Linkage

I must admit I got a bit teary watching this. There's more with Jeremy on the creators' YouTube channel.

Motorist deaths in Melbourne have fallen by half over the past decade, but there’s been no reduction in deaths among pedestrians, motorcyclists and bicycle riders over the same period.

It is in this context that City of Yarra councillors voted last week to expand a trial of 30km/h speed limits across all of Fitzroy and Collingwood, other than major thoroughfares and pending state government approval.

A growing number of major cities including London, Paris, Toronto and Barcelona are adopting 30km/h limits on their streets and say it has made their cities safer. The World Health Organisation has called for it to be the maximum where vehicles mix with pedestrians and cyclists. But Victoria Police’s chief commissioner, Shane Patton, scoffed at the plan last week, saying he was not aware of any evidence that it would reduce road trauma. “I think no one is going to obey it ... it’s ridiculous,” he said.

Patton’s view – although perhaps widely shared – may have been a shock to Victoria Police’s fellow members of the Victorian Government Road Safety Partnership, made up of the Transport Accident Commission and the Transport, Justice and Health departments.

The partnership told a state parliament inquiry into road trauma earlier this year that successive studies had shown that 30km/h was the “maximum impact speed for a healthy adult before death or very serious injury becomes increasingly likely”.

Someone hit by a car at 50km/h has a 90 per cent chance of being killed, compared with a 10 per cent chance at 30km/h, those studies show.

I must admit I misinterpreted the headline. "Wait! This is the era of post offices? How wonderful! Why has nobody told me?"

Martinez Ferrada said the federal government is looking to support downtown revitalization through several agencies, but there are also opportunities to rethink the core purpose of downtowns, creating new ways to bring people back without relying on office workers.

“One of the opportunities that we see is for those cities to develop kind of a new stream of how can we use downtown cores,” she said.

[…] 

Montreal’s Morizio said the long-term solution may be to re-establish downtowns as a place for social connection rather than just going to an office.

She said Montreal has begun installing pedestrian-only streets to create public spaces, but such projects are costly and not applicable everywhere.

“People aren’t going to come to work more than two or three days a week ? So, I think to be able to counter that, what we need to do is we need our commercial streets to almost be our third place,” she said, referring to a familiar public spot that people can go.

“Besides our dwelling and where we work, we need a space where people can come and connect. That’s a lot of what we lost during the pandemic.”

On Thursday 9/28, I had the opportunity to speak at a virtual roundtable convened by Congressman Bobby Scott on "AI in the Workplace: New Crisis or Longstanding Challenge?". The roundtable was a closed meeting, but sharing our opening remarks is allowed, so I am posting mine here.

The purpose of this white paper is to publicly present the fundamentals of MMT

What is MMT?

MMT began largely a description of Federal Reserve Bank monetary operations, which are best
thought of as debits and credits to accounts as kept by banks, businesses, and individuals.
Warren Mosler independently originated what has been popularized as MMT in 1992. And while
subsequent research has revealed writings of authors who had similar thoughts on some of MMT’s
monetary understandings and insights, including Abba Lerner, George Knapp, Mitchell Innes, Adam
Smith, and former NY Fed chief Beardsley Ruml, MMT is unique in its analysis of monetary
economies, and therefore best considered as its own school of thought.

Two recent papers from York University, from a team led by assistant professor Kinnon MacKinnon, offer a wider sampling. MacKinnon and his team interviewed 28 detransitioners who told them complicated stories of identity evolution, medical complications, and experiences with anti-trans and anti-nonbinary discrimination. Taken together, they suggest ways providers and society as a whole could better support trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people. Spoiler: It’s not by banning care.

Published in PLOS One on Nov. 29, the first paper sought to “qualitatively explore the care experiences and perspectives of individuals who discontinued or reversed their gender transitions.” The second, published in Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity on Nov. 30, took those qualitative findings and attempted to demarcate four discrete subtypes or pathways for detransition.

Of 28 interviewees who answered a call for people in Canada who had shifted or discontinued a transition, 10 were at birth assigned male, and 18 female. They all had negative experiences during their initial transition. But most did not follow the typical sequence that widely shared detransitioner stories follow, of switching genders, then switching back to identifying as cis. A clear majority, 60 percent, had shifted from a binary trans identity when they began transitioning into a nonbinary identity at the time of the interview. By contrast, only six identified as female or a woman, and none identified as male or a man.

Many offices are sitting empty following the rise of working from home, while cities around the world face housing crises. Building new housing is extremely carbon intensive. Could converting unused offices into housing help solve both problems?

Melissa Fisher believed her jobseeker payments would be cut off if she didn’t complete a resilience training course.

So the South Australian-based artist, who has a disability and has been on income support for several years, signed up. She found herself being asked to rate her friends and family, whether God played an important role in her life and if she felt grateful she had enough to eat.

At one point in the four-day course, she was shown pictures of Brad Pitt in a chicken suit to illustrate how people can go from “nothing to something”.

“I found all of it so condescending,” Fisher says of the resilience training run by WISE employment in South Australia.

“They said that who we have in our life is important and surrounding ourselves with successful people will make us successful. If we surround ourselves with unsuccessful people we will be unsuccessful.”

Fisher says she believed the course was part of her mutual obligations which jobseekers are required to undertake otherwise their payments can be suspended. Fisher says she was never told she could choose not to do the course – and other jobseekers across Australia say they also thought the same.

The reported cancellation of Hasan’s show has similarly caused outrage, with left-wing commentators saying that Hasan was both a unique on screen talent and a critical voice on the left and on the topic of Gaza in the sphere of corporate media.

“[MSNBC], make this make sense,” wrote human rights lawyer Noura Erakat. “[Mehdir Hasan]’s program has felt like an oasis on air and more needed than ever. His program with Mark Regev was a whole class on journalistic method. He should be amplified, not shut down.”

“It is bad optics for MSNBC to cancel [Mehdi Hasan]’s show right at a time when he is vocal for human rights in Gaza with the war ongoing,” wrote Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California). “MSNBC owes the public an explanation for this decision. Why would they choose to do this now?”

Victoria should commit to build 60,000 new social housing dwellings by 2034, end the first home owners grant and lobby the federal government to examine tax concessions for investment properties, the state inquiry into the rental and housing affordability crisis has recommended in its final report.

The report stopped short of making any recommendations on rental price regulation, which is a contentious issue between the Greens, who have been campaigning for rent caps, and the government, which has resisted calls.

The 34 recommendations included a call for the government to commit to building 60,000 new social housing dwellings by 2034, with 40,000 of them completed by 2028.