The House is voting on its health care reform bill tomorrow. Exciting! There’s a summary of the bill and rules for the vote here. Will Americans be able to afford insurance? Will our country go bankrupt? Are we on a slippery slope to socialism? If you want to get in a last-minute call to your representatives to let them know what you think, you can do that here. Once the House votes, it’s the Sentate’s turn.

It’s tax policy time! The Homebuyer Tax Credit (official site here) gives $8,000 of taxpayers’ money to people buying new homes. It was about to expire, but Congress just signed off on an extension through April. Everyone seems to think this was a big mistake.

Ezra Klein (speaking in the third person) says it’s pointless because most people who are buying homes aren’t moved to do it by a paltry $8,000:

Like a lot of renters, Klein took…

Transition Towns, if you haven’t heard, are communities that are preparing themselves for peak oil and climate change by reducing their energy use and carbon emissions, eating locally, and sometimes even setting up their own currencies. There are 243 official Transition Towns at the moment (the list is here). Most of them are in the United Kingdom, where the movement started, but Transition Towns are springing up elsewhere in Europe, and in Oceania and the States.…

The digital ethnographer Michael Wesch on the dark side of social media, what we learned from Iran, and why the future of the web depends on human interests—not market interests.

As a graduate student in Papua New Guinea, Michael Wesch studied how the introduction of books and literacy changed government and society. Now, as a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, Wesch examines how digital media is changing human interaction. His YouTube video “Web 2.0…

Ontario is going to introduce a new, green license plate, available exclusively for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. And the benefits of the plates won’t just be aesthetic:

Electric vehicles with the plates will be able to travel in the province’s carpool lanes until 2015 — even if only one person is in the vehicle.

Owners of eligible vehicles can also use recharging stations at GO Transit and other provincially owned parking lots. Owners of those…

So in Maine yesterday, the voters reversed the state’s law allowing gay marriage by a margin of 47-53. This is unfortunate news, especially on the heels of the passage Prop 8 in California.

But here’s some encouragement. Over at The Baseline Scenario, James Kwak presents the following chart, which shows how much different age groups support same-sex marriage, and concludes that “Barring a backlash even bigger than the one we’ve seen over the last ten years (during which…

The House is voting on its health care reform bill tomorrow. Exciting! There’s a summary of the bill and rules for the vote here. Will Americans be able to afford insurance? Will our country go bankrupt? Are we on a slippery slope to socialism? If you want to get in a last-minute call to your representatives to let them know what you think, you can do that here. Once the House votes, it’s the Sentate’s turn.

It’s tax policy time! The Homebuyer Tax Credit (official site here) gives $8,000 of taxpayers’ money to people buying new homes. It was about to expire, but Congress just signed off on an extension through April. Everyone seems to think this was a big mistake.

Ezra Klein (speaking in the third person) says it’s pointless because most people who are buying homes aren’t moved to do it by a paltry $8,000:

Like a lot of renters, Klein took…

Transition Towns, if you haven’t heard, are communities that are preparing themselves for peak oil and climate change by reducing their energy use and carbon emissions, eating locally, and sometimes even setting up their own currencies. There are 243 official Transition Towns at the moment (the list is here). Most of them are in the United Kingdom, where the movement started, but Transition Towns are springing up elsewhere in Europe, and in Oceania and the States.…

The digital ethnographer Michael Wesch on the dark side of social media, what we learned from Iran, and why the future of the web depends on human interests—not market interests.

As a graduate student in Papua New Guinea, Michael Wesch studied how the introduction of books and literacy changed government and society. Now, as a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, Wesch examines how digital media is changing human interaction. His YouTube video “Web 2.0…

Ontario is going to introduce a new, green license plate, available exclusively for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. And the benefits of the plates won’t just be aesthetic:

Electric vehicles with the plates will be able to travel in the province’s carpool lanes until 2015 — even if only one person is in the vehicle.

Owners of eligible vehicles can also use recharging stations at GO Transit and other provincially owned parking lots. Owners of those…

So in Maine yesterday, the voters reversed the state’s law allowing gay marriage by a margin of 47-53. This is unfortunate news, especially on the heels of the passage Prop 8 in California.

But here’s some encouragement. Over at The Baseline Scenario, James Kwak presents the following chart, which shows how much different age groups support same-sex marriage, and concludes that “Barring a backlash even bigger than the one we’ve seen over the last ten years (during which…

Global Voices, defenders of free speech online, have launched a new tool called Threatened Voices that lets you look up where bloggers have been arrested or threatened by their governments. China, Iran, and Egypt look particularly bad. And here in the States, Elliott Madison was arresed for using Twitter to help G20 protesters evade the cops.

Via Boing Boing.

Harvard University has entered into a 15-year agreement to buy power and renewable energy certificates from a wind energy farm to be built in Maine. Good on ya, but I’m still not contributing to that ridiculous endowment.

Original article: Harvard Univ. to buy power from Maine wind farm – Yahoo! News

A huge concentrated solar thermal plant planned for the Sahara desert gets a few more backers and a few more futuristic-looking renderings.

Original article: Inhabitat » $555 Billion Sahara Solar Energy Belt Takes Giant Step Forward

In the GOOD 100 we applauded the idea of not only creating more space for cyclists and pedestrians on our roads, but of appropriating car lanes to do it. One place this has been tried is on the Burrard Bridge, which connects Vancouver’s downtown to the Kitsilano neighborhood to the west. Last summer the city gave one of the bridge’s six car lanes to bikes. The idea was controversial, to say the least. Skeptics thought it…