Saturday, December 31, 2022

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Wow, wow, wow! Sugaring NYC is putting in a brand new "store" in our neighborhood shopping mall, without question, one of the best malls of this type in the Dallas-Ft Worth area. 

Covid-19: percent of Americans vaccinated for Covid-19. Link here.

Seasonal flu -- link here:

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The Book Page

A slew of books are now in the public domain:

In 2019, for the first time in over two decades, a new crop of literary work entered the public domain: everything first published in the United States in 1923. (Don’t forget the secret public domain books, either.) In 2020, books by E.M. Forster, Edna Ferber, and Edith Wharton became available for remixing. 2021 brought us everything published in 1925, “the greatest year for books,” including, of course, The Great Gatsby (yes, a sequel was published immediately, with plenty more in the works). And last year, notably, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh passed through the veil, leading, inevitably and unfortunately, to this.

 

So what’s on the table this year? Though copyright laws differ from country to country, on January 1st, 2023, books that were published in 1927 will enter the public domain in the United States. Here’s a selection of the most interesting:

 

Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

Agatha Christie, The Big Four

Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets

Franklin W. Dixon, The Tower Treasure (The Hardy Boys #1)

Franklin W. Dixon, The House on the Cliff (The Hardy Boys #2)

Franklin W. Dixon, The Secret of the Old Mill (The Hardy Boys #3)

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger”

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place”

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Franz Kafka, Amerika

Anita Loos, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes

Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Week 52: December 25, 2022 -- December 31, 2022

Top US energy story of the year:

Top story:

  • Joe Biden is still president

Top international non-energy story:

  • Russian-Ukraine war continues
    • Ukraine destroying Russia's conventional military with cast-off weapons from US
  • Covid-19 surges in Asia
    • all the attention on China, but Japan, South Korea also experiencing surge

Top international energy story:

  • Russia to flood global economy with diesel just before sanctions kick in
  • EU energy crisis averted (at least for now): warm weather and de-industrialization
  • Texas grid -- ERCOT -- holds just fine

Top national non-energy story:

  • various agencies, states recommend US mask indoors again; data doesn't support that recommendation -- yet
    • cases plummeting

Top national energy story

  • WTI ends at $80.29 last trading day of 2022
  • natural gas: proved reserves in US sets a new record
  • oil: US oil reserves increased by 16%
  • STR acquires MNRL
Javier Blas:

Focus on fracking: most recent edition.

Top North Dakota non-energy story:

  • Polar vortex shuts down 1/3rd Bakken production

Top North Dakota energy story:

Geoff Simon's top North Dakota energy stories:

Bakken economy:

Commentary:

Entertainment:

Saturday, New Year's Eve -- December 31, 2022

Sunny skies and 70 degrees -- this is north Texas on New Year's Eve and Olivia's soccer team winning this morning's tournament game, 6 - 0. 

Rock my world:

Brooks and Dunn


Saudi Arabia foreign exchange reserves: link here.


US natural gas records: link here.

Laser-focused on dividends: link here.

Companies in the S&P 500 allocated an estimated $561 billion toward dividends in 2022, up from $511.2 billion in 2021 and the highest amount on record.
Dividend spending is poised for another record in 2023 as companies are under pressure from investors to keep increasing returns ....“There is still a lot of cash on corporate balance sheets. You’d have to have significant pullback for there not to be a record [in 2023] at this point.” 
Other shareholder returns, such as buybacks, are expected to decline slightly from a total of around $963 billion in 2022, as a 1% excise tax is set to take effect in January.
S&P 500 companies spent $210.8 billion on stock buybacks in the third quarter, down about 10% from a year earlier.
Among the businesses that increased dividends in 2022 were chip maker Broadcom Inc., fast-food giant McDonald’s Corp., credit-card firm Visa Inc. and biopharmaceutical business AbbVie Inc.
For example, Broadcom in December said it was boosting its quarterly dividend by 12% to $4.60 a share for the fiscal year ending October 2023, pointing to strong cash flows over the past year and the expectation of continued demand in most of its markets.
Broadcom: cash and cash equivalents were $12.4 billion as of Oct. 30, 2022, up 2% from a year earlier, a filing showed. It paid $7 billion in cash dividends for the year ended October 30, 2022, up 13.2% from the prior-year period.
Dividends are also set to get a boost in 2023 as some of the companies that cut or pared payouts early in the pandemic bring them back. Nearly 190 U.S.-listed companies stopped paying dividends in 2020 to preserve cash as the pandemic closed swaths of the economy.
Thirty-nine returned to them that same year, 53 followed suit in 2021, and roughly 30 have done so this year. 

I have to thank a reaeder for alerting me to Broadcom, now a significant part of my "new money" allocation, 30-year plan.