Good morning, RVA! It's 41 °F, and today is probably the warmest day of the week with highs right around 60 °F. We may see some sprinkles here and there, and possibly some real rain this evening, but I say get out there and enjoy the warmer weather this afternoon if you can!
Water cooler
If you wish, you may read the text of Governor Youngkin’s State of the Commonwealth address or watch a video of it over on WTVR’s YouTube. I haven’t tapped through myself because I think it’d just make me angry, and I’ve got a lot more important things to do this morning. For a good selection of some of the in-the-moment Democratic responses, you can scroll back through VAPLAN’s Twitter timeline. You can also read David Ress’s summary in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which contains this salty quote from Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw about the likelihood of the Governor’s wishlist making it through the Senate: “The speech should have started ‘once upon a time.’” P.S. Just a quick reminder that many of the bills you’ll read about in the coming days have absolutely zero chance of becoming actual law. In the moment, it’s sometimes hard to know which proposed legislation is a political stunt to improve a legislator’s election-year resume and which is something to get emotionally invested in. So when you read a headline that fills you with a furious rage—and you will read many!—take a minute to think about where we are in the bill-becomes-a-law process and, importantly, what Senate Democrats have to say about it.
Keeping in mind the previous sentence, Roger Chelsey at the Virginia Mercury has a nice column about the Governor’s no-good plan to defund public schools. I liked this bit in particular: “Even if some public schools are failing to educate students, the state should first provide more than the bare minimum of resources before consigning them to the trash heap. The unofficial GOP mantra of ‘low taxes above all else’ has consequences – especially for education.”
Axios Richmond’s Karri Peifer reports on the proposed regional Tourism Improvement District, which you can read more about on this new website put together by our regional tourism folks. The TID would levy a 2% fee on hotel stays on certain hotels across our region, and then use the money collected—an estimated $8 million—to promote the region around the country. Honestly, the graph on the aforelinked website of Richmond’s tourism marketing budget compared to its peer cities makes a pretty compelling case for the new tax. This quote in Peifer’s reporting, though, raises a red flag for me: “To be competitive, Richmond needs to offer subsidies, such as free parking, to lure big events. And it needs money to do it...” Using the TID money for marketing is one thing, using it to subsidize parking is something else entirely.
I missed this, but GRTC resumed service at the Pulse Government Center Eastbound Station yesterday! Construction of the General Assembly’s new digs, parking deck, and secret tunnel under 9th Street have kept bus service from its regular routing for a while now, and it’s nice to see that finally wrapping up. A few stops still remained closed and a few detours remain in effect, but putting the Pulse back together again is a big piece of the Downtown puzzle.
This morning's longread
Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t
I think about to-do lists, getting things done, and productivity a ton, so I really enjoyed this thoughtful piece on why it’s so hard to actually _do_ stuff despite the proliferation of helpful tools around us. For me, I don’t use to-do apps to increase my capacity, I use them because I want to help my future-self remember what my current-self thinks is important.
To-do lists are, in the American imagination, a curiously moral type of software. Nobody opens Google Docs or PowerPoint thinking “This will make me a better person.” But with to-do apps, that ambition is front and center. “Everyone thinks that, with this system, I’m going to be like the best parent, the best child, the best worker, the most organized, punctual friend,” says Monique Mongeon, a product manager at the book-sales-tracking firm BookNet and a self-admitted serial organizational-app devotee. “When you start using something to organize your life, it’s because you’re hoping to improve it in some way. You’re trying to solve something.” With to-do apps, we are attempting nothing less than to craft a superior version of ourselves. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that when we fail, the moods run so black.
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Picture of the Day
“Hurding turds so you don’t have to.” OK, you got me, Advanced Plumbing.
