Only Six Months Ago, Goldman Sachs Warned Of $40 Oil -- January 21, 2018

Perhaps they were just a bit early in their prognostication. As oil trends higher, Russia and Saudi Arabia are likely to throw caution to the wind and start producing again.

Having said that, more and more talk of oil trending higher, and at least one trader is making "what-if" plans for $100 oil. No link; saw the story last night; did not meet the blog's criteria for linking. LOL.

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Idle Chatter -- Nothing About The Bakken

I have a free day -- at least until 2:00 p.m. Everyone is at a soccer tournament; they left at 6:20 a.m. this morning to drive clear across Texas for another tournament. Never seems to quit. Actually, it's only an hour away. Our granddaughter's team should make the finals, and right now it is projected they will be seeded #1 in their bracket, and could end up facing the #2 team in Texas for their age group.

Soccer. This is the "06" team that she has been with for several years. It is composed of girls born in calendar year 2006. She is the youngest, born in 2007, and allowed to be on the "06" team by some loophole that I don't understand. But she is the youngest. Three nights ago during practice her coach told her she was the best player on the field that night -- and then he noted she was the youngest, by 18 months in some cases.

After their first game in this tournament, which they won, the coach told her she was NOT the best player on the team during that game. Tough love. LOL.

I'm having a blast. It started last night. And will continue through the day. No grandparenting responsibilities, and another NFL-free Sunday. Amazing how much free time that creates.

Movies: I watched  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the umpteenth time. It's a standard DVD so it plays in the Apple computer DVD drive. Interestingly, not one Apple product will play Blu-Ray and that will never change. Early on, it was believed that Steve Jobs made that decision because of licensing rights -- he didn't want to pay the royalty that would ensue if he added Blu-Ray capability to his products. Since then it has evolved to the rationale that a) he wants to keep the desktop monitor-computers as thin as possible; and, b) streaming is the future, not moving parts that DVSs entail.

The good news: almost every Blu-Ray DVD I order these days -- very, very few, by the way -- come with all three: a) conventional DVD that plays on Apple products; b) Blu Ray; and, c) streaming (inside the case there is a code that one uses to download the movie directly). But all agree that streaming is not a robust as Blu-Ray.

The whole story is interesting because at one time Apple was a proponent of Blu-Ray and Microsoft was going the HD-DVD route. Blu Ray won out. I had a blog on that years ago. This was one such post.

Books: I added this book to my nightstand last night -- The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of Williams Fox, Vanda Krefft, c. 2017. I skimmed through the book at Barnes and Noble -- came across it completely by accident. It met all my criteria for buying the book. Having said that, what sold me on it was the description of the "gilded age." It's one thing to read the wiki entry but it's another thing to read so much about this period in US history by such a great writer.

Goldman Sachs is mentioned on page 3 of the book and was the principal banker standing in the way of William Fox's plans to buy Warner Bros. Whether the deal would go through or not depended on the US Attorney General. That was back in 1929. Here it is, 2018, and nothing has changed. LOL.

• the biography itself: 755 pages
• notes: 127 pages
• bibliography: 11 pages
• index: 25 pages

Weather: back to nice weather here in north Texas. Not sure how long it will last but hopefully we have had our winter. We set a electricity-demand record last week due to the cold but the grid held. The Dallas Morning News says the record was shattered. I did not read the article; just the headline.  The regulators assured us the grid would hold but there was some doubt among some.