Its Monday again my friends, which means its time for the Monday Good News Roundup, where myself and the GNR Newsroom (Bhu and Killer300), bring you the good news to get your work week started off right. So lets jump right in to this weeks good news.
It certainly seems so. With remarkable speed, governments across America are adopting three reforms recommended by UCLA Distinguished Research Professor and internationally recognized parking expert Donald Shoup:
- Remove off-street parking requirements. Developers and businesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers.
- Charge the right prices for on-street parking. The right prices are the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on each block, so there will be no parking shortages.
- Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the metered streets. If everybody sees their meter money at work, the new public services can make demand-based prices for on-street parking politically popular.
So it looks like parking might become a little bit easier in the future. That seems like good news (I don’t drive myself so I would not know).
The last few years have seen significant victories for the guaranteed income movement — the push to simply give people cash with no strings attached. Pilot programs in places ranging from Stockton, California, to southwestern Kenya have been launched in recent years, and the research literature on the positive effects of guaranteed income is growing.
A new pilot program is now pushing guaranteed income into a new frontier by focusing on a potentially controversial constituency: formerly incarcerated people. The outcome of the program may help define the political bounds of just giving people money.
Just Income GNV — a guaranteed income project by Community Spring, an organization dedicated to dismantling structural poverty and spurring economic mobility — last month launched a guaranteed income experiment for people who were formerly incarcerated in Alachua County, Florida. In January, the first half of participants in the program received $1,000 each. Over the next 11 months, they will receive $600 each per month as an unconditional cash transfer, which means recipients can spend it however they choose.
This seems promising. Hopefully it will work out and get used elsewhere and for more people.
EXCLUSIVE, SPOILER ALERT: Rudy Giuliani was unmasked as an exiting costumed contestant in last week’s taping of the first Season 7 episode of Fox’s popular primetime series The Masked Singer. Deadline hears that as soon as they saw Giuliani, judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke quickly left the stage in protest.
The show is known for its jaw-dropping surprises when celebrity contestants shed their headpieces after they are eliminated. The reaction to Giuliani was perhaps the most polarizing the show has seen since 2020. The Masked Singer faced criticism then when another controversial Republican politician, Sarah Palin, was unveiled as The Bear.
So, I guess working for Trump isn’t working out for Giuliani.
When it comes to stories of progress, there aren’t many environmental successes to learn from. We’ve seen massive improvements in many human dimensions in recent decades – declines in extreme poverty; reductions in child mortality; increases in life expectancy. But most metrics that relate to the environment are moving in the wrong direction. Although there are some local and national successes – such as the large reductions in local air pollution in rich countries – there are almost none at the global level.
Yet there is one exception: the ozone layer. Humanity’s ability to heal the depleted ozone layer is not only our biggest environmental success, it is the most impressive example of international cooperation on any challenge in history.
Hey remembered when we fixed the Ozone layer? That was pretty cool wasn’t it. We can do the same for climate change, and we will.
Streets were deserted and shops abandoned across many of Myanmar’s towns and cities on Monday, as the public defied threats by the military junta and stayed at home in a “silent strike” on the first anniversary of the country’s coup.
Images posted on social media showed usually congested roads with no traffic and stores shuttered. In a photograph shared by Khit Thit Media, the usually busy Sule Pagoda road in downtown Yangon was completely empty. In Mandalay, the second largest city, a normally bustling market had virtually no customers.
Images posted online showed similar scenes across the country: from Myitkyina and Namati in Kachin, Myanmar’s northernmost state, to Dawei and Myeik in Tanintharyi region in the south of the country.
The military, which has struggled to control widespread opposition to its rule, had threatened charges of sedition or terrorism against anyone who participated in the stay-at-home protest. Business owners had also been told their properties would be seized if they participated.
Some opened their stores but left them unattended to get around the threats. In one image shared widely on social media, a seller mockingly left a sign next to their food stall that said: “All menu items are available.” Beside it, empty bowls were labelled “beans”, “tofu” and “kale”.
The military ousted the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi on 1 February 2021, and has inflicted deadly violence and terror in an attempt to crush opposition.
Power does not lie in authoritarian bullies, it lies in the people. And the Myanmar people just proved they are stronger than the bullies who stole their country from them.
The hits keep rolling in for the MAGA social media platform Gettr, as the site faces increased competition from the likes of Donald Trump’s yet-to-be-launched Truth Social and far-right platform Gab. The Washington Examiner reported Thursday how Gettr remains in decline after laying off at least 13 staffers this past December, including an entire IT department and two executives. “At least 13 members of GETTR’s online security and infrastructure teams, including the platform’s chief information officer and its chief information security officer, were let go on Dec. 28, 2021, less than three months after they were first hired,
Like this seems to be a trend with these “conservative only” social media platforms (As if Facebook and twitter don’t already bend over backwards for these assholes) where the people running them either don’t know what they are doing, are a bunch of con men, or both. I can’t imagine this is the end of Gettr’s troubles. If you ask me the people who use this app should gettr a life (I am a comedic genius).
It's very unlikely that whaling licenses will be renewed in Iceland when they expire at the end of 2023, its Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture, Svandís Svavarsdóttir, has announced. This will effectively end commercial whaling in Iceland once again after it was resumed back in 2006.
However, it may not be due to the controversy surrounding the nation's whaling practices. It appears that there is little economic benefit to whale hunting anymore, and a combination of the pandemic restrictions and Japan starting commercial hunting of whales again in 2019 has pushed the few firms allowed to hunt these marine mammals to stop the practice already.
You know what I’ll take it. If they wont stop because its the right thing to do, they can stop because nobody wants to buy their whale blubber anymore.
Last week the British government added a clause to its Health and Care Bill that would make hymenoplasty -- or "virginity repair" surgery -- illegal in England and Wales. In November 2021, "virginity testing" also became a criminal offence.
According to
an article on BMJ Global Health, "'virginity' testing involves visual inspection of the hymenal membrane by a medical professional. In some cases, the examination includes a 'two-finger' test to assess the size of the vaginal opening."
Its always good news when gross, creepy, and malicious practices like this get banned.
Taylor’s killing sparked condemnation of how no-knock raids — and police raids in general — are executed and enforced around the country. Slow progress on reforming and regulating the practice has raid victims and justice advocates continuing to press for meaningful change.
Both Locke’s and Taylor’s deaths resemble a situation that one policing expert called many people’s “worst nightmare”: While a person is asleep at home at night, armed men burst in with little to no warning.
Police need to be taught to calm the eff down, and stop going in like they were freaking Rambo (Which is ironic because the movie Rambo was about a homeless Vietnam Vet who snapped after he was pushed around by corrupt cops), suspending no knock warrants is a good first step there.
That does it for this weeks samplings, I hope the good news is enough to sustain you through the work week, we'll be back next week same good news time, same good news channel.
