Mads

producer of art, music, and chaos

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

A rural Arkansas school district was hemorrhaging $250,000 a year and couldn't keep teachers. So residents voted to take out a $5.4 million bond, upgrade every building in the district, and install 1,400 solar panels.

Three years later, the deficit flipped to a $1.8 million surplus.

The project wasn't just solar. Energy efficiency upgrades across all six schools, new lighting, HVAC systems, windows, and thermostats cut energy consumption by 1.6 million kilowatts annually.

The panels, some installed as a canopy at the school entrance and some on unused district land, generated enough excess electricity that the district started selling it back to the grid. Monthly utility bills dropped from $17,000 to $4,000.

The school board voted to put the savings into paychecks. Teachers saw raises averaging $2,000 to $3,000 a year, with some receiving up to $15,000 depending on tenure.

Batesville went from one of the lowest-paying districts in Arkansas to one of the highest-paying in its county. Resignations slowed and applications went up.

Taxpayers funded the upfront cost through the bond. The savings paid it back and then some. "Batesville has reduced the checks they write to utilities," said the energy company that managed the project, "and increased the checks they write to teachers."

At least 20 nearby districts have since copied the model. Nine thousand schools across the US now run on solar. Batesville was the first to route the savings directly into teacher salaries.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Tucson, Arizona changed the color of 20,000 streetlights, cut light pollution by 7%, prevented countless wildlife deaths, and saved taxpayers a boatload of money.

Most cities retrofitting streetlights to LED chose cool-white bulbs in the 4,000K range because they're bright and cheap. Cool-white light scatters upward and sideways at higher rates than the old sodium lamps, which is why light pollution has actually increased in many cities that switched to LED. Hundreds of millions of migrating songbirds navigate by stars and get pulled off course by that scatter every year, many of them fatally.

Tucson chose warm-white 3,000K LEDs instead, added full shielding so the light points down rather than up or sideways, and programmed adaptive dimming: 90% brightness from sunset to midnight, 60% after that until dawn. It was a win for wildlife and taxpayers: the whole thing costs less to run than what it replaced.

Philadelphia, LA, and Phoenix have all run LED retrofits that made skyglow worse. The technology to do it right exists and isn't expensive. It's a procurement decision, which means it's a political one. And political decisions are ones you can influence.

Your city council chose your streetlights. Most of them have never been asked about color temperature, shielding, or dimming schedules, not because those things don't matter, but because most people don't know to ask.

The night sky is habitat. The darkness migrating birds need to navigate is habitat. We've been treating it as a waste product of lighting decisions made by people who weren't thinking about birds.

Ask your council what color temperature your streetlights are. Most of them won't know the answer.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Running a gas leaf blower for 30 minutes produces roughly the same hydrocarbon pollution as driving a car 1,100 miles and shreds next summer's insects.

That's before you get to what the air does to the yard itself. Leaf blower air exits the nozzle at up to 200 miles per hour. That's enough to shred caterpillars, strip butterfly eggs off leaves, and fling overwintering fireflies, ladybugs, and ground beetles into the street.

The leaf litter being blown to the curb is where next summer's insects were waiting out the winter. A chickadee pair needs 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to raise one brood. Most of those overwinter in exactly the debris being removed.

California banned gas-powered leaf blowers. So did Washington DC and a growing number of cities. Germany's environment ministry advised citizens to avoid them unless "indispensable," which is a very German way of saying please stop.

The leaves can be raked into beds as mulch, mowed over and left as nutrients, or just left alone. Any of those options take roughly the same time and produce approximately zero hydrocarbon pollution and zero shredded caterpillars.

The leaf blower is loud, bad for air quality, and running a massacre on the insects that feed your birds. Is it time to ban them entirely?

[Mads @Maggadz]

@briscoepark Buddy are we getting into surrealist dark video? Now I’m imagining this is what’s been going on around all those wild stills you shoot

[IncarcerNation.com @IncarcerNation]

While we are staring at our imperialist wonder wars, this is happening without getting the attention it is owed. Ghana is drowning. More than 470 people rescued by the Ghana National Fire Service. Floodwaters submerged roads, neighborhoods, businesses&vehicles across Accra&Tema.

[The Debt Collective 🟥 @StrikeDebt]

You actually have until September 29th at the earliest to leave the SAVE plan. Don’t let the Department of Education scare you into making a payment you can’t or don’t want to make.

[jon drake @DrakeGatsby]

Getting news in the town square the old fashioned way

[Mads @Maggadz]

@sauvamemte 🙌 yes please

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I remember when the tech world tried to launch Google Glass in the Bay Area. People got booed and kicked out of bars and restaurants, and some even got smacked. Google eventually gave up on making that happen. We need that same energy for Meta glasses.

[Mads @Maggadz]

@ankyhaidy Booo that’s his service elephant.

[Cinemarxism @CinemarxismBret]

ICE has been absolutely relentless in Kansas City since the World Cup started, just as we expected, and not a single local media outlet has reported on it once.

They took everyone from an agua Fresca stand in Olathe this morning. Just a total dragnet. Fucking pigs.

[Sara McGee for Texas HD 132 @SaraForTexLege]

This is the moderate position. This pledge should be a litmus test for every single candidate in 2026 and beyond.

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

A Justice Department lawyer just signed a memo saying disabled Americans have no right to live in their own homes. In the same document, she admits no court in the country agrees with her.

Read that again. A government official wrote down, in black and white, that her own argument is wrong by every legal standard of the last thirty years, and she made it anyway.

Here is what it means in plain terms.

Right now, 8.4 million people get help that lets them stay in their own homes. Aides who help them dress. Care that lets them work, see friends, raise their kids, sleep in their own beds at night.

This memo tells states they can cut all of it.

And if they cut it, where do those people go? Into nursing homes. Into institutions. Into facilities where someone else decides when you wake up, what you eat, who your roommate is, whether you go outside today.

A lawyer who has visited people locked in these places said their whole world shrinks to one hallway. That is the future this memo is opening the door to.

Keeping people in their own homes is cheaper. In one case, home care cost under $7,500 a year. The nursing home would have cost close to $50,000. The cruel option is also the expensive one. They want to spend more money to make people's lives worse.

So why?

Because last summer Trump signed an order to deal with homelessness by force, by sweeping people off the streets and committing them. He said it out loud during the campaign: the mentally ill belong back in institutions.

The only thing standing in the way was the law that says people deserve to live in their own communities.

This memo is how they get around it. And it landed the same week Republicans slashed Medicaid, giving every cash-strapped state the perfect excuse to start cutting.

A think tank drew up the plan. A lawyer wrote the memo. A president signed the order. Three signatures, and millions of people could lose the right to their own front door.

We are about to spend the summer celebrating 250 years of American freedom.
Some Americans are about to find out it doesn't include them.

[Andy Downing @andydowning33]

“So, if government officials, elected officials are getting more clued into the types of data Flock gathers and maintains, and if it’s the kind of thing that is giving them pause, then don’t renew the contracts.”

https://t.co/uyA40BTzh2

[Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib @RepRashida]

These sentences are a travesty and totally unjustified, but that's the point. Americans hate the fascist Trump regime, so the only way they can try to cling to power is brute force. NSPM-7 is a grave threat to all of us and more bullshit "terrorism" charges like these are coming. https://t.co/LBREZVVY6D

[Homeschool Faye @homeschoolfaye]

Tonea Nicole Miller was found hung in a tree while celebrating Juneteenth in Miami, FL!

Little to no news coverage is surrounding this case.

Help spread the word. The family is looking for answers!

[Vitalist International @VitalistInt]

the public defenders in the prairieland case failed to defend or meaningfully support the defendants. they called no witnesses (despite having access to them) and they filed no motions. they must be disbarred for client neglect. this would assist the appeals process.

[Erin Overbey @erinoverbey]

It should be a much bigger deal that @WIRED fails to mention that its own former Editor-in-Chief Nick Thompson (Jonah Lehrer’s former editor at the @NewYorker) is listed in this group of members/attendees of Peter Thiel’s secret society, Dialog.

[alpha @omarsbigsister]

Ezra Klein and Bret Stephens among others being in a super secret society by Peter Thiel is all the more proof that America doesn't actually have journalism anymore.