Locator: 47983TEXASSPORTS.
The championship team and all their supporters are now going swimming -- a midnight party. I'll know more tomorrow! LOL.
So, our granddaughter's girls' high school soccer team took state last year -- she was a junior and a captain on the team. Now, in her senior year, her high school boys’ team took the Texas baseball championship. Practicing and playing in the backyard of the Texas Rangers -- the World Champions last year -- this was really, really sweet.
Locator: 47982ECON.
Or direct to Barron's: link here.
A resilient global economy is leading to a rise in wealth once again for the world’s richest individuals, despite plenty of economic and geopolitical uncertainty, according to a new report.
Globally, the population of those with at least US$1 million in investable assets rose by 5.1% last year to 22.8 million, while their wealth rose 4.7% to US$86.8 trillion, according to the 28th annual World Wealth Report from Capgemini Research Institute, a global think tank division of Paris-based Capgemini.
It’s a sharp difference from a year earlier, when global wealth fell 3.3% to US$83 trillion. The growth trend was particularly evident in the U.S. last year, where economic resilience, slowing inflation, and soaring U.S. stocks led to a 7.3% increase in the population of those with at least US$1 million in investable assets to 7.5 million, Capgemini said.
The wealth of these individuals rose 7% to US$26.1 trillion.
More later. Watching a movie.
This was from 1998, also from Barron's. The wealth effect.
**************************
Movie Night
Kinky Boots tonight.
Perhaps one of the most poignant films ever. I never get tired of it.
And best music ever.
Locator: 47981OXY.
News today:
BRK / OXY:
Ticker:
Disclaimer: I often make a lot of mistakes doing back-of-the-envelope calculations. If this is important to you, go to the source.
Locator: 47980AAPL.
Updates
June 17, 2024: SoC / SiP update with focus on M4.
Main Page
Locator: 47980AAPL.
Tag: Apple, SoC, AAA, Triple-T — see Apple Silicon below for “Triple-T” discussion.
Chips, semiconductor: link here.
Wiki.
Suppliers: wiki.
Companies: link here.
Apple Silicon -- CNBC -- December 1, 2023. Link here.
Apple’s soaring stock price over the past two decades has been driven by its iconic consumer devices. It started with the iPod and iMac. Then came the iPhone and iPad. And more recently, the Apple Watch and AirPods.
But there’s a lot more to the biggest U.S. company by market cap than just gadgets. At its Silicon Valley headquarters, in a non-descript room filled with a couple hundred buzzing machines and a handful of engineers in lab coats, Apple is designing the custom chips that power its most popular products.
Apple first debuted homegrown semiconductors in the iPhone 4 in 2010. As of this year, all new Mac computers are powered by Apple’s own silicon, ending the company’s 15-plus years of reliance on Intel.
“One of the most, if not the most, profound change at Apple, certainly in our products over the last 20 years, is how we now do so many of those technologies in-house,” said John Ternus, who runs hardware engineering at Apple. “And top of the list, of course, is our silicon.”
That change has also opened Apple up to a new set of risks. Its most advanced silicon is primarily manufactured by one vendor, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Meanwhile, smartphones are recovering from a deep sales slump, and competitors like Microsoft are making big leaps in artificial intelligence.
In November, CNBC visited Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California, the first journalists allowed to film inside one of the company’s chip labs. We got a rare chance to talk with the head of Apple silicon, Johny Srouji, about the company’s push into the complex business of custom semiconductor development, which is also being pursued by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.
“We have thousands of engineers,” Srouji said. “But if you look at the portfolio of chips we do: very lean, actually. Very efficient.”
Unlike traditional chipmakers, Apple is not making silicon for other companies.
“Because we’re not really selling chips outside, we focus on the product,” Srouji said. “That gives us freedom to optimize, and the scalable architecture lets us reuse pieces between different products.”
It's a very, very long article.
Buried deep in the article:
Apple’s leap to 3-nanometer continued with the M3 chips for Mac computers, announced in October. Apple says the M3 enables features like 22-hour battery life and, similar to the A17 Pro, boosted graphics performance.
“It’s early days,” said Ternus, who’s been at Apple for 22 years. “We have a lot of work to do, but I think there’s so many Macs now, pretty much all Macs are capable of running Triple-A titles, which is not what it was like five years ago.”
Ternus said that when he started, “the way we tended to make products is we were using technologies from other companies, and we were effectively building the product around that.” Despite a focus on beautiful design, “they were constrained by what was available,” he said.
Triple-A titles?
One can quickly see where Apple is headed and what it means for Apple.
Apple is playing the long game.
TSM and AAPL.
"Flowers" received positive reviews from music critics and was a massive commercial success, breaking many records.
It was the best-selling global single of 2023, earning 2.7 billion subscription streams equivalents globally, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), making it Cyrus's most successful single worldwide to date.
In the United States, the single debuted at number one and spent eight non-consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 in addition to becoming Cyrus's second number-one song on the chart since "Wrecking Ball" (2013).
"Flowers" became the longest-running number one-song in the history of the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, with 50 weeks at the top.
The song was also a commercial success worldwide, debuting atop the Billboard Global 200 chart and staying at the summit for thirteen non-consecutive weeks. It topped the charts in 37 other countries including in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Singapore, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
It also broke a string of records on streaming services, including the Spotify record for the most-streamed song in a week (during both its first and second week) and the fastest song in Spotify history to surpass one billion streams (doing so in 112 days).
One wonders if time to reflect, find new friends during the Covid lock down had a lot to do with this.
Locator: 47978JOBS.
Updates
June 8, 2024: even Fox was blown away by the numbers, noting that 272,000 new jobs blew past even the highest estimates (258K). Over on social media (the comments), it sounds like a lot of folks have no clue.
Original Post
WMB: link here. Seeks to put more projects into service.
Regional Energy Access natural gas project already under construction into service by July 1, 2024 ....
... seeking to provide about 0.16 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) of the roughly 0.83-bcfd project's gas capacity available to customers on an interim basis.
The company has estimated the project's total cost at around $1 billion.
The project is already partially in service.
FERC said it approved Transco's request to make the first roughly 0.45-bcfd phase of the project available on an interim basis in October 2023.
One billion cubic feet of gas is enough to supply 5 million U.S. homes for a day. Williams said on its website that it started construction in the second quarter of 2023 and expects to put the project fully into service in the fourth quarter of 2024.
******************************
Germany
Germany gets approval to lay in more natural gas-fired power.
Decades ago, generating electricity from natural gas was a solution looking for a problem. Ten years later, we found the problem: large data centers are going to be consuming a lot of electricity. Absolutely amazing how things work out.
Move over EVs. It's no longer about "you." It's all about data centers. And Nvidia.
