🏋️ Good morning, RVA: Landscaping a circle, one less parking lot, and debt ceiling lifted

Good morning, RVA! It’s 58 °F, and today you can expect highs in the upper 80s—maybe even 90s depending on what kind of urban heat island you spend your time on. I think this is the first real sunny, hot day of the season, and, to be honest, I’m looking forward to it! As for the next few days, temperatures will cool off just a bit, the sun will continue to shine, and I hope you will remember to wear sunscreen.
 

Water cooler

Thad Green at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the work to landscape the circle at Monument and Allen (aka Marcus-David Peters Circle) has started in earnest! Tap through for a profile on YME Landscaping, a local, Black-owned company, that’s handling most of the work. Remember, the horrible fencing won’t come down until the landscaping wraps up, and it sounds like that could be as soon as next month.
 

Richmond BizSense’s Michael Schwartz reports that Dominion has scrapped their plans to build the laughably named “clean energy park” parking lot down on 8th and Cary. Good! The last thing we need in literally the most dense, most valuable part of the entire region is a surface-level parking lot—that land alone is worth $10 million! A Dominion spokesperson says that the company will soon begin a process to sell the property, and, with any luck, the next owner will want to build an actual building on the site.
 

Good news: The Senate signed legislation raising the debt ceiling last night, averting the panic and disaster for which Republicans had hoped and dreamed. The New York Times has the recap, which is mostly boring, but the late-night legislation does impact Virginia in a couple of ways (aside from preventing potential economic devastation). First, despite efforts from Senator Tim Kaine, the Mountain Valley Pipeline is back on the table. Kaine says he’s “deeply troubled by the unprecedented provision to cherry-pick one project and exempt it from the normal judicial and administrative review process”, and I totally agree. Second, with the debt ceiling now lifted, I think we should start to see Virginia’s legislature start to pick up the pieces of its own budget process again.
 

I quickly crunched the numbers this morning, and, after just one day of the Good Morning, RVA pledge drive (which definitely needs a better, catchier name), the generous readers of this email newsletter have taken me 15% of the way towards my goal of $381 in new monthly Patreon support. That’s pretty impressive for a single day! Thanks, y’all. If you’d like to chip in a couple of bucks (or a couple more bucks), you can do so over on patreon.com/gmrva.
 

Reminder: The Greek Festival continues! Head over to Malvern & Grove, stuff your face with Mediterranean delights, and then buy a bunch more to take with you to the pool this weekend for sharing with your best pool buds. It’s the start of the season, and it’s important to make a good impression. Totally unrelated side note: I am never not amazed that our Greek Festival somehow got the URL greekfestival.com.
 

This morning’s longread

The Problem With Counterfeit People

OK, OK, this longread is clearly way too much and part of what I’ve seen folks call “AI doomerism.” So know that going in. However, I did like this part about the emotional and mental costs (and, maybe, unintended consequences) of constantly having to question if every online interaction is with a real human or an AI.
 

“This text has been generated by a human. Or has it?” It will soon be next to impossible to tell. And even if (for the time being) we are able to teach one another reliable methods of exposing counterfeit people, the cost of such deepfakes to human trust will be enormous. How will you respond to having your friends and family probe you with gotcha questions every time you try to converse with them online? Creating counterfeit digital people risks destroying our civilization. Democracy depends on the informed (not misinformed) consent of the governed. By allowing the most economically and politically powerful people, corporations, and governments to control our attention, these systems will control us.
 

If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
 

Picture of the Day

Why is this corner of the courts building so unnecessarily sharp??