Author: Adam Clare

This New Paris Community Demonstrates Sustainable Cities

Good Street from Streetmix

In the capital of France, the new Clichy-Batignolles development demonstrates how a city can have a carbon-neutral footprint while providing modern living. The development itself is built on old industrial lands and includes community housing, a theatre, and many other important features of a city including a massive park. The neighbourhood focusses on sustainable buildings and sustainable transit; the developer specifically designed the spaces to be walkable and ensuring that there is no need for a car.

All buildings are being constructed to the demanding Passivhaus standard, meaning that the energy consumption required for heating is just 15 kilowatt-hours a square metre of floor space per year, and the overall energy consumption is under 50kWh asqm of floor space per year.

The buildings are south-facing and super insulated, capturing and retaining the sun’s heat and warmth given off by their occupants and technology. Buildings are composed of renewable materials while other materials such as PVC are banned.

The area will contain 40,000 sq m of solar photovoltaic roofs that will eventually generate around 4500-megawatt-hours a year to supply 85 per cent of the remaining energy needs, while deep geothermal energy will provide 83 per cent of the space heating and domestic hot water, so that the entire site will have a carbon neutral footprint.

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Eating Yogurt Helps Reduce Inflammation

happiness

Eat more yogurt to help reduce inflammation inside your body. Yummy yogurt is also good for your tummy. Some recent research has concluded that yogurt can help reduce inflammation while also helping those with obesity. Be careful though and check the sugar content of popular yogurt brands since the sugar content can eliminate the other health gains.

If yogurt isn’t your thing you can ingest the following bacteria strains Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, and Lactobacillus acidophilus.

But now, a pair of new studies suggest there might be something about yogurt after all. In the female subjects, at least, it appears to help with markers of inflammation—and that, in turn, can keep other types of diseases at bay.

Inflammation, the body’s immune response to invaders, can be a good thing—it’s how our wounds heal, for example. But a steady, low-level simmer of inflammation in the body is associated with diseases like asthma and arthritis, as well as obesity, metabolic syndrome, and heart disease.

“People who are obese have chronic inflammation, which is why there are diseases associated with obesity, like cardiac disease,” says Caroline Childs, a lecturer in nutrition at the University of Southampton. “So if you can reduce the inflammation, you might have less associated diseases.”

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Diamonds Suck; De Beers Gives Up

Back in 2006 Josh Kaufman got married and during that process he discover the sham of modern diamonds – they aren’t that valuable. Kaufman created the website Diamonds Suck to raise awareness of a diamond alternative: maisonette. It was known then that blood diamonds were a problem and still today people are dying for something that can be made in a lab. Diamond companies don’t like being portrayed as killers (and destroyers of nature) pushed back with marketing efforts; while that was happening they were trying to fend off another threat: fake diamonds.

Today there is no reason to spend a large sum on diamonds for a ring and there’s no reason to continue mining the planet for them. Indeed, it’s good to read that the world’s largest diamond miner, De Beers, has admitted defeat and is switching to manufacturing diamonds.

Here’s Kaufman’s rationale for not evening considering diamonds:

If I can prevent a single reader from needlessly dropping $6,000-10,000+ on a diamond engagement ring, this site will be a success. Financial worries are the #1 cause of stress in a married relationship – there is absolutely NO excuse to start your married life by taking on that level of debt.
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Moissanite is a rare, naturally-occuring gemstone that is typically found in very small quantities in meteorites, corundum deposits, and kimberlite. (The chemical name of moissanite is Silicon Carbide.) Moissanite has several qualitites in common with diamond: it is transparent, extremely hard (9.25 on the Mohs scale, compared to 10 for diamond), and has a high index of refraction (2.65 – 2.69, compared to 2.42 for diamond). When a large rough moissanite sample is cut and polished, the end result is a very bright, brilliant, transparent gemstone that is indistinguishable from diamond to the human eye.

Diamonds suck

Places Erupt Tackles Trolls in Their Newest Video

The Toronto-based band Places Erupt has put a lot of thought into the state of online discourse and decided to share their two cents. Their most recent video is all about online trolls and the disconnect between how they behave in their in person interactions compared to their online interactions. It’s a fun video and song that captures a current issue in today’s strange media climate.

“Bloggers is about the phenomenon of trolling, where people shirk away from expressing their political opinions until under the safe shield of cyber anonymity, ranting angrily online. It’s become a terrifying and unhealthy side effect of the internet, poisoning discourse and breeding hate. In the real, physical world, the troll is blah and beige, while in the cyber world, he grows into this outsized monster, breathing fire over everyone in his path.”

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Disclosure: Greg O’Toole, who irregularly writes on this site, is in the band.

Need a Job? Let’s Give Jobs to Everybody!

Interview

Underemployment runs rampant in too many sectors of our economy; and this contributes to a long-term unsustainable economic system. For example, people born in the 1980s are now the brokest generation since the Depression (for reasons why see this post). With these problems in mind, some thinkers are calling for a radical solution by providing jobs to anybody who wants one. It’s like universal income but for work.

To advocates, the payoff from this kind of program would be immense: In a single stroke, the government could not only eliminate involuntary unemployment but also alter the private job market. The wages and benefits at guaranteed public jobs would effectively set a floor for private employment. With more workers fully employed at higher wages, there’d be less demand for social services like food stamps. And although the program would require a significant initial investment, it would ultimately spur economic growth, as workers go out and spend their new paychecks.
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Advocates of a jobs guarantee are clear on the need for on-the-ground leadership. The CBPP plan calls for federal administrators of a jobs guarantee program to work closely with state and local governments, and it advises that project proposals be developed “in conjunction with community leaders, local government officials, labor organizations, and local residents.”

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