On Wednesday this week, May 8, a US strike by Uber and Lyft drivers drew considerable attention. This was far from the first driver strike for the ride-sharing companies, but it was the most widespread to date, and it’s timing eye-catching. On Friday, Uber is expected to move forward with one of the largest IPOs in recent years, raising close to $100 billion from investors, while earlier this week Lyft issued its first financial results since its own March IPO.

Expect many more. Strikes, not IPOs.

The driver protests are timed to draw attention to pay and work conditions at a time when the companies are hoping to focus on their attraction to investors. How followed and how effective this driver strike was varied widely, and specific demands also varied from city to city. In many cities service disruption was minimal at most. Drivers generally are seeking higher wages (which New York drivers successfully got last year), and more regulation – particularly caps on the numbers of drivers in given markets. A study by the Economic Policy Institute last year estimated the net hourly pay for ride-share drivers at $9.21 an hour. Lyft and Uber drivers in the US are classified as independent contractors (1099 workers), not employees, meaning they are ineligible for benefits, including paid time off.

Neither company has paid that much attention to driver pressure, unless backed by regulations. The strike this week is targeting legislators and city officials more than corporate leaders. Still, neither company has yet found a route to profitability – Lyft’s just-issued financial results note widening losses – and would be uncomfortable with concerted disruption to its product. Uber’s IPO documentation includes the statement:

“Driver dissatisfaction has in the past resulted in protests by Drivers… Such protests have resulted, and any future protests may result, in interruptions to our business.”

Today the ride-share companies are trying to find a balance between the financial pressures to cut costs and increase margins, and the desire to avoid too-great disruptions to service from drivers […]

via And Many More Strikes to Come — Infrastructure Ideas

ELECTRIC VEHICLES WON’T SAVE US from runaway climate change, but they’re part of the solution, along with support for public transit and active transport like walking and cycling. The transportation sector accounts for almost one-quarter of the world’s carbon emissions, so it’s an area where change is necessary and possible.

As Norway and other countries are demonstrating, incentives and tax policy can move people quickly into cleaner vehicle options. Half of Norway’s cars are expected to be electric this year, and it’s on track to meet its commitment to have only zero-emissions cars sold by 2025. Its strong EV mandate, inexpensive hydropower, tax incentives and price parity with internal combustion engine vehicles contributed to this success.

Reduced tolls, bus-lane access and free parking and ferry rides sweetened the option for Norwegians. Only four per cent of the country’s EV owners say they would go back to conventional cars.

Norway is ahead of much of the world, but electric vehicles are on track to reach more than half of global new car sales by 2040. Government policies have driven this shift. The Norwegian government offered about US$1 billion in incentives this year, including waiving high vehicle import duties and taxes for electric car buyers. The government plans to phase these out in 2021, gradually replacing them with higher taxes on fossil-fuelled vehicles.

China used government incentives to increase EV production last year by 50 per cent over the previous year, and built the world’s first fully electric bus fleet in Shenzhen. India has a US$1.4 billion, three-year subsidy plan to jump-start electric and hybrid vehicle sales.

Although Canada isn’t embracing the full policy package needed for significant behavioural change, it’s making progress, with commitments to reach 100 per cent zero-emission vehicle sales by 2040, and 2025 and 2030 targets coming. But it’s a long road ahead. Just 2.5 per cent of total vehicle sales last year were electrics. Federal rebates implemented in May should boost electric vehicle sales, but we need mandatory targets.

Provincially, B.C. and Quebec are echoing California, which in 1990 became the first place to set up a zero-emission vehicle standard. One of 10 new vehicles purchased there last year were EVs. Quebec’s mandate sets a target for one-third of all new vehicles sales to be EV by 2030. B.C.’s mandate, expected to become law soon, requires that all new light-duty car and truck sales be zero-emission by 2040. That could play a big role in helping B.C. meet its transportation climate targets.

Municipalities and provinces can help prepare for the EV transition by building more public charging infrastructure and requiring new residential buildings to install chargers or be electric-vehicle friendly. Other ways to lower transportation emissions include cleaning up the electricity used to charge EVs and reducing the carbon content of fuels for non-electric vehicles with biofuels or hydrogen produced from renewables.

Even without government interventions, electric vehicles may cost less than gas-powered cars by 2024, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts. Add lower operating and maintenance costs and savings from forgoing high-priced gas, and there are many incentives to switch. Hydro-Québec’s online calculator estimates it costs $10.65 to drive a gas-fuelled compact car 100 kilometres and $2.10 for an electric […]

via SUZUKI – Government support for electric vehicles drives down emissions — ArmchairMayor.ca

Denver is poised to become the first city in the nation to effectively decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms.

After closing an early vote deficit Tuesday night and early Wednesday, final unofficial results posted late in the afternoon showed a reversal of fortune — with Initiative 301 set to pass narrowly with 50.6 percent of the vote. The total stands at 89,320 votes in favor and 87,341 against, a margin of 1,979 […]

via Denver Voters Pass Nation’s First “Magic Mushroom” Psilocybin Decriminalization Initiative

Michelle Lim, University of Adelaide

We are witnessing the loss of biodiversity at rates never before seen in human history. Nearly a million species face extinction if we do not fundamentally change our relationship with the natural world, according to the world’s largest assessment of biodiversity.

Last week, in the culmination of a process involving 500 biodiversity experts from over 50 countries, and 134 governments negotiated the final form of the Global Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Read more: Radical overhaul needed to halt Earth’s sixth great extinction event

IPBES aims to arm policy-makers with the tools to address the relationships between biodiversity and human well-being. It synthesises evidence on the state of biodiversity, ecosystems and natures’ contributions to people on a global scale.

The IPBES Global Assessment provides unequivocal evidence that we need biodiversity for human survival and well-being. To stem unprecedented species decline the assessment sets out the actions governments, the private sector and individuals can take.

Importantly, a whole chapter of the Global Assessment (about one-sixth of the assessment) is dedicated to examining whether existing biodiversity law and policy is adequate. This chapter also outlines ways to address the vortex of biodiversity decline.

If we are to halt the continued loss of nature, then the world’s legal, institutional and economic systems must be reformed entirely. And this change needs to happen immediately […]

via ‘Revolutionary Change’ Needed to Stop Unprecedented Global Extinction Crisis — Red Revolution Media

Cannabis growing in Yunnan Province in China in 2004. Leisa Tyler/LightRocket, via Getty Images

SHANCHONG, China — China has made your iPhone, your Nikes and, chances are, the lights on your Christmas tree. Now, it wants to grow your cannabis.

Two of China’s 34 regions are quietly leading a boom in cultivating cannabis to produce cannabidiol, or CBD, the nonintoxicating compound that has become a consumer health and beauty craze in the United States and beyond.

They are doing so even though cannabidiol has not been authorized for consumption in China, a country with some of the strictest drug-enforcement policies in the world.

“It has huge potential,” said Tan Xin, the chairman of Hanma Investment Group, which in 2017 became the first company to receive permission to extract cannabidiol here in southern China. The chemical is marketed abroad — in oils, sprays and balms as treatment for insomnia, acne and even diseases like diabetes and multiple sclerosis. (The science, so far, is not conclusive.)

The movement to legalize the mind-altering kind of cannabis has virtually no chance of emerging in China. But the easing of the plant’s stigma in North America has generated global demand for medicinal products — especially for cannabidiol — that companies in China are rushing to fill.

Hanma’s subsidiary in Shanchong, a village in a remote valley west of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, cultivates more than 1,600 acres of hemp, the variety of cannabis that is also used in rope, paper and fabrics. From the crop, it extracts cannabidiol in oil and crystal form at a gleaming factory it opened two years ago, in a restricted zone next to a weapons manufacturer.

“It is very good for people’s health,” Tian Wei, general manager of the subsidiary, Hempsoul, said during an interview at the factory, which was punctuated by test gunfire from the manufacturer next door.

“China may have become aware of this aspect a little bit late, but there will definitely be opportunities in the future,” Mr. Tian said.

China has, in fact, cultivated cannabis for thousands of years — for textiles, for hemp seeds and oil and even, according to some, for traditional medicine […]

via China Cashes In on the Cannabis Boom – By Steven Lee Myers May 4, 2019 — Just Sayin’

United Nations experts have called for Julian Assange to be freed from prison, saying they were “deeply concerned” about his well being and accusing the British government of breaching his human rights.

via UN Calls For Julian Assange To Be Released — Nwo Report

With all of the hysteria and fear-mongering about measles that’s sweeping mainstream media headlines these days, one might assume that children everywhere are dropping dead from this chickenpox-like infection. But according to official data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), not a single person has died while being infected with measles in more than 15 years.

On the other hand, it’s an undeniable fact that at least 100 people have died as a consequence of receiving the MMR vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella, which we’ve all been told by government health authorities, is supposed to protect against measles […]

via Measles Vaccine Kills Far More Children Than The Measles Itself; So, Why Is It Being Pushed On Us? — NationalAddictionNews.com

by Phil Duncan

While a layer of (overwhelmingly) liberal pakeha women followed the example of prime minister Jacinda Ardern in donning the hijab as a show of ‘solidarity’ with the Muslim community after the white nationalist terror attacks in Christchurch on March 15, women in countries where Islamic law prevails have been fighting repressive dress codes.  In Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Indonesian province of Aceh, wearing of the hijab, for instance, is compulsory.

Such dress codes are anti-women.  And women in the places they are imposed have been fighting to bring them to an end.  Moreover, not only are these dress codes repressive in and of themselves – they involve the state telling women how to dress – they are also indicative of the much wider denial of even formal, legal equality to women there.

For instance, at the very time Ardern and other women in New Zealand were donning hijabs, Iranian women’s rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh was being sentenced to 33 years imprisonment and 148 lashes for defending women in Iran who were refusing to wear the hijab […]
via Women’s rights in Iran or hijab ‘solidarity’ in New Zealand — Redline

The difference between Orwellian totalitarianism and Huxleyan totalitarianism is the permission for “fun.”

In Orwell’s world, there was no fun at all. It was pure drudgery. Sex was outlawed. No pleasure at all. No sports, no entertainment, no leisure time. And so in our minds we believe that if we are allowed to have fun—watch sports, watch porn, go to music festivals, have casual sex with many partners, enjoy movies and TV shows, lose ourselves in online content and video games—then we are not oppressed. Hedonism equals freedom!

But on the contrary: the Brave New World view of tyranny is not that pleasure is outlawed, but that it is leveraged against you and used to oppress and control you. It is a distraction. Entertainment and fun are the opiates of the masses, because without them, the masses will have nothing to do but sit and think about how awful things truly are.

Modern-day tyrants don’t want to deprive you of fun. They don’t want you to live a life of constant drudgery and seriousness.

They want you overwhelmed with superficial pleasures. Do drugs, get drunk all the time, obsess over sports and TV dramas, pour countless hours into video games, watch tons of online porn, buy Nice Things from Desirable Brands—anything but think about how corrupt the government is.

They want you distracted. They want you focused on trivial pursuits. They want your life to revolve around the next big music festival.

When you’re not wasting away in a cubicle pushing paper for some Megacorporation, they want you mentally sedated by entertainment.

People whose lives revolve around entertainment of course, in the back of their minds, ultimately feel unfulfilled. They wonder if there’s more to life than obsessing over sports, entertainment and nightlife. Materialism is unfulfilling. Most people are aware of this on some level.

They may not know what, exactly, is missing in their life, but they are at least partially aware that something isn’t right. Maybe it’s visceral, but once you get a bit older you begin to realize that you will never find fulfillment and meaning in life through entertainment and materialism. For me, this first started to dawn on me around my senior year of high school.

Yet even though most people are partially aware that there is more to life than entertainment and materialism, most people still nonetheless believe that they are free because they can enjoy superficial pleasures like entertainment, drinking, partying and materialism […]

via Just Because the Government Allows us to Have Fun Doesn’t Mean We’re Free —

Source: Mac Slavo

The food crisis could be upon us, as farmers in the United States report that income has plummetted.  If farmers can no longer afford to grow the food we all buy in the stores, expect not only a major price hike on the food that is available but a shortage of whole foods as well.

The personal income of farmers in the U.S. declined by an annualized $11.8 billion between January and March, the biggest 1st quarter drop in 3 years, Bloomberg reported, citing Commerce Department data released Monday.  The drop in income is being driven primarily by the fallout from President Trump’s trade disputes, a nosedive in commodity prices, and record flooding in the Midwest. As a result, farmer bankruptcies in the Midwest have shot up to levels the U.S. hasn’t seen for approximately a decade.

This makes the prospect of a food crisis very real. Although reports from the government claim that progress in the trade war can be described as “cautiously optimistic,” little can be done for the farmers already struggling. According to a report by Axios, America’s farmers are living through the worst economic crisis in almost 30 years and there is no end in sight […]

via Food Crisis Alert: U.S. Farmer Income PLUMMETS — Nwo Report