Think Outside the Bun 🌮
Wales Online: ‘I quit home and job to live in car and I’ve never been happier’
After working “a lot” of different jobs in 10 years, losing his dad, in 2017 and struggling to hold down a relationship - he realised he wanted a change. He took a job as an UberEats rider earning £300-400-a-week - and drove on a whim to Penzance, Cornwall, on the night of June 1, 2023.
Since then, he’s not had to pay a penny in rent by moving into his Fiat 500 - which he parks up on side roads and car parks. He still works as an UberEats driver wherever he goes - earning “enough to pay for his needs.”
All his possessions are stored in the boot of his car - while his pay goes on car insurance, food and a £45 gym membership, just so he can use the shower. He mostly eats takeaways - for “convenience” - but also buys bread to make sandwiches.
Long-term security matters too, but happiness is pretty important.
TechCrunch: Mitti Labs aims to make rice farming less harmful to the climate, starting in India
Rice is the staple crop of more than half of the world’s population. Demand is growing with the rising population in South and Southeast Asia. However, a significant portion of rice farming still relies on traditional cultivation methods that lead to substantial methane emissions, which are a major contributor to climate change – methane is nearly 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the atmosphere, although it dissipates faster. Growing rice also requires a considerable amount of freshwater, around 3,000 liters for every kilogram of rice, or 20 million liters for every hectare of a rice farm.
Mitti Labs aims to limit methane emissions and water wastage in rice farming using its technology solutions.
NYT: This Street Was Clogged With Traffic. Now It Belongs to Ping-Pong.
A neighborhood in Queens, New York, turned 1.3 miles of a regular road into an open street for pedestrians, cyclists and playing children, with aims to make some of it into a park.
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… just three blocks north, running parallel to Roosevelt, is 34th Avenue, where a stretch of 26 blocks, running east to west, has been closed to cars from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day since 2020.
NYT: At the Republican National Convention, Climate Change Isn’t a Problem
As the event opens with a focus on energy, former President Trump and other leaders are calling for more oil, gas and coal development.
The United States is experiencing scorching new levels of heat fueled by climate change this summer, with dozens of people dying in the West, millions sweating under heat advisories and nearly three-quarters of Americans saying the government must prioritize global warming.
But as the Republican Party opens its national convention in Milwaukee with a prime-time focus on energy on Monday night, the party has no plan to address climate change.
Ars Technica: Dirty diaper resold on Amazon ruined a family business, report says
A feces-encrusted swim diaper tanked a family business after Amazon re-sold it as new, Bloomberg reported, triggering a bad review that quickly turned a million-dollar mom-and-pop shop into a $600,000 pile of debt.
Paul and Rachelle Baron, owners of Beau & Belle Littles, told Bloomberg that Amazon is supposed to inspect returned items before reselling them. But the company failed to detect the poop stains before reselling a damaged item that triggered a one-star review in 2020 that the couple says doomed their business after more than 100 buyers flagged it as “helpful.”
Isn’t reselling a returned item as “new” fraudulent?
CBC: Why the Ford government nixed deposit on soft drink cans, bottles
Ontario has the worst recycling rates in Canada for cans, plastic bottles and cartons of non-alcoholic beverages, with billions of these containers going to landfills and incinerators annually.
But for more than a year, momentum was building toward a key shift to try to improve things. Premier Doug Ford’s government was seriously consideringcreating a deposit-return system for soft drink containers, a system that’s already in place in eight other provinces and that already exists for beer, wine and spirits in Ontario.
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Then suddenly, with zero advance notice and no public announcement — and with a potential LCBO strike dominating the news — senior government officials phoned the participants on the afternoon of July 4 to tell them the working group was being shut down, and plans for the deposit-return system scrapped.
Last Updated: 15.Jul.2024 17:22 EDT
