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Democrat Mike Espy wants to debate Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, but Hyde-Smith has not accepted invitations. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

With the Nov. 3 election quickly approaching, Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is not giving any indication that she plans to debate her Democratic opponent Mike Espy.

Espy has publicly accepted one debate invitation from WJTV in Jackson and most likely will accept a similar invitation in coming days from WLBT, another Jackson television station.

But it takes two to debate.

The Hyde-Smith campaign has not responded to questions from Mississippi Today about whether she plans to participate in a debate. In earlier interviews with Mississippi Today, Hyde-Smith spokesperson Justin Brasell said the campaign had received an invitation to participate in a debate but had not decided whether it could be worked into the senator’s schedule.

Most incumbent U.S. senators facing re-election this year, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have agreed to debates with their major-party opponents.

“Corrupt Mike Espy is desperate to attract any attention he can get for his failing campaign,” the Hyde-Smith campaign said to WJTV earlier this month. “He was too corrupt for the Clinton Administration and is too liberal for Mississippi. Voters in our state know we have a bright future with Cindy Hyde-Smith and have no desire to revisit Mike Espy’s past scandals.”

While serving as U.S. secretary of agriculture under President Bill Clinton, Espy was indicted on multiple public corruption charges. But he was acquitted on all counts.

In 2018, Hyde-Smith and Espy debated when they were vying in a special election to replace longtime Sen. Thad Cochran, who resigned for health reasons. Hyde-Smith was appointed by then-Gov. Phil Bryant to replace Cochran in the interim before the special election. She is now vying for a full six-year term, and Espy, who captured more than 46% of the vote in 2018, is challenging her again.

Thus far the campaign has been relatively low-keyed, largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hyde-Smith has said she has been actively campaigning via the internet, though it is difficult to find examples of that.

“Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is afraid to debate because she knows that Mississippians are hurt by her policies,” said Joe O’Hern, Espy’s campaign manager. “Given Sen. Hyde-Smith’s availability to ‘do a lot of townhall meetings’ and her claims that she’s ‘covering the state’ with events, the senator certainly has enough time to debate on the issues that matter most during this pivotal moment.”

In accepting the WJTV debate invitation, Espy said, “Debates provide an important opportunity for Mississippians to hear from candidates on our vision for the state and on the issues that matter most to Mississippians as we approach the election.”

In 2018, Hyde-Smith also was reluctant to debate. She refused multiple debate invitations before finally agreeing to one hosted by the Farm Bureau. Farm Bureau had previously honored Hyde-Smith who was the commissioner of agriculture and commerce when she was appointed to the U.S. Senate. Her family also owns a cattle ranch.

The post Espy wants a Senate debate, but Sen. Hyde-Smith still hasn’t committed appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A little over two years ago, a shipping container-sized cylinder bearing Microsoft’s name and logo was lowered onto the ocean floor off the northern coast of Scotland. Inside were 864 servers, and their submersion was part of the second phase of the software giant’s Project Natick. Launched in 2015, the project’s purpose is to determine the feasibility of underwater data centers powered by offshore renewable energy.

A couple months ago, the deep-sea servers were brought back up to the surface so engineers could inspect them and evaluate how they’d performed while under water.

But wait—why were they there in the first place?

As bizarre as it seems to sink hundreds of servers into the ocean, there are actually several very good reasons to do so. According to the UN, about 40 percent of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of an ocean. As internet connectivity expands to cover most of the globe in the next few years, millions more people will come online, and a lot more servers will be needed to manage the increased demand and data they’ll generate.

In densely-populated cities real estate is expensive and can be hard to find. But know where there’s lots of cheap, empty space? At the bottom of the ocean. This locale also carries the added benefit of being really cold (depending where we’re talking, that is; if you’re looking off the coast of, say, Mumbai or Abu Dhabi, the waters are warmer).

Servers generate a lot of heat, and datacenters use most of their electricity for cooling. Keeping not just the temperature but also the humidity level constant is important for optimal functioning of the servers; neither of these vary much 100 feet under water.

Finally, installing data centers on the ocean floor is, surprisingly, much faster than building them on land. Microsoft claims its server-holding cylinders will take less than 90 days to go from factory ship to operation, as compared to the average two years it takes to get a terrestrial data center up and running.

Microsoft’s Special Projects team operated the underwater data center for two years, and it took a full day to dredge it up and bring it to the surface. One of the first things researchers did was to insert test tubes into the container to take samples of the air inside; they’ll use it to try to determine how gases released from the equipment may have impacted the servers’ operating environment.

The container was filled with dry nitrogen upon deployment, which seems to have made for a much better environment than the oxygen that land-bound servers are normally surrounded by; the failure rate of the servers in the water was just one-eighth that of Microsoft’s typical rate for its servers on land. The team thinks the nitrogen atmosphere was helpful because it’s less corrosive than oxygen. The fact that no humans entered the container for the entirety of its operations helped, too (no moving around of components or having to turn on lights or adjust the temperature).

Ben Cutler, a project manager in Microsoft’s Special Projects research group who leads Project Natick, believes the results of this phase of the project are sufficient to show that underwater data centers are worth pursuing. “We are now at the point of trying to harness what we have done as opposed to feeling the need to go and prove out some more,” he said.

Cutler envisions putting underwater datacenters near offshore wind farms to power them sustainably. The data centers of the future will require less human involvement, instead being managed and run primarily by technologies like robotics and AI. In this kind of “lights-out” datacenter, the servers would be swapped out about once every five years, with any that fail before then being taken offline.

The final step in this phase of Project Natick is to recycle all the components used for the underwater data center, including the steel pressure vessel, heat exchangers, and the servers themselves—and restoring the sea bed where the cylinder rested back to its original condition.

If Cutler’s optimism is a portent of things to come, it may not be long before the ocean floor is dotted with sustainable datacenters to feed our ever-increasing reliance on our phones and the internet.

Image Credit: Microsoft

State revenue collections through the first two months of the fiscal year are $258.7 million or 34.8% above what was collected during the same time last year.

The revenue report for the month of August, recently released by the staff of the Legislative Budget Committee, details unprecedented growth in state tax collections which some say was boosted in part by federal stimulus funds.

The strong revenue collections could play a factor as legislative leaders on the Legislative Budget Committee meet later this month to begin the months-long process of developing a budget for the new fiscal year, which starts July 1.

Earlier this year, state leaders and economists feared a $1.2 billion decrease in tax revenue during the latter part of the past fiscal year and current fiscal year of because of the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Such a downturn would result in major cuts in state services and the elimination of a significant number of state jobs.

But unless a dramatic downturn occurs in the coming months, such cuts are not likely to happen.

Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today

Gov. Tate Reeves

Gov. Tate Reeves has touted what he says is an improving state economy. In early August, he cited a national report placing Mississippi at seventh nationally in terms of regaining jobs lost in March and April as the nation and state shut down because of the pandemic.

“We’re not in love at all with our economic results, but we are certainly doing better than a lot of other states,” he said in August.

In fact, revenue collections for the first two months of the fiscal year would indicate that the state is experiencing unprecedented economic growth. Generally, state revenue collections, such as from the sales tax, personal and corporate income tax and to a lesser extent from other sources, are viewed as an indicator of economic strength.

But in this instance, some other issues might be contributing to the large increase in tax collections. For instance, state leaders opted to push back the deadline for people to pay their tax liability from April 15 to July 15. That resulted in income tax liabilities that normally were paid to the state in the last fiscal year being collected in the new fiscal year. As a result, personal income tax collections for July, the first month in the new fiscal year, increased $119.5 million or 94.2 percent. That delay in filing and paying tax returns, no doubt skewed revenue collections in a favorable way for the current fiscal year.

Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/ Report for America

Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory

And more importantly, said Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, is that the state economy, and thus the revenue collections, was buoyed by the income Mississippians received earlier this year from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. The $2 trillion plus program approved by Congress provided most adults in the nation earning less than $99,000 a federal payment of $1,200, or a maximum of $3,400 for a family of four earning less than $198,000.

Bryan said the federal payments had a greater impact “in a poor state like Mississippi” because low income people are more apt to quickly spend such payments to address their needs.

“I don’t think there is any question that when you drop that amount of money in the Mississippi economy, it will get spent and have an impact,” Bryan said.

In addition, people who lost their jobs (about 200,000 Mississippians, according to state data) were receiving an additional $600 per week in unemployment benefits through July thanks to the CARES Act. Some of the state’s political leadership complained that the extra payment resulted in many Mississippians who lost their jobs opting not to go back to work because they were earning more not working as a result of the federal supplement.

When legislative leaders complained to then-state Economist Darrin Webb about people not returning to their jobs because of the enhanced unemployment benefits, he said, “They do want to work, but they also respond to market forces.”

The enhanced unemployment benefits in the CARES Act ended on July 31, but Reeves has opted to accept an additional $300 per week for many unemployed Mississippians on a short-term basis thanks to an executive order enacted by President Donald Trump.

Bryan said the issue is not that people were not working because they could receive more in unemployment benefits in the short term, but that wages were so low in Mississippi that people would make that choice. He said the key to Mississippi getting off the bottom economically is not by reducing the unemployment rate, but by increasing the average pay of its workers.

As legislative leaders begin work in the coming weeks on developing a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, beginning July 1, they will have to try to ascertain whether the growth in tax collections will continue or fall off as the impact of the CARES Act evaporates.

The post CARES Act cited as a factor in soaring revenue collections early in fiscal year appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America

Gov. Tate Reeves walks out of the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson on Thursday, March 26, 2020, as he prepares to speak to media about the coronavirus during a press conference.

Gov. Tate Reeves’ approval rating for his handling of COVID-19 dropped from 56% in late April to 34% in late August in an ongoing survey that shows a decline nationwide in approval of governors’ management of the pandemic.

But approval in Mississippi of President Trump’s handling of the pandemic has remained relatively stable, at 46% in late April and 45% in late August.

The 50-state survey is a joint project of Northeastern, Harvard, Rutgers and Northwestern universities. The latest survey, conducted from Aug. 7-26, is the ninth wave of the project. The project took an online survey of 21,196 people across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The margin of error for Mississippi’s results is +/- 7.

Reeves is among 12 governors with “notably low” approval ratings below 40%, the project reported, including those in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Hawaii, Idaho, Oregon, Oklahoma, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas.

Overall, governors saw their average approval drop 3 points over the previous month, and from 63% in late April to 48% in late August. Trump’s approval for the same period went from 42% to 34%, but he has seen an uptick from his lowest approval of 32% in late July.

Republican governors, like Reeves, have on average dropped 12 points among Republicans surveyed and 19 points among Democrats. Democratic governors on average have dropped 8 points among Democrats and and 16 points among Republicans.

Reeves has, in turns, faced criticism in Mississippi for moving too slowly or not being strict enough with shutdowns and mandates such as mask wearing, and for being too strict. He has also faced some criticism for not himself wearing a mask in large public gatherings even as he urged or mandated that others do.

READ MORE: Gov. Tate Reeves extends statewide mask mandate

In a written statement last week, Reeves said he’s “done everything possible to balance freedom and responsibility” as Mississippi has dealt with the pandemic and that it has been successful.

“The state is open for business,” Reeves said. “And our coronavirus cases are plummeting. Our hospitals have the capacity they need today. Why? Because we’ve got limited, targeted interventions in place the people can realistically work within.”

The post Survey: Gov. Tate Reeves’ COVID-19 approval rating plummets while Trump’s holds steady appeared first on Mississippi Today.

First of all, my heart goes out to our brothers and sisters in Alabama and Florida. Hurricane Sally, a slow moving storm, intensified right as it approached Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, sending in storm surge, winds and up to two feet of rain into Baldwin County and the Florida panhandle. Sally was originally forecast to hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast — and once again, national media outlets struggled with what to call us. Some of the examples are in the cartoon. It’s a minor problem in the scheme of 2020, but it’s annoying.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Landmass appeared first on Mississippi Today.