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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
As you have heard me say on SR many times in the past, highways that charge the vehicles that drive over them are the way to evolve out of the carbon era, not a new network of charging stations to replace gas stations. This and the project in Detroit are very good news.
Indiana highway Credit: Taidgh Barron/Zuma
Blake Dollier spoke excitedly as he watched the construction crews pulverize concrete along a quarter-mile stretch of US Highway 52 where it passes through West Lafayette, Indiana.
Soon, the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT), where Dollier works as the public relations director, will install a series of copper coils under the highway’s surface to test a new technology Purdue University researchers developed that can provide power to electric vehicles wirelessly as they drive past.
“Wouldn’t it really be something if we could just drive over the road and catch your charge for your vehicle as you drive across it?” Dollier said during a phone interview, watching the progress from the parking lot of one of the department’s satellite offices in West Lafayette.
The state began construction of its new pilot project this month, and officials say they believe it could spur greater adoption of EVs and redefine the way people think about them. The project, they said, which is being done in partnership with Purdue and the […]
Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez and McKenzie Beard, - Microsoft Start / The Washington Post
Stephan:
Working-age rural Americans (25-54) are dying at a much higher rate, particularly in Red states, than men and women their age in Blue states, and this is happening in part because Red states have not expanded Medicaid. And yet, those same people are the core voters of the TCP/Republican Party. How can these rural men and women not realize what is happening to them by just looking around their own world? Ignorance seems to be the main answer.
Rural Americans are way more likely to die young. Why? Credit: Jeff Roberson / AP
Three words are commonly repeated to describe rural America and its residents: older, sicker and poorer.
Obviously, there’s a lot more going on in the nation’s towns than that tired stereotype suggests. But a new report from the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service gives credence to the “sicker” part of the trope.
Rural Americans ages 25 to 54 — considered the prime working-age population — are dying of natural causes such as chronic diseases and cancer at wildly higher rates than their age-group peers in urban areas, according to the report.
The USDA researchers analyzed mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from two three-year periods — 1999 through 2001, and 2017 through 2019. In 1999, the natural-cause mortality rate for rural working-age adults was only 6 percent higher than that of their city-dwelling peers. By 2019, the gap had widened to 43 percent.
The disparity was significantly worse for women — and for Native American women, in particular. The gap highlights how persistent difficulties accessing health care, […]
As this important research study reveals: “For the first time in the report’s 12-year history, the U.S. didn’t earn a spot among the top 20 happiest countries in the world. It’s No. 23 — down from a 15th-place finish the previous year.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The latest World Happiness Report has some unhappy news for Americans.
For the first time in the report’s 12-year history, the U.S. didn’t earn a spot among the top 20 happiest countries in the world. It’s No. 23 — down from a 15th-place finish the previous year.
The report, which ranks countries by age group for the first time, shows the U.S. decline is at least partly attributable to Americans under age 30 feeling worse about their lives. The U.S. still ranks in the top 10 countries for those 60 and older, with a score of 7.258 out of 10. But for those under 30, it ranks 62nd, with a score of 6.392.
While the U.S. lost ground, Finland retained its crown as the happiest country in the world for the seventh straight year. But it wasn’t No. 1 for those under 30 or over 60. Lithuania and Denmark, respectively, took those honors.
The differences in the rankings by age illustrate how people’s life satisfaction ratings — which determine the rankings — vary a lot between the […]
American culture is in turmoil. This is an article on “tradwives” as they are called, women who seek and prefer a 1950s lifestyle where their husbands work and they stay at home, and they are happily submissive to their husband’s will. This article describes the movement but does not really focus on what I think is the real reason this trend is occurring. As a society we are being consumed by materialism and greed. We have become a society in which wellbeing is hardly a factor in our planning or social order, and it is making Americans miserable.
The return of “tradwives” and stay-at-home girlfriends, as an aesthetic and an idea, suggests that some young women are wondering whether liberation is overrated. Credit: Getty
It’s always inspiring when citizens of the vast and disparate internet find something to unite them, and in late March, the unifying force was hatred for an essay, published in the Cut, called “The Case for Marrying an Older Man.” It was written by a woman who had done just that: Grazie Sophia Christie spent her undergraduate years at Harvard sneaking into receptions for MBA candidates where she hoped to bag a more established male before her “fiercest advantage” — her youth — disappeared and rendered her common. After some trial and error, at the age of 20, she made off with a 30-year-old whose defining characteristics seemed to be that he was French and rich.
The essay’s alleged offenses ranged from the kind that would irritate Greta Thunberg — the casual way Christie’s byline […]
With increasing frequency, I am seeing reports of what climate change is going to cause, and am struck by how many things no one considered are going to be impacted. Here is an example of what I am finding when I research climate change, and what I mean by the surprising effects it is having.
San Andres Tomatlan metro station on Line 12 of the Mexico City Metro Collective Transportation System, July 2023. Credit: Gerardo Vieyra / ZUMA
With its expanse of buildings and concrete, Mexico City may not look squishy—but it is. Ever since the Spanish conquistadors drained Lake Texcoco to make way for more urbanization, the land has been gradually compacting under the weight. It’s a phenomenon known as subsidence, and the result is grim: Mexico City is sinking up to 20 inches a year, unleashing havoc on its infrastructure.
That includes the city’s Metro system, the second-largest in North America after New York City’s. Now, satellites have allowed scientists to meticulously measure the rate of sinking across Mexico City, mapping where subsidence has the potential to damage railways. “When you’re here in the city, you get used to buildings being tilted a little,” says Darío Solano‐Rojas, a remote-sensing scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “You can feel how the rails are wobbly. Riding the Metro in Mexico City feels […]
I have published and commented on several studies on the effect of spending hours each day focused on social media on the mental health of users, particularly young people. Personally, I don’t use social media, so I am not really knowledgeable about what it is like to do that. What I do see happening is that kids are spending much less time playing together outdoors, and I don’t think that is a positive trend, and I do think more consistent rigorous research needs to be done on the effects this trend is producing. There is no question that social media and the weaponization of lies is producing negative changes in our culture but that is a different issue than leading the young to commit suicide. Here is a good article on both sides of the argument about the effect on the young.
The Zoomer tween in their natural habitat. Credit: Leon Neal/Getty
The kids are not all right — and the device you are probably reading this on is to blame.
By Haidt’s account, smartphones and the addicting social media apps we download onto them have lured the world’s youths away from those activities that are indispensable to healthy child development — such as outdoor play, face-to-face conversation with friends, and sleep — and trapped them in a digital realm that saps their self-esteem, drains their attention spans, and forces them to put on a perpetual, high-stakes performance of their own personalities.
Smartphones have even hurt kids who don’t use them much, according to Haidt, because they’ve restructured communal life […]
Hannah Natanson and Lauren Tierney, Education Reporter | Senior Graphics Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan:
This is a tragic report on the effect the Great Schism Trend is having on the education of the young. To me, the main takeaway is that like everything else in this trend, the result is going to be that children in Red states are going be less educated, and less factually knowledgeable than children in Blue states. The long-term implications of this and everything else in The Great Schism Trend will be an inferior quality of wellbeing for those who live in states controlled by the TCP/Republican Party. Frankly, if I had young children, I would move to a Blue state.
Three-fourths of the nation’s school-aged students are now educated under state-level measures that either require more teaching on issues like race, racism, history, sex and gender, or which sharply limit or fully forbid such lessons, according to a sweeping Post review of thousands of state laws, gubernatorial directives and state school board policies. The restrictive laws alone affect almost half of all Americans aged 5 to 19.
Since 2017, 38 states have adopted 114 such laws, rules or orders, The Post found. The majority of policies are restrictive in nature: 66 percent circumscribe or ban lessons and discussions on some of society’s most sensitive topics, while 34 percent require or expand them. In one example, a 2023 Kentucky law forbids lessons on human sexuality before fifth grade and outlaws all instruction “exploring gender identity.” On the other hand, a 2021 Rhode Island law requires that all students learn “African Heritage and History” before high school graduation.
This kind of story gets no coverage except in a few environmental/ecological websites like EcoWatch, but it is a very big deal. It is telling us that our technologies and cultural patterns are destroying earth’s matrix of life. It is long past time we awakened to the realization that all life is interdependent and interconnected and that fostering wellbeing is the only safe road into the future.
New video footage released on April 11, 2024 shows that bleached corals on the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef extend to greater depths than has been reported during the current mass bleaching event. Credit: Australian Marine Conservation Society / Facebook screenshot
The Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) has released video footage showing that the southern portion of the Great Barrier Reef is suffering from deep-sea coral bleaching, reported The Guardian.
The footage shows that the bleaching extends at least as far down as 59.1 feet — the deepest reported during this mass bleaching event, a press release from AMCS said. Some of the corals have begun to die in the face of record marine heat waves.
“I feel devastated. This bleaching event is the worst I have seen. It’s a severe bleaching event,” said Dr. Selina Ward, University of Queensland’s former academic director of the Heron Island Research Station, in the press release.
Ward reported extensive coral bleaching at all 16 southern Great Barrier Reef sites she had visited, saying it was […]
