Tuesday, February 19, 2019 -- Making America Great -- US Steel, Natural Gas. Hollywood? Not So Much....

Box Office: winter, 2019, revenue hit an 8-year low in the US. Link here. The entertainment coming out of Washington, DC, swamped (pun intended) whatever was coming out of Hollywood. Where are the Coen Brothers when we need them?

US Steel: making America great. US Steel reopens Texas mill as industry rebounds. Just as predicted.

U.S. Steel is opening a previously shuttered East Texas mill after market conditions that originally forced the manufacturer to close the facility have improved.

The process of reopening the shuttered No. 1 Electric-Weld Pipe Mill at Lone Star Tubular Operations in Lone Star, Texas — about two hours east of Dallas — began immediately, the Pittsburgh company announced earlier this month. About 140 people will be hired at the mill.

"We are encouraged by an improvement in market conditions and an increased customer demand for tubular products that are mined, melted and made in America," said David Burritt, president and chief executive of United States Steel Corp. (NYSE: X), in a prepared statement.

U.S. Steel permanently idled the facility in 2016 when oil prices were low and activity in the Permian Basin slowed considerably. Also, the domestic steel market was suffering from cheap Turkish and Indian imports that undercut American prices.

Three years later, the landscape looks very different.

The Permian Basin in West Texas is roaring and producing at record amounts. And after President Trump took office, he levied steel import tariffs against several countries in an attempt to kickstart the struggling industry.

Trump may not be the smartest man in the room, but .... he knows American business.

Natural gas: can US production keep up with demand? Data points:

• Mexico now imports 7 percent of US daily production
• consumption by electric power sector increased by nearly 50% from 2005 to 2016, reaching 27 Bcf/d
• industrial demand has also increased by 30 percent as some manufacturing relocated to the US to take advantage of low gas prices
• demand has also increased from LNG exports: LNG exports have reached almost 4 Bcf/d (December, 2019

Somewhere out there, there's gotta be intelligent life ... but then, again, it's hard enough finding intelligent life on earth. Scientists have just "found," "discovered," counted 300,000 more galaxies in the "known" universe. Link here. And that was just looking at "a segment of the northern sky." Of course, I can't put this into perspective because:

• they don't say how "big" that segment of the sky was (if the segment represented only 1% of the "sphere," the total number of observable galaxies might increase by a factor of 100
• they don't say how many galaxies they have counted so far

Where's Paul Sagan when you need him?