- Good news:
- Computing tech:
- Zoom will have additional features for their VisionOS version: usage of visionOS personas based on face scans, pinning faces of meeting participants with transparent backgrounds in the real-world environment, and 3D object file-sharing.
- Meta Quest 3 to support iOS/visionOS Spatial Video.
- Interview with Metalenz
- Reports: Meta Quest Pro 2 set to ship in early 2025 with LG as hardware partner. Hopefully going to build on top of lessons from both Quest 3, original Quest Pro and Apple Vision Pro.
- Reports: Apple considering competitor to Meta Ray-Ban, other AI glasses. Apple also looking at options for augmenting other devices, including cameras in AirPods.
- Vision Pro release party in San Francisco, complete with multiple people wearing VP headsets while partying (more on the organizers)
- Disney Research invents HoloTile, a multi-user omnidirectional treadmill.
- Feds to Insurer: AI cannot be used to deny health care coverage.
- IFTAS takes action against deadnaming and misgendering in the fediverse.
- ideas on visionOS 2.0 features (sourced from this concept, these comments, this video)
- Engadget: Researchers at Cornell built AI-infused sonar glasses that track facial movements for silent communication. Also Engadget: These AI-infused sonar-equipped glasses from (again) Cornell could pave the way for better VR upper-body tracking (paper)
- Civil rights and elections
- Japan’s Wakayama Prefecture to become the 21st to create a same-sex partnership registry on 1 February (news in Japanese). More prefectures to create similar registries throughout the year, but no news as to more mutual recognition agreements between prefectures as of yet. Keep track on Wikipedia.
- PA Supreme Court rules that the state’s Equal Rights Amendment protects Medicaid coverage of abortion procedures.
- Governor Tony Evers signs last-ditch legislative district maps from the Republican-supermajority legislature who want to avoid a WI Supreme Court unilateral redraw. New maps, which are very evenly divided, take effect for the November 2024 elections for all Assembly seats and half of Senate seats. Evers is seeking judicial override of a portion of the new law prohibiting use of the new maps for an earlier special election. Big Republican concession nonetheless, a decade and some change in the making.
- Sightline Institute on even-year local elections.
- Same-sex marriage now legal in Greece. The Wild Hunt reviews reactions from local polytheists.
- Polish public TV reporter apologizes on air for carrying homophobic, transphobic water for the former PiS government.
- Reconciliation within the Alabama Democratic Party?
- Florida Officials Confirm Abortion Legalization Ballot Measure Qualifies for the Ballot Pending FL Supreme Court Decision
- How indigenous leaders saved Guatemalan democracy
- Alabama union membership increases for 2nd year
- Weed legalization passed in German Parliament
- POTUS’ Plan B on student loan debt forgiveness and its success
- Climate, housing and infrastructure
- Decatur declared “most bikeable city in Georgia” by Redfin. Still a long ways from Portland OR though.
- Researchers achieve breakthrough in solar technology: system can capture and store solar energy for up to 18 years and can produce electricity when connected to a thermoelectric generator (EuroNews Green, paper)
- SPUR Urban Center publishes white paper recommending the creation of a California Housing Agency and California Planning Agency (PDF).
- Spain’s cabinet supports bill to ban domestic flights which can be replaced with a high speed rail ride.
- Australia’s cars emit more cumulative CO2 than elsewhere. Pressure on the Albanese government to make voluntary emission standards mandatory.
- How Los Angeles is becoming a sponge city and overcoming the ongoing atmospheric river.
- Professor Michael Mann wins big in court against climate denialists in defamation case.
- Streetsblog USA: Why Jaywalking Reform is an Unhoused Rights Issue.
- Half of 2022 bike rides in US were for social or recreational use.
- Amsterdam is the first European city to endorse the Plant-Based Treaty.
- Superfund for Climate Change?
- Nanowerk: sound-powered sensors could save millions of batteries.
- Strong Towns on how Sacramento City Council ended single-family zoning in city limits by increasing the Floor Area Ratio and switching to a form-based zoning code. This is on top of laws passed by the state to override city laws to abolish parking minimums within a 1/2 mile of transit and allowing for homeowners to split their home lots into ADUs.
- Washington State House passes lot splitting bill.
- Researchers find way to use AI to slash energy use of carbon capture.
- States are preparing to use Medicaid for rental assistance for the first time.
- Climate concerns shifting some voting preferences/patterns
- Health
- Computing tech:
- Bad news:
- Study (PDF): African Americans freed from slavery in slave states after the Civil War had worse, multi-generational economic outcomes afterward than those freed from slavery in free states prior to Civil War, and Jim Crow added compound economic interest. Makes sense.
- From Erin Reed: A full-on assault on bodily autonomy for anyone is plotted by religious bioconservative legislators, including against abortion and gender confirmation treatment.
- Study: We blew past 1.5C degree of warming 4 years ago. Yikes.
- Power companies paid civil rights activists in the South. Sad, frustrating.
- Spam attack wave hits the Fediverse, erupting from a stupid feud in the Japanese-language Web. Investigations from Cappy at Fyra Labs, Techcrunch (and another article on how Discord failed to take any action against the perps)
- Big trouble for electrified transport in Germany.
- CNBC tries to explain why these tech layoffs keep happening
- Ohio families seek funds to flee Ohio after veto override on transphobic legislation
- NYC Marathon refuses to give nonbinary prize money to winner. Rule: “a runner eligible for prize money in the nonbinary group had to be a member of the NYRR for at least six months, and compete in several club-sponsored events. The same rule applies to professional and invited athletes.” Winner: “They added this stipulation to this division following the registration period. It was not there last year.”
- Somber news:
- Sonar detection found an object which may be Amelia Earhart’s plane somewhere near Howard Island in the Pacific. It took years and millions of dollars, and will take even more to lead an expedition to confirm.
- The mass murders of Jews and Romani people by Nazis and their collaborators were deeply interlinked.
- Study: Transphobia hurts trans women’s health.
- How the word “voodoo” became a racial slur.
- How America failed to defend liberal values abroad.
- LGBT rights groups bring complaints against Texas to UN
- Air pollution linked to dementia
- The Non-Emergent Democratic Majority?
- Interesting
- BlueSky opens up their AT protocol, shining a light on the ongoing beef that many Fediverse users have with BlueSky and their protocol.
- Mozilla walks away from Hubs and Fediverse projects, tries to chase AI and profit. At least they’ve open-sourced both.
- Toward a unified taxonomy of text-based social media use.
- The New Republic: Quit Hating on California
- How conservatives are finally admitting they hate MLK
- Abolish the $100 bill
- Time for Democrats to Make Some Enemies. Cue Drake.
- Wikipedia links:
- Role of mothers in Disney media
- Slate voting
Tag Archives: climate
A Better Climate Theory
She’s wrong on the facts: Climate change is real, and the devastation it’s causing is not good. But politics requires stories about how things could keep getting better. We do have such a story. Unlike Marjorie Taylor Greene’s story, ours is true. It goes like this: By addressing the climate crisis, we are making the world better. With every policy step we take away from fossil fuels, we are cleaning up the air and water, creating new clean industries in which humans can thrive, making our cities greener, more beautiful, cooler, and full of life. People will live longer lives, evading heat waves and devastating storms. Indeed, our children could well have a future that is more pregnant with exciting possibility than the world we live in now.
Liza Featherstone, The New Republic: “Marjorie Taylor Greene’s New Climate Theory Is Absurd. It’s Also Very Smart.“
I’d also like to add these:
- People will no longer need to live on the streets, tents and sidewalks
- Less people would die from being hit by automobiles
- More people would be able to get to more places without a car or plane
- Less people would be victimized by, or driven to, crime and violence
- Less neighborhoods would be broken up by highways
- More people would live without segregation contorting their lives from birth to death
Cycling is a Patriotic, Humanist Act
This post by David Hembrow in the Netherlands captures my feelings on the geopolitical, moral and environmentalist importance of cycling at this moment:
When driving a car means funding a country which is attacking Europe, riding a bicycle should be seen as a patriotic act. Insulating homes and other projects to reduce energy consumption should be viewed similarly, as should projects to generate sustainable energy in our own countries.
The Department of the Interior as a Department of Environment and Climate Protection
Reading this article from Vox about why the incoming Biden administration should establish a Department of Climate, the only times it goes into specifics about what this proposed department should look like is when it mentions current gaps in environmental justice, as well as how the Department of Homeland Security was cribbed from agencies in various departments.
If anything, the Department of the Interior, which has been so gutted of agencies over the last century that it has been called “the Department of Everything Else” and currently only manages federal lands and Native American affairs, would be a good candidate for serving as a Department of Environment and Climate.
All it needs is:
- a reshuffling of the NOAA from the Department of Commerce (for surveying the environment)
- the US Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service from the USDA (to conserve forests and natural resources)
- Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy from the Department of Energy (to support renewable energy, sustainable transportation and energy efficiency)
- the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences from HHS (for research into the effects of the environment on human disease)
- a (re-)merger of the EPA (for environmental assessment, research, education and regulation)
- Some permanent White House Initiatives on Environmental Justice for each ethnic minority community (African Americans, Native Americans and Alaskan Natives, AAPI Americans and Hispanic and Latino Americans)
If all of this (plus some) could be done, the DOI could become a powerful, holistic spearhead of federal climate and environmental policy.
Also: The Patent and Trademark Office should be moved to the DOJ, and the Census Bureau should be moved to HHS.
Two-Party Duopoly’s Effect on Climate Change Policy
If we had a multiparty system, do you think conservative partisans would be so intensely skeptical to climate change?
My idea is that part of the reason why climate change is regarded as such among the American right is because the big-tent nature of the Republican Party forces even those conservative or libertarian partisans who are sympathetic to the idea of climate change from the perspective of free-marketism or religious conservatism to put that on the shelf for the sake of party unity and getting other policies which they may favor into law.
The free-marketism of the oil, coal and natural gas barons and those citizens – entire states of citizens – who depend on their money is a third rail in the Republican Party, and needs to bar climate change as a logical possibility from their minds.
But not every Republican politician or voter lives in an oil/coal/gas-dependent state. And among that subset are those who may be skeptical about the skepticism. And they don’t have control of the party at this moment. Where is their representation?
In a multiparty system, I think they’d have their own party separate from those who are climate change-skeptical/beholden to big oil. And climate change would have far more acceptance than it does right now.
