I assume somebody's crying at The Los Angeles Times.
What do you do when you can't give it away? You charge 10 cents/week to look like it's a great deal.
This is simply the best story I've seen all week, and it wasn't even a story. Again, Don caught it. How he catches these things, I have no idea. I think his cat is a co-conspirator. Heaven knows I've sent that cat more tuna than I've bought for myself (and I won't even mention all the bets I've lost to that cat).
I digress.
Here's the "story" that Don caught. The most liberal newspaper in the USA -- more liberal than The New York Times can now be yours for only ten cents per week. Ten cents per week. Through the end of the year. That's ten cents/week for the next 12 weeks. That's about $1.20 for three months of The Los Angeles Times.
Wow, talk about an embarrassment.
But to get this great deal, you have to:
a) agree to $1.99/week after that (but you are allowed to cancel at any time); and,
b) agree to read the front page and not laugh
Okay, I made that part up about reading the front page and not laughing.
Don noted that you can't even get a Starbucks coffee for a buck-twenty.
And, no, not even for a buck-twenty for three months do I plan to subscribe.
Starbucksshutters its on-line store. I did not know they had one. I guess maybe I did know after the recent press but, if so, I had not known about it until the recent decision to close the on-line strore.
The United States won their seventh consecutive
Presidents Cup over the International team on Sunday even as the final
margin of eight points disguised the one-sided nature of the event.
A
Sunday rally by the beleaguered Internationals, who won six of the 12
singles matches and halved three others, allowed the visitors to avoid a
record defeat and escape Liberty National with a little pride.
The U.S., led by unbeaten
Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson, prevailed 19-11 to claim the cup for
the 10th time in 12 stagings of the biennial event.
The record winning margin is 11-1/2 points by the Americans in 2000.
NASCAR: great race today. Incredible that Chase Elliot could lose this race.
Futures: all green (despite the fact that the Trump tax cut bill is DOA).
Union: won't deliver water, food to Puerto Rico victims. No links; story everywhere. If Trump sends in US Army logistics, his approval rating will surge.
DUCs: in the Bakken, a lot of DUCs are going to be reported this week; if this trend continues, we could see North Dakota crude oil production drop below one million bopd when the August, 2017, data is released later this month.
NFL-free weekend, including no SNF.
NFL-free weekend, caught up on some reading, bits and pieces of the following:
Monet: his early years; pastels
Ernest Hemingway: "The Letters of .." -- a 3-volume set
Mark Twain: his autobiography -- a 3-volume set
**********************************
Banking in Texas
Sophia withdrawing $5 while visiting the local "pumpkin patch" this afternoon:
She told me her password is, "IloveT3xas." She told me to keep it a secret.
Sophia is a believer in this bull market by the way. When I asked her about the risk of an inverted yield curve in the bond market, she referred me to this article, and said, "not to worry. Now where is the ice cream and kettle corn?"
Shadows in a Mirror, Chris Isaak
When he's good, he's very, very good.
Sunday night is always the toughest night of the week for me. This song and video take me back to the first love of my life, my coming of age years -- she passed away some years ago, so no threat to current relationship -- but that doesn't make tonight - a Sunday night -- any easier to get through.
500 Miles Away From Home, Inside Llewyn Davis
Why I love to blog (and want to live forever). If I did not blog, I never would have come across this article about one of my favorite movies, Inside Llewyn Davis. It's one of my top ten movies, but interestingly, I cannot watch it over and over, like most of the other movies I love. It's simply too intense for me, emotionally.
There are an incredible number of headlines at the various news aggregators regarding the price of oil going forward.
I plan to spend the day reading: I will attack the 3-volume Mark Twain autobiography that first started appearing in 2010. The third volume has a copyright date of 2015. I don't particularly care for Mark Twain but I felt any good library needed to include his autobiography. My notes on the autobiography will be at this post.
I have read snippets of the first volume but did not enjoy it; my mind was unprepared. However, now I am ready and having read some from all three volumes today, I am more than ready to proceed.
So, if the blogging is intermittent today, you will know why.
With regard to all the stories being reported today, for now I will simply link the articles, make minimal comments and come back to the stories later if the spirit moves me, and likely it won't.
Note: some oilprice links may be sponsored content; I no longer know what articles from oilprice are paid content.
Comments:
much of this oil-price forecasting seems to be coming from an echo chamber from a cubicle on the 98th floor of some skyscraper on Wall Street
themes affecting price of oil
strength of the US dollar: Yellen wants to strengthen the US dollar (price of WTI drops); tea leaves suggest Trump will "price" her out to pasture
recent IEA and OPEC prognostications of increasing demand for crude oil in 2018
misleading headlines that OPEC is complying with cuts (OPEC production increased in September and hot summer in Mideast is coming to an end, just as the driving season in the US is coming to an end
bulls betting on collapse of Kurdish exports
$60 oil and the Bakken ramps up
$80 oil and The New York Times will have an article on the Bakken boom
$100 oil and the Bakken explodes (memo to self: note to Jane Nielson, the writer of the prescient essay, "Bakken Oil Hype")
*********************************
By the way, from the "Bakken Oil Hype" link above, Ms Nielson wrote:
Not unreasonably, USGS estimates of undiscovered and technically
recoverable oil are posed rather like gambling odds. At Bakken, USGS
estimates:
5% chance of finding a total of 4.3 billion barrels,
95% chance of finding a total of 3.1 billion barrels, and
50% chance of finding a total of 3.6 billion barrels (the famous USGS “mean” estimate).
In its Fact Sheet 2008-3021, USGS upped its estimate of undiscovered
oil in the Bakken by a factor of 25, compared to its 1995 figures. Many petroleum experts are quite willing to agree with USGS’s admission of significant uncertainty in these estimates.
Back-of-the-envelope calculations and comments:
the North Dakota Bakken boom began in 2007 and hit its stride in 2010
North Dakota is producing about 1,000,0000 bbls of oil/day -- not all of it from the Bakken, but most of it is now coming from the Bakken
1 million bopd x 365 days = 365 million bbls/year
x 10 years = 3,650 million bbls or 3.65 billion bbls
some say operators have drilled one-sixth of the wells that will ultimately be drilled
EURs of future wells will exceed current and older wells
Amazing, isn't it. The USGS "mean" projection was 3.6 billion bbls.
Disclaimer: I often make simple arithmetic mistakes and mathematical errors. I often make typographical and factual errors. My typographical errors include typing "billion" when I mean "million" and vice versa. If any of this information is important to you, go to the source.
**********************************
Imagine The Negative G's and Zero Gravity
I'm not sure why this was posted over at Twitter today. It was filmed more than a year ago at the Farnborough 2016 Air Show:
