRC), as 1–2 unit buildings currently are. By eliminating expensive requirements such as mandatory sprinkler systems and fire-rated doors, housing projects should pencil out at lower costs, which incremental housing advocates say could be a boost to small-scale development in communities that desperately need more housing inventory.
More good news on the affordable housing front. Make housing affordable again.
LIHUE, Hawaii — It’s hard to find anywhere in the United States that has greened its electricity supply as quickly as verdant Kauai. And the people of Kauai achieved that on their own, through collective ownership of the electricity grid, not by hoping profit-maximizing utilities find a way to balance the urgency of human-caused climate change with quarterly dividends for shareholders. Kauai used to have a Wall Street–owned, for-profit utility, much like roughly 70% of U.S. electricity customers. But the island’s grid infrastructure took a beating from Hurricane Iniki in 1992, and the utility, Citizens Utilities Company of Connecticut, eventually wanted to sell. Kauai residents raised financing and acquired the utility in 2002, turning it into a locally owned cooperative that pledged to lower rates, which were the highest in the state at the time.
Lessons to be learned about how to fix our broken systems. Make them owned by the people, not big corporations.
he UAW’s victory in its forty-five-day strike against the Big Three Detroit automakers is historic and transformative, ending a forty-three-year era of concession bargaining and labor movement defeat that began with Chrysler’s near bankruptcy in 1979 and Ronald Reagan’s destruction of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization two years later. Not only did the union win substantial wage increases for all members in its tentative agreements (TAs) — at least 25 percent over the four-and-a-half-year contract — but the wage structure is radically progressive, eliminating the second- and third-class status endured by thousands of temps and second-tier workers. With the regularization of their employment status, these workers will enjoy extraordinary pay increases, in some cases upward of 150 percent. And the union clawed back the annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) that had been eliminated during the 2008 financial crisis. COLA had been a standard feature of UAW contracts since 1948, when General Motors first proposed it to the union to blunt the effort, forcefully pushed by then UAW president Walter Reuther, to limit auto and steel industry price hikes either through collective bargaining or government regulation. The labor movement at the time was fighting to limit inflation but secure a healthy wage increase — benefitting working class and middle class alike, union and nonunion, by advancing a program that shifted income and wealth from capital to labor.
This week was a big win for unions in general, but these guys were one of the biggest winners.
Amidst all of the understandable concern with inflation and recession risks, the evidence continues to foretell a welcome inflection point on the horizon—a rare procyclical upturn in productivity growth.
A lot of charts that I don’t understand, but overall it seems promising.
Rome CNN — A new ruling by the Vatican’s doctrine department has opened the door to Catholic baptism for transgender people and babies of same-sex couples. The new rules, dated October 31, come from a set of questions, or dubia, submitted to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) by Brazilian bishop Giuseppe Negri. The answers to his questions about certain sacraments were published on the Vatican’s website in Italian on Wednesday evening. Regarding transgender people, the document says a person who identifies as transgender can be baptized like any other adult, “as long as there is no risk of causing scandal or disorientation” to other Catholics.
Yep, even the Catholic Church is coming around on LGTBQ rights. We are winning.
Tuesday’s off-year elections saw Democrats win a pro-abortion-rights referendum in Ohio and turn the entire state legislature in Virginia blue, dealing a setback to Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. But there were also other results, less prominent but arguably no less significant.
To the surprise of no one (except maybe the GOP who don’t live in the same reality as the rest of us), the Dems cleaned house last Tuesday, and we’re gonna do it again in November just wait and see.
Friends, As I sat down this morning to write I realized that I have a simple message for all of you - we just keep winning elections of all kinds across the US, and we should be very optimistic about winning the Presidential election next year. I discuss all this in my Hopium-filled talk recorded yesterday, which features some inspiring words from Sam Cornale, the Executive Director of the DNC. I hope you will watch, and share with others you think might be interested.
Like I said, Dems are on fire these last few years. We should be proud of that, and gear up to keep it going next year.
Republicans across the country suffered a crushing defeat in the transgender battle that they thrust into the national spotlight just two years ago. GOP candidates in Virginia, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Kansas suffered major losses Tuesday night in several local elections where voters rejected anti-trans policies by voting against Republicans in school board races. The results of the 2023 election suggest that a tide is turning against the so-called "parents rights" movement, which gained momentum two years ago and has since dominated the national conversation about education and American politics. Fresh off of Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin's 2021 victory, Republicans seized on school culture wars as a winning election strategy. Advocacy group Moms for Liberty gained significant traction as Republican lawmakers, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, pursued education policies that tackled critical race theory, sexual orientation and transgender rights.
People are not buying what the GOP is selling, and I am very grateful for that.
In late August, hundreds of women sanitation workers came together at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. The 18th-century astronomical observatory has become a popular place to publicly show dissent in India due to its proximity to the Parliament, a little more than a mile away. The protesters were opposing recently released official statistics regarding the death of sanitation workers. The women claimed that the number of so-called “manual scavengers” who died while on duty due to the precarious nature of the occupation was much higher than what the Parliament claimed. Timed to coincide with the government’s commemoration of the 75th anniversary of India gaining independence from the British, the demonstration was part of a widespread series of coordinated actions using the slogan “Stop Killing Us.” It also marked the 475th day of a nationwide campaign launched in May 2022 by the Safai Karamchari Andolan, which translates loosely to the Sanitation Workers Movement. The organization works to create awareness and to engage government bodies towards eradicating the practice of manual scavenging, referring to the removal of human waste from dry latrines and sewers by people with bare hands and no safety gear. Those in this occupation face several health hazards, including exposure to gasses such as ammonia, methane and hydrogen disulfide. This often results in visual impairment, respiratory problems and sometimes even death. Manual scavenging is a unique feature of sanitation in India — a nation embedded in a caste system that is also present in other nations in the subcontinent — and it is a problem intrinsically linked to untouchability.
Good news out of India.
And now, for your enjoyment, a GNR Lightning round
What could go right? Gen Z goes to work
US solar generation has grown 12x in a decade
Some houses are being built hurricane resistant and for lower emissions
India solar adoption entering accelerated growth
Small Finnish city will be carbon neutral in a few years
Country’s largest ferry system going green
Bubble curtain protects porpoises from wind turbine noise
New vaccine offers hope of breaking cocaine addiction
One county shows how fighting opioid epidemic could work
Tobacco and E cigarette use among high schoolers declines
COVID Vax campaign saved 2.4 million lives
Austin becomes largest city to drop parking requirements
Biden administration invests in ports to improve supply chains, keep food costs down
Legislation expanding gun restrictions for domestic abusers clears Michigan house
Floating desalination machines powered by waves
Super Melanin heals injuries from sunburns and chemical burns
Great stuff, lets push on.
It was lucky for me, because if I had stayed in that industry I would have been part of its slow deterioration, though by now I would probably have retired and have perhaps missed the nose dive of the past several years. There are people right on this site who still believe in the validity of polling—or at least they believe it when it tells them something they want to hear. Most recently, the ones who don’t like Biden have been latching onto poll results that claim he’s losing to Trump. Previously there were other issues. In fact, none of these poll results, whether we like them or not, have any relationship to reality, and here’s why. The bedrock of a valid poll is to collect a true random sample of the population you want to study. This is easy enough to do when it’s a small population. I can sample my church by going down the Directory and marking every 20th name, and I’ll have a true random 5% sample of that population—at least if I’ve made sure the Directory is up to date. But if you want to study a larger population, it becomes progressively more difficult. Studying, let’s say, likely voters in all 50 states, becomes much more difficult because you can’t begin by making a true list of all of them, and then using some mathematical method to pick a random sample. But let’s say you COULD get an excellent random sample of that group. The next pitfall is much more daunting, though at one time that was not the case. You have to get a high response rate from your sample. 75% would have been considered a good rate back in the day. (Now a “good rate” can be as little as 5%. Keep that in mind.) That means you have made a list of names of those whose responses you want, and 75% of those people will complete your questionnaire. So first you have to contact each of them in some way, and then you have to convince them to take the time to answer all the questions, either verbally, in writing, or on line, depending on the method of data collection you’re using. What happens if you don’t get a high response rate? In that case you have what’s called a “self-selected sample”. That is, some people chose to answer while others didn’t, but you have no way of knowing on what basis they made that choice. Maybe it’s a factor irrelevant to the subject of your study, or maybe not. If it’s a political study, maybe only the red-haired people answered, or maybe only the Southerners answered, or maybe only meat-eaters answered. Are those factors relevant? Can you possibly know?
Yes I know we were all freaked out by the New York Times polls, but don’t be, because polling is crap. Maybe it was a valid way to predict elections once upon a time but not anymore. Pay attention to the word on the street.
Michigan’s Democrat-controlled legislature has passed a package of clean energy bills that includes one of the most aggressive state-level clean energy targets in the nation. Senate Bill 271, which requires the state’s major utilities to achieve 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2040, as well as bills 273, 502 and 519, were passed on party-line votes in the Michigan House of Representatives and Senate, where Democrats hold narrow majorities. Michigan is now one of several states in which Democrats won governing “trifectas” in the 2022 midterm elections and then proceeded to enact significant climate policy
Way to go Michigan! Lead the way to a green future.
To deal with the climate crisis, the world needs to build a lot of carbon-free energy. And to build a lot of carbon-free energy, the world needs to spend money — a ton of it. It’s encouraging, then, that more and more dollars are flowing to sectors like low-emissions power, energy efficiency, batteries and electrification, per the International Energy Agency’s most recent World Energy Outlook.
Fossil fuels are just that, fossils. Leave em in the past.
There’s no doubt that the threat of wildfires is growing more and more dire as greenhouse gas emissions continue to warm the planet. The evidence? Five of the 10 worst wildfire events in U.S. history occurred in the last 10 years. Eight of the 10 largest fires in California’s documented history have occurred since 2017. It’s a staggeringly large problem with a global reach: “If wildfires were a country, they’d be ranked No. 4, behind China, the U.S. and India in terms of carbon emissions,” Nancy Pfund, founder and managing partner of investment firm DBL Partners, told a packed audience at a recent Canary Live panel. The growing urgency of this issue has given rise to a category of startups called “firetech,” a technology ecosystem that aims to confront the threat of wildfires and restore the health of the world’s forests. There is an incumbent set of players, but there is also a brigade of investors dedicated to pumping money into the sector and mission-driven entrepreneurs committed to devising solutions; no fewer than 50 U.S. startups are working in the space right now. The wave of firetech companies is a good sign that investors are looking for ways to finance climate resilience and adaptation. Resilience efforts focus on enhancing responses to and recovery from climate-related events, while adaptation efforts refine existing systems and technologies to better address the evolving climate reality. It’s a segment that historically has attracted less funding than companies focused on more tangible products such as solar or batteries. At least one investor, Convective Capital, backs nothing but early-stage companies building solutions to wildfires.
The sad fact is the wildfire problem is probably gonna get worse before it gets better, so thank goodness we are taking steps to deal with that problem as well.
The city of Edmonton, Alberta, has passed substantial zoning reforms that officials and housing advocates hope will generate more infill construction and help the fast-growing city add housing to keep pace. The revised zoning bylaw, which passed city council by an 11–2 vote in October and takes effect in January 2024, will allow more housing types in more settings, including three stories by right, more mixed-use development, and reduce the number of administrative zones within the city from 46 to 24. The preface to the new zoning revisions says the changes are intended to allow for a range of small-scale residential construction. Speaking in support before the passage of the measure, Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi said that by focusing on infill within city limits, the new rules allow Edmontonians to use the existing infrastructure and services that are already in place. He contrasted that with expanding suburban development that imposes large infrastructure costs and an economic burden on the commuters who move there.
More good news in regards to affordable housing.
And we leave this GNR on another triple feature of GNR theater, so sit back, grab a snack, dim the lights, and we’ll se you next week.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/13/2205352/-From-the-GNR-Newsroom-its-the-Monday-Good-News-Roundup?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
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/
