COVID-19 revealed to many the precariousness of modern “free trade” supply chains, indeed the pandemic supply chain issue is still impacting us to this day. Various international deals that favour profits over people put us in this situation, so how do we get out of it? This is the question many are trying to answer and now there’s a website to help. Import Yeti lets NGOs, companies, and anyone examine the supply chains of any company based in the USA.
Bill of ladings are public information that every large eCom owner or FBA seller I know uses but they are too cost prohibitive, challenging to obtain and difficult to use for the average joe. ImportYeti’s goal is to solve that problem.
Market Street in San Fransico connects many communities within the city, yet using it to navigate from place to another was a slog. Until they got rid of cars last year. The removal of cars on the popular main street made getting around the city faster, easier, and healthier. Anyone who lives in a city knows how much space cars take up so it’s a logical thing to ban them from streets that are best serviced by public transit, bicycles, and pedestrians.
A renewed Market Street will anchor neighborhoods, link public open spaces and connect the City’s Civic Center with cultural, social, convention, tourism, and retail destinations, as well as Salesforce Transit Center, the regional transit hub. The vision is to create Market Street as a place to stop and spend time, meet friends, people-watch while sitting in a café, or just stroll and take in the urban scene.
This is the year nobody should use pesticides, if you’re on the fence about using pesticides I’ll remind you that they do more harm than good. They negatively impact human health, kill unintended species, and even taint groundwater. Many smart gardeners already avoid using the killer chemicals and you too can be a smart gardener. Why use dangerous chemicals when you can use plants?
Over at PopSci they’ve complied a list of what plants in North America you should plant to protect your garden from pests.
You can find examples of pesticide plants stretching back thousands of years. Native Americans, for example,may have developed companion plantingas early as10,000 years ago, long before home gardening became a pastime. Although synthetic chemical-based pesticides have become common, you don’t need to follow that trend.
When you use plants to keep pests away, you’re employing a proven gardening technique backed byscientific research. Installing the right plants in your garden is fast, easy, and (the best part) extremely fun. If you’re not sure where to start, we have some suggestions for every planting zone in the US.
Barcelona’s urban layout of “superblocks” has proven to be a great way to make cities liveable, efficient, and environmentally friendly. We’ve looked at the brilliant design in Barcelona before, and now the question is how to take this urban design to other cities. Can car-focussed cities like Atlanta, Toronto, and Sydney benefit from the person-focussed approach in Barcelona? Of course they can, and so can other places like Mexico City and Zurich. The question how to implement the design approach and at what scale.
We’re all one step closer to living in a 15-minute city.
“Density is important, as the superblock model focuses on districts where many people live to allow active street life,” says Eggimann. Having enough people in one area also makes public transportation efficient, he says, and good public transportation is part of what makes the superblock possible. The design doesn’t work well in sprawling neighborhoods that only have single-family homes—even if those neighborhoods have a perfect street grid, as is the case in Atlanta and many other American cities.
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While cities are taking a variety of approaches to rethinking traffic on streets, Eggimann thinks that superblocks can be especially useful. “I think the superblock model is particularly interesting as it strives for combined tackling of multiple challenges neighborhoods and cities are faced with—mobility, noise, walkability, urban green space—and that it is a model which envisions city-scale wide and broad transformation, going beyond single street transformation,” Eggimann says.
Us Canadians need to live up to the stereotype that we are a nice, peaceful, and safe country. Clearly the so-called trucker protest tarnished our reputation, but in financial circles our reputation is tarnished thanks to our neglect of corporate accountability. Internationally Canada is seen as a great place to launder illegal obtained funds akin to third world tax havens. Laundering money in Canada is known as snow-washing.
Thanks to excellent research to Transparency International Canada (and more organizations) we finally know the extent of snow-washing. In order to address the problem we must first understand it. So let’s hope Canadian politicians step up to fight this corporate corruption in our government.
Although Canada has vowed to establish a publicly accessible corporate beneficial ownership registry, a database that will store details about who ultimately owns and controls millions of private companies, it won’t be operational until at least 2025.
“Open data allows journalists, civil society and other stakeholders to investigate wrongdoing,” the report says. “This is particularly important for Canada, where law enforcement and regulatory authorities have limited capacity to investigate domestic crime, let alone criminal activity beyond our borders.”
As an example, one of the report’s case studies about a Russian transnational laundromat builds on previous reporting by investigative journalists, including The Globe’s Mark MacKinnon.
For far too long, Canada has been saddled with a reputation as an international haven for financial crime. As the report rightly argues, transparency is the only antidote.
