We’ve heard lots of big claims from oil companies about their commitment to sustainable energy production, but those are all words. Their actions are still to extract fossil fuels which undercut all their efforts to produce renewable energy. The simple reason oil companies are still killing the environment is profit.
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Things Are Good: The Climate Change Deniers are Done
Climate change deniers have clearly set back human progress and delayed us in reducing emissions, obviously that’s no good. What is good is that they barely exist anymore. The science has always been done properly around climate change and people are living the chaos that climate change has caused; it’s
Continue readingThings Are Good: NYC Delivery Workers Help Each Other
Delivery apps make ordering food easier and cheaper for consumers, but it costs the workers. By offloading the costs of actually delivering food onto labour the app companies like Uber have few expenses they need to cover, thus the appeal to investors. For the first wave of food delivery apps
Continue readingThings Are Good: Save the Planet from Your Kitchen
We are what we eat, and what we eat can change the world. All of us can make tiny changes in the kitchen to help reduce the harm modern food consumption does on the planet. Over at Eater they explore some ideas that people can try in their kitchen to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Understanding that the Map is not the Territory
Maps are all around us and you probably use them more than you think, and maps change the way you think. Knowing that the abstracted representation of the world (the map) is not the actual place (the territory) is an important distinction that we need to make. Another, easier, way
Continue readingThings Are Good: Want Better Communities? Get rid of Homeowners
\ The North American dream often hinges on owning the shelter you reside in, but with raising home prices this is a challenge for many. It may work out in the long run though as we should be creating systems that favour renters over owners since homeowners tend to hold
Continue readingThings Are Good: Avoid these Evil Tech Companies
Tech companies have transformed from the stereotypical scrappy startup to the stereotypical megacorporation hellbent on making money before all else. Google is a great example of this transition from a company doing good to a company getting in arguments with its employees about how evil they should be. Slate asked
Continue readingThings Are Good: No Better Time than now to Work from Home
For many office workers there is little reason to go to the office thanks to the advances in technology (it seems the only reason to be in an actual office is to be watched by a manager). The environmental gains from telecommuting are obvious and the cost saving for workers
Continue readingThings Are Good: GDPR Forces NYT to Serve Better Ads
Online media companies were forced to rethink their advertiser policies last year because of the introduction of the GDPR. The New York Times decided to stop using ad services that tracked you across the web; exactly what the GDPR was designed to do. Most people claimed that because marketers can’t
Continue readingThings Are Good: Planning for a Zero-Growth Economy
The economy is sometimes referred to as an entity outside of human control – it isn’t. We control the economy through policies and practices in each nation. The last half century focussed on growing the economy at the expense of all else from social care to the environment. We’ve seen
Continue readingThings Are Good: People Who Trust News Sources More Likely to Identify Fake News
Figure 1 from Cook, Ellerton, and Kinkead 2018. CC BY 3.0 A recent survey to find out who is susceptible to “fake news” found that people who hate the media were more likely to misidentify misleading information. The research studied a few thousand individuals in the USA about their thoughts
Continue readingThings Are Good: “Hustle Porn” Losing its Appeal
The term “hustle porn” covers all those ridiculous Youtube videos about get-rich schemes and stories by so-called hard-workers making tons of money because they “work hard”. In practice these people are selling ideological snake oil and it’s hurting vulnerable individuals. They argue that hustling all the time will automatically lead
Continue readingThings Are Good: Watch This Anti-Palm Oil Ad Banned in the UK
Palm oil gets used in plenty of consumer goods and processed foods, as a result the demand for palm oil increases every year. The problem with using palm oil is that most sources of the plant are from unsustainable farming practices. Indeed, the cultivation of palm oil greatly contributes to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Less Open Debates for a More Open Democracy
The last few years of this bizarre decade have witnessed the resurgence of hate groups. Some of these hate groups are just nicer sounding Nazis and that’s a really bad thing. Since this site is dedicated to good news let’s take a look at how to deal with these ignoramuses.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Ways to Better Avoid Fake News
Figure 1 from Cook, Ellerton, and Kinkead 2018. CC BY 3.0 The term fake news may new to the modern discourse but the idea is very old. Before President Trump started making up new phrases we called “fake news” we used words like lies, propaganda, and fiction. Regardless of the
Continue readingThings Are Good: Kids Don’t Benefit from Helicopter Parenting
Being a parent must be hard since websites are constantly telling you what you’re doing wrong. If you’re letting your kid explore the world on their own terms than you’re doing things right! Take a breather parents, it turns out that relaxing and stepping back is best for your kid.
Continue readingThings Are Good: WikiTribune to World: “Hello”
In 2001 when Jimmy Wales launched Wikipedia he never thought that the website would become what it is today. This year he has launched (with many others) WikiTribune and hopes that it becomes as influential as Wikipedia is online. WikiTribune exists because of the disappointing state of news media right
Continue readingThings Are Good: 15,000 Scientists Want to Change Climate Change
They want to stabilize the change and, ideally, change the trajectory we’re on. Climate change is happening faster than predicted and the positive feedback loops have started (meaning that it’s even harder to stop climate change) – this is the warning from over 15,000 scientists. The Alliance of World Scientists
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Best Interrogation Technique is to Listen
Over the course of the last decade interrogation techniques involved violence, yelling, and trying to “outsmart” the person being interviewed. Sadly that’s how interrogations were shown in entertainment and in reality at places like Guantanamo (which is still running). This bizarre approach to information gathering bothered psychologists Emily and Laurence
Continue readingThings Are Good: Positively Trolling Racists on the Web
Racists aren’t smart, and recently their stupidity has been taken advantage of to make the internet a little better. The popular online community Reddit has some parts of the site occupied by racists and the larger contingent of the community got sick of it. Some members started to infiltrate those
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