Welcome back friends to the Monday Good News Roundup, where your intrepid GNR Newsroom (Myself, Killer300, and Bhu) bring you the stories to start your week off right.
As you may recall I had a lot going on last week, and the results have been….bittersweet.
On the plus side, My hearing to keep my unemployment went well, primarily because my job produced no evidence of witnesses of me doing anything wrong on my part. So I get to keep using it for now. In even better news, I got the all clear to go back to work tomorrow, which after over a month of being out of play is most welcome.
Sadly my job interview did not go well. Unbenknowst to me I had applied to a job in Indianapolis (This is why I hate applying for jobs online).
Also the major bombshell for me this past week: I’m going to be evicted soon.
Yeah as I mentioned my landlord had a massive debt she had to clear for the place and there’s no way she and my dad can pay it, so we’re going to be out by September. I already filed the paperwork to try and get in at a nearby place that has slightly higher rent than my current place (But its a really nice place), so hopefully I can get on the waiting list for there, but I may end up living with my dad for a little while again until I can get things settled, its just been a major source of stress and frustration all around. And after I had started to get comfortable in this place. Ah well.
But hey, you didn’t come here to hear me whine about my problems, you came here for good news, and good news I shall deliver.
The fight over competition policy doesn’t always break down on partisan lines, because it splits business. Since the late 2010s, there has been a civil war between big tech and everyone else in commerce. In some cases, big tech’s business opponents aren’t small, but are multi-billion dollar firms angry at the trillion dollar gatekeepers who control their markets. In 2020, video game maker Epic Games kicked off this tussle, suing both Apple and Google for taking a 30% cut of revenue from app makers who were trying to distribute on Android or the iPhone.
The two cases had somewhat different outcomes. Epic’s attack on Google was easier, because it’s pretty clear Google was arbitrary in how it managed the Android ecosystem. Epic Games won on Federal antitrust charges, with a jury finding the search giant liable for monopolization. A judge is about to determine the remedy there, and it will probably be what Epic Games is asking for, which is the right to open a rival app store on Android phones.
Apple was a trickier case, because Apple’s ecosystem has always been closed, so it’s hard to argue that the closed nature of the system was monopolization instead of a product design decision. Nevertheless, Epic Games also won against Apple, not on Federal antitrust claims, but on a single count of violating a state law against unfair competition.
Great news from the world of fair business practices (Not that Epic games are saints by any standard but still, this is good in the long run).
he Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Monday issued a sweeping reform to transmission grid planning, one that proponents say is a major, much-needed win for the effort to transition the country’s power sector away from fossil fuels.
FERC’s action was praised by clean energy and climate advocates, who’ve been pushing the agency for years to craft a “strong rule” around long-term planning, with provisions they say are vital to build the tens of billions of dollars of new high-voltage power lines necessary to meet the country’s energy goals. They say the new rules will allow the U.S. to connect gigawatts of new clean energy projects to the grid, reduce power costs, and improve grid reliability across the country.
The faster we can transfer over to clean energy the better.
At a moment of dark news proliferating across the globe, the American labor movement has recently been, in a refreshing change, a bright spot. We find ourselves at a moment of growing public support for unions, recent high-profile victories by unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) in their “stand-up strike” against the Big Three automakers, and a number of innovative new organizing campaigns across a wide range of corporations and industries in the United States.
The latter is the topic of Rutgers labor scholar and frequent Jacobin contributor Eric Blanc’s forthcoming book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big (University of California Press, 2025), as well as his article in the journal New Labor Forum, “Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral,” drawing from research on that book. Blanc argues that the worker-to-worker model allows workers to train each other and gives them tools to start organizing on their own, rather than relying on expensive, unscalable, staff-heavy union organizing models.
The union movement has been going strong lately, and they’re only gonna get stronger.
May 7 - In a small but growing number of cities across the United States, parking reform is gaining momentum. How a city approaches parking could seem trivial, but it is deeply rooted in issues relating to less carbon-intensive transportation systems, encouraging green spaces and increasing access to affordable housing.
According to Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains The World, the U.S. has over 1 billion car parking spaces and more square footage of space dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person.
Surplus car parking spaces have arisen as a result of the widespread practice of cities setting minimum parking standards, whereby the developer of a new building has to provide a minimum number of parking spaces to get a building permit.
Yeah we don’t need parking spaces we need places to live. Cars are not people.
As cities continue to grow and traffic congestion worsens, many urban planners and environmentalists are advocating for a shift toward car-free cities. By prioritizing public transportation, biking, and walking, these cities aim to reduce pollution, improve public health, and create more livable communities. Learn more about the benefits and challenges of car-free cities.
See? They get it.
You can’t miss Cargi B. The City of New York’s first e-cargo bike, whose name was plucked from an online poll, looks like a miniature UPS truck from the back and a golf cart from the front. Emblazoned with the white and green Department of Transportation logo and just three feet wide, Cargi B has a Richard Scarry–esque cuteness, an apple car in a city full of 18-wheelers and box trucks. And on one blustery April day, I took the four-wheeler for a test drive under the watchful eyes of a handful of DOT employees.
Cargi B is harder to get going than I expect; it takes a few heaves, much like biking uphill. But once the pedal-assist clicks on, its weight becomes bearable. Turning a corner is a lot more unwieldy than I’m used to: I get stuck a few times, underestimating the distance I need to turn, and a DOT employee has to help me get out of a tight spot. But once I get the hang of it, I’m cruising. And I’m a bit jealous. DOT employees now have this alternative to trucks for smaller jobs and supplies. But it’s also a glimpse of how the agency hopes to transform delivery for everyone.
“New Yorkers hate to see big trucks in our street, but at the same time, they’re ordering online a lot more,” said Ydanis Rodriguez, the city’s transportation commissioner. That dependency on delivery has only grown, with a daily onslaught of 2.4 (some say 3.7) million packages dropped off at doors every day. Cargi B is a prototype that could meet that demand; unlike commuter cargo bikes with their back wagons or even the Amazon tricycles we’re used to seeing, it’s “longer, wider, and able to hold more weight to have all of those boxes,” Rodriguez said.
This is a fun little idea. I approve.
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — There’s a new way to zip around Indianapolis as the Indiana Pacers Bikeshare program received an electric jolt with its new fleet.
More than 300 e-bikes are now available for people to use downtown. Thanks to a new initiative, residents of Marion County can register for a free annual Pacers Bikeshare pass.
Hm, maybe I should have taken that Indianapolis job.
Planning on replacing your water heater in the next few years? You could find yourself in the midst of an appliance revolution: Heat pumps are set to soar in the world of water heating.
In the U.S., about half of the roughly 9 million water heaters sold each year use gas. The other half mostly rely on electric-resistance elements.
These appliances are inefficient, expensive to operate, and worse for the planet than the up-and-coming alternative, heat-pump water heaters. Also known as hybrids because they typically have electric resistance for backup, these water heaters eschew fossil fuels, can run on just a third or a quarter of the energy of conventional tech, and typically save hundreds of dollars annually on the utility bills of consumers who switch.
This weeks dose of “Science is awesome”. New water heater dropped you guys!
No quote for this one, I think it stands on its own. The big takeaway is Biden is gonna debate Trump. On my Birthday! I may have to tune in for this one.
A few miles south of downtown Houston, on the site of what once was a Texas-size massive parking lot, a transformative urban development is taking shape. Helix Park is a 37-acre life-sciences campus that’s being built as part of the Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest medical complex. While the $5 billion project further expands the center’s acclaimed healthcare facilities, its biggest impact may lie between the buildings.
Absolutely gorgeous. I hope I end up living near something that nice.
And now its time for GNR theater, this week we have from CNN: The Supreme Court standing against big business’s attempts to ruin us all.
In late April, a high-ranking member of the yakuza, Japan’s “mafia,” was arrested in Tokyo. “Yakuza” might ring a bell if you’ve seen HBO’s recent series Tokyo Vice or any of the classic yakuza movies. Dark suits, sunglasses, heavily tattooed, perhaps missing a part of a finger (the classic punishment for mistakes)—yakuza gangs are involved in all kinds of seedy business.
And yet the arrest was not for anything the yakuza are traditionally known for, from drug trafficking to prostitution to blackmail. It was for stealing Pokémon cards in an office break-in, among other personal property.
Gotta catch em all right?
The health impacts of air pollution are often underrated. There are a range of estimates for how many people die prematurely from local air pollution every year.1 All are in the low millions. The World Health Organization estimates around 7 million.
The good news, then, is that the world is probably passed “peak pollution”. I say “probably” because confidently declaring a peak is, apparently, the best way to make sure it doesn’t happen.
Here, I’m talking specifically about emissions of harmful local air pollutants: gases like nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulphur dioxide which causes acid rain, carbon monoxide, black carbon, organic carbon, non-methane volatile organic compounds. I’m not talking about greenhouse gases.
The Community Emissions Data System (CEDS) recently extended its long-term dataset on emissions of air pollutants up to the end of 2022.
Well, fingers crossed that this is true. Not gonna jinx it.
A British toddler has had her hearing restored after becoming the first person in the world to take part in a pioneering gene therapy trial, in a development that doctors say marks a new era in treating deafness.
Opal Sandy was born unable to hear anything due to auditory neuropathy, a condition that disrupts nerve impulses travelling from the inner ear to the brain and can be caused by a faulty gene.
But after receiving an infusion containing a working copy of the gene during groundbreaking surgery that took just 16 minutes, the 18-month-old can hear almost perfectly and enjoys playing with toy drums.
There’s nothing more adorable than a deaf baby hearing their parents for the first time, another one for “Science is awesome.”
Football shirts, sports event banners and uniforms are piled up ready to be pumped into a machine which melts them down for recycling ready to be made into new clothes.
In a world first in Kettering, Northamptonshire, Project Re:claim is taking technology used for recycling plastic bottles and adapting it to reprocess polyester textiles into granules that can be turned back into yarn for new clothes.
The joint venture between the Salvation Army and recycling specialist Project Plan B uses items from the charity’s sorting centre, which separates out the 10-20% of donated items that cannot be resold according to type of textile. Infrared sensors pick out wool, cotton and nylon items that can be sent off to experimental reprocessors and yarn makers around the world – including polyester for the pellet-making machine.
Project Re:claim expects to recycle 2,500 tonnes of waste this year and to double that in 2025. It is working with big retailers, including Tesco and John Lewis, as well as specialist manufacturers such as school uniform maker David Luke, which encourage suppliers to use the recycled polyester.
Sounds like a neat idea. I love it.
A recent study that looked at the effects of European bison on the ability of forests in Romania to store carbon found that these large animals have a ‘heroic’ effect.
By increasing the carbon storage potential of forests by 10%, it’s the equivalent of taking 54,000 US gasoline-powered cars off the road—and there are only 170 animals.
In 2014, WWF Romania reintroduced a herd of European wood bison into the Țarcu mountains that has grown from 100 to 170 head. Rooting around in the woods, scrub, and fields for their fodder, rolling around on the ground, and stomping, breaking, and squishing the landscape up with their hooves, are all important ecosystem mechanisms that have been absent for decades.
As the graphic above depicts, bison epitomize the concept of a keystone species, one that holds the ecosystem together through their actions, whether it’s dispersing seeds caught in their fur, or creating patches of clear earth for lizards to sunbathe in.
If you didn’t know, Europe doesn’t have a lot of large animals like this because they were all hunted to extinction ages ago. So seeing their revival and the positive effect on the environment are both very good news.
And I think that’s a good stopping point for this week, I’ll see you all next week, hopefully with more good news and better personal news.