Good morning, RVA! It's 32 °F, and today looks cold and, later this evening, rainy. Expect highs right around 50 °F, which is still pretty chilly, if you ask me. Slightly warmer temperatures move through tomorrow, but, really, we’re looking at some regular, early-winter weather for the rest of this week.
Water cooler
David Ress at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that City Council (thankfully) voted to keep the City’s real estate tax rate at $1.20, avoiding shortchanging Future Richmond millions and millions of dollars. That’s great news! They also introduced the legislation to issue a one-time real estate tax rebate to homeowners, which should work its way through the bill-becomes-a-law process over the next month or so. With six supporters already on board, I don’t see any obvious roadblocks—plus the Mayor wants to get checks in the mail early next year, not leaving a ton of time for Council to delay. Assuming the rebate does pass, I think this was a pretty good outcome, all things considered. Richmond avoided a potentially catastrophic misstep and now has some time to figure out how best to ease the impact rising assessments can have on folks with lower incomes.
Remember how the Virginia Board of Education has delayed voting on the new history and social science learning standards a couple of times? With each delay I felt the likelihood of bad-faith Republican shenanigans increase, and, now, the Washington Post reports that “The Virginia Department of Education proposed revisions to the commonwealth’s history and social science learning standards late Friday in a move that would significantly alter the guidelines it had previously recommended and prompted a blistering response from critics who described it as political meddling.” You can find the draft standard here, which has six mentions of Ronald Reagan and zero mentions of Carter, Clinton, Obama, or Biden. I have no idea how that compares to the current standard or the standard proposed earlier this year before all the delays, so take my cmd+Fing with a grain of salt!
The Daily Progress has many, many stories about Sunday night’s fatal shooting at UVA. I’d start there if you’re looking for either updates or the communal processing that happens through media after horrific events like this.
Style Weekly has a bunch of fun stories celebrating their 40th anniversary, including this one by Lorna Wyckoff about why they started the enduring magazine 40 years ago.
OK, fourth or fifth time is surely the charm: NASA has set tomorrow at 1:04 AM as the new launch window for the Atermis I mission. Should everything go as planned, a massive rocket will blast off with an unmanned spacecraft that’ll make its way to the moon and back 39 days later. This is a big and very practical step toward returning humans to the surface of the moon in my lifetime (something I didn’t think would necessarily happen). I’m a little disappointed that I won’t be able to watch the launch live, but still excited to wake up and read more tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed!
This morning's longread
After Twitter
The chaos level over on Twitter has increased by orders of magnitude since Elon Musk took over, and I expect that trend to continue (at least for the short term). While I don’t think Twitter will suddenly vanish tomorrow, the currently level of turmoil does feel like a good opportunity for folks to reevaluate where and how they share their thoughts with the entirety of the internet. If you feel like doomscrolling Twitter makes you physically ill or that you don’t need to actively contribute to a billionaire’s pet project, I recommend you...start a blog! Remember blogs?? There are a ton of free and paid options (I use micro.blog, which even cross-posts to Twitter automatically), and whenever the bird site does crumble into a smoldering pile of ones and zeros, you’ll still have a corner of the internet to call your own. Blogging is slower-paced and generates fewer dopamine hits, but maybe that’s a good thing? Seriously, give it a try and lemme know where you end up.
The internet’s town square should never have been one specific website with its own specific rules and incentives. It should have been, and should be, the web itself. Having one entity own and police that square could only deform the worldwide conversation, to disastrous ends, even with the smartest and most humane people at work. Twitter’s new owner is certainly not one of those people. But it doesn’t matter: he unintentionally brought the change that needed to happen, the break in the consensus.
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Picture of the Day
Overlapping patterns.
