Green Beans Create a Summer Salad to Remember
Having grown up on limp, soggy, overcooked beans, I was reluctant to try this technique. I got the water boiling, dropped the beans, watched the pot and when they turned a bright green, drained them and refreshed under cold running water. They were pliable but no longer snapped back. After I drizzled the beans with a little good olive oil and sprinkled with coarse salt, they were so finger-licking good I nearly polished off the entire lot. The baby bean inside the green bean added a gentle creaminess. Cooked this way, the beans were milder and less harsh—more of themselves.
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CNET
2 hours ago
- CNET
One Easy Change Took My Power Bill From Painful to Almost Nothing
When the summer heat kicks in, turning up the air conditioner is an easy choice, but the comfort comes at a cost. With electricity prices climbing and inflation stretching budgets, a recent CNET survey found that almost 80% of Americans feel stressed by high energy bills. The good news is you can stay cool without spending as much. One of the simplest ways to use less energy is also one of the easiest to forget. Turning off the lights when you leave a room cuts down on heat from bulbs, which means your air conditioner doesn't have to work as hard. Over the course of a summer, that small change can make a real difference on your bill. Pair that habit with other smart moves like closing blinds during the hottest part of the day, running ceiling fans the right way, and unplugging electronics you're not using. With a few small adjustments, you can keep your home cooler and reduce your energy costs without sacrificing comfort. Why should you turn off the lights? You've probably been told repeatedly about the importance of conserving energy, but you might be wondering why it's so important. First, reducing your energy usage by turning off your lights is an excellent way to reduce your carbon footprint. Electricity generation is one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. By turning off your lights when you aren't using them, you can do your part to reduce carbon emissions and therefore help the environment. Second, reducing your home's energy usage doesn't just help the environment. It also helps your wallet. Turning off lights when you don't need them can help reduce your electricity bills. You'll also extend the life of your light bulbs, which will save you money as well. Pro savings tip Buying a smart lightbulb can help you conserve energy by setting your lights to go on and off at certain times, so no more falling asleep with all the lights left on overnight. The Wiz tunable white LED smart bulb is CNET's pick for the best white-light smart bulb. Details $20 at Amazon How much money can you save? The amount you can save on your electricity bill by turning off your lights depends on the type of light bulb you use. You can figure your potential savings using the light bulb's wattage. Let's say you have a light bulb that's 40 watts, meaning in one hour, the bulb will use 0.04 kWh. Then, you can use your electricity price — which you can find on your most recent utility bill — to figure out how much you'll save for that hour. In the case of the 40-watt bulb, if you pay an electricity rate of 10 cents per kWh, your savings by turning that bulb off for one hour would be 0.4 cents. It's easy to see that number and think it's simply not worth it to turn off your lights more often. After all, what difference does 0.4 cents make? First, remember that the estimate is for a 40-watt bulb. If you have higher-wattage light bulbs, the savings will be greater. Next, that estimate uses an energy price of 10 cents per kWh, but in many areas, the price of electricity may be higher than that. Finally, our estimate looked at the savings of turning off one bulb for one hour. You likely have many light bulbs in your house, and there are far more than just one hour in a month. So when you calculate the savings of turning off all of your light bulbs for many more hours per month, your savings will increase significantly. When should you turn off the lights? You can save money by turning off your lights and fans whenever you don't need them. During the spring and summer, it's a good idea to check in on the peak and off-peak energy hours in your area. Many providers use a time-of-use electricity plan where energy costs rise during peak hours, or hours where the grid is facing higher demand, and lower during off-peak hours. These hours change depending on the seasons, so transitioning between seasons is a good time to check when you're paying the most for energy. During peak hours, usually during the afternoons in the summer, while in the early morning and in the evenings after sunset during winter, it's helpful to be especially diligent in turning off lights and other electronic appliances when you leave a room to cut down on your energy bill. During the spring and summer, daylight saving time is in effect, which means more daylight and less need to have the lights on in your home. A small change can yield big savings Turning off the lights and other electric appliances when you aren't using them is one of the most basic steps you can take to reduce your energy usage and save money on your electricity bill. Even a small change can add up to big energy savings and help reduce your carbon footprint. More money-saving tips for you
Business Insider
4 hours ago
- Business Insider
Welcome to Super City, USA
Depending on who you ask, suburban living is either the stuff of the American dream, a desolate, alienating existence, or something in between. But there is no doubt of the grip that the white picket fences and green lawns have on the American imagination. In his 1985 book Crabgrass Frontier, the historian Kenneth T. Jackson — perhaps the dean of American suburban studies — wrote that "suburbia has become the quintessential physical achievement of the United States; it is perhaps more representative of its culture than big cars, tall buildings, or professional football." To many urbanists, the suburbs also represent something a little more prosaic, though no less important: a major governance problem. In particular, the suburbs pose a problem called municipal fragmentation. Most of the little bedroom communities surrounding a major city have their own governments, their own electorate, and their own set of policy priorities. The central problems of urban governance — how to run a safe and efficient transportation network, where to put housing, how to cultivate a strong job market — are essentially regional, but the mosaics of incorporated towns and unincorporated county lands that surround major American cities struggle to properly coordinate to address these issues. Each little fiefdom is largely free to pursue its own goals, even if those goals conflict with the interests of the larger metropolitan region, and there are few regional bodies in the United States that have the muscle to overcome this parochialism. But overcoming local parochialism is the key to creating vibrant, growing cities across the nation. If we're going to solve the housing crisis, build a transportation network that works for all people, and provide economic opportunity to all of the more than 80% of Americans who live in urban areas, then we need institutions that can tie together the towns, hamlets, and satellite cities of our major metropolitan regions, so that they all start moving in the same direction. To understand the problem of municipal fragmentation, consider New York City's housing shortage. (By one estimate, the New York metropolitan area would need to build more than half a million homes in order to close the housing gap.) The city can and should stimulate a lot more housing production within its borders (and is attempting to do so), but even if the city council abolished all zoning laws tomorrow and allowed massive amounts of new construction, New York would probably still be digging out of a housing shortage in a decade, albeit a less severe one. That's in part because New York City comprises less than 10% of the entire New York City metropolitan area in terms of surface area. The region as a whole includes more than 900 other municipalities, from New Haven, Connecticut, in the north to the seaside towns of southern New Jersey. Quite a few of those localities are affluent bedroom communities that have grown prosperous off their proximity to New York while providing the city with very little in return. For example, many residents of Greenwich, Connecticut (average household income: $272,636) have lucrative jobs in Manhattan. They benefit from the city's booming economy, as well as its high concentration of skilled workers and major employers in high-wage industries like finance, but their property taxes don't go to New York. Instead of seeing itself as part of the broader NYC area and welcoming people who are looking to secure their economic future there, Greenwich has instituted a draconian zoning code that keeps people out and contributes to the region's housing supply crunch. (It doesn't help that the governor of Connecticut recently vetoed a bill intended to mitigate the state's housing shortage.) If Greenwich and every other exclusionary suburb in the New York metro area loosened up their zoning, it would go a long way toward easing the central city's affordability crisis. There's plenty of room there; even increasing Greenwich's population density to make it on par with a denser midsize city like New Haven would mean growing its population by fivefold, adding more than 250,000 residents. More homebuilding in the suburbs would not only make the region as a whole more affordable, but it would also give more enterprising people a chance to move to the area, work, build businesses, and contribute to the shared prosperity of the region. But officials in New York City have no jurisdictional authority to push other towns to greenlight more housing. And since the potential benefits are so diffuse, Greenwich residents who oppose more development (aka NIMBYs) have little clear incentive to be part of a region-wide solution. Some metropolitan areas have solved this collective action problem through municipal consolidation: New York City's borders stopped at the edge of the Island of Manhattan until it absorbed the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island between 1873 and 1879. More recently, Louisville, Kentucky, merged with surrounding Jefferson County in 2003. But in general, consolidation is a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Fragmentation is the norm in the United States. While it's unlikely that big cities will be able to annex surrounding counties en masse anytime soon, there is another way to fight municipal fragmentation and to alleviate the housing crunch on a wider scale: through regional super-governments that conduct planning and exercise some land use authority over entire metropolitan areas. The United States is already dotted with regional government authorities — in particular, the metropolitan planning organizations that help distribute federal transportation funding, like the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, the San Francisco Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. But regional bodies often have little power compared to cities, making the battle for change an uphill fight. Our tradition of strong hyperlocal rule and weak regional government is fairly unusual across the globe. The regional governments of Barcelona and Helsinki's urban areas, for example, do genuine regional planning. And in stark contrast to the United States, Japan is subdivided into prefectures, which are supercharged regional governments that have broad control over planning and land use. That may help to explain why housing costs in big Japanese cities like Tokyo have largely remained stable even as the country's rural population has shrunk and its urban population has grown. Three decades ago, California very nearly became the first US state to inch in Japan's direction. In some ways, the state is an ideal testing ground for super-regionalism, thanks to the extreme fragmentation of its largest metropolitan areas (Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area), its history of progressive experimentation, and its yawning housing shortage. Policymakers in the state spent a lot of time in the late 1980s and early 1990s thinking about solutions to municipal fragmentation. Some of what they came up with was genuinely radical. For example, the Los Angeles 2000 Committee, which then-Mayor Tom Bradley assembled to consider the city's future planning needs, issued a report in 1988 that proposed a regional Growth Management Agency for greater Los Angeles. The goal of this agency would be to produce plans that would help the Los Angeles metro area, which sprawls over 4,850 square miles and more than 100 municipalities, "achieve a favorable balance between jobs and housing." The agency would have been empowered to, for example, stimulate job growth in eastern Los Angeles and encourage greater housing production in prosperous Orange County. Inspired in part by the work of the Los Angeles 2000 Committee, in 1989 some influential Northern California residents secured both public and private funding to create the Bay Area 2020 Commission. This commission's work was much more explicitly regionalist, and so its core recommendation was for a significantly more muscular regional planning mechanism than even the Los Angeles committee had devised. The Bay Area's commission proposed merging the area's three major regional bodies (the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District) into a single commission. This Regional Commission would have had extensive powers, including the ability to levy fines on local governments that didn't comply with regional plans, and to issue permits for a proposed development anywhere in the Bay Area's nine counties. A bill was introduced in the state senate to implement Bay Vision 2020, but, needless to say, it didn't pass. Many local governments, and two of the three regional bodies that were supposed to merge, were not pleased with the prospect of ceding their autonomy. But that wasn't even the spiciest proposal from the era. That honor belongs to an idea cooked up by then-Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. Brown was one of the central figures of late 20th-century California politics: the first Black speaker of the Assembly, the first Black mayor of San Francisco, and the kingmaker who helped launch the political careers of both Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom. He actually floated two separate proposals for overhauling regional government across the state. The first one was about as audacious as it gets: In 1987, Brown casually suggested completely abolishing city and county government in the state of California and replacing it with a series of regional governments. In essence, he was proposing that California adopt the Japanese prefectural system. Though his idea never made it into legislative language, a couple of years later, he proposed something a little less radical. As Bill Fulton, the dean of California urban planners, wrote of Brown's proposal in his book about Los Angeles, The Reluctant Metropolis, Brown's proposed "Regional Development and Infrastructure Agencies" would have been directly-elected boards that could pass "judgment on large development projects that were previously the province of local cities and counties." By making the boards directly elected, these "regional legislatures" would have seriously diluted the power of the NIMBY bedroom communities and drawn in ambitious politicians seeking to enact major projects on a region-wide scale. Once again, this proposal died on the vine: Brown didn't push it particularly hard, the governor wasn't interested, and a looming recession bumped regionalism off the legislative agenda. But maybe it's time to take another look at some of these ideas. If states like California did beef up their regional governments, it could go a long way toward solving the housing crisis. A 2023 report from California YIMBY (my former employer, full disclosure) found indications that the biggest potential housing gains from zoning and land use reforms can be found in suburbs, not the high-cost cities they surround. Eliminating zoning in San Francisco could yield a lot more units, but doing the same in Marin County would lead to much bigger results. Granted, implementing something like Brown's proposal for regional super-governments would likely infuriate a lot of people in both San Francisco and Marin. Opponents would no doubt describe regionalism as an unconscionable usurpation of local democracy. In return, I would argue that region-wide planning is more democratic than giving exclusive enclaves like Sausalito free rein to write their own rules and lock out lower-income residents from the rest of the region. If hyper-local control is what got us the Bay Area's current housing and homelessness crisis, what is it really worth? We may never get the Bay Area mega-city that Willie Brown seems to have envisioned. But at a time when many Americans are concerned about housing costs and commute times, even some halfway measures toward tighter integration across metropolitan benefits would yield enormous benefits.
Epoch Times
a day ago
- Epoch Times
Green Beans Create a Summer Salad to Remember
'Americans just do not know how to cook green beans,' said Ann, a Bayfield Farmers Market vendor, as she handed me a sack of deep green, plump beans she picked earlier that morning. 'When they're underdone and too crisp, they just don't have much taste. Give them a few minutes more time when you boil them. They're tender but still firm. The little beans within the green bean [the seed] will cook, too.' Having grown up on limp, soggy, overcooked beans, I was reluctant to try this technique. I got the water boiling, dropped the beans, watched the pot and when they turned a bright green, drained them and refreshed under cold running water. They were pliable but no longer snapped back. After I drizzled the beans with a little good olive oil and sprinkled with coarse salt, they were so finger-licking good I nearly polished off the entire lot. The baby bean inside the green bean added a gentle creaminess. Cooked this way, the beans were milder and less harsh—more of themselves.
