In episode 30, We discuss the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders which The Changeling film was loosely based on. And as always…food. Special guest: Josh Ballard from Our Tupelo.
All Cats is part of the Truthseekers Podcast Network.
Host: April Simmons
Co-Host: Sahara Holcomb
Theme + Editing by April Simmons
http://anchor.fm/april-simmons to donate to our pickles & coffee fund
Contact us at allcatspod@gmail.com
Call us at 662-200-1909
https://linktr.ee/allcats for all our social media links
In episode 30, We discuss the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders which The Changeling film was loosely based on. And as always…food. Special guest: Josh Ballard from Our Tupelo.
All Cats is part of the Truthseekers Podcast Network.
Host: April Simmons
Co-Host: Sahara Holcomb
Theme + Editing by April Simmons
http://anchor.fm/april-simmons to donate to our pickles & coffee fund
Contact us at allcatspod@gmail.com
Call us at 662-200-1909
https://linktr.ee/allcats for all our social media links
The House of Representatives during the legislative session in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, May 28, 2020.
Before ending their 2020 session – for now – lawmakers late Wednesday night finalized spending $1.25 billion in federal coronavirus relief funds.
The Legislature earmarked the spending for small business grants, internet access in rural areas and computers to help schools provide distance learning in the pandemic, and to reimburse hospitals, cities, colleges and other institutions for pandemic-related expenses.
Gov. Tate Reeves did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday or indicate whether he would sign off on the Legislature’s CARES Act spending.
The Legislature’s earmarking of the funds comes after a heated battle between Reeves and the Legislature over control of the federal coronavirus relief spending. Reeves said that emergency spending should be controlled by the governor, and cited precedent including federal Hurricane Katrina relief. Lawmakers said control of state spending is the constitutional duty of the Legislature.
For now, lawmakers have prevailed. The Legislature’s spending plan passed Wednesday night provides Reeves with $50 million in a “discretionary fund” he will control.
The largest block of CARES Act spending, which lawmakers had already approved in May, is $300 million for small businesses. This spending is well underway, with $240 million going for grants up to $25,000 each for qualified businesses with less than 50 employees. Another $60 million went for quick, emergency grants of $2,000 to about 30,000 small businesses.
“We believe that getting Mississippi’s economy back starts with small businesses,” House Speaker Philip Gunn said of the business grant program. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann noted that Mississippi was one of the first state’s to get CARES Act relief money out to small businesses.
The spending also includes $275 million for expanding rural broadband and helping schools purchase tablets, computers and other hardware for distance learning amid the pandemic.
“This legislation brings connectivity to the world for our children, educators and parents and is a giant leap forward for our state’s future,” Hosemann said Thursday.
Lawmakers directed nearly $182 million of the CARES Act money to the state’s unemployment trust fund, to cover unprecedented payment of unemployment benefits to Mississippians during the pandemic shutdown. Gov. Reeves has warned lawmakers that failure to adequately fill the fund – he estimated about $500 million may be needed – would result in an automatic tax increase to businesses who pay into the fund when they can least afford it.
To address concerns about increased costs for businesses, lawmakers temporarily changed laws so that large unemployment rates caused by the pandemic would not force businesses to pay extra for now.
The CARES Act spending faces a deadline of the end of the year to be spent under federal guidelines. The Legislature included a caveat that any unspent money by late in the year will go to the unemployment trust fund.
For some of the CARES Act earmarks, state contracting and purchasing rules were reduced, to hasten spending the money as “emergency contracts” by the federal deadline. Some lawmakers questioned whether this is a recipe for trouble.
“I understand that falls under emergency spending, and it has to be fast-tracked,” said Rep. Jerry Turner, R-Baldwyn, who has been a champion of contracting and purchasing reform. “But I can tell you, any time you limit accountability and transparency and limit competitive (bidding), there’s an opportunity for misuse. I understand the need for fast-tracking, but I would much rather it be different.”
Sen. John Polk, R-Hattiesburg, another lawmaker who has led contracting reform, was successful in ensuring the CARES spending comes under emergency purchasing regulation, as opposed to being totally exempt from state requirements. Polk said he believes claims that following state purchasing and contracting requirements would slow things down too much to be spurious.
“The way they were initially worded would have allowed any agency head to buy anything they wanted for any price,” Polk said.
A breakdown of the $1.25 billion in CARES Act spending approved by the Legislature:
Small business grant program: $300 million
Governor’s discretionary fund: $50 million
Broadband access: $75 million
Health care: $129.7 million. This includes $80 million for hospitals, and nearly $50 million for other health providers and nonprofits, including food pantries.
Mississippi Emergency Management Agency: $40 million
Cities and counties: $70 million
Corrections: $20 million
Tourism: $15 million
K-12 Distance learning: $150 million
K-12 Internet connectivity: $50 million
Universities: $50 million
Community colleges: $50 million
Private schools and colleges: $10 million
Workforce development: $55 million
Elections: $1 million
Courts and judiciary: $2.5 million
Unemployment trust fund: $181.8 million
Lawmakers on Wednesday night also finalized most of a $6 billion state budget. But because of disagreement over spending $52 million in federal Gulf restoration money, they left without passing a budget for the Department of Marine Resources. They are likely to come back into session in coming days to address the DMR budget.
The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we do things, big-time. The events, places, and activities we were used to enjoying have been canceled, closed, or in some cases, permanently shut down. Virtual versions of just about everything have sprung up: meetings, concerts, parties, classes, conventions. This week another event was added to the list of things gone virtual: the Tour de France.
First held in 1903, the Tour de France has gone on every year since, with the only exceptions being during the first and second World Wars. As of right now, the in-the-flesh tour is still scheduled to take place, though it’s been pushed back to an August 29 start date (it usually takes place in July).
With all the smaller cycling races that usually go on during the summer having been canceled, the virtual Tour will give cyclists some motivation to train, and a chance to see how they stack up against their competitors (whose training routines have no doubt been equally disrupted over the last few months). Participants will be on stationary bikes in their homes rather than real bikes on the road, and there are some other key differences between the virtual Tour and the real thing.
For starters, the Tour is normally broken down into 21 parts, or “stages,” each classified as flat, hilly, or mountain. Cyclists have 23 consecutive days to complete all the stages, with the total distance spanning a whopping 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles), about the distance from San Francisco to Chicago.
The virtual Tour will look a little different (or, let’s be honest—a lot different. About as different as possible while still being called a bike race). Rather than consecutive days, the race will happen over three weekends in July, with six stages lasting one to two hours apiece. As in real life, each stage will tend toward being mostly hilly, mountain, or flat (meaning participants will need to be adjusting the resistance on their trainer bikes and sometimes standing or crouching to simulate climbing a hill; if you’ve ever done a spin class, you know how it works).
The race will be conducted on a virtual platform called Zwift. Zwift isn’t brand-new—it’s been around for a few years—and it markets itself as a training app for cyclists, runners, and triathletes. Athletes use a treadmill or stationary bike in combination with an array of sensors plus their laptop or smartphone. They can access customized training programs and join virtual races against other users all over the world.
Ideally, competitors in the virtual Tour will have a big screen in front of them simulating their ride through virtual environments, some of which Zwift created especially for this event. For the first two days of the race, riders will bike through Watopia, a virtual world created by Zwift. But the company also rushed to build new, custom worlds for the Tour, mainly mimicking the real-life locations where the race usually takes place, including the French countryside, a 6,263-foot peak in Provence called Mont Ventoux, and the finish line on the famous Champs-Elysées in Paris.
In one cycling coach’s opinion, riding on Zwift can actually feel more physically challenging than being out on a real bike, for three reasons: it’s harder for your body to cool off, the bike’s resistance works differently, and “your motivation dwindles due to not having the wind in your hair and the road moving underneath you.”
That last point is key. The pandemic has played out very differently than it would have just 10 years ago; technologies like Zoom and Slack allowed millions of people to work from home, our smartphones helped us stay ultra-connected even when physically apart, and quick access to information kept us informed of what was going on.
Of course, talking to our friends or watching musicians stream on a screen will never be a good-enough substitute for doing these things in person, just as riding a stationary bike through a virtual world will never give you that wind-in-your-hair, road-beneath-your-feet feeling.
But in a time when we have no choice but to appreciate the small things, it’s better than the alternative, which is… nothing. Alas, depending how the pandemic continues to play out, we may be in for a highly virtualized future, with events we never would’ve thought could go virtual finding a way to do just that.
23 men’s teams and 17 women’s teams have registered for the virtual bike race, including the last three winners of the real-life event. “Footage” will be broadcast in more than 130 countries.
Let’s just hope all the contestants have stable internet connections.
One of the world’s first 3D printed houses went up in China in 2016. At 400 square meters in size and 2 stories tall, the house took 45 days to print—and at the time, this seemed amazingly fast.
Since then, similar houses have popped up in other parts of the world, including Russia, the US, Italy, and even an entire community of 3D printed homes in Mexico.
This month, another country joined the list: the Czech Republic. Not to be outshined by its predecessors, Prvok, as the house has been christened, even boasts a few extra-cool features: it has a green roof, it’s built to last over 100 years, and it can float (not on its own, though). Printed this month in a warehouse in the southwestern city of České Budějovice, the house will be transported to Střelecký Island on the Vltava River in Prague in August, where it will be open to the public.
Prvok is the brainchild of Czech artist Michal Trpak, who collaborated with bank Buřinka to make his vision a reality. “Architecture is rational, calculated in a way,” Trpak said. “Sculpture is irrational and it’s more about emotion. I like to fuse, experiment, and try new materials and technologies.”
The house was printed using a robotic arm called Scoolpt, which was tweaked and reprogrammed for this purpose after initially being used on an automotive assembly line. The material used was a concrete mixture enriched with nano-polypropylene fibers and substances to improve plasticity and speed up drying. “I love concrete for many reasons,” Trpak said. “It can be shaped, cast, molded, sprayed, layered… it offers so many possibilities.” It takes 24 hours for the concrete to initially “set,” or harden, but 28 days for it to set to its full load-bearing capacity, which the project’s engineers say is equivalent to that of a bridge.
It took 2 days (not straight through—22 hours of total printing time), 25 workers, and 17 tons of the custom concrete mixture to print the house, which is about 463 square feet (43 square meters). That’s the size of a studio or small one-bedroom apartment, and the space is divided into a living room/kitchen combo, a bedroom, and a bathroom. The project hasn’t released details about the cost of printing the house or its final price tag after completion.
Though it can stand on land, Prvok was specially designed to live on a pontoon. It’s fitting; with a submarine-like shape and circular porthole-like windows, the house has a distinctly nautical appearance. Trpak claims it can weather at least a hundred years in any environment. “In the future, the owners can crush the building once it has run its useful life, and print it again with the same material directly on the location,” he said.
Granted, 100 years isn’t an extraordinarily long lifespan for a house; there are plenty of them that have been around for that long, and have decades of life ahead of them. But if you consider the speed with which 3D printed houses go up and the simplicity of their construction and materials, it’s a pretty cool build-time-to-longevity ratio.
3D printing has been hailed as a fast, cheap, environment-friendly way to build affordable housing. Earlier this year, a handful of 3D printed homes were added to a community outside Austin, Texas built for people who were previously homeless, and 50 homes are being built for low-income residents of Tabasco, Mexico.
Both of those projects came from Austin-based construction technologies startup ICON, whose co-founder Jason Ballard said, “With 3D printing […] you have the possibility of a quantum leap in affordability. Conventional construction methods have many baked-in drawbacks and problems that we’ve taken for granted for so long that we forgot how to imagine any alternative.”
3D printed houses do have their own drawbacks; they’re most practical in rural areas with low population density, but the world’s biggest need for affordable, safe housing is in or near big cities. The material they can be built from is currently limited to concrete and plastics, which aren’t practical in some climates. And the bare-bones concrete walls that are spit out by a printer can present engineering challenges or limit functionality in the home’s interior.
On the plus side, though, it seems the Czech project has just overcome one big barrier for 3D printed houses: they’re no longer exclusively confined to land.
Scattered Afternoon T-Storms will continue though the weekend in North Mississippi. Temperatures will average in the low to mid 90s. Keep the umbrella handy and have a Happy & Safe holiday weekend!!
FRIDAY: A 40% chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Otherwise, it will be mostly sunny skies, with a high near 91. Calm wind becoming northeast around 5 mph.
FRIDAY NIGHT: Partly cloudy, with a low around 74.
🎇INDEPENDENCE DAY🎆: A 30% chance of showers and thunderstorms. Otherwise, mostly sunny skies, with a high near 92. Calm wind becoming east around 5 mph.
SATURDAY NIGHT: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 73.
SUNDAY: A 40% chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Otherwise, mostly sunny, with a high near 90. Calm wind becoming east around 5 mph in the afternoon.
SUNDAY NIGHT: A 20% chance of showers and thunderstorms with a low around 73.
ITTA BENA — When the coronavirus pandemic hit, pre-existing health, education, housing, and economic conditions amplified the impact on the country’s most vulnerable people, including those living in the southernmost region — particularly the Mississippi Delta.
Bill Bynum, CEO of HOPE Credit Union, a member-owned financial institution that provides banking, loans, and financial resources, said his organization wasn’t surprised that a disproportionate number people of color tested positive and died from COVID-19. In addition to that, the economic impact of the pandemic hit low-income Black workers even worse.
“The service and retail industry is one of the hardest hit sectors of the economy and many people of color are employed in that sector, whether its health conditions or economic conditions, people of color, low income people are more fragile,” Bynum said.
While many rural people lost their jobs and economic viability as a result of COVID-19, HOPE provided payment flexibility and financial resources to some of them. With a $10 million deposit from Netflix, the credit union looks to do even more by bringing wealth into places like Itta Bena. Over the next two years, HOPE said the Netflix funds will support financing to more than 2,000 entrepreneurs and homebuyers of color.
A part of its $100 million commitment to bring capital into Black communities across the country, Netflix announced Tuesday its investment in HOPE Credit Union in the form of a Transformational Deposit. What this means is that Hope will “reimport capital into these capital starved communities,” Bynum said.
For example, HOPE is the only financial institution in Itta Bena – a town of more than 1,800 with a median household income of about $19,000. To support small businesses, housing, home or car ownership, the community needs more money coming in.
“The total potential deposit in the entire town from its residents is a little over $1 million, that is not enough to support the development needs in that communities whether its small business, homeowners, families who have need to buy a car or need of an emergency, you typically go to a bank,” Bynum said. “But when the community like Itta Bena has so little wealth, they don’t have the ability to save and put deposits in a local financial institution.”
After conversations around diversity and inclusion in April, Aaron Mitchell, director of talent acquisition at Netflix, spearheaded the initiative to help Black-owned and Black-led banks, credit unions, and financial organizations.
As a result of Bynum’s relationships with senior executives at Netflix, he spoke with Mitchell, who determined HOPE was a “solid investment.” The deaths of George Floyd in Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia heightened Netflix’s focus to invest in Black communities, Bynum added.
Compared to 9 percent of white households, 19 percent of Black families have no assets or negative wealth, Mitchell and Shannon Alwyn, treasury, wrote in a joint blog post.
“We believe bringing more capital to these communities can make a meaningful difference for the people and businesses in them, helping more families buy their first home or save for college, and more small businesses get started or grow,” they said.
With the $10 million, HOPE plans to continue to close the racial wealth gap in rural communities, communities of color, and low-income communities across the South.
“We believe at HOPE that whether you’re trying to close education gaps, housing gaps, make sure communities have grocery stores that sell healthy food, improve housing conditions, at some point all of those needs require capital,” Bynum said. “We help to address these conditions by providing affordable, responsible financial services that more wealthy, more prosperous, more majority white communities take for granted but are absent in the communities we serve.”
