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California’s salmon fishermen are making their living from whale watchers and sea burials because the fishery is closed for a 2nd year

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William Smith has long fished the California coast for salmon, taking avid anglers out on his boat in hopes they’ll get to wrestle with and reel in the prized catch.

But not anymore.

Smith, known as “Capt. Smitty,” now spends time on the seas with aspiring whale watchers, or scattering the ashes of the deceased — whatever it takes to stay afloat since salmon fishing was barred in California two years ago due to dwindling stocks. Smith said a rise in the Bay Area’s Hindu and Buddhist communities has made sea burials more popular, and he now does more than 200 a year — and that’s helping him pay off his $250,000 boat engine.

“The bills keep going, whether I’ve got a fishery or not,” said Smith, who runs Riptide Sportfishing in Half Moon Bay, California. “There’s no season on when people die.”

California’s sport and commercial fishermen have been walloped by two years of salmon closures and are bracing for a potential third, which they blame on a years-earlier drought and state and federal water management policies they say have made it tough for the species to thrive. The closures have taken a toll on people’s livelihoods in coastal communities where salmon, fishermen say, is a special fish.

Salmon must swim upstream to lay their eggs, and young fish make their way out to the ocean through California’s waterways — something done more easily when cool water flows are abundant. The fishery has long been strained and the Pacific Fishery Management Council, which manages West Coast fisheries, said there will be very limited salmon fishing this year in California, if at all. A decision is due in April.

The dim outlook comes as President Donald Trump has ordered officials to find ways to put “people over fish” and route more water to farmers in California’s crop-rich Central Valley and residents of its densely-populated cities. Trump has professed his love for farmers and contends too much heed is paid to the tiny delta smelt, a federally-threatened species seen as an indicator of the health of California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

But salmon depend on this same water system for their survival. And some in the fishing community are wondering if fishermen aren’t people, too.

“We are people that are hardworking and it’s our jobs on the line,” said Sarah Bates, a commercial fishing captain in San Francisco. She said local markets have been devastated by the salmon closures and Bay Area restaurants aren’t snapping up halibut or other catch as they did salmon.

The history of commercial salmon fishing in California dates back more than a century, and in the 1970s and 1980s the fishery thrived off the state’s coast. Over time, salmon fishing has declined with swings in stocks amid volatile weather patterns in a drought-prone state and water management decisions about when surface water, and how much of it, should flow to farms, burgeoning cities and the ecologically-sensitive bay delta.

California’s salmon fishing industry includes commercial fleets and charters that take anglers out for recreation.

Jamie O’Neill, owner of Seattle-based Dock Street Brokers, said many of California’s commercial salmon fishermen are getting out of the business, selling their permits or simply letting them expire. Permits now sell for a fraction of what they used to, and there are fewer than 900 permits compared to 1,200 in 2010, he said.

Charter operators, meanwhile, have branched out to host boat tours and party cruises, especially since short trips require little fuel and can help offset the cost of boat maintenance.

While fishermen can still catch halibut, cod and striped bass along the extensive Pacific coastline, they say without the all-popular King Salmon, anglers just aren’t coming like before. Each fish requires a different bait and technique, and a fast-swimming salmon is a fighter that anglers aspire to catch.

“One is hamburger, and one is filet mignon,” said Andy Guiliano, whose sportfishing boat the Pacific Pearl in Emeryville has expanded its historic tour offerings since the closure. “It makes the cash register ring.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Trump-backed World Liberty Financial raises $550 million in WLFI token sales

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World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance platform backed by President Donald Trump, announced this week that it has raised a total of $550 million in a series of token sales.

“This milestone proves that those who truly understand crypto and finance recognize what we’re building—and that WLFI is on track to supercharge DeFi as it transforms global finance in the coming years,” Zach Witkoff, cofounder of World Liberty Financial, said in a statement earlier this week. 

The company sold $300 and $250 million worth of Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tron, Ondo, Sui, and other cryptocurrencies. The purchases are part of its strategic token reserve which “helps strengthen leading cryptocurrency projects while providing stability to its treasury through diversification before ultimate disposition,” the company said in a statement. 

World Liberty Financial also says it has “established key relationships” with major players in the crypto space including other decentralized finance platforms like ONDO Finance, Sui, and Aave. Justin Sun, the founder of Tron blockchain, has invested $75 million in World Liberty Financial since Trump’s election in November. 

“The token sales are just the beginning,” Witkoff said in a statement this week. “We’re gearing up to launch a wave of disruptive technology that will redefine the boundaries of what’s possible with digital assets.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called GTC a Super Bowl where there are no losers — then he tackled concerns about China’s DeepSeek

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  • Jensen Huang reaffirmed Nvidia’s starring role in the AI industry during a keynote address at Nvidia’s annual GTC conference on Tuesday. Through its new open-source software, Huang showed how Nvidia can ramp up DeepSeek R1’s efficiency 30-fold. Yet, while he spoke, Nvidia’s stock price dropped more than 3%—after the company announced its GPU timelines.

Clad in his signature black leather, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took center stage at Nvidia GTC on Tuesday, defending the chip maker’s dominance in the industry and touting the impact it could have on DeepSeek. 

The event drew more than 25,000 people to the SAP Center’s National Hockey League arena, and Huang opened the keynote by launching t-shirts into the crowd and coronating this year’s GTC the “Super Bowl of AI.”

“The only difference is everybody wins at this Super Bowl, everybody’s a winner,” he joked. And like the Super Bowl, there were GTC watch parties and packed crowds to get a glimpse of Huang on stage. 

With his address, Huang sought to dispel any uneasiness around AI investment, and said discussion about lower spending does not concern Nvidia. In January, apprehension engulfed the chip maker after it lost $589 billion in market cap in a single day after Chinese AI reasoning model Deepseek R1 claimed to operate at a fraction of the cost. 

While large language models offer foundational knowledge, reasoning models offer more complex, analytical responses. Using the company’s new open source software Nvidia Dynamo, Huang said the tech giant’s Blackwell chips will be able to make DeepSeek R1 30 times faster. He then played a video demonstrating for the crowd how it could be done.

“Dynamo can capture that benefit and deliver 30 times more performance in the same number of GPUs in the same architecture for reasoning models like DeepSeek,” said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of Nvidia’s hyperscale and HPC computing business.

From there, Huang’s keynote covered everything from the chip maker’s plans to roll out its newest chips— Blackwell Ultra later this year, Vera Rubin in 2026, and Feynman in 2027.

“We have an annual rhythm of roadmaps that has been laid out for you,” Huang said.

While Nvidia’s announced its strategic runway for years to come, that wasn’t enough to stop the stock’s slide. The chip maker’s share price tumbled 3.4% Tuesday.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Cathie Wood says most memecoins will end up ‘worthless’

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Most of the so-called memecoins that are flooding the $2.6 trillion cryptocurrency space will probably end up “worthless,” according to Cathie Wood. 

The combination of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence is creating “millions” of meme cryptocurrencies that “are not going to be worth very much,” the ARK Investment Managment LLC founder and CEO told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday, adding that her private funds are not putting money into these coins. 

Memecoins are a type of digital asset often inspired by jokes, current events or trends in popular culture. In February, the US Securities and Exchange Commission said memecoins are not considered securities so they will remain unregulated.

“If I have one message for those listening who are buying memecoins: buyer beware,” said Wood. “There’s nothing like losing money for people to learn, and they’ll learn that the SEC and regulators are not taking responsibility for these memecoins.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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