Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Transparency in the Federal Government; Wednesday Links: Big Sugar Bailout; Apple Gets All The Good Apps; Oil Drillers Coaxing More Oil From Shale; Fifth RBN Installment on CBR Terminals In The Bakken


President Obama's transparent federal government: American finances will be made transparent to all federal "spy" agencies. I think it's great; if you have nothing to hide, who cares? I assume the ACLU will go "nuts." If this had even been proposed under a GOP regime -- but, then, of course, it wouldn't have been. There may not be enough money to fund White House tours, but there's enough money to institute more programs to make the government "transparent."

RBN Energy: fifth installment on crude-by-rail terminals in the Bakken.

WSJ Links

Section D (Personal Journal):
Section C (Money & Investing):
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is considering buying 400,000 tons of sugar—enough for 142 billion Hershey's Kisses—to stave off a wave of defaults by sugar processors that borrowed $862 million under a government price-support program.
The action aims to prop up tumbling U.S. sugar prices, which have fallen 18% since the USDA made the nine-month operations-financing loans beginning in October. The purchases could leave the price-support program with an $80 million loss, its biggest in 13 years, said Barbara Fecso, an economist at the USDA, in an interview. [Later, others saw this, also: the DailyTicker comments.] [Later, also made CNBC.]
Section B (Marketplace):
As expected, the FAA-authorized fixes involve a redesign of the lithium-ion devices to better insulate individual cells as a way to prevent internal short-circuits and overheating from spreading inside the batteries. Boeing also envisions a more-fireproof outside container for the battery, along with a new system to vent smoke and hazardous fumes outside the aircraft in the event a battery starts smoldering or catches fire. 
If all goes well, commercial 787 flights could resume by early May, according to industry and government officials.
  • Chevron expects 20% output rise; story everywhere, no link

  • Oil drillers boost efforts to coax more from shale (nothing of substance in the story; however, there is a photo of a rig outside of Williston, although it could be anywhere in North Dakota, I suppose):
Right now, even with horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, new shale wells tap only a small percentage of the oil and gas trapped in small pores in the rock, leaving more than 75% behind."From 2004 to 2012, the development of shales was basically, hit it with a big sledgehammer and see what comes out," says Richard Spears, vice president of Spears & Associates, a Tulsa, Oklahoma, firm that tracks oil-field spending. 
"Now the question is who can do it the best and optimize the process. Shales aren't tube socks, a one-size-fits-all thing," he said, pointing to using fracking techniques of differing scale and intensity in different shale formations.
Section A:
A federal judge ordered Texas officials to allocate water supplies to meet the needs of what is believed to be the world's last wild flock of endangered whooping cranes.
In the latest skirmish over water rights in Texas, Judge Janis Graham Jack ruled that state water regulators violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to divert enough water from the Guadalupe and San Antonio rivers to feed the estuaries on the Gulf of Mexico where the cranes winter. As a result, the judge wrote in the ruling released late Monday, at least 23 of the birds died in the winter of 2008-09—representing about 9% of the flock.
  • Book review, Do As I Do, Not As I Say, Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg (this review worth the price of the entire paper, today; great review):
For one thing—and this is the most interesting part of Ms. Sandberg's book—it seems that few young women who earn high-end business-school degrees give any serious thought to how a business actually operates.
She describes a speech that she gave at Harvard Business School in 2011. During the question-and-answer session afterward, the male students asked such questions as "What did you learn at Google that you are now applying at Facebook?" and "How do you run a platform company and ensure stability for your developers?"
The female students asked such questions as "How can I get a mentor?"—the "professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming," as Ms. Sandberg puts it.
Her advice: If you want a mentor, impress a higher-up with how good you are at doing your job. She is similarly dismayed by a young woman at Facebook who asked her advice about how to "balance work and family"—even though the young woman wasn't even married.
"If current trends continue," Ms. Sandberg told the business-school students, "fifteen years from today, about one-third of the women in this audience will be working full-time and almost all of you will be working for the guy you are sitting next to."
The record of most preschool programs is disappointing. For example, a federal study recently found that the $167 billion spent on Head Start since 1965 has failed to deliver sustainable improvements in school readiness among the children who go through it. That program has recently undergone some changes, but there is understandable skepticism about the Obama administration's plan to spend $10 billion a year making preschool universal.
Anyone involved in such efforts should consider an atypical "pre-preschool" program called Reach Out and Read, which may be the most effective literacy program in the nation. Started 24 years ago by two doctors at Boston City Hospital, the program now touches four million low-income children a year at a cost of $10 per child. Here's how it works:
Whenever a parent brings a child to a participating doctor's office for a checkup, the staff "prescribes" that the parent read to that child. Doctors and nurses—who volunteer to incorporate literacy into regular checkups—demonstrate how to do so and why. Many parents have no tradition or habit of reading themselves, so doctors explain how important it is to read to children every day and give the family an age-appropriate children's book to keep.
  • Op-ed: drill, Barack, drill. A new study shows the US oil boom is all on private and state land. 
President Obama does a neat John D. Rockefeller imitation these days, taking credit for soaring domestic oil and gas production as if he planned it that way. Not quite. As a new Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports shows, "All of the increased [oil] production from 2007 to 2012 took place on non-federal lands."
Ever since the president took credit for piloting the first helicopter that took out Osama bin Laden, nothing surprises me any more.

2 comments:

  1. Drill Barack drill? I don't think so. That would be a screwed up mess. It should read " just get the heck out of the way Barack just get the heck out of the way.

    ReplyDelete