Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, your source for all things wonderful and hopeful, at the time you need them the most: the beginning of the work week. Well, where i am the hot weather is finally behind us it seems and its starting to cool down, and all I can say is FINALLY. Like I’m sorry if you hate cold weather, but after the hottest, muggiest summer I can remember I’m ready for fall to start already.
But before we fall to fall, its time to fall into some good news stories, special thanks to my crew of Killer300 and Bhu who always work hard to get the news stories we need.
Since the start of the year, less than five percent of all new passenger cars sold have been gas-powered, and a slightly smaller percentage have been diesel, while about 80 percent have been all-electric. As estimated by OFV, sales of all-electric cars increased by roughly 46 percent compared to the previous September.
More and more countries are phasing out fossil fuels and it is awesome.
On September 13th, the hacker collective Anonymous unveiled a massive data leak from the servers of the web hosting company Epik, which was notorious for taking on neo-Nazis, extremist groups and other far-right actors that had been booted from mainstream platforms.
Epik CEO Rob Monster had boasted that the web service had top-tier privacy, but the hack was made possible by sloppy, amateurish security measures and a wanton disregard for encrypting sensitive info. The initial leak comprised 15 million email addresses, a decade’s worth of transactions and one million invoices; additional data dumps by Anonymous on September 29th and October 4th provided further access to Epik’s servers.
In one fell swoop, researchers, journalists and activists now had a magnifying glass to examine extremist organizing, connecting the dots between far-right sites and the people who use them. The Epik hack was, as one expert put it, the “Panama Papers of hate groups” — an unprecedented flood of data for people to pore over, with more revelations surely to come.
Hackers are making Nazi’s afraid again, as they should be. Name and shame the lot of them.
In less than two weeks, a tiny group of a half dozen workers in Barkhamsted, Connecticut will vote on whether to become the only unionized Dollar General store employees in America. These six people in a small town about 20 miles northwest of Hartford now find themselves positioned to gain a historic toehold for organized labor inside a booming, low-wage industry. But it will not be easy.
The Pandemic made a lot of people realize who really holds the power in labor: the laborers, and now they are beginning to seize back their power.
Workers at Paizo, publisher of the Pathfinder and Starfinder tabletop role-playing games, have formed a union. United Paizo Workers (UPW) was created with the help of the Communication Workers of America (CWA), which has been working these last few years to organize labor in the video game industry. This represents a first for the tabletop role-playing sector, which is currently not served by organized labor in any major way.
This is mainly for myself but I consider it very good news. For years I was a huge fan of Paizo’s Pathfinder game, and I am very happy to see them unionizing, and I hope other companies follow their lead. (Looking at you Activision Blizzard)
As I wrote in the spring, quitting is a concept typically associated with losers and loafers. But this level of quitting is really an expression of optimism that says, We can do better. You may have heard the story that in the golden age of American labor, 20th-century workers stayed in one job for 40 years and retired with a gold watch. But that’s a total myth. The truth is people in the 1960s and ’70s quit their jobs more often than they have in the past 20 years, and the economy was better off for it. Since the 1980s, Americans have quit less, and many have clung to crappy jobs for fear that the safety net wouldn’t support them while they looked for a new one. But Americans seem to be done with sticking it out. And they’re being rewarded for their lack of patience: Wages for low-income workers are rising at their fastest rate since the Great Recession. The Great Resignation is, literally, great.
Its true, people do expect better, and companies are gonna have to sweeten the pot if they want to keep people.
I’m seeing it right outside my window: Apparently my Tim Hortons next door is so understaffed its being run by managers only.
The line that resonated with what I’ve seen as a reporter is “the ceiling of the possible is constantly rising.” I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve reported on “a thing that can’t be done” that is already happening.
That doesn’t prove that everything contemplated by clean energy visionaries will come to pass or succeed as hoped. But it’s good reason to challenge skeptical takes that regurgitate old arguments that have been proven wrong again and again.
Technology is always moving forward and as it does the tools we will have to fix our planet increase, we can do this, we can save the Earth.
Mitigating climate change is no longer an expensive collective action problem; it is a technology revolution with enormous wealth-generating and redistributive potential.
Getting this framing right is critical, for the road to Glasgow and far beyond. It is not only that ‘gain not pain’ breeds co-operation and competition; rather that this is a far more accurate representation of the reality in 2021. However, the residual narrative of pain and burden-sharing is very strong. And harnessing this great wave of innovation and redistribution requires moving on from the old framing and overcoming the vested interests that cling on to it.
Like I said, saving the world is easier and cheaper every day, and we need to make sure the people know it.
And that’s it for this week, I hope you all have a pleasant Monday, and I hope me and my crew made it just a little bit better for you.