Good morning, RVA! It's 36 °F, and you can expect a sunny, cool day with temperatures right around 60 °F. Stay tuned for tomorrow, though, when we'll see highs back up in the 70s!
Water cooler
Plateau or nah? Take a look at this week's all-time graphs of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in Virginia and see what you think. Even if cases have started to level out, we're not seeing that same thing in the hospitalization or deaths graphs (or we're waiting on those to catch up). The New York Time's nationwide graphs are not as optimistic as all that, showing an increase in cases and a definite plateauing in hospitalizations. However, I feel pretty good about Virginia's statewide vaccine numbers: 63.8% of the population is fully vaccinated, 72.2% have had at least one dose, and 85.6% of adults have received at least one dose. Over on the kid side of things, just a couple weeks in to vaccinating children aged 5–11, and 12.4% have gotten their first dose. Is that a lot? I can't tell, but knocking out an eighth of eligible children in that age range in just a couple of weeks seems like progress.
Jack Jacobs at Richmond BizSense reports that our newish Central Virginia Transit Authority will "earmark around $108 million toward the Fall Line trail, a proposed 43-mile walking and biking trail that would connect Petersburg to Ashland." That's a huge chunk of money! Last we checked in on the funding of the Fall Line (via this excellent PDF), only $73 million of the $234 million total cost had been committed. This new money puts the trail well on its way to full funded. With at least some of the money in hand, I wonder when we'll start seeing segments of this trail on the ground and completed?
Richmond Magazine's Eileen Mellon has a piece celebrating ten entire years of Hardywood Park Carft Brewery. We can celebrate these dudes all we want, but without now-Senator McClellan's work to loosen things up in the General Assembly, we'd have exactly zero breweries packing our previously-industrial spaces—Hardywood included.
City Council's Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee will meet today, and, for those of us keeping track, will again discuss RES. 2021-R026—the resolution asking the Planning Commission to deal with Council's messy parfait of amendments to Richmond 300. Originally introduced 204 days ago, this resolution gets closer and closer to dying a slow death with each and every continuance. Also on LUHT's agenda, RES. 2020-R065, the resolution asking the City to come up with a process for residents to request a traffic study to see if it'd be appropriate to lower speeds on neighborhood streets to 15 miles per hour. First, despite what the City's head of the Department of Public Works says, infrastructure is how you slow down drivers reliably, not with posted speed limits. Second, if Council wants to make speeds lower, just do the thing! Don't ask the City to come up with a process so that residents then have to ask the City to do a study to then take to Council to then see if posted speeds can be lowered! Saltiness aside, props to Councilmember Lynch for trying to do something, anything to lower the dangerous speeds in her district—especially given the current mindset of DPW leadership. Tim Kaine eyebrow raise at Councilmember Lambert, though, who is a co-sponsor on this resolution and who, on her own authority, pulled out actual speed-reducing infrastructure on Brookland Park Boulevard. I don't see how those two things are internally consistent.
It's fun to watch our local reporters cover Governor-elect Youngkin's vaporware policy platform as he transitions to the actual work of governing. Here's a work of art by the Richmond Times-Dispatch's Michael Martz about Youngkin's business agenda, which, as far as I can tell, boils down to asking Virginia's tourism industry to try harder and declaring "Virginia open for business" on day one. I love, love, love how Martz systematically unplugs all of the governor-elect's rhetoric: "We will not have shutdowns" says Youngkin, yet March 2020 was the end of any COVID-related restrictions in Virginia says Martz; Youngkin blames labor issues on "government incentives for people not to work", but Martz points out that "those benefits ended on Labor Day and the labor force still hasn't recovered." Similarly, the Virginian-Pilot tries to figure out, specifically, what Youngkin will do about COVID-19 when he takes office, but, unfortunately, all they've got to go on is campaign quotes because "[the governor] and his team declined through a spokesman to comment for this story, citing a busy schedule."
This morning's longread
Hey, Facebook, I Made a Metaverse 27 Years Ago
Another essay in the Atlantic by the guy who invented pop-up ads! This one's about "the metaverse," which I personally don't believe will ever be a thing. Confirming my opinion, the Wall Street Journal has a hands-on with the nascent metaverse that you should watch, too.
But that’s not the problem with Zuckerberg’s metaverse. The problem is that it’s boring. The futures it imagines have been imagined a thousand times before, and usually better. Two old men chat over a chessboard, one in Barcelona, one in New York, much as they did on Minitel in the 1980s. There’s virtual Ping-Pong and surfing, you know, like on a Wii. You can watch David Attenborough nature documentaries, like you do on Netflix. You can videoconference with your workmates … you know, like you do every single day. Zuckerberg isn’t building the metaverse because he has a remarkable new vision of how things could be. There’s not an original thought in his video, including the business model.
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