Author Archives: hedsdfx

Undocumented immigrants still face unique obstacles in Flint’s water crisis.

by hedsdfx Posted on September 9, 2016

Australian architect James Gardiner wants to use 3D-printing technology to build structures for coral to grow on in places where reefs are decimated by disease, pollution, dredging, and other maladies (looking at you, crown o’ thorns).

Right now, artificial reefs are built out of uniform, blocky assemblages of concrete or steel. Those are cheap and easy to make, but don’t look or work like the real thing — for starters, because “the marine life that colonizes these reef surfaces can sometimes fall off,” one biologist told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Gardiner worked with David Lennon of Reef Design Lab to design new shapes with textured surfaces and built-in tunnels and shelters. The computer models are turned into wax molds with the world’s largest 3D printer, and then cast with, essentially, sand. It’s a cheap and low-carbon way to manufacture custom, modular pieces of reef.

Reef Design Lab installed the first 3D-printed reef in Bahrain in 2012 — and, eight months later, it was covered with algae, sponges, and fish.

Mandatory disclaimer: Rebuilding all of the world’s coral reefs by hand is impossible, and climate change is still the biggest threat facing coral reefs, so let’s not forget to save the ones we’ve got.

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Undocumented immigrants still face unique obstacles in Flint’s water crisis.

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Why Is Obama’s Department of Labor Bringing On a Top McDonald’s PR Person?

by hedsdfx Posted on November 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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Labor Secretary Tom Perez has taken a lead role in President Barack Obama’s push to increase the federal minimum wage. The fast food industry is one of the nation’s largest employers of low- and minimum-wage workers. So why has the labor secretary brought on a top McDonald’s PR person as a senior adviser?

Ofelia Casillas worked as a national media relations manager for McDonald’s until she was hired as Perez’ director of public outreach. At McDonald’s, Casillas was in charge of overseeing “media crises” for the company. That would include the wave of fast-food strikes designed to draw attention to poverty wages. McDonald’s average wage is $7.81 an hour.

During a national strike in August, in which workers were demanding that fast-food joints pay a $15 minimum wage, Casillas told Bloomberg that the strikers were not “providing an accurate picture of what it means to work at McDonald’s.”

At the Department of Labor, Casillas will be meeting with business and community groups about the secretary’s policy priorities, one of which is raising the minimum wage. That means she will inevitably be dealing with companies like McDonald’s as well as the striking fast-food workers, says Craig Holman, a government ethics expert at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen. Her previous work for McDonald’s could color how she presents their concerns to Perez, he argues, which means there is “clearly an appearance of a conflict of interest.”

(The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The SEIU, which has helped organize the national movement of fast-food strikes, and the AFL-CIO, which is active in the minimum wage fight, declined to comment, as did Berlin Rosen, a public relations firm promoting the SEIU’s Fast Food Forward Campaign.)

Carl Fillichio, senior communications adviser at the DoL, says the hire does not represent a contradiction. “The Secretary is committed to raising the minimum wage and so is the Obama administration,” he says. Fillichio notes that prior to her job at McDonald’s, Casillas was a regional press secretary for the Obama campaign, and before that she worked at the American Civil Liberties Union. At the DoL, she does not influence policy, he adds, but merely serves as a liaison between the labor secretary and outside groups.

Critics are not convinced. “If she’s a gatekeeper for who the DoL is meeting with, that’s a problem,” says a top organizer in the minimum-wage fight who did not want to be identified. He adds that McDonald’s officials clearly don’t have an “understanding of where workers are… The hire certainly sends a troubling message.”

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Why Is Obama’s Department of Labor Bringing On a Top McDonald’s PR Person?

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In Virginia, the Business Community Abandons the Tea Party

by hedsdfx Posted on November 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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I don’t know enough about Virginia (or New Jersey or New York City) to have much to say about their elections yesterday. So I was hoping that one of my Virginia friends would come through with a long, thoughtful email about the McAuliffe-Cuccinelli race, which I considered by far the most interesting of last night’s races.

In that race, Terry McAuliffe won a close victory even though the polls had him well ahead.1 Does this bode ill for Democrats? Sure, maybe. On the other hand, McAuliffe was an unusually unsympathetic candidate, and Republicans still couldn’t beat him in a state that looks increasingly like the country at large. On balance, then, this really seems like bad news for Republicans no matter how they try to spin things.

However, one of my liberal Virginia pals had an interesting take on why Cuccinelli lost:

I agree with Erickson and First Read regarding a lot of the race-specific reasons for Cuccinelli’s loss. But, to me, the biggest mistake that Cuccinelli made was his initial tentative step toward making this a Tea Party campaign that downplayed economic messages in favor of his hot buttons — which, by the way, far and away most animated him on the stump (reminiscent of Santorum, almost).

This just doesn’t fly with the NoVa business interests. They’ll support any right wing crank as long as there is no daylight between them on business interests, taxes, etc. But Cuccinelli had the unnerving tendency to go headlong and unapologetically into his crusades at the expense of all else (e.g., massive and expensive witch hunt against UVA professor for climate change views, unqualified support for anti-abortion and contraception laws, and, of course, leading the doomed Obamacare challenges). In none of his crusades would business benefit in any significant way if he were successful. At the end of the day, he was spending significant resources to prove ideological points. Further, his attempted course corrections at trying to put his economic message front and center just lacked authenticity — more pro forma than passion. The business lobby wants the Governor out there selling Virginia, attracting business and jobs. Cuccinelli just seemed to be the worst salesman for this.

This speaks to all the recent chatter about whether the business wing of the GOP is finally fed up with the tea party and willing to do something about it. The message here isn’t that Cuccinelli was anti-business, but simply that he was so plainly animated by crusades on social issues that the business community didn’t trust him. They were afraid that at worst he might actively scare away business, and at best he’d never put any real energy into attracting it. McAuliffe, by contrast, is all about attracting business to Virginia. So the usual business-tea party partnership broke down.

I just thought I’d share this. Cuccinelli might be a bit of a unique character, but he’s not that unique. The business community might have fired a shot across the tea party bow last night.

1Will this be a boon for the folks who are convinced that mainstream polls are all skewed against conservatives? Maybe!

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In Virginia, the Business Community Abandons the Tea Party

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Kids these days just don’t care about cars

by hedsdfx Posted on May 14, 2013

Kids these days just don’t care about cars

By Claire Thompson

Shutterstock

I refuse to conform to your car culture.

At Grist, we’ve been onto the trend of the youngs losing interest in driving for awhile now. And every time a new study or survey comes out to statistically corroborate the anecdotal evidence we see every day, we hear the same responses from skeptics — it’s just the economy, just a stage of life. Wait til those millennials get real jobs, get married, have families, and move to the suburbs. Then you bet they’ll start driving.

But the latest report on declining driving trends — released today by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund — argues that a rejection of car culture is here to stay. “The Driving Boom is over,” it declares. In fact, the report calculates that “If the Millennial-led decline in per-capita driving continues for another dozen years … total vehicle travel in the United States could remain well below its 2007 peak through at least 2040 — despite a 21 percent increase in population.”

The U.S. PIRG study reveals how, after six decades of steady growth, both total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and VMT per capita have been falling since 2007. Total VMT is now at 2004 levels, while VMT per capita has fallen to 1996 levels. And once again, it’s those meddling millennials who are reimagining one of the pillars of American culture. Young people ages 16 to 34 drove an average of 23 percent fewer miles in 2009 than they did in 2001, according to the report. If you consider that more than half the people in that age group were old enough to drive in 2001, too, that suggests that even as those at the older end of this generation enter their 30s — presumably settling into more stable jobs and in some cases starting families — they’re still not switching over to a car-centric lifestyle at the same rate as generations before them.

Economic factors — high gas prices, the recession — obviously motivate people of all ages to drive less. But, as we’ve pointed out before, larger societal shifts lie behind millennials’ generation-wide “meh” attitude toward car ownership. Brian Merchant at Vice summarizes them in two words: Facebook and Brooklyn.

To expand on that slightly: Technology lets people socialize without being physically in the same place. And when they do leave the house to hang with friends IRL, kids these days would rather walk, bike, bus, train, longboard, or — if those options prove impossible — car-share to get there. That’s why millennials are flocking to communities that cater to a walkable, urban lifestyle, and why even historically unhip towns like Charlotte, N.C. — the setting for The New York Times’ coverage of the Wash PIRG study — are now modeling themselves more in Brooklyn’s image, “filling in the urban core with new development and encouraging new construction along major transportation corridors, including an expanding rail line.” (Charlotte’s transit-happy mayor, Anthony Foxx, is Obama’s pick for transportation secretary.)

Merchant explains why Facebook and Brooklyn could solidify the decline in driving into a lasting trend:

As more folks from the affluent 18-34 demographic settle in cities, the need for cars will diminish. More parents simply won’t own them. Which means the physical barriers to socializing erected by the suburbs will thus never be put in place, and teens won’t need to overcome them to feel liberated. Meanwhile, social media will still be providing alternative channels for interaction.

The prospect of driving, after all, is only exciting if there are places you’re dying to go. Growing up in a place where all of your friends and activities are already within walking distance, and being able to bridge the rest of the gaps online—gaming, gossiping, etc—may hopelessly antiquate that four-cylinder headrush.

I knew a few folks in college who, having grown up in Manhattan or San Francisco, simply never learned to drive — there was no reason to. I found this exceedingly strange at the time, but Merchant’s point is that as millennials lead a larger cultural shift in our lifestyle values, and more cities adapt to their preferences, those license-less kids will become more the rule than the exception.

Which means, as the report points out, “The time has come for America to hit the ‘reset’ button on transportation policy” — repair existing roads and bridges instead of build new ones; focus resources on mass transit and bike infrastructure, as Charlotte is doing; and support the development of walkable neighborhoods.

The consequences of a transportation policy “stuck in the past,” as the report puts it, are not only costly, but tragic. Texting while driving has replaced drunk driving as the No. 1 cause of teenage death on the road, which no doubt has something to do with the smartphone replacing the car as the most important vehicle for teenage freedom. Just as improved transit options reduce the temptation to drive drunk, so too do they eliminate the temptation to text behind the wheel.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Kids these days just don’t care about cars

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