Ride-hailing giant Uber's plans for a helicopter-based service starting as soon as this year have been revealed, with previously secret documents detailing an ambition for a fast, noisy and busy service above its first Australian trial city, Melbourne.

• Documents obtained under freedom of information laws reveal previously unknown details of Uber Air's Melbourne plans
• The documents outline flight plans under 500m altitude at speeds of up to 320kph
• The Victorian Government has committed to helping Uber "navigate the regulatory landscape" and "broker federal relationships"

"Flights will travel at an altitude of ~1,500 ft [457m] with speeds of up to 150-200 miles/hour [241-321 kilometres per hour] and a range of up to 60 miles [96 kilometres]," a key document reveals.

Uber has previously stated their target of an appropriate level of vehicle noise will be 67 decibels for a ground observer when the helicopter is at an altitude of 75 metres. That is the same level as a vacuum cleaner or busy road.

Community researcher Petra Stock is concerned about the potential impact of the scheme. Only scant details have been made public, until now.

"We don't know any specifics and we don't know the basics around how many helicopters, heliports and where these things are going to fly," she said.

"And then we don't know anything about the impact on privacy, for example, how they'll use our mobile and data networks … there's a long, long list of questions that we won't get answers to."

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-28/uber-air-plans-for-1000-strong-me...

The choice will be for electric, petrol (Avgas) or pedal power depending on your budget....

A BP refinery worker in Australia has successfully won back his job after being sacked for parodying the company in a well-known Hitler meme.

Scott Tracey used the popular meme, from the 2004 film Downfall, to portray scenes from company wage negotiations, posting it on a closed Facebook group.

He later lost an unfair dismissal case which ruled the video was offensive.

But an appeal judgement on Friday found it was unreasonable to say the parody had likened BP managers to Nazis.

"Anyone with knowledge of the meme could not seriously consider that the use of the clip was to make some point involving Hitler or Nazis," the Fair Work Commission wrote in its decision.

The meme takes Downfall's climactic scene - in which Hitler confronts his generals in his bunker - and replaces the subtitles with topics of parody.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-51670003

Meanwhile:

A scheme to abolish the Department of Energy (DOE) helped spur a failed 1980 Libertarian Party presidential bid — and in the process laid the groundwork for Charles and David Koch's powerful network of influence — as documents from a newly published archive show.

The documents in the new KochDocs.org archive include a relatively little-noticed column penned by fossil fuel industrialist Charles Koch for the Libertarian Review in August 1977, in which Charles, who had served as a member of President Carter’s energy task force in 1976, argued against Carter’s energy policy, writing that the “only ‘certainty’ to be associated with governmental planning is that it will not work, will tend to produce results opposite to those intended, and will doom any substantial private long-range planning in energy development.”

Within three years, the Energy Department had been established by federal law — and its abolishment had become a central plank of the Libertarian Party’s 1980 presidential campaign, which featured Ed Clark as its presidential candidate and Koch Industries’ David Koch as his running-mate. 

“There’s nothing wrong with America’s energy problems that deregulated, decontrolled private enterprise can’t cure,” a Clark campaign ad published on May 5, 1980 proclaimed.

“One of my first priorities as President would be to abolish the Department of Energy,” the ad quoted Clark as saying.

The documents shine new light not only on the Kochs’ early opposition to the formation of the Department of Energy but also on their evolution from direct participation in politics to secretive behind-the-scenes funders of the American political right.

“That election also handed the Kochs their first political setback, driving them to rethink their approach to libertarian ideas,” The New York Times reported in 2014. “Instead of replacing the Republican Party, they have helped to profoundly reshape it.”

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/08/07/documents-shine-new-light-koch-bro...

Read also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33615

With an anomaly of + 2.7 ° C, this meteorological winter, which ends on Saturday February 29, is already the warmest since the surveys began 120 years ago.

Consisting of the months of December, January and February, the 2019–2020 meteorological winter, which ends this Saturday, promises to be the warmest ever measured in France, Météo France announces.

Nationally and seasonally, average temperature is forecast to be above normal (1981–2010) by 2.7 ° C, making this winter the 1st warmest winters since the surveys began, with 1900. It thus outdoes the winters 2015–2016 (+ 2.6 ° C) and 1989–1990 (+ 2 ° C).

Read more:

https://www.sudouest.fr/2020/02/28/l-hiver-2019-2020-est-d-ores-et-deja-...

Read from top. 

Please note that according to Gustimates, major weather upheavals should start when about half of the "ice" (as observed from the time of the industrial revolution) on the planet has melted (note*: Antarctica large ice volume is to be discounted on this as "Antarctica is somewhat isolated from the rest of world"). This is based on the loose "ice in the whisky effect", long described on this site (see the Antarctica conundrum and other articles). The observation is simple. At first, ice in the whisky will cool the liquid as THE TEMPERATURE OF THE ICE climbs up.

Of course this depends on the amount of ice versus whisky, but in regard to the surface of the planet, the exchange of heat between ice and the rest of the planet oceans and atmosphere starts to have less influence, when half of the ice has gone*. What is not seen because "ice is ice", is that the temperature of the ice has gone up as well.

Imagine that your freezer "makes ice" at minus 19 degrees Celsius, while the ice you buy at the servo (petrol/gas service station) is at about minus seven degrees Celsius and will take less time to melt than your own freezer's cubes... 

Work all the details and the massive bits on a planetary scale, and — behold — massive upset, such as a QUICK rise in world temperature average and massive disruption in climate zoning and weather patterns should appear like eddies (currents of "melting" water and alcohol/warmer water slowly mixing) in a whisky glass (com'on be observant!) by 2032...