Category: Progressive

Chinese officials launch a matchmaking app

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For single people, dating fatigue is a universal phenomenon. Hours of swiping left can lead to despair at the potential matches in your area. One city in Jiangxi, a province in eastern China, reckons that it has come up with a solution for the lovelorn or love-weary: a state-sponsored matchmaking service…

The app is part of a province-wide initiative to boost the marriage rate, which has been falling nationwide for the past decade. In 2021 there were 5.4 marriages per 1,000 people, compared with six in the US…

One of the main pillars of the Jiangxi pilot is a campaign against high “bride prices”. In recent years the government has discouraged the traditional practice of a potential groom offering a bride’s family cash before marriage. The country’s civil code prohibits “the exaction of money or gifts in connection with marriage”. But in practice the tradition remains common, especially in rural areas. In 2022 Jiangxi topped an unofficial nationwide ranking of bride prices, with an average of 380,000 yuan (£45,000)…

Through a combination of public awareness campaigns and limits on extravagant wedding ceremonies and banquets, Shicheng county claims to have virtually eliminated “betrothal gifts”.

Tradition can be a royal pain-in-the-ass! Glad I dropped that from my list of personal priorities before I got into the 1960s.

For FREEDOM!

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Protests continued in several cities across Iran on Thursday against the death of young woman in police custody, state and social media reported, as a human rights group said at least 83 people had been killed in nearly two weeks of demonstrations.

Mahsa Amini, 22, from the Iranian Kurdish town of Saqez, was arrested…in Tehran for “unsuitable attire” by the morality police that enforces the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code for women.

Her death has sparked the first big show of opposition on Iran’s streets since authorities crushed protests against a rise in gasoline prices in 2019.

“At least 83 people including children, are confirmed to have been killed in (the) #IranProtests,” Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based group, said on Twitter.

Despite the growing death toll and a fierce crackdown by authorities, videos posted on Twitter showed demonstrators calling for the fall of the clerical establishment in Tehran, Qom, Rasht, Sanandaj, Masjed-i-Suleiman and other cities.

There are some glorious videos around, online…showing these demonstrations. I’m not going to search and cut-and-paste to attach all of these to this post. You can do that search yourself. We have these tools, now. Instagram, Twitter, the Web, easy video, iPhones, laptops and more. Hardware and software that helps us to communicate with each other. The bastards can’t shutdown all of these conversations.

We will not stop!

Some say…”Electric Vehicles are bringing out the worst in us”

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American car executives keep insisting that there is no trade-off between saving the planet and having a hell of a good time behind the wheel. “What I find particularly gratifying,” Ford’s executive chair, Bill Ford, said in April as he unveiled his company’s new electric truck, “is not only is this a green F-150, but it’s a better F-150 … You’re actually gaining things that the internal combustion engine doesn’t have.” Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, sounded equally bullish in a recent social-media post: “Once you’ve experienced an [electric vehicle] and all it has to offer—the torque, handling, performance, capability—you’re in.”

The pitch is enticing, but it raises a few questions. Is the electric F-150 Lightning “better” than the conventional F-150 if its added weight and size deepen the country’s road-safety crisis? And how, exactly, are electric-vehicle drivers going to use the extra power that companies are handing them?…

Converting the transportation system from fossil fuels to electricity is essential to addressing climate change. But automakers’ focus on large, battery-powered SUVs and trucks reinforces a destructive American desire to drive something bigger, faster, and heavier than everyone else.

And that question raised in conjunction with what smallish discussion there is among American consumers about battery-electric cars…sounds like, feels like, every discussion I’ve wandered into about more power, different power methods, in the last seventy years of my life. Not that the discussion originated with me. That just covers the time on this wee planet I’ve spent as a car nut, a hot rodder, sports car jockey and rally car navigator.

I honestly feel it’s over-emphasized in the article. Excepting me, my immediate and even somewhat-extended portions of our family are fairly representative consumers of automotive gear. Most of our vehicles are US-made cars and pickup trucks. They already include a few hybrids…usually driven as designed with a significant portion of all driving done on electric power. We can announce our “gas mileage” is 50 or 70 or 90 miles per gallon (today, in fact) when we’re out running errands to town in my wife’s Ford Maverick Hybrid.

What I see of the folks in our small community driving hybrids from the host of brands already midway to full-electric commitment, our driving styles haven’t changed a jot from prior. The same holds true of the few Teslas in the neighborhood. Aside from that subtly different nose, that crew is mostly identifiable by the sudden sprouting of solar panels atop their garages.

USPS ready to buy 66000 EVs

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Oshkosh Winning Design

The long-running saga of the United States Postal Service’s delivery fleet took another turn when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced that the service is increasing the number of electric vehicles it plans to purchase. The new plan calls for a minimum of 60,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDV) by 2028, 45,000 of which will be battery EVs. The USPS will also buy an additional 21,000 commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) EVs—perhaps EVs like the Ford e-Transit or the BrightDrop Zevo 600—for deliveries by 2028. And from 2026, all vehicles bought by the USPS will be BEVs.

Further establishing the precedent for modern progressive business in the GOUSA.

Borderland Ministries

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Ana Reza has served as bridge chaplain for the Rio Grande Borderland Ministries of the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande for about three years.

The bridge chaplain moves back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico to greet incoming asylum seekers or immigrants seeking legal entry into the U.S.

“I do want people to know how grateful we are in everything we’ve done so far and we look forward to build new relationships and to continue to build the new relationships we have now,” Reza said. “The need is there…”

“It’s a lot of work. Pray for us that we be able to continue to provide a safe space because if it wasn’t for the shelters, Border Patrol would just drop them off at the airport and we see how that’s going,” Reza said.

There is a government-run shelter in Las Cruces with 29 staff members that just received about $1 million in FEMA funds, Reza said.

“I think that’s a healthier way to run things,” Reza said. “That’s a good model that our government needs to have a place where we, as pastoral people, can go and be pastoral to the people instead of running the shelter barely and as a manager my volunteers who volunteer to stay the night, have a better chance of interacting than I do because I’m just moving around making sure everything is moving along.”

Many of the people Reza spoke to who are seeking asylum in the U.S. came from situations that were unsafe and getting worse and the family decided they wanted a better life in the U.S.

The kind of Christians I grew up with, the church I belonged to when I was a kid, many of the nicest folks I know in this life of mine – often we march to the beat of the same drummer. We may think we hear differences; but, often, what counts most over time are the similarities.

Tracking wildfires…and anything else…with micro balloons

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Inflating one of their “little” balloons to check for leaks

Urban Sky, a Colorado-based company focused on collecting images and data of the Earth using small stratospheric balloons, says it is officially entering commercial operations after three years of operating partly in stealth and raising funding. The company says it is ready to start serving customers with its balloons, which can be deployed from the back of a pickup truck and ascend into the sky in just minutes.

Specifically, the company offers what it calls “microballoons,” high-altitude balloons that can float to the stratosphere carrying a small payload and maintain a constant position over an area. About the size of a Volkswagen bus at launch, these balloons ultimately inflate to be the size of a small car garage in the air. That’s much smaller than a typical stratospheric balloon, which could engulf an entire football stadium when fully inflated…

Urban Sky envisions its technology being used for things like real-time wildfire monitoring, environmental changes, storm-related property damage, and more at a lower cost than comparable satellite imagery. After conducting roughly 50 flight tests, Urban Sky’s founders say they are ready to start deploying their product regularly, offering imagery with resolution of 10 centimeters per pixel. “We’re at a technology maturity level, where if a customer calls us and says, ‘I want imagery over this area in the Rocky Mountain region,’ we can deploy and go get it…”

They launch these critters from a pickup truck.