Prepare for Change

  A Baby Boomer's Lament by Jeff Jacobsen I was born in the US in1955, ten years after World War II, but smack in the middle of the Cold War. I lived near an air force base that had B-52 bombers flying around non-stop, ready to drop nukes on the Soviet Union should we be attacked first. We didn't practice hiding under our desks at grade school, but I'm sure that's just because everybody knew if the time came we were all screwed anyway. Us Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964) lived through technological change never before seen. Looking back, things seem so old. On my grandparents' farm on the other side of the state was a phone on a community line. The other farmers in the neighborhood were on the same line, so if you heard the phone ring (certain rings for certain customers), you could surreptitiously listen in on any phone call. Black and white TV had 3 channels available. Drinking water was hauled in from the artesian well. When it got hot, there...

  https://www.wired.com/story/the-microplastic-crisis-is-getting-exponentially-worse/   Overall, the team found that microplastic levels have been doubling in Arctic Ocean sediments every 23 years. That mirrors a previous study of ocean sediments off the coast of Southern California, which found concentrations to be doubling every 15 years. Other researchers have found an exponential rise in contamination in urban lake sediments .  The problem is likely to keep getting worse, lead author Seung-Kyu Kim, a marine scientist at Incheon National University, told WIRED by email. “The input of microplastics into the Arctic has increased exponentially over the past decades, with an annual increase rate of 3 percent,” Kim writes. “The mass production of plastic at an 8.4 percent annual increase—coupled with inefficient waste management systems—is projected to further increase loads of plastic entering the ocean for the next several decades, and thus plastic entering th...

      " Millions of tons of sargassum wash up on beaches across North America every year. Exposure can lead to breathing problems, and it costs millions to clean it up. Now, one Mexican entrepreneur is building houses out of bricks made from the invasive species."

  https://digg.com/digg-vids/link/guy-succinctly-explains-why-all-billionaires-are-evil-GSG72n6kBe?utm_source=digg   We see now that Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, not as an investment, but as a toy. We see now from the time of the pandemic who really are the "essential workers" and it's not billionaires. We see now that billionaires are hoarders who simply keep money like Smaug because they are addicted to it, not because they do anything incredible with it.

  https://digg.com/data-viz/link/public-transit-national-usa-decline-data-lockdown-graph-vMCJsvimdx?utm_source=digg   "Before the initial pandemic lockdowns of early 2020, average ridership for these transit systems was around 100 million daily. That plummeted to less than 25 million after March 2020's lockdowns. After staggered openings since mid-2020, ridership has slowly started to rise, but is still nowhere close to pre-2020 levels." * * * * * Mass transit is the best way to fight global warming.  It's cheaper than owning a car.  It helps take cities back from the cars to the people.

  https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/24/business/drive-thru-fast-food-chick-fil-a-urban-planning/index.html   Magnets of traffic and congestion, drive-thrus discourage walking, public transit use and visits to neighboring businesses. They also lead to accidents with pedestrians, cyclists and other cars, and contradict the environmental and livability goals of many communities. A host of cities and regions want the sprawl to stop: Atlanta lawmakers will vote this summer on whether to ban new drive-thrus in the popular Beltline area. Minneapolis; Fair Haven, New Jersey; Creve Coeur, Missouri; Orchard Park, New York, and other cities have banned new drive-thrus in recent years .   * * * * * If we want to prevent urban sprawl and turning our cities over to cars instead of people, we need to take steps to make local access more reliable.  

  https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/opinions/homelessness-solutions-houston-model-eichenbaum-nichols/index.html   Then we made three crucial decisions. First, we decided to work together as a collaborative system, aligned around a standardized set of goals, processes and strategies, rather than as individual organizations and government entities each trying to chip away at the problem. Today, more than 100 entities in the Houston area are working together and combining their efforts and resources to move the needle on reducing homelessness. Our collaboration includes using a centralized database to capture information and track the service needs of people experiencing homelessness and using a standardized assessment to determine which housing and/or service interventions best suit each household. Second, we embraced the data-proven best practices of Housing First , a strategy focused on getting individuals and families out of homelessness and into ...