Good Things Friday (212) and Link Love
March 17, 2023
1. Weekend wins: I got some rest on Sunday afternoon.
2. I finally crossed off all the warranty replacements from my to-do list: the kids’ Contigo bottles have arrived, as has the replacement lantern for our power outage supplies.
Helping others:
Ramadan, a holy month when charity is given, is March 22. Muslims will fast from sunrise to sunset. Aseel will be distributing a Daily Iftar Package ($3 USD) to any individual on the street who needs it. They also have a Ramadan package for families ($98). The Child and Family Relief Round 2 that we’ve contributed to for the past few months is still well short of their goal.
Hattip to Nicole and Maggie for this one: Brooklyn Public Library (the library that allows any kid to get a library card to read their digital books) is facing extreme budget cuts and needs people to sign their petition. Please sign to help!
We need to keep fighting the creeping fascism that we’re seeing in the US. We and our future generations deserve better than that.
Bhatia, P.I. fiction by Shiv Ramdas. I really liked this piece. Wish there were more.
This especially warms my heart because he escaped Vietnam like my family did. There’s part of me that feels kinship with anyone who came here as a refugee and had to make their own way. I hope he gets many more roles to sink his teeth into: Ke Huy Quan, Comeback Kid: The Oscar Winner on ‘Everything Everywhere,’ Kissing Harrison Ford and Why He’s Worried About What Comes Next
Influencer Parents and The Kids Who Had Their Childhood Made Into Content:
“It almost feels like exploiting your children has become a career choice,” she said. “If you have a baby now, you have a new career opportunity.”
I feel so bad for these kids. I talk about my kids a lot but I mask almost everything about them because they don’t deserve to carry my online baggage with their identities. Related: Fountain of Money
‘Horribly Unethical’: Startup Experimented on Suicidal Teens on Social Media With Chatbot
Everything related to AI that I’ve seen so far seems to be bad. Not magic: Opaque AI tool may flag parents with disabilities
Why are we chasing after more oil rather than finding better ways to do things that don’t use fossil fuels? The stakeholders are split in ways I don’t quite understand but globally I wonder why we aren’t doing more to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels and why there’s so much emphasis on drilling: Biden administration approves controversial Willow oil project in Alaska, which has galvanized online activism
I didn’t know that “Audubon” was someone’s name, much less than he was an enslaver but you’d think that perhaps having known that, people who aren’t pro-slavery (we know there are people out there saying it wasn’t bad, feel free to volunteer to be enslaved then!) wouldn’t want to associate with that name. We’d be wrong: National Audubon Society, pressured to drop enslaver’s name, keeps it
This is really neat
A world in a nutshell, daily life in miniatures by artist xiujun1314pic.twitter.com/RlioEiqNrb
— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) March 14, 2023
I hear you on Willow. I live in AK, and it is tough to be a Democrat – or even a rational human who pays attention – here sometimes. For what it is worth (which is nothing, this is just guessing), here is my take:
I’m assuming that Biden approved Willow because he needs Murkowski to continue being … persuadable … on other things. She is one of the few Republicans who will cross the aisle on a few things, and she could very well have made Willow the explicit trade for something Biden wants. Also, this increases the chance that our new Democratic Representative Mary Peltola might be able to keep her job next election if she can point to this.
And (I’m hoping) there might be litigation tactics that could keep it tied up for a few years – until after 2024, maybe? – so the activism is just crucial right now.
I don’t know if that idea helps you, but it helps me feel a little less sad and hopeless on this issue, so I thought I’d share. And if I’m wrong I just don’t want to know.
Ke Huy Quan makes me so happy every time I see him or hear his name mentioned. He just seems like such a kind and decent person.
Thank you for sharing your thinking, I can’t get my arms around the whole background and your guesses are more informed than mine could be.
My understanding from the articles I’ve read is that Biden approved the Willow project because they felt that the 20-year-old leases on the location were such that they couldn’t win if it came down to a court case.
Speaking as someone who has fracking happening under her house right now… the legal stuff surrounding oil and gas is not always a winnable fight. I can believe that they were hamstrung by the existing agreements, even as part of the government.
(We didn’t sell our mineral rights despite all the letters and phone calls, but were force-pooled after enough of our neighbors sold their rights. If it were up to us, there wouldn’t be fracking.)
I see, that seems to match up with some parts of that article. I’m sorry to hear that you got stuck in this fracking nonsense even though you were against it – that’s awful.