Weekly Picks – January 14, 2024
This week’s collection:
- Why Are American Drivers So Deadly?
- 2023 smashes record for world’s hottest year by huge margin
- Skipping School: America’s Hidden Education Crisis
- Is Finland’s Housing First really the miracle cure for Canada?
- The geometry of other people
- Acts Harmful to the Enemy
- I Spent the Holidays in Inheritance Capitalism
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
“In aggregate, from 2010 to 2019, the number of serious injuries and deaths in Nevada subsided and then flatlined, more or less in line with national trends. Multiple airbags were standard on nearly every new vehicle, regardless of price, and backup cameras and lane-departure and blind-spot sensors were cheaper to produce. The improved technology meant that drivers not only had more peripheral awareness; they were more likely to survive crashes that might have killed the occupant of an older vehicle. “It all made sense to me — all the things that were supposed to be working were working,” Kuhls remembers. “But then things stopped making sense. Everything changed, radically, like someone had flipped a switch.”
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[T]he same behavioral patterns she had observed back in Nevada were playing out in nearly every state in the country, often at record-shattering scale. From 2020 to 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has since calculated, the number of crashes in the United States soared 16 percent, to more than six million, or roughly 16,500 wrecks a day. The fatality figures were somehow even worse: In 2021, 42,939 Americans died in car crashes, the highest toll in a decade and a half. Of those deaths, a sizable portion involved intoxicated or unrestrained drivers or vehicles traveling well in excess of local speed limits.
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The relationship between car size and injury rates is still being studied, but early research on the American appetite for horizon-blotting machinery points in precisely the direction you’d expect: The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords, and the more destruction it can wreak. In a report published in November, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit, concluded that S.U.V.s or vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches — standard-issue specs for an American truck in 2023 — are 45 percent more likely to kill pedestrians than smaller cars.
Forty-three percent of our 4.2 million miles of road, meanwhile, are in poor or mediocre condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. And they’re unlikely to be repaired soon, given the $786 billion construction backlog.
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“If I was to set out to create a situation that would make the most people act badly and angrily, I couldn’t come up with anything better than driving,” he says. “Every element that provokes an anger response is there. There’s your mood when you entered the car in a rush. There’s provocation — something that happens to you, like being cut off. And relatedly, there’s how you interpret the provocation based on your mood.””
“The high temperatures drove heatwaves, floods and wildfires, damaging lives and livelihoods across the world. Analysis showed some extreme weather, such as heatwaves in Europe and the US, would have been virtually impossible without human-caused global heating.
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Scientists said recently that the Earth’s life support systems have been so damaged that the planet was “well outside the safe operating space for humanity”.
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“Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest [on] record. This in turn means that 2023 will end up being one of the coldest years of this century. Enjoy it while it lasts.””
“Absenteeism has long been a problem in the Detroit area, as in other places with high poverty rates, but since the coronavirus pandemic it has worsened dramatically. Nationwide, the rate of chronic absenteeism — defined as missing at least 10% of school days, or 18 in a year — nearly doubled between 2018-19 and 2021-22, to 28% of students.
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Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people in recent years, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health — exacerbated by social isolation — and elevated youth violence and car thefts, some occurring during school hours. But schools are using relatively little of the billions of dollars that they received in federal pandemic-recovery funds to address absenteeism.
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Society, as a whole, needed to reinforce — as it had in Massachusetts more than a century ago — the importance of school. It was where children awakened to the world’s opportunities, where they learned how to be productive citizens and, for some, where they found a daily routine and regular meals.
Instead, as Lenhoff noted, families often got the opposite message. Inadequate infrastructure had led Detroit to cancel school for several days last year because of excessive heat. Schools had also closed in the face of forecasts of snow that brought no actual snow. Districts get penalized by the state’s funding formula if attendance drops below 75% on any day, and so they may close schools when they fear that too few kids will show up. “If you have that happen often enough, it does erode your feeling that the system is there for us, and not just when it’s convenient for them,” Lenhoff said.”
“Why do Canadians have amnesia on the historic success of our national housing program and instead look afar for miracles?
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Canada created a fully funded national housing program post World War II. It delivered on average 20,000 new units per year. After 50 years and sadly, without much public outcry, the federal government slashed its national housing program in 1993. The federal government then furthered a social welfare disaster by cutting transfer payments to provinces and territories.
Provinces followed suit with further retrenchment cutting funding for social programs such as social assistance and downloading housing to municipalities. The rest is history. A catastrophic social welfare disaster that has impacted all of Canada.
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Finland’s success is about more than Housing First. The documentary shows that homeless services in Finland include the key components of skilled street outreach, respecting and listening to the voices of those impacted and supportive housing solutions that include harm reduction, common space for meals, gathering and community building. However, it is the affordable and importantly mixed income housing that is the foundation of the Finnish model.”
“Why do we use spatial and architectural metaphors to describe so many of our human relationships? Good, trusted friends are described as ‘close’, regardless of their physical proximity, and a loved one on the other side of the world may feel ‘nearer’ to you than someone you live with. You might have an ‘inner circle’ of friends or feel ‘left out’ from the circles of others. A colleague with ‘higher’ status may seem to be ‘above’ you and those with ‘lower’ status may be ‘below’. There is even something architectural about the way we speak of ‘setting boundaries’ or ‘walling someone off’.
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Why do social relationships form distinct geometries in our minds? In the past few decades, research has shown that these metaphors are not merely idiosyncratic uses of language. Instead, they reveal something fundamentally spatial about how we experience our social lives. And this leads to a radical possibility: if we make sense of our friendships, acquaintances, colleagues, families and societies through spatial relationships, could architectural concepts – the intentional design of space – become tools for creating new metaphors for social and political thought?”
“Under international humanitarian law (IHL), it is illegal to intentionally target medical facilities. But as supporters of Israel’s assault have been quick to point out, if those facilities are used by combatants in the commission of “acts harmful to the enemy,” they lose their protected status. Of course, the principles of proportionality and noncombatant immunity still apply regardless of whether the building itself is protected, but that single turn of phrase—acts harmful to the enemy—was enough to obscure the souls trapped within.
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International humanitarian law has not prevented the carpet bombing of residential neighborhoods, the use of white phosphorus, the death of more children than it is sensible to describe, and the endless trauma, which will last generations. There are no standing adjudicative bodies with both the authority and the power to regulate state action, and even if there were, it is not clear what IHL could offer in the case of Palestine. IHL was crafted by state powers to regulate wars between them; it is, in many respects, fundamentally antagonistic to a stateless national movement fighting for liberation.
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Not every action taken under the banner of a just cause is necessarily just—nor does every act of revolutionary violence advance the cause of liberation. Making those political assessments and moral judgments requires disaggregating the actions of the various actors, both militant and vigilante, and situating them in their proper context. The discourse of international law—which on the one hand legitimates the horrors of conventional warfare, and on the other criminalizes revolutionary violence—makes a sober evaluation of these questions incredibly difficult. Unlearning its dogma will be an essential task of just worldmaking in the denouement and afterlife of the US empire.”
“Whatever your housing situation, it’s important to pay attention to where we are headed. Because whether the Canadian dream of home ownership is attainable or not, it’s the dream that is still aggressively being sold.
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For decades, provincial and federal governments have offered little relief to renters compared with the amount of policy that privileges home ownership, from tax breaks to a parade of programs for first-time buyers. There was the B.C. Home Owner Mortgage and Equity Partnership in 2016, the federal First-Time Home Buyer Incentive in 2019 and last year’s First Home Savings Account.
Who can buy into this fantasy of real estate?”
A complement to this piece: