By Walt Hickey

Miniatures

Demand is huge now for miniature versions of livestock, including mini goats, horses, donkeys and pigs. The trend is driven by hobby farmers looking for animals for smaller plots of land, as well as a surge in interest on social media for the admittedly adorable beasts of burden. Mini goats are very popular, and animal breeders have registered 8,330 mini goats with the Miniature Dairy Goat Association, up 73 percent over the year ending July 2021. Mini Moos LLC, a breeder of mini cows with a thriving TikTok presence that sold 190 calves last year, made between $2,000 and $30,000 per calf.

Haleluya Hadero and Anne D’Innocenzio, The Associated Press

Shadow Fleet

Ships all have an associated nation’s flag, a practice that is essential to maintaining global safety standards at sea and tracking large vessels. Some countries are known to be particularly popular for different vessels — Liberia and the Marshall Islands are known as popular flags for oil tankers — but a new practice has emerged where some countries that do not care in the slightest about the oceans are fine with vessels that, say, run Russian oil to help them avoid sanctions, using their flag for the right price. The United Arab Emirates has just banned all arrivals from ships bearing the flag of Eswatini, a landlocked African nation previously known as Swaziland, which it suspects of doing just that. As of 2023, there were no ships with its flag, understandable given that, again, it’s landlocked. As of today that’s now 26 ships, and several of them previously hauled Russian and Iranian oil.

Alex Longley, Bloomberg BNN

Movies

The new Tyler Perry movie, Divorce in the Black, is, according to Amazon, the single biggest driver of sign-ups to Prime Video of any Amazon MGM Studios-produced movie ever. Nielsen clocked the movie at 498 million minutes watched in its first four days of availability, which comes out to about 3.5 million watches. In its third week of release, it’s still pulling in 93.2 million minutes watched, according to Luminate.

Angelique Jackson, Variety

Seafood

Per-capita consumption of seafood in the United States rose from 11.7 pounds per year in 1970 to 20.3 pounds per year in 2021. Overall, the U.S. produced 7.5 billion pounds, which breaks down to 21.4 pounds of seafood per capita, but in fact the U.S. only produced 76 percent of the seafood demand, with the balance being seafood that is caught and then exported, used as bait fish or ground up for fatty acids. As a whole, American seafood production has ranged between 59 percent and 110 percent of demand over the 50-year period of study.

University of Maine

Natural Disaster

A new survey found that 26 percent of Americans said they live in an area where hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes are a major problem. Overall, 13 percent of respondents said that tornadoes are a major problem in their local area, 13 percent said hurricanes are, and 7 percent said earthquakes are. The earthquake crowd is, naturally, mostly the West Coast, Hawaii and Alaska, the hurricane crowd is predominantly in the Southeast, while large swaths of the center of the country say tornadoes are an issue, including 73 percent of Oklahomans. The states where people are least likely to call any of the three natural disasters an issue are Oklahoma (26 percent say none are a problem), Louisiana (31 percent) and Florida (39 percent). The state-by-state data is super interesting to dive into here, and I would draw attention to what I believe is the major distinguishing factor between New Yorkers and New Jerseyans, both of whom got slammed by the exact same storm in 2012 but appear to have handled it differently: New Yorkers hold the grudge and were twice as likely to call hurricanes a “major” problem, while New Jerseyans clearly got over it.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Race

Austin Dillon was ranked 32nd in NASCAR’s points system and had a 0 percent chance of making the playoffs without a win at Sunday’s Cook Out 400 in Richmond. This desperation led the driver to make an audacious, controversial move where he sent two other racers ahead of him careening into a wall in order to snatch the win. People are ticked off given the recklessness of the move, but the reality is that NASCAR engineered its playoff system — where anyone who wins a race gets an automatic entrance — to incentivize this kind of behavior. A new analysis found that it’s led to worse drivers getting into the playoffs over better drivers, with drivers just outside the bubble averaging more top 10 finishes (8.7 finishes) than those who made the playoffs with a win (6.1 top 10 finishes on average).

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Water

NASA’s Insight lander gathers data on seismic activity on Mars, and researchers have been able to determine that there are indeed likely vast quantities of groundwater on the planet — enough to cover the planet’s surface in 1 to 2 kilometers of water — but it’s far too deep to be of any use. Mars lost its oceans over 3 billion years ago, and the water that’s there is in cracks and pores in the Martian crust, somewhere 11.5 to 20 kilometers below the surface. It would be a troublesome issue to extract it, as drilling a kilometer-deep hole on Earth is itself a big challenge.

Robert Sanders, University of California - Berkeley

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