Latest news with #Wall-E
Forbes
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
One Of The Best Kids Movies Ever Made Is Now #1 On Netflix
The Wild Robot Now that I have a young child, more than ever attempting to find quality content for them to watch during their limited screen time is more pressing than ever (and more pressing during long flights!). Now, Netflix's new #1 movie perfectly slides into that category. I certainly think that you could make the case that The Wild Robot is on a list of some of the best kids movies ever made. It has a hugely impressive 96% critic score and a 98% audience score. I mean, that's significantly above all the Toy Story movies, if you can believe that (and above this weekend's 93% for the live-action Lilo and Stitch remake). This is also not a Disney or Pixar production. It's Dreamworks, of How to Train Your Dragon and others. They may have fewer all-time classics than their rivals, but this is certainly one. Here's the synopsis: Top 10 I know a friendly, abandoned robot may have vibes similar to Wall-E, but no, I don't think they share much past that. Both are heartwarming, the lost robot in the woods attempting to find common ground with the fauna is a fantastic adventure and a great watch not just for kids, but adults too, and it's a great feature for the whole family on a given movie night. I am not shocked it is currently #1 on Netflix, and it deserves to stay there for a while. The Wild Robot is actually a trilogy of books, rather than an original animated production. There's The Wild Robot (2016), The Wild Robot Escapes (2018), and The Wild Robot Protects (2023). Last we heard in October of 2024 a sequel to the movie is in the works, likely adapting that second book in the trilogy. One aspect of The Wild Robot that's great besides its story is the animation. This is a gorgeous film using a type of animation we rarely see in the medium, and it makes it stand out past so many other films. It's incredible and worth watching for that aspect alone. Enjoy. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
AsiaOne
04-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- AsiaOne
Eco-friendly activities for the family , Lifestyle News
April is Earth Month, a time to reflect on our planet, appreciate nature's beauty, and take actionable steps toward sustainability. And what better way to celebrate than by involving the whole family? From toddlers to teens, there are plenty of fun and meaningful eco-friendly activities that everyone can enjoy. Here are some creative and simple ways to go green together this Earth Month. 1. Start a mini garden Whether you have a big backyard or a small balcony, gardening is a great way to connect with nature and teach kids about where food comes from. You can plant herbs, vegetables, or pollinator-friendly flowers. Make it a fun science experiment by tracking the growth of each plant and learning about composting food scraps as natural fertiliser. Tip: Use recycled containers or old egg cartons as plant starters! 2. Go on a nature scavenger hunt Take a family walk in a local park or nature trail and create a scavenger hunt list of things to spot — like a butterfly, a feather, or a tree with rough bark. This encourages kids to slow down, observe their environment, and appreciate the small wonders of nature. Bonus: Bring reusable bags and gloves and pick up litter along the way! 3. Do a home energy audit together Turn off unused lights, unplug devices, and look for ways to reduce energy usage. Get the kids involved by assigning them "energy detective" roles. They can check which appliances are left on unnecessarily or suggest ways to use less water during showers or dishwashing. Fun twist: Create a family eco-challenge. Example — who can save the most electricity this month? 4. Try a no-waste craft day Gather materials like old magazines, cardboard, fabric scraps, or bottle caps and challenge each other to create something new. From toy robots to homemade bird feeders, upcycled crafts are a fun way to repurpose materials and spark creativity. Pro tip: Share your creations on social media to inspire others and spread the Earth Month message! 5. Host a family swap party Spring cleaning season pairs perfectly with Earth Month. Instead of throwing away items, host a swap at home! Let each family member pick toys, clothes, or books they no longer use and exchange them with each other. You can even invite neighbours or friends to join. Eco-win: Less waste going to the landfill, and fewer new things to buy! 6. Watch eco-themed documentaries or movies Curl up with popcorn and watch a family-friendly film that highlights the beauty of our planet or teaches about climate change. Some great options include The Lorax, Wall-E, Our Planet, or The Biggest Little Farm. Discussion starter: After the movie, chat about what your family learnt and one eco-action you'd like to try. 7. Support local and sustainable brands Use Earth Month as a reason to explore local farmers' markets, refill stores, or sustainable brands. Take your kids along and explain how shopping locally reduces carbon footprints and supports community businesses. Activity idea: Let kids help pick fruits and veggies and create a meal using local produce. 8. Walk, bike, or take public transport Choose car-free days when the whole family can walk, bike, or ride public transport to your destinations. It's healthier for the environment and for everyone's bodies too! Make it fun: Plan a walking tour of a neighbourhood you've never explored before. Earth Month is a wonderful opportunity to show kids that small actions can lead to big change. By making eco-friendly choices fun, hands-on, and family-focused, we teach the next generation to love and protect our planet every day of the year. So grab your reusable bags, put on your walking shoes, and get ready to celebrate Earth Month the green way, with love, laughter, and lots of nature! [[nid:716799]] This article was first published in theAsianparent.
WIRED
03-05-2025
- WIRED
The Matic Robot Vacuum Is the Cutest and Most Useful Home Cleaner
It's the only robot vacuum that's quiet enough that I can run it while my kids are watching TV, which is important because they leave potato chip crumbs all over the place. Their comfort levels with the vac could also be because it came with several sets of stickers to give it a face, so my children have also developed a sort of weird, Wall-E type relationship with it. This robot vacuum has a comparatively low suction power of 3,200 Pa—even the cheapest robot vacuum I've tested recently has a higher suction power, with high-end ones going as high as 20,000 Pa. But the Matic has made me rethink why anyone even needs that much suction. It's not like I expect any robot vacuum to dig that deep into my carpet fibers. It's so quiet and efficient that I end up filling the waste bag just as quickly as with a regular vacuum, and I never skip cleanings because it gets lost or stuck or it's too loud. Even the accessories are thoughtful. For example, it comes with a little plumber's snake if the tube gets clogged. It hasn't happened so far, but this inclusion is genius, because I've been using a chopstick to do this for years without even thinking about it. Finally, it's much more reasonably priced than any other robot vacuum with this level of functionality, even if I can fill up a waste bag in about three days instead of the projected week. (I blame dogs and kids, not the Matic, for our general filth levels.) There are a lot of features the Matic doesn't have, including fairly basic ones like dirt detection and gesture and voice controls. Annoyingly, you have to tidy your house up a bit before you clean—while the Matic recognizes pieces bigger than 1 inch as obstacles to avoid, it will vacuum up my son's Lego blocks if I leave those out. Nariyawala noted in an email, however, that these features should be arriving as software updates in the coming months, and I'll retest the Matic once they do. I'm already reluctant to replace it to test other vacuums. Forget the robotic arm and the huge docking station. Just give me a small, cute, quiet robot vacuum that doesn't take up a ton of space, is adorable and extremely quiet, does everything I tell it to do easily, can learn for itself, knows when it's flying, and also costs less than a third of what other top-of-the-line vacuums cost. What more could you ask for? Give me three!
Axios
22-04-2025
- General
- Axios
Look inside our landfill — and learn how to reduce what goes there
We rarely think about it, but our trash doesn't go "away" when we throw it away. I recently visited the dump to see what happens to it firsthand. Why it matters: The Franklin County Sanitary Landfill near Grove City takes in 2 billion pounds of trash every year, per the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio. A 2019 study determined about 76% of that waste could have been diverted through recycling, composting or reuse. Threat level: At the current trash collection rate, there's enough landfill space to last 42 more years — but Central Ohio's population is booming, and more people means more trash. This is bad for the environment, as decomposing materials release harmful greenhouse gases (though some is captured and reused). We'd also have to eventually haul our trash farther away, costing both money and local jobs, senior landfill manager Adam Burleson told me. State of play: SWACO and local governments have been working to help residents and businesses divert more materials. As my tour truck climbed the massive hill leading to the landfill's working face, we were greeted with a symbol of how much work still needs to be done. Rows and rows of plastic grocery bags clung to a chain-link litter fence, which keeps drifting trash contained on windy days. All could have been recycled at a store. "There's just plastic everywhere you look," Burleson said. 💭 My thought bubble: It's hard to grasp the scope of the problem until you see it — a truck trailer tipping backwards, dumping literal tons of trash, as bulldozers shift and flatten it all. The dystopian dying planet from the Pixar movie "Wall-E" doesn't seem so far off. I immediately felt guilty. I'm a frequent recycler and thrift shopper, but I don't compost, and I slack on recycling items that aren't allowed in my curbside Columbus bin. Yes, but: There are broader signs of progress. Since making curbside recycling pickups weekly instead of biweekly in 2023, the city of Columbus has collected 25% more recyclable materials and reduced trash hauled, spokesperson Debbie Briner tells us. In 2024, SWACO's new Recycling Convenience Center diverted over 291,000 pounds of waste. The bottom line: Small changes can really add up. What's in the landfill Food waste and cardboard are the landfill's most common materials out of the 76% that could have been diverted, per SWACO's most recent data. Stunning stat: Nearly 1 million pounds of food waste arrives at the landfill every day. That's three-fourths a pound per person. The alternatives: Composting breaks down food scraps into nutrient-rich fertilizer, while cardboard is recyclable in curbside bins and at drop-off sites. What's next: SWACO plans to conduct its next waste characterization study later this year, spokesperson Hanna Greer-Brown tells Axios. Plus: The authority launched a new campaign today, Choose to Reuse — aimed at reducing household waste generated in the first place, which is even better for the environment than recycling. More ways to help It's easier than ever to recycle and reuse tricky items in Central Ohio, with new drop-off sites and programs launching in recent years. 🔋 SWACO's Recycling Convenience Center accepts items including plastic foam packaging, batteries, prescription pill bottles, appliances, bicycles, food scraps and much more. 10:30am–6pm Monday–Friday and 9am–4:30pm Saturday, 2566 Jackson Pike. 🪑 Columbus' Waste and Reuse Convenience Centers accept similar items, plus furniture, which goes to the Furniture Bank of Central Ohio, and clothing for Goodwill. 10am–6pm Tuesday–Saturday, 2100 Alum Creek Drive and 1550 Georgesville Road. 🥕 Seven free composting spots in Columbus are open 24-7. ♻️ A new program, Hefty ReNew, lets you recycle grocery bags and other hard-to-recycle plastics by placing them in a special orange bag that goes in your curbside bin.
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Gaping Hole in the Center of the Abundance Agenda
America has a housing affordability crisis. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance, Yoni Appelbaum's Stuck, and Mark Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works argue to varying degrees that land-use restrictions, mostly at the local level, are what created this problem and that easing them will solve it. Build more housing and it will become more affordable. Last week I argued that there are sound reasons for local communities to exert some control over their neighborhoods—reasons that the new supply-side liberals are reluctant to acknowledge. Protecting the environment, scaling building size to limit opportunities for crime, and preserving architecture of historical significance are all legitimate goals. People should have some power to make their communities livable, because if your community doesn't do that, it's doubtful outside forces will—either commercial or governmental. I don't disagree that these defensible goals often act a smokescreen for indefensible goals—such as the exclusion of lower-income people, or the elimination of racial or ethnic diversity. It happens often enough that supply-side liberals are right to call for greater regulatory flexibility, mostly at the local level, to make it easier to build stuff, and not just housing. We need to make it easier to build all sorts of things, including (to cite a central example in Abundance) a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. My main problem with supply-side liberalism isn't what it contains, but what it omits. To address the housing shortage, to build vital infrastructure, and to address all sorts of other problems, judiciously-targeted deregulation will be nowhere near sufficient. We also need to address the demand-side problem of distribution. At the start of the Great Depression John Maynard Keynes published a famous essay titled 'Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren,' in which he argued that their future would be brighter. He was correct: The Depression ended, the global war that followed defeated fascism, and the west prospered. But Keynes overstated his case. In the essay, he wrote that 'the struggle for subsistence' would end and 'the economic problem' would disappear. Keynes predicted correctly the creation of stupendous wealth that he wouldn't live to see. (He died in 1946.) But he was quite wrong to presume that this wealth would be distributed humanely over the long term. Just look around. It isn't. Klein and Thompson almost certainly have read Keynes's essay. If they haven't I presume they've at least seen the 2008 Pixar cartoon Wall-E, which turns Keynes's conceit into a sort of sunny dystopia. Yet they begin their book with a description of a futuristic world that's kind of like—well, Wall-E, minus the grim externalities (a ruined planet, people too fat to walk, etc.). In Keynes's essay and in Wall-E everybody's economic needs are met because the fruits of economic success are shared by all. Will that happen? I hope so. But it won't happen by itself, and we certainly can't get there by tinkering with zoning variances. The government must reverse the past half-century's trend toward ever-growing wealth and income inequality. Abundance alone won't cut it. Boosting wages, increasing worker power, and generally restoring the middle class to meaningful participation in America's economy are much more necessary. Otherwise we'll just make Elon Musk's grandchildren richer. I don't doubt that the authors of all three books favor these liberal goals; just not enough to give them much ink. Granted, it could be worse. The 'It's Too Hard To Build Stuff' argument, which has been around for decades, used to place heavy blame on the cost of union labor. There have been a few instances (for example, the 1975 New York City financial crisis) when that was even true! But in recent memory that hasn't been the case, and I'm pleased to report that these books (mostly) eschew union-bashing. Klein and Thompson point out that it costs twice as much to built a kilometer of rail in the United States as it does in Japan or Canada, and that union density is much higher in the latter two countries. Consequently, they argue, unions can't logically be the problem. (A few pages later they quote an affordable housing consultant griping about having to pay prevailing wage, which usually means union scale, but never mind.) Still, not talking much about unions isn't good enough. The authors of these books ought to consider unions part of the solution to housing affordability. Boost wages and people can buy houses. This blind spot about stagnating wages is pretty glaring. Klein and Thompson cite the economist Ed Glaeser's finding that prior to the 1980s wages in New York City were unusually high compared to the cost of living, meaning people stood to benefit if they moved there. After 2000, though, moving to New York City meant taking 'an effective pay cut. That's not because paychecks have shrunk but because housing costs have risen.' True enough, but another reason housing got less affordable—in New York and elsewhere—was that real wages failed to rise for all but the wealthiest. In a thriving economy, incomes are supposed to rise alongside housing prices, and for everybody, not just the rich. The long-term decline in geographic mobility within the United States is a theme in all three books, and in Appelbaum's Stuck it's the central topic. A thriving economy requires that people move to where economic opportunity is greatest—'Go west, young man,' as Horace Greeley said. Alarmingly, there's far less job-related migration among today's young men and women (unless they're affluent) than in the past. To the limited extent working-class people do migrate, it's away from economic opportunity, because when you have little prospect of increasing your wage significantly you may decide to live someplace where housing is cheaper. I published an article about this problem a dozen years ago ('Stay Put, Young Man,' Washington Monthly), and I reported that, yes, among the reasons for this harmful economic trend was overly restrictive zoning. But the underlying problem was income inequality. Citing pioneering work in this area by Harvard's Daniel Shoag and the University of Chicago's Peter Ganong, I pointed out that working-class people had seen their share of state per capita income growth shrink from 88 percent in 1940 to 36 percent in 2010. Opportunity dried up for America's working-class majority, putting places with brisk economic growth out of reach for all but the professional class, who could afford to pay more for housing. Shoag and Ganong have since concluded that zoning restrictions drive growing economic inequality between regions (which in turn drives the nation's red-state blue-state divide). But ask yourself why red states are able to thrive economically without welcoming in-migration from the working class. It's because the working class has, to an alarming degree, been dealt out of the United States economy. A much-cited recent study by Moody's Analytics found that the top 10 percent in the United States income distribution (i.e., households earning $250,000 or more) now account for 49.7 percent of all consumer spending and about one-third of GDP. The more alarming reality isn't that high housing costs keep the working class out of America's boomtowns; it's these boomtowns don't have to care. They don't require much working-class labor and they don't require much working-class consumer spending. That diminishment of economic power, tantamount to invisibility, isn't a housing problem. It's an inequality problem, and a humanity problem. Reducing zoning restrictions can help, but not enough. Indeed, in the cities where the affluent are most determined to live, building more housing may serve to increase demand, much as Robert Moses's expressways, rather than ease traffic congestion, drew additional motorists onto New York City streets. I've suggested elsewhere that something like this may be happening in Washington, D.C., which during the past quarter century increased the number of its housing units by an astonishing one-third, yet saw median monthly rent rise even faster—by one-half. Housing for low-income people is especially unlikely to become more affordable through market forces. If there's a supply-side liberal paradise, it's Houston, which has no zoning at all (though it does have some land restrictions). Klein and Thompson report that Houston has 'the lowest homelessness rate of any major U.S. city,' and they cite low building costs as the reason. But a 2023 Governing magazine piece by Alan Greenblatt pointed out that Houston also had no zoning back in 2011, when 'Space City' boasted the sixth-largest homeless population in the United States, prompting the department of Housing and Urban Development to place Houston on a watch list. Greenblatt attributed the city's turnaround to collaboration with various government and nonprofit entities (including HUD), a large pile of Covid stimulus cash—and a more than twentyfold increase in police citations issued at homeless encampments. Houston's lack of zoning creates plenty of problems. Between 1930 and 1978, 82 percent of the city's trash got dumped in Black neighborhoods, even though Blacks represented only 25 percent of the population. The neighborhoods had no power to stop it. A 2025 report by the nonprofit newsroom Houston Landing said this problem persists, and that because of Houston's insufficient local housing subsidies affordable housing was more readily available in Boston, which is routinely ranked among the top ten most expensive housing markets in the country. 'There is pressure among liberals,' Klein and Thompson write, 'to focus only on the sins of the MAGA right.' Yes, at the moment that does seem to be kind of an emergency (and not just for liberals). 'But this misses the contributions that liberal governance made to the rise of Trumpism.' Sorry, I'm not buying it. All three of these books were written before the election; their argument would be more compelling had Kamala Harris won. A Harris presidency would have created more space for a conversation about small tweaks to liberal orthodoxies. Trump's victory doesn't leave us that luxury. If Democrats are to win back the working-class majority necessary to regain the White House, they'll need to talk about how a more activist government can address demand-side problems experienced by the proletariat. Back during the 1988 election, Michael Dukakis was judged an out-of-touch technocrat in part because he'd once taken to the beach a book supposedly titled Swedish Land-Use Planning. The supply-side liberals want us to take to the beach a book that might as well be titled American Land-Use Planning. No thank you. I don't can't walk that dark road again.
