Notes From All Over, Part 1 -- February 18, 2020

Boardings in the Bakken, January, 2020, passenger boardings commercial airports, across the entire state of North Dakota, up 12% over January, 2019:

• every commercial airport saw an increase in boardings except Grand Forks;
• Dickinson: up 13.5 percent
• Bismarck: up 12 percent
• Minot: up 9 percent
• Williston: up 5.4 percent
• the other three cities were not mentioned: Fargo, Jamestown, Devils Lake?
• anecdotally business activity is about the same year-over-year; 
• my hunch: some NoDaks are seeing huge increases in their net worth due to oil sector and are spending some of that money on winter trips to Hawaii and Phoenix;

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

The market: the Dow is not the market but it certainly seems ... we've discussed this before. Let's move on. The Dow was down about 300 points at its worst today but finished down about 160 points. Pretty amazing, considering.

Coronavirus statistics for February 18, 2020. I haven't seen them yet; let's look together, at the same time. Coronoavirus statistics.

We've leveled off at 6 to 7% worldwide, change in total, day-to-day, but change in daily was incredibly bad news. The change in daily, day-over-day, was a whopping 39%.

The biomedical statisticians should have fun with this.

One wonders if the Chinese going back to work has something to do with this. I would still like to see some analysis of the health status of the folks who died before they were infected with SARS-CoV-2.

NASCAR: still no "real" news regarding Ryan Newman, Daytona 500. NASCAR will look at this closely -- the events leading up to the accident, and the event that caused the accident -- but I'm not hopeful that any changes will be made. I might come back to this later.

Costs of renewable energy: back to Australia. The article is too complicated to review here. Elon Musk is salivating. He knows that Americans won't be able to figure this out -- but he will end up selling them a lot of batteries.

Cash-back: this credit card cash-back stuff is quite incredible. I just received my "cash-back distribution" from Costco today. And the annual distribution from USAA almost pays for car insurance for six months; in fact, I think it does and then some. Best of all: Amazon, of course. On top of that there are some incredible deals on Amazon. The other day I saw a hard-cover coffee-table book that was the cat's meow, as they say. At the local bookstore (not Barnes and Noble) it was selling for $50 and no discount. At Amazon, for some inexplicable reason, it was selling for $5.91. And it was being sold by Amazon, not a third party seller. It arrived yesterday (one-day free shipping), and brand-new, still in its shrink-wrap. 

Bernard Kerik: one of those folks that President Trump pardoned / commuted today. Interesting, interesting story for the crime he was serving.

Zero Hedge: one of the first -- if not the first -- to report the possibility of a Chinese lab "producing" the coronavirus. After that revelation, Zero Hedge was banned from twitter. More and more stories now coming from other sources suggesting that it was entirely possible that a Wuhan lab was responsible. Tonight, it is being reported that US Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) is suggesting that that story should be seriously entertained.

Barr: now we got the Democrats defending Barr.

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"Because they're crap!"

Vincent, Freddie Starr
The Brits are simply brilliant.

I assume that, subconsciously, Sophia painting on the iPad brought me here tonight.