The global backlash against climate policies has begun | Young Americans are losing the southern accent | New York’s Airbnb Ban Is Descending Into Pure Chaos | What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World?

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The global backlash against climate policies has begun - The Economist

“We need to be good stewards of our planet. But that doesn’t mean I need to do away with my gas vehicle and drive an electric vehicle with a battery from China,” said Kristina Karamo, the chair of the Republican Party in Michigan, on September 22nd. America’s Democrats, she warned, are trying to “convince us that if we don’t centralise power in the government, the planet is gonna die. That seems like one of the biggest scams [since] Darwinian evolution.”

It would be tempting to dismiss Ms Karamo as an irrelevant crank, but she is not irrelevant. She represents an extreme wing of a movement that is gathering pace around the world: a backlash against pro-climate policies. One of its more familiar cheerleaders could be America’s next president. On September 27th Donald Trump said: “You can be loyal to American labour or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics but you can’t really be loyal to both…Crooked Joe [Biden] is siding with the left-wing crazies who will destroy automobile manufacturing and will destroy our country itself.”

On September 20th Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister, announced a weakening of net-zero targets, including a five-year delay of a ban on the sale of new petrol cars. Two weeks earlier, Germany kicked a mandate to install green heating in new homes years into the future. France has seen huge protests against high fuel prices, and could one day elect as president Marine Le Pen, who deplores wind farms and thinks the energy transition should be “much slower”. In America climate change has become a culture-war battleground: at a recent debate for Republican presidential candidates, only one admitted that man-made climate change is real.

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Young Americans are losing the southern accent - The Economist

IS THE SOUTHERN accent in decline? A recent study by four researchers from three universities, widely covered in the press, indicates that a prized and unique part of America’s linguistic culture may be under threat. As the Washington Post put it, “The Georgia drawl is fading, y’all.”

Accent shifts often accompany demographic ones. Americans began moving south in larger numbers in the 1960s. Southern cities boomed as a result. Naturally, people took their children along (including a young Johnson, who moved from Nebraska to Atlanta with his Georgian father and Wisconsin-born mother).

The study found that the southern accent is most common among baby-boomers, born from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, before the influx of migrants to the South ramped up. Among Generation X—people born from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s—the prevalence of southern sounds declines, as Georgia-born children socialised with transplants from northern cities like Boston and Chicago. The youngest Georgians, millennials and Generation Z, sound the least southern of all.

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New York’s Airbnb Ban Is Descending Into Pure Chaos - WIRED

As few as 2 percent of New York City's previous 22,000 short-term rentals on Airbnb have been registered with the city since a new law banning most listings came into effect in early September. But many illegal short-term rental listings are now being advertised on social media and lesser known platforms, with some still seemingly being listed on Airbnb itself.

The number of short-term listings on Airbnb has fallen by more than 80 percent, from 22,434 in August to just 3,227 by October 1, according to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog group that tracks the booking platform. But just 417 properties have been registered with the city, suggesting that very few of the city's short-term rentals have been able to get permission to continue operating.

The crackdown in New York has created a "black market" for short-term rentals in the city, claims Lisa Grossman, a spokesperson for Restore Homeowner Autonomy and Rights (RHOAR), a local group that opposed the law. Grossman says she's seen the short-term rental market pick up steam on places like Facebook since the ban. "People are going underground," she says.

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What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World? - WIRED

The Morrissey had the right melodrama in his limbs, and his voice was strong and pained. I was at Gramercy Theatre in Manhattan to see a Smiths tribute band. I tried to get Morrissey’s acid yodel in my throat, to sing along. I am human and I need to be loved / just like everybody else does. But it didn’t feel right to copy a copy.

Most tribute bands don’t practice outright impersonation, so the way this fake-Smiths singer captured everything about Morrissey was messing with my mind. I’d hoped to be able to savor the music’s maudlin glory without the headache of the flesh-and-blood Morrissey, who seems to have aligned himself with white supremacists. The contempt in Morrissey’s lyrics and politics was presumably not native to Seanissey, as the tribute singer called himself. Seanissey’s performance probably didn’t, as they say, “come from a bad place”—or a misanthropic place, or a far-right place, or even a vegan one.

What place did it come from? I’ve had this no-there-there anxiety with ChatGPT dozens of times. When it uses idioms like “in my life”—when it doesn’t have a life—I go cold. Likewise, to invest into Seanissey, a gentle Manhattanite who happened to sing and dance as Moz did, the passions that were first aroused in me by the Smiths 30 years ago felt like a bad emotional bet.

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