Good Morning, RVA: It’s National Night Out!

Tonight, get out of your house and into your neighborhood.

August 4, 2015; 7:02 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: Matt Niemi

Good morning, RVA! It’s already 76 °F, and today’s highs will hit the mid-90s. If you’re anti-air-conditioning like me, it’s one of those days you’ll probably have to acquiesce to the people around you and cut the thing on. There’s a small chance we close out the day with some isolated thunderstorms.

Water cooler

Tonight is National Night Out! It’s a citywide chance for neighbors and police officers to get together in support of crime prevention. There are about a billion and a half events going on tonight, so there’s almost certainly one within walking distance of your current location. Meet your neighbors! Meet your police officers! Stay hydrated!

I missed this piece in Saturday’s RTD by news duo Katy Burnell Evans and Graham Moomaw about the City’s continued insistence on a building a free-standing children’s hospital and VCU/Bon Secours’s insistence on not building one. It seems crazy to move forward with any sort of hospital plan while two of the major healthcare entities in town are decidedly not on board. While the players figure out what they want to do, I’ll keep reading what Nick Dawson wrote a couple months back and keep feeling ambivalent.

Yesterday President Obama released his Clean Power Plan, which sets a nationwide goal of decreasing carbon emissions 32% from 2005 levels by 2030. The RTD has a nice, long piece explaining what this means for Virginia (less than what it means for other states, since we’re pretty far ahead of the game).

Whoa, this explainer about the Puerto Rico debt crisis is super interesting. One of the many possible outcomes could be true statehood. I truly look forward to the subsequent heated arguments about how to add another star to the American flag.

Sports!

• Squirrels are back in town and open a short three-game series against New Hampshire tonight at 7:05 PM. Get your tickets online.
• The Nats’ losing streak continued last night as they fell to the Diamondbacks, 6-4. They’ll try to break that streak tonight at 7:05 PM.

This morning’s longread

The automation myth: Robots aren’t taking your jobs– and that’s the problem

Pair today’s article about our desperate need for robots to help us be more productive with yesterday’s piece about how automation helped cause a terrifying and accidental overdose.

The bad news is that these concerns are wrong. Rather than an accelerating pace of automation, we’ve actually been living through a slowdown in the pace of productivity growth. And that slowdown is a huge problem. Unless it reverses, we’ll be waking up soon to find ourselves in a depressing world of longer working years, unmanageable health-care needs, higher taxes, and a public sector starved of needed infrastructure resources.

In other words, don’t worry that the robots will take your job. Be terrified that they

This morning’s Instagram

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August 4, 2015 7:02 AM 0