The Dickinson Press Has Another Story On Man-Camps -- This Time One Out East -- April 12, 2015

Link here.

Over the years it's been interesting to see how various news outlets spin a story, something I did not pay attention to until I started blogging.

This is how different news outlets would report this story:

The Williston Herald: would ignore the story entirely; a man-camp? The city has been there, done that, and is now looking at a $500 million shopping hub to be built by a Swiss company; and then the newspaper would get back to sports. 

The Wall Street Journal: huge fertilizer factory to be built in eastern North Dakota; to take advantage of cheap labor, energy; will provide more jobs than the Obama stimulus program; will take 3 years to build; will require significant new housing; huge impact on local economy. 

The Atlantic Monthly: what happened to Poppers' proposal for converting North Dakota to a buffalo commons? 

The New York Times: should Hillary Clinton visit North Dakota? 

Drudge Report: Minnesotans See More Opportunity In Neighboring State

The Dickinson Press: OMG! It's another man-camp proposal!

In case the link to the story breaks:

While the man camps in the Oil Patch are just 330 miles west of Grand Forks, they seem like part of a different world to many people in eastern North Dakota. 

But with 2,000 workers expected in Grand Forks for construction on the planned $1.85 billion Northern Plains Nitrogen fertilizer plant, the need for some sort of temporary labor housing — commonly called man camps or crew camps — in Grand Forks is likely, city officials say. 

Feland and a city planner said any man camp in Grand Forks would be different from what is in the Oil Patch in the sense that it will be more limited and more temporary. 

“It’s not going to look like what you see out west,” Deputy City Planner Ryan Brooks said. 

But University of North Dakota researchers studying man camps said they expect to see many similarities between a crew camp in Grand Forks and those in Williston and other western North Dakota towns. 

“It won’t be different in the sense that every type of workforce housing that exists in the world exists in Williston,” said Bill Caraher, history professor at UND and part of the North Dakota Man Camp Project, which has researched man camps in the state for about three years. Any type of man camp that may end up in Grand Forks is already in the Oil Patch, he said.

That's the best line in the entire article:  “It won’t be different in the sense that every type of workforce housing that exists in the world exists in Williston."

The Bakken was (and still is) a great laboratory for the oil and gas industry.

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Lost Credibility

George Friedman, in Barron's, p. 7: "Netanyahu, and by extension, Israel, have lost much credibility ... for a decade or more, Netanyahu has engaged in his Chicken Little art of insisting that Iran is just a year or two away from developing a bomb. Yet, the doomsday never comes.

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GDP In Real Time

From Barron's, p. M1: The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has created GDPNow, an online forecast of its US GDP estimates prior to release.

It's an automated real-growth estimate, updated in real time, that tracks 13 components of GDP growth  as they're reported. The project goes back only to the second half of 2011, but in seven quarters from late 2011 to early 2014, its accuracy beat flesh-and-blood economists 5 out of 7 times, with one loss and one tie. The model is especially good when the expected growth is less than 1%.

In 2015's first quarter, GDPNow sees 0.1% growth. If correct, that would startle human economists, who expect 1.5% to 2.0%.