Notes From All Over, Part 2 -- November 19, 2019

I thought the Permian boom was over. Weren't there stories just a few weeks ago that things were slowing down in the Permian? Whatever. Link to this story here. Also at zerohedge.

I thought the Permian boom was over, part 2:

From the linked Bloomberg story via Rigzone:

The New York city area may boast the largest share of personal income in the U.S., but pay is growing the fastest in the much smaller oil-boom towns of Odessa and Midland, Texas.

Indeed, Midland’s per capita personal income of more than $122,000 a year was higher than that of San Jose, San Francisco, Boston or New York last year.

Midland and Odessa -- bases for Permian basin shale production -- have benefited from a boom that last year drove the U.S. to surpass Russia to become the world’s largest oil producer.

Still, personal income in the New York-Newark-Jersey City area last year rose to almost $1.5 trillion, or 8.3% of the U.S. total -- the largest share in the U.S. The NYC metro area was followed by Los Angeles with a 4.8% share and Chicago at 3.3%. Among the top 20 largest, Denver surpassed Riverside, California for the 18th spot last year.

For the fifth year in a row, metropolitan areas in the U.S. outpaced rural and small towns in per capita personal income -- total pay divided by population.

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Backyard News

McKesson: previously posted, about a year ago. Company's headquarters moving from San Francisco to "a suburb of Dallas." Apparently that move is now taking place. Headline story of 329 folks at San Francisco headquarters who elected not to move to Texas. I was curious -- exactly to which Dallas suburb is McKesson moving. I see why the name of the suburb was not mentioned. It's a bit confusing. The company is moving to a "planned community" inside the city of Irving, TX, pretty much in between (and north) of Dallas/Ft Worth. The "planned community" is Las Colinas.

Las Colinas? Sounds like a city in southern California or Arizona or New Mexico. I had never heard of it. Here's the wiki entry. Very, very interesting. It turns out the city is closer to my apartment than it is to Dallas or Ft Worth. It's literally just down the road from where we live. I could bike there if the twelve-lane divided highways weren't such a problem between my house and Las Colinas.

The migration of businesses to Texas is truly incredible.

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The Vikings
For The Granddaughters

The names of the three long-ships that excited the "Viking Age" literature:

• the Tune ship, unearthed at Rolvsøy, 1867; dated to about 900 AD
• the Gokstad ship, unearthed at Sandar in Vestfold, 1880; overshadowed the Tune find
• the granddaddy of them all, the Oseberg ship, unearthed at Slagen in Vestfold, 1904; dated to about 820 A.D. based on tree-ring dating; the ship's active life ended in 834 A.D., when her presumptive owner died

820 A.D. -- this would be about the same time as Constantinople reaching mid-life as a Christian city. About a century after the burial of this ship (834 A.D.),

On the other side of the Viking world from Oseberg and the Norwegian Vestfold and about a century later, the Arab diplomat and Islamic teacher Ibn Fadlan noted down his detailed description of the rites surrounding the cremation of a Viking chieftain on the banks of the Volga which he witnessed in 921.

When I was in eighth grade, my dad took my grandfather (Paul Oksol) and me to Norway. The trip to Oslo-Trondheim-Bergen-Copenhagen-Berlin-Luxembourg-Paris took lasted about three weeks I suppose. Maybe only two weeks but it was a long trip measured by everything we saw.

Early in the trip -- perhaps the first "thing" we visited  --  we were taken to the museum where one or all (?) of these long ships were on display having been restored to pristine condition. At the time I did not know what the big deal was. Things are now starting to fit together. What a great story.

My three books for the week:

• Lost To The West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization, Lars Brownworth, c. 2009.
• The Vikings: A History, Robert Ferguson, c. 2009.
• And I'm re-reading 1421: The Year China Discovered America, Gavin Menzies, c. 2008.