TGIF -- Odds And Ends -- Nothing About The Bakken -- July 15, 2022

WTI: mid-day, on a Friday, WTI is up almost 3%; up almost $3.00; trading at $98.61.

BNPL: a new wrinkle with "buy now pay later."

• our apartment complex manager has partnered with a lending company that will pay one's rent automatically on the first of each month;
• the renter will then have all month to pay back the lender
• in other words, renters can now pay their monthly rent on a weekly or even daily basis
• it also makes it easier for unrelated roommates to share rent costs
  
• "enroll for a small monthly fee" -- which is not disclosed until you enroll
  

Tanks: huge; link here to Peter Zeihan:

• at the link, be sure to read the comments;
• Poland to buy 116 used Abrams tanks from the US
• this frees up Poland to send all its preexisting tank stocks to Ukraine
• WW-iii expands

Masks are back: Los Angeles County will mandate masks again on/about July 29, 2022. 

• Most of the rext of California will probably say "nyet" to Newsom on masks.

Surge: see state-by-state surge in Covid the past month or so.

• California's numbers continue to rise;
• Texas: subtle but it looks like numbers continue to rise slowly;
• Florida: also subtle but it looks like Florida's numbers have peaked and are now dropping again;

Chrome: wow, wow, wow! This is amazing. How many old Macs are sitting around your home not being used because they don't have the chip / memory needed for new MacOS updates. I can't wait to get this firestick from Amazon and see if I can "re-vive" an old massive desktop. This would be huge. Link here.

• from Google: ChromeOS Flex
• will replace the operating system of older PCs and Macs that turns these old bricks into Chromebooks
• a bootable USB stick
• Chrome cloud-first operating system
• this is simply brilliant
• Macs released after 2010 with 16 GB of free storage
• universally panned by those commenting at the link; that's fine.
• I wonder if my old massive desktop would still work as a "streaming" monitor only?