But getting to 500,000 in calendar year 2018 will be quite a feat.
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Toyota's Kentucky HQ To Shut Down
This is not news, but it's for the archives. Back in 2004, or thereabouts, Toyota announced it was going to consolidate its North American operations to Plano, TX. The AP was simply updating the story. The people and the cities affected have known about this for years, and nothing has changed, I guess, except the move has now begun.
Toyota is beginning to move hundreds of jobs out of its northern Kentucky headquarters as part of a nationwide consolidation.
Workers
have begun relocating from Toyota's Erlanger plant and will continue
through the end of 2018.
The
company, which is moving its facilities to the Dallas suburb of Plano,
said the move will affect 648 workers. All employees received a job
offer as part of the restructuring.
Erlanger has been home to the Japanese automaker's North American engineering and manufacturing headquarters since 1996.
Marc
Fields, Erlanger's city administrator, said the city is sad to see
Toyota leave, but has been preparing for this moment since Toyota
announced its consolidation plans in April 2014.
Plano is just north of DFW, not far from where we live. Plano is home to a number of Fortune 500 companies, and is a very, very popular destination for folks living in the Dallas-Ft Worth area.
The GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the fourth quarter of 2016 is 2.9 percent on January 3, up from 2.5 percent on December 22.
The forecast of the contribution of inventory investment to fourth-quarter growth increased from 0.35 percentage points to 0.73 percentage points following the U.S. Census Bureau's Advance Economic Indicators release on December 29. This was offset by a decline in the forecast of the contribution of net exports to fourth-quarter growth from -0.25 percentage points to -0.67 percentage points following the same release.
The forecasts for consumer and government spending and business fixed investment all increased after this morning's construction spending release from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Manufacturing ISM Report On Business from the Institute of Supply Management.
June 11, 2017: Clifford Kraus, NY Times, did not know why gasoline prices were so low this summer; did not even hazard some opinions on why gasoline prices might be so low.
April 9, 2017: Juan Gonzalez, deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs during the Obama administration who now suggests that Putin may have had nefarious reasons for returning to Central America under the Obama administration. At the time, he admits he was skeptical of any security threats that Putin might pose in the region.
January 3, 2017: That didn't take long, our first nominee for the 2017 Geico Rock Award. Prince Harry: "Saving endangered animals is God's test for humanity." I guess he missed the Aleppo story, the 2016 equivalent of the 1940s Holocaust.
January 3, 2017: that didn't take long, our first nominee for the 2017 Geico Rock Award. Prince Harry: "Saving endangered animals is God's test for humanity." I guess he missed the Aleppo story, the 2016 equivalent of the 1940s Holocaust.
January 3, 2017, song #3 of 20 as we count down the days:
End of the Line, Traveling Wilburys
January 3, 2017: I tuned into CNBC this morning about 8:00 a.m. but had to turn it off at about 8:10; the discussion among Cramer and two others about the president's tweets were inane. Cramer said that these individual tweets don't amount to a "hill of beans" (my words, not his). Now we have this breaking news over at AP, via Twitter (yes, Twitter: Ford cancels plan for new $1.6 billion plant in Mexico; to add 700 jobs in Michigan to build electric, autonomous vehicles. I think one can safely argue that Ford would have continued with its plans for the Mexican plant had Trump not tweeted. This is a huge "thank you" to the people of Michigan who voted for Trump. Trump is creating more jobs for Americans BEFORE he becomes president than Obama did with a trillion dollars in stimulus.
January 3, 2017: Washington Post completely changes story;
in-line with Trump -- Russian government hackers do not appear to have
targeted Vermont utility say people close to investigation. This is
the newspaper's mea culpa, buried fairly deeply in the article:
The Post initially reported incorrectly that the country’s electric grid
had been penetrated through a Vermont utility. After Burlington
Electric released its statement saying that the potentially compromised
laptop had not been connected to the grid, The Post immediately
corrected its article and later added an editor’s note explaining the
change.
For all the grief PEOTUS Trump gets for "shooting from the hip," well, what can I say .... ?
Some months ago I started beating the drum that Trump's tweets will knock network news shows off balance. I saw that this morning, a clear-cut example. An individual scheduled some days ago to be interviewed on CNBC this morning was cut off abruptly and the interview was much shorter than planned because the show was "off-schedule" due to Trump's tweet on the GM Cruze that's being made in Mexico and then sold here in the states. And then GM tweeted back with their side of the story. The CNBC talking ahead specifically stated they had to end the conversation early because the GM tweet conversation had taken up time earlier.
****************************
The Market
NYSE:
new highs, 125: MPC (Marathon Petroleum), HAL, Statoil (STO),
new lows,9
Opening: up 142 points. Oil right at $55.00.
Futures: Dow 30 futures up about 125 points. Oil up over $55. Despite what Gartman said four months ago.
“The vast majority of the companies who have large overseas cash also
have substantial amounts of domestic cash,” he said.
“The reality is
that cash that is brought home will be used to pay dividends, to buy
back shares, to engage in mergers and acquisitions, to rearrange the
financial chessboard, not to invest in large amounts of new capital. It
is a chimera to suppose that there will be large increases in capital
investment as a consequence of that repatriation.”
I'm trying to see the downside. Larry seems to be describing a win-win situation for long-term investors.
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The Biology Page
Endless Forms Most Beautiful:
The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom
Sean B. Carroll
c. 2005
DDS: 571.85 CAR
This is pretty much a book on Hox genes.
Preface: Revolution # 3
Introduction: Butterflies, Zebras, and Embryos
Part I: The Making of Animals
Chapter 1: Animal Architecture: Modern Forms, Ancient Designs
Chapter 2: Monsters, Mutants, and Master Genes
Chapter 3: From E. coli to Elephants
Chapter 4: Making Babies: 25,000 Genes, Some Assembly Required
Chapter 5: The Dark Matter of the Genome: Operating Instructions for the Tool Kit
Part II: Fossils, Genes, and the Making of Animal Diversity
Chapter 6: The Big Bang of Animal Evolution
Chapter 7: Little Bangs: Wings and Other Revolutionary Inventions
Chapter 8: How the Butterfly Got Its Spots
Chapter 9: Paint It Black
Chapter 10: A Beautiful Mind: The Making of Homo sapiens
Chapter 11: Endless Forms Most Beautiful
Revolution #1: natural selection
Revoution #2: DNA
Revolution #3: Evo Devo -- evolutionary developmental biology
Samuel Williston, paleontologist, 1914: "It is also a law in evolution that the parts in an organism tend toward reduction in number, with the fewer parts greatly specialized in function." Chapter 1: Animal Architecture: Modern Forms, Ancient Designs
modular parts
repetitive
William Bateson: noted the nature of repetitive parts making up animals
page 26, author writes "these two groups of animals" but he appears to have failed to mention of the two groups; the only group he mentions at that point was arthropods; was something edited out? Maybe the first group was tetrapods.
homologs: example -- forelimbs of salamanders, sauropods, mice, and arms of humans
serial homologs: with respect to each other, forelimbs and hindlimbs are serial homologs
mouthparts, antennae, and walking legs of arthropods are serial homologs
changes in the number and kind of serial homologs are a principal theme in animal evolution
Williston's Law: page 55
to modular and repetitive, add:
symmetry
polarity
Williston / Bateson: key - modular, symmetry, and polarity
Chapter 2: Monsters, Mutants, and Master Genes
5 - 7% of newborn sheep, at one time in Utah: cyclopia -- one eye
due to ewe ingesting a toxin / teratogen around the 14th day of gestation
teratogen: cyclopamine produced by the corn lily Veratrum californicum (teras, Greek, monster; tyranno); from wiki:
cyclpamine prevents the fetal brain from dividing into two lobes (holoprosencephaly) and cause the development of a single eye (cyclopia). It does so by inhibiting the hedgehog signaling pathway (Hh). Cyclopamine is useful in studying the role of Hh in normal development, and as a potential treatment for certain cancers in which Hh is overexpressed.
Note: wiki says the farm was in Idaho; Sean Carroll said this originated in Utah
Chapter 3: From E. coli to Elephants: homeotic genes with homeoboxes are called Hox genes for short. See this article, from 2012 regarding animals, Hox genes, and sponges. Animals, by definition, contain Hox genes; sponges do not, apparently contain Hox genes, but sponges are considered animals. The author's suggest at the linked story: "At some point in the murky depths of their ancestry, sponges lost bona fide Hox and ParaHox genes!"
Chapter 6: The Big Bang of Animal Evolution: Evo Devo and Williston's Law allows us to speculate on animal history prior to the "Big Bang in Biology": the Cambrian Explosion.
Chapter 7: Little Bangs: Wings and Other Revolutionary Inventions
evolution of the paper clip: Philadelphia, Wright, Reeve, and Gem (current common paper clip)
Later, 1:41 p.m. Central Time: Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006; he won the Nobel Peace Prize for same in 2007. It's now been ten full years that "we" have been told that the science is settled.
In these past ten years, the Department of Defense never converted any of it's on-base vehicle fleet to EVs. For example, even at the smallest Air Force installation, there were generally two or three ambulances when I was in the USAF. Saying that these ambulances averaged six miles/day would be generous. They all should have been converted over to EVs by now. Same with all the on-base law enforcement sedans, probably as many as a dozen on even the smallest installations. The command staff at each installation generally each had their own vehicle for on-base use and again, none were converted to EV over the past decade.
The USPS has not converted it's vehicles to EVs, a fleet that should have been converted long ago.
Many more examples, but this tells me all I need to know about the government's -- and the past eight years, the #1 global warming cheerleader, President Obama's -- commitment to preventing global warming.
But the US government under President Obama was targeting cow farts.
Allete says it will team with MDU Resources' Montana-Dakota Utilities unit to expand
the Thunder Spirit wind farm in North Dakota, reaching the 150 MW
permitted capacity of the facility Allete Clean Energy developed in
2014-15
ALE also secures a 25-year power purchase
agreement with MDU to purchase energy from the expansion near
Hettinger, N.D.
MDU will have the option to purchase the expansion upon
completion, as it did with the first phase of Thunder Spirit
