I would rather Beshear too, but mostly because I’m less worried about getting Kentucky having a Republican Govenor than I am about Arizona Senator Kelly getting replaced with a Republican Senator if Kelly becomes the VP pick.

Please someone stop Gerard Barron before he kills us all. From reuters:

“What are the alternatives if we don’t go to the ocean for these metals? The only alternative is more land mining and more pushing into sensitive ecosystems, including rainforests,” said Gerard Barron, CEO of Vancouver-based The Metals Co, the most-vocal deep-sea mining company and one of 31 companies to which the ISA has granted permits to explore for - but not yet commercially produce - deep-sea minerals.

Other companies with exploration permits include Russia’s JSC Yuzhmorgeologiya, Blue Minerals Jamaica, China Minmetals, and Kiribati’s Marawa Research and Exploration. Their potential future activities are seen as augmenting mining on land.

To give a better answer to his seemingly rhetorical question: The alternative is to ramp up salt-water battery tech, look for other tech and NOT deprive our biosphere of oxygen.

More on the mining stuff from wired and forbes (forbes link paywalls itself after a short while).

Would Trump? Probably. Would Project 2025? Absolutely.

Per WaPo, Project 2025…

… calls for breaking up NOAA, whose climate research it calls “harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” It suggests the Weather Service should “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” because its data is already used widely by private companies.

The report bases that proposal on an assertion that “forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS.”

… as if those forecasts didn’t start with the government service and then build on it. And how much more would everything cost when everyone has to pay for weather information? Food? Planes? Fish?

Remember the AccuWeather issues in Trump’s first term?

Lastly: do you want to HOPE that some private company has enough customers in your area for them to make your forecast? Maybe it is insurance companies worrying about tornadoes, but your area is a mix of several firms (Allstate, Gieco, State Farm, whomever) and they all concentrate their forecast for the regions they dominate.

It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.

do we want flood-risk predictions sponsored by a flood-insurance company, or heat advisories from an air-conditioning conglomerate?

The agency is home to one of the most significant repositories of climate data on Earth, which includes information on shifting atmospheric conditions and the health of coastal fisheries, plus hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of ice-core and tree-ring data.

Eliminating or privatizing climate information won’t eliminate the effects of climate change. It will only make them more deadly.

It sounds like the counter to this is to point out to voters that they don’t really want to pay more for fish because fishermen can’t get data, and we don’t want planes to be even less reliable AND cost more because the government stops tracking upper level wind speeds, and that, generally, we want people who get a salary for doing accurate work rather than people who get paid to say whatever the bossman want to hear. Ask them to imagine how it would work if Google, NBC, Amazon, and Fox each sunk the money for trying to replicate the existing infrastructure and then sold pieces of it to paying customers – such as Allstate, CBS, and Delta Airlines. Everyone else would have to HOPE they were getting complete data and have to wonder what was missing. Noticing record highs and lows would become proprietary and forbidden from broadcast in a way akin to being disallowed from referencing “The Superbowl” unless you pay for a license. How’s any of that going to work?

How did X do Y?! Click here to find out the amazing answer you won’t believe!

Click-bait headlines should always be punished. More particularly, re-posting click-bait headlines without explaining the answer in the body must be condemned.

Saved you a click:

the 1930s were the decade of the Dust Bowl — the grim result of relentless overplowing of the Great Plains followed by natural oceanic cycles that favored a multiyear drought, which coincided with the Great Depression.

The heat was localized to one continent. See their pic for world comparison (open in new tab for bigger version):

I’ve bolded the bits that stood out to me:

Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service, generated millions of dollars in subscription revenue and caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,” the Justice Department said Thursday.

The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services (including the Pirate Bay and Torrentz) for illegal copies of TV episodes, which they then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers, according to federal prosecutors. The men were charged in 2019 with conspiring to violate federal criminal copyright law.

The jury convicted the five men of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. In addition, the jury convicted Dallmann of two counts of money laundering by concealment and three counts of misdemeanor criminal copyright infringement. Dallmann faces a maximum penalty of 48 years in prison, while Courson, Garcia, Jaurequi and Huber each face a maximum of five years in prison, according to the Justice Department. A sentencing date has not yet been set.

I wish the article told us which crime could lead to which sentence length. Is money laundering punished more or less than copyright infringement?