🏳️‍🌈 Good morning, RVA: Early voting starts today, municipal recycling, and Pridefest

Good morning, RVA! It’s 54 °F, and that cooler, fall weather has finally arrived! Today you can expect highs in the low 70s, sunshine, and a beautiful start to the weekend. Temperatures may heat up a little on Sunday and Monday, but the vast majority of the next ten days looks lovely. I hope you have some excellent weekend plans to go alongside this excellent weekend weather!
 

Water cooler

As of last night, the CDC’s COVID-19 Community Levels for Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield are all medium across the board—but only just! The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 133, 105, and 101, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 10.6. If the current trends continue, next week we could see the first low Community Levels in…who knows how long! That’s exciting news, and, for now at least, the creeping fall hasn’t yet brought along with it creeping COVID-19 case counts or hospitalizations. Let’s keep it that way: If you haven’t yet made an appointment to get your new, bivalent COVID-19 booster (and this year’s flu shot), just go ahead and do that today. Do your part in helping keep these coronanumbers down!
 

Early voting for the November 8th election starts today at your local registrar’s office, if you’re looking for something civics-y to do this weekened. However, if you still need a minute to get yourself together, you have plenty of time to request an absentee ballot or even register to vote. However: Don’t put either of those things off, don’t let the off-cycle election deter you, and don’t let the last nine months of lessons go to waste! Make a plan cast your ballot today.
 

WTVR’s Tyler Layne has an fascinating report on municipal recycling in Chesterfield and Henrico. Chesterfield has decided to stop providing municipal recycling, and residents will now need to buy their own recycling services. The County cites reduced demand and “rising costs…attributed to a transforming market and collapse of overseas markets for recyclable commodities in 2019.” That’s interesting on its own, but doubly interesting are these quotes from Henrico County manager John Vithoulkas: “Chesterfield’s decision to end its recycling contract with the Central Virginia Waste Management Authority increases the cost of recycling for Henrico…This Board of Supervisors and County Manager are going in the opposite direction from Chesterfield by enhancing options for the 90,000-plus residents who take advantage of recycling in our community…Our residents value and depend on recycling, and Henrico County is committed to providing it, as we not only serve our residents, we serve our environment.” That’s a medium sick burn, and you don’t typically see this sort of county-on-county drama—however staid—play out in the media! Anyway, if Chesterfield leaving the regional recycling program increases costs for Henrico, I wouldn’t be surprised if it increases costs for Richmond, too.
 

Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the Richmond Fire Department will add 72 new positions thanks to a $13.7 million grant from FEMA. That’s a heckin' lot of money, and adding six dozen new humans to an organization seems like it’d be transformational.
 

Via /r/rva a 1976 commercial for King’s Dominion that ends with a really excellent jingle. We’ve really lost the art of the jingle, haven’t we?
 

Virginia Pridefest kicks off tomorrow, September 24th, down on Brown’s Island. The entire day—from 12:00–8:00 PM—is packed with events, performers, and personalities, but the whole thing culminates with Big Freedia at 6:50 PM on the main stage. Big Freedia is a big deal and is featured on the new Beyoncé track “BREAK MY SOUL.” If you’ve never seen a live Big Freedia performance…you’re in for a treat!
 

This morning’s longread

We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business

There is one 70-year-old guy still out there selling floppy disks, and he seems like a pretty great dude. Whatever inventory he’s got, that’s all there is, like, in the world—unsurprisingly, no one manufactures floppy disks anymore. At his current rate, unless he uncovers a secret stash of disks (which sometimes happens), he expects to be in business for four more years. After that, you’re outta luck!
 

20 years ago I was actually in the floppy disk duplication business. Not in a million years did I think I would ever sell blank floppy disks. Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as printing money. It was unbelievably profitable. I only started selling blank copies organically over time. You could still go down to any office supply store, or any computer store to buy them. Why would you try to find me, when you could just buy disks off the shelf? But then these larger companies stopped carrying them or went out of business and people came to us. So here I am, a small company with a floppy disk inventory, and I find myself to be a worldwide supplier of this product. My business, which used to be 90% CD and DVD duplication, is now 90% selling blank floppy disks. It’s shocking to me.
 

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Picture of the Day

It looks like I’m just standing on a random street, but I swear I was riding my bike in a bike lane while wearing the bike-lane sweeper T-shirt.