alyaza

One of the main selling points of congestion pricing, besides reducing traffic, is improving air quality. Fewer cars on the road means fewer cars emitting exhaust in the nation’s most densely populated city — and less traffic also means that less time spent idling.

An environmental assessment of congestion pricing published in 2023 estimated the impact tolls would have on a number of air pollutants, including carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, and benzene. These chemicals have been linked to health problems including heart disease, respiratory issues, cognitive impairment, and increased risk of cancer. The assessment also looked at the impact tolls would have on greenhouse gases. It analyzed these impacts at a regional level, looking at 12 different counties across New York and New Jersey, and projected how big or small the change in pollutants would be by 2045.

The report found that, with congestion pricing, Manhattan would see a 4.36 percent reduction in daily vehicle-miles traveled by 2045. This would lead to sizable reductions in air pollutants in Manhattan, especially in the central business district (the area drivers must pay a toll to enter). For example, per the environmental assessment’s modeling, the central business district would see a 10.72 percent drop in carbon dioxide equivalents by 2045, as well as a similar drop in fine particular matter, and slightly lower drops in nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide (5.89 percent and 6.55 percent, respectively).

Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post. Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy—Donald Trump—at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.

I therefore have resigned from The Post, effective today. In doing so, I join a throng of veteran journalists so distressed over The Post’s management they felt compelled to resign.

It was late at night, and Darim's animation studio had just finished designing a new look for a character in one of South Korea's most popular video games, MapleStory.

Darim was proud of her work. So, sitting alone on the floor of her small studio apartment, she posted the trailer on social media. Almost immediately, she was flooded with thousands of abusive messages, including death and rape threats.

Young male gamers had taken issue with a single frame in the trailer, in which the female character could be seen holding her thumb and forefinger close together.

They thought it resembled a hand gesture used by a radical online feminist community almost a decade ago to poke fun at the size of Korean men's penises.

archive.is link

In amongst all this, key figures from within the wider WordPress community have stepped forward. Joost de Valk — creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former marketing and communications’ lead for the WordPress Foundation) — last month published his “vision for a new WordPress era,” where he discussed the potential for “federated and independent repositories.” Karim Marucchi, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed similar thoughts in a separate blog post.

WP Engine, meanwhile, indicated it was on standby to lend a corporate hand.

Earlier this week, Automattic announced it would reduce its contribution to the core WordPress open source project to align with WP Engine’s own contribution, a metric measured in weekly hours. This spurred de Valk to take to X on Friday to indicate that he was willing to lead on the next release of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that his “team stands ready.”

Collectively, de Valk and Marucchi contribute around 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, Mullenweg said that to give their independent effort the “push it needs to get off the ground,” he was deactivating their WordPress.org accounts.

“I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort,” Mullenweg wrote.

At the same time, Mullenweg revealed he was also deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation given: Sé Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it’s worth noting, is president and CEO of a newly incorporated non-profit called the WP Community Collective, which is setting out to serve as a “neutral home for collaboration, contribution, and resources” around WordPress and the broader open source ecosystem.

Last month, 461 video game workers with Microsoft’s ZeniMax Online Studios announced they were unionizing with the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees–Communications Workers of America (CODE-CWA). ZeniMax employees join over six thousand workers across the tech and video game industry in the United States and Canada who have now unionized with CODE-CWA since its creation in 2020. That now includes unions at major video game studios like Sega of America, Blizzard, and Bethesda, as well as games like World of Warcraft.

For Jacobin, CODE-CWA senior director of organizing Tom Smith recently moderated a roundtable with a number of video game workers and organizers who have been trying to unionize the industry in recent years. They discussed how union efforts at their workplaces started, how unions have helped workers navigate difficult times in the industry, and what might be next for the labor movement in video games.

The complex’s residents went on a rent strike during the pandemic, withholding their rent until their landlord, Jason Korn, fixed the significant issues aggravating residents. They knew the road ahead was difficult. They were going against Korn, who had been named New York City’s worst landlord in 2019 and 2020 by the public advocate’s office. Korn’s 55 apartment buildings were cited by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development with thousands of building code violations each year, accumulating fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At the end of 2024, after more than four years of the rent strike, residents defeated eviction efforts by their new landlords, Gillman Management, who took over the building in 2022. Members of the tenant association and their legal representation used a defense of “rent-impairing violations” to ask for rent deferment for as long as the building continues to have severe breaches of the building conservation code.

A judge on Dec. 13 sided with the renters, finding that repairs in the building were necessary and waiving rental arrears from January 2020 to May 2022, which added up to $250,000. The period coincided with Korn’s tenure as the owner of the building.

2024, however, did not come without hope and progress despite its political turmoil. Moving towards the direction of LGBTQ rights, Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a “gay/trans panic defense” law, prohibiting courts from allowing this defense in homicide cases. With this, Michigan became the 20th state to enact a law of this kind.

Trans activists made their voices known following a bathroom sit-in demonstration protesting U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, who proposed H.Res 1579 on Nov. 18. The resolution would prohibit House members, officers and employees of the House from using single-sex facilities other than those “corresponding to their biological sex,” ultimately banning transgender people from using restrooms in the House. The demonstration made waves following the arrest of 15 participants of the sit-in who demanded justice.

Additionally, states across the country are enacting “shield” or “refuge” laws, to ensure protection and safety for those crossing state lines to receive gender-affirming care, declaring themselves safe haven states.

With 2025 making its turn around the corner, five trans and nonbinary leaders share with Reckon their wishes for the year ahead.

Dreams On A Pillow is a stealth adventure that tells the story of a young mother during the Nakba - the 1948 ethnic cleansing, displacement, and cultural suppression of Palestinian Arabs by Israel. As its funding campaign puts it, it’s a game about "a land full of people being made into a people without land."

The campaign still has a few days to go, but surpassed its initial goal earlier this week. Abu-Eideh says the reaction has been overwhelming. "I know people care," he says, but he never expected so much support, and so many kind words. The funding launched with the acknowledgement that he’d need more than twice the goal to fully "pay for salaries, outsourcing, and asset creation". But this does mean he and a small team of artists, calligraphers, and coders can begin production.

"We needed talented people who believed in this project," Abu-Eideh says. "That’s like the basic requirement for something like this, because it's not a normal project. You need people that believe in your cause". While the team and he prepare to move on from pre-production, I ask what his day-to-day currently looks like from his home in the West Bank.

"It’s very hard, daily life. Just taking your kids to the school is a big deal because you don't know which road you should take. You don't know where the checkpoints are and if they’re going to block the roads today or not. On a daily basis, there are multiple attacks in different villages in cities by the soldiers or by the settlers. Burning houses. Cutting trees and burning trees. Destroying the main roads. So it’s kind of the daily hustle that we live in."

Diversity syndrome is a cultural condition where the “otherness” of an author is elevated over the impact of their work, to the detriment of the author, their work, and their audiences. Much like structural racism, it’s more systemic than individual, though individual actions certainly uphold or subvert its existence. An illuminating case study of diversity syndrome in the real world is that of Black authors of what I’ll broadly define as speculative fiction.

A word, first, on genre and race. The term “speculative fiction” has contested definitions: here, I use it to mean anyone whose written imagination is located in the fantastic, whether that’s represented in New York City with six people functioning as avatars of the boroughs (N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became) or in an interstellar hunt for the meaning and translation of a language whose fundamental quality is change (Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17). When it comes to race, I’m a Black writer of speculative fiction—I enjoy examining the experiences of those working in my preferred genre. But beyond that, I think both Black authors of any genre and speculative fiction authors of any race have two of the most glaringly obvious experiences of diversity syndrome.

When readers pick up work by Black authors of speculative fiction expecting it to be centered on the authors’ identities, or approach these authors with questions confined to specific racial or genre-based expectations, they are pigeonholing the authors and limiting their own ability to experience the richness of these narratives. These authors are frequently specialists at crafting stories that are intensely meaningful to our current reality without trying to “make a point” as Black authors, something the social impacts of diversity syndrome might indicate they should aim to do; we should really be trying harder to understand that Black speculative literature is much bigger than just Black.

It's a new year, and despite the numerous encroaching horrors, What's Good shall continue. If I don't do nothing else, I'm going to help you put together your personal soundtrack for getting through this mess.

If this is your first time visiting, What's Good is my weekly new music blog, where I give you a big list of new music, along with playlists for your convenience, and a few bits of music news and writing in a section called Bonus Beats. Sound cool? Then join me for the new drops, including:

New Albums

• doseone & Steel Tipped Dove
• Ethel Cain
• Matthewdavid
• miles cooke
• NAHreally
• Satchel Brown
• Sleep Sinatra & August Fanon

New Singles

• Boldy James
• clipping.
• Deep Sea Diver
• Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek
• Ghais Guevara
• Japanese Breakfast
• SPELLLING

archive.is link

A different kind of perfect storm had hit the Pelleys: volatile weather, a country failing to keep up with rising flood risk and a mortgage industry writing loans without considering the future of the environment around the home. Homeowners in Florida and California have already been trying to reconcile their mortgage duration and dwindling insurance options with neighborhoods that may not live to see 30 years. In a nation where long-term loans are the gateway to homeownership for most families, climate change is rewriting the basic assumptions about risk.

The lending industry relies on insurance to absorb some of the risk of mortgages failing. And the insurance industry is largely predicated on the idea that if a home is damaged or destroyed, a comparable structure should be rebuilt on the same spot. This model will have trouble accommodating land changed beyond recognition, no longer able to host a dwelling.

Rather than capitulate to out-of-state policies and market forces, the state ought to set an example and outlaw carbon reduction measures altogether — a “bold step forward to lead a balanced, science-based dialogue,” Sen. Cheri Steinmetz (R-Torrington) wrote in a column published by the Cowboy State Daily, announcing Senate File 92, “Make carbon dioxide great again-no net zero.”

The bill is co-sponsored by Freedom Caucus Chairman Emeritus Rep. John Bear, a Republican who represents Gillette, the heart of Wyoming’s coal country. It would declare that “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and is a beneficial substance,” and codify in Wyoming law that carbon dioxide “not be designated or treated as a pollutant or contaminant.”

Fresh off an electoral win this fall, the Freedom Caucus has taken leadership control of the Legislature as lawmakers prepare for the winter session that begins Tuesday. The Steinmetz-Bear-sponsored bill promises to bring climate change denial to the forefront of Wyoming policymaking once again.

“Despite its essential role in sustaining life, CO2 has been demonized as a pollutant,” Steinmetz wrote in a column recently.

Senate File 92 would declare that “Carbon dioxide is a foundational nutrient necessary for all life on earth,” according to the bill. “Plants need carbon dioxide along with sunlight, water and nutrients to prosper. The more carbon dioxide available for this, the better life can flourish.”

To that end, the bill would repeal state-imposed mandates directing utilities to retrofit aging coal-fired power plants with carbon capture, use and sequestration technologies instead of retiring the facilities. That policy has already tapped Wyoming ratepayers for millions of dollars to comply with the initiative.