China's Crude Oil Production -- Second Greatest Monthly Decline On Record -- October 19, 2016

Some time ago, I had a post with this heading: China's peak oil problem. That was September 13, 2016. Now look at this, over at Rigzone. You cannot spin this story: China's September crude oil output was its second-biggest decline on record. Read that again: China's September crude oil output was the second-biggest decline on record.

Yes, there is such a thing as "Peak Oil." Just ask China. 

China's crude oil production fell 9.8 percent in September from a year earlier, marking the second-biggest year-on-year decline on record, government data showed, as major producers shut high-cost wells to rein in spending.

Domestic crude output fell to 15.98 million tons, or 3.89 million barrels per day (bpd), near the lowest in six years on daily basis, the National Bureau of Statistics data showed, reflecting both spending cuts at oil fields and the closure of old wells.

After that, lots of jaw-jaw at the linked article. It is what it is. Yes, I know, China says they dropped domestic production because of large imports the previous month. But if that's the case, that also speaks volumes about China's domestic oil industry.

 
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The Apple Page

Apple has officially announced an October 27th Mac-Centric Event. The excitement seems to focus on the MacBook Pro.

I have both: the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air.

The MacBook Pro has one moving part: the hard drive.

The MacBook has no moving parts.

Without question, I will never go back to a machine with moving parts (excluding keyboard, track pad; I'm talking about hard drives).

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A Note For The Granddaughters, Especially Arianna

Alexander Hamilton has gotten a lot of attention recently.

From Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution, by Nathaniel Philbrick, c. 2016, page 201, is quite interesting. This is a description of the Caribbean during the US revolutionary war:

There was nowhere in the world where money could be made at such a staggering clip as the Caribbean. In 1776 the British West Indies generated 4.25 million pounds of trade, almost three times what had been made by great Britain's East India Company.

France was just as dependent on her Caribbean possessions, which accounted for more than a third of all her overseas trade. If Britain could scoop up a few more of these precious islands from the French, it might provide a way to pay for what had so far been a financially ruinous war Britain was even considering giving up entirely on its American possession so that it could concentrate what resources it still had left to fighting the French.

For Philadelphia's loyalists it was almost beyond comprehension: after a mere eight-month British occupation, they were about to suffer the same reversal of fortune that their counterparts in New Jersey and Boston had already experienced and get handed back to the patriots.

Putting that paragraph into perspective, and reading the history of Alexander Hamilton's first 18 years of life (wiki) puts much of the Revolutionary War and the financial history of the US into perspective.

Perhaps the one article you should read today if you have time for only one article (and this article is very, very long): "Adding a Zero." The profile of Sam Altman in The New Yorker, October 10, 2016, issue -- the story of Y Combinator and "accelerators."

 

In the same issue, a huge miss by The New Yorker, a four-page review of "The Birth of a Nation," Nat Turner's movie on a slave rebellion, arriving amid a resurgence in movies about slavery. The movie bombed. No links. Probably not hard to find if interested. I'm not.

In the same issue James Surowieki whines about racial economic inequality, which for him, revolves around one issue: home ownership. He does manage to slip in his own suggestion to solve things, by spending other people's money, which is in the concluding paragraph of this really, really awful op-ed:

Closing the racial wealth gap would require radical measures, like reparations, which few politicians will discuss. But what's really dismal is that even reforms that could keep the gap from getting wider -- ending the mortgage-interest deduction, challenging residential segregation -- are politically toxic.

Wow, I'm glad I canceled my subscription to The New Yorker.

But then this, in this week's issue (I'm catching up on The New Yorker after being gone for several weeks), there is a profile on Leonard Cohen. The title in the print edition: "How the Light Gets In." On-line, the same essay, "Leonard Cohen makes it darker." Leonard Cohen, no doubt, was on the short list of those who nominated Bob Dylan for the Nobel Prize for Literature. I prefer a profile on Leonard Cohen rather than on Bob Dylan: Cohen, I think, is a much, much deeper thinker. Dylan tapped into an American conscience that wasn't particularly deep (think Joan Baez) whereas Cohen went to the depths of the human condition.

The big loser in all this was the legacy of that artist who was formerly called Prince. He left no will. He never sat for an interview (of which I am aware). He was incredibly secretive even by the standards of musicians. He seldom toured and when he did, they were incredibly limited in venues. Cohen continues to tour; and Bob Dylan really continues to tour, even at age 75. Cohen has written books. So has Bob Dylan, including his acclaimed memoir, volume one. If the artist formerly known as Prince wrote a book, I am unaware.

Speaking of books, this might be very, very interesting. I'm serious. Future Sex, Emily Witt, c. 2016. More on this later. Maybe.