Good morning, RVA! It's 40 °F, and today you can expect weather a lot like yesterday—highs around 60 °F, sunshine, and plenty of signs of spring popping up all around. I don’t know about you, but my hostas are excited to be alive. Temperatures start to warm up tomorrow and will continue to do so through the end of next week.
Water cooler
Jahd Khalil at VPM reports on the City’s 2022 Office of Community Wealth Building Impact Report, which you can download as PDF and read directly if you’d like. OCWB exists to elevate Richmonders out of poverty and they do so through a handful of interesting initiatives (including a small and nascent basic income program!). Each year they’re required by City Council to draft a report of what they’ve been up to, and the main takeaway from this year is that poverty fell 1.5%. That probably doesn’t seem like a lot, but, as OCWB’s director puts it “it’s been moving in the right direction.” Take a minute and scroll through the actual PDF report though, because there are a lot of interesting stats and tables that are worth your time. Like: Since 2012, poverty among Black and Latino Richmonders has fallen 12% and 48% (?!) respectively.
Tyler Lane at WTVR continues his reporting on deaths in the City’s jail. Since March 2022, five people have died in the jail, with three of them confirmed to be the result of a fentanyl overdose.
Related, and I expect to be writing a lot more about this in the coming months, yesterday the FDA approved Narcan, a drug that prevents opioid overdoses, for over-the-counter use. If you’re unfamiliar with how Narcan works, I recommend this really excellent video from the National Harm Reduction Coalition. You can also get free narcan (and training on how to use it!) through your friendly local health department.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Charlotte Rene Woods digs into the Governor’s decision to make it harder for people who have been convicted of a felony to have their voting rights restored. Making it harder to vote is part of the official Republican platform these days, so I’m sure no one is super surprised by the Governor’s quite adjustment to this policy (even though Republican Bob McDonnell took the first steps down Virginia’s path to a more automatic restoration of rights). The numbers are kind of shocking: “In his first year, Youngkin restored 4,300 people's rights. Meanwhile Democratic governors, Northam restored more than 126,000 and Terry McAuliffe restored more than 173,000.“ At this rate, by the end of his term, Youngkin will have restored rights to just 14% of the people his predecessor did. A handful of legislators in the General Assembly want to remove this authority from the Governor, and rightfully so! Unfortunately, it’d take a constitutional amendment, so don’t hold your breath.
Sarah Vogelsong at the Virginia Mercury has a nice look at where we are in the Commonwealth’s budget process and what happens if the General Assembly can’t get their acts together and pass a budget. Luckily, because of the ancient and mysterious way in which Virginia works, last year’s budget was technically a two-year budget, so there’s no fear of a government shutdown or anything like that. There are, however, a bunch of new projects and initiatives that would have to wait until the next year for potential funding—including $100 million investment into Richmond’s combined sewer overflow system.
Yesterday, Penn State announced that they’d hired away VCU basketball coach Mike Rhoades after he spent the last five seasons with the Rams. Wasting almost no time at all, later that same evening, VCU named Ryan Odom as their new head coach. You might remember Odom from that time he became the first person to ever lead a 16-seed team (UMBC) to a win over a 1-seed (UVA) in the NCAA tournament.
This morning's longread
Smoke screen
More AI thoughts! I liked this piece because I think it’s so easy to forget how AI isn’t magically immune to inheriting all of humanity’s racism, sexism, and every other ism we’ve got—I mean, it’s trained on the content of the internet!
But there are other ways this story works too: fears about so-called AIs eventually exceeding their creators’ abilities and taking over the world function to obfuscate the very real harm these machines are doing right now, to people that are alive today. We already have ample evidence of the ways that the application of AI and adjacent methods are being used to issue automatic and capricious denials of medical care; to target people for surveillance or arrest; to create content that is racist, sexist, ableist, and so on—not to mention that its penchant for bullshit makes it a highly scalable tool for generating and disseminating disinformation. All of which is to say, so-called AI is yet another tool for accelerating the already-happening efforts of precaritization, austerity, and inequality. But it’s difficult to locate those concerns—or address them—within the tale of a new intelligence coming into being.
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Picture of the Day
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