Notes From All Over -- The Early Morning Edition -- November 24, 2020

Iraq: cash-strapped. Seeks $2 billion up-front for crude oil contract. This will be behind a paywall, but the headline tells the story which will start to be re-told over the next few days.

South Dakota basketball tournament: cancels plans for fans. WSJ. Irony: sponsored/hosted by Sanford Health.

Echo: "Sidewalk" coming to this device. Apparently the "app" will download automatically on Echo devices later this year but one can disable the app at any time. From CNET, October 7, 2020. Amazon alerted me to this new feature in an e-mail received overnight. All of a sudden AWS has gotten my attention, especially after noting its record-setting chip. Posted yesterday.

Chinese flu:

• damaged sense of smell; WSJ: absolutely fascinating; maybe more on this later;
• herd immunity: people still don't get it; remove the outliers and the USA leads the world in Covid-19 penetration, and yet, the penetration in the US is still below 4%; herd immunity is said to require 70% (although I'm not so sure); one leading financial analyst says herd immunity won't be reached until 4Q21;

Warren Buffett: after the customary SEC-approved delay, Warren's 3Q20 purchases are starting to be reported; here's the first I found, in US News: eight stocks Warren Buffett just bought:

• Abbvie
• Merck & Co
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Co
• Snowflake: 2.2% ownership in this company; 6.1 million shares; currently worth about $1.6 billion
• T-Mobile US: this is quite a story; #2 among US telecoms; and of the three, clearly in a league of its own;
• Pfizer
• Bank of America
• General Motors: BRK holds 80 million shares of GM, currently worth $3.4 billion;
  

Biden's economy: could be huge, absolutely huge; already the Fed is telegraphing that there will be no rate hikes until late 2023, maybe 2024.

Green hydrogen, from SeekingAlpha. Disclaimer: SRE absolutely fascinates me. I am not adding to my current position any time soon.

• Sempra Energy says its California utilities Southern California Gas and San Diego Gas & Electric are developing a program to use surplus renewable electricity generated in the middle of the day to produce green hydrogen that can be injected into the natural gas grid to help cut carbon emissions.
• SoCalGas and SDG&E are planning multiple hydrogen blending projects throughout their respective service territories, with the first proposed project expected to blend hydrogen into an isolated section of primarily polyethylene plastic distribution system in SoCalGas' service territory; the initial hydrogen blend level is planned at 1% and may increase to as much as 20%. 
• In addition to the hydrogen blending projects, SDG&E announced last month that it plans to pilot two hydrogen projects by 2022 as part its sustainability strategy to advance carbon neutrality.

Glued sounds: this is what Sophia, six-years-old, first grade is being taught -- 

• Welded or Glued Sounds- these are sounds that when they are together they do not say their normal sounds, but rather create a slightly different sound. The welded sounds are the following: all, am, an, ang, ing, ong, ung, ank, ink, onk, unk.
• At first I thought it was ridiculous, but it is amazing. It seemed this was linguistics for college students, but now I get it. Pretty impressive that teachers are teaching this to first graders.
• which word does not belong in this group: bat, cat, fat, mat, fall -- if you "guess" correctly, you will understand the concept of "glued sounds"
  

Iraq and Russia: for the archives. Link to Simon Watkins. This will be an interesting story to re-visit after Biden has been president for a year or so. The tea leaves suggest "everything" will change in the Mideast under a new US administration. Should be fascinating to watch.