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On The Wrong Side Of History?
It's Beginning To Look That Way
The S&P 500 hit another record high today.
This is starting to not look good.
BRK-B's benchmark: the S&P 500.
BRK-B: down 12.5% from its 52-week high.
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Passing The Baton -- A Flashback
Locator: 48645REALITY.
Yuval Noah Harari was recently in the news again. Link here.
Yuval needs to look at 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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What The Hell Happened To Centene?
Down 40% in the past five days.
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Wow, Wow, Wow -- Another Very Misleading Headline
Based on the headline, I thought Freevee was gone for good. But it’s not going away. And it will still be free. There will simply be one less "icon" selection on my streaming monitor.
Nope, it's not gone. Freevee has simply migrated to Amazon Prime Video.
From the linked article:
Amazon is discontinuing its stand-alone free streaming TV service next month as it looks to consolidate its content offerings under Prime Video.
The service, called Freevee, launched in 2019 underneath IMDb, the film and TV site Amazon bought in 1998. It offered a stable of free, ad-supported video, including original series and some Prime Video content, primarily through an app.
The Freevee app will shut down in August, at which point users will be able to watch shows and movies on Prime Video for free without a subscription to Amazon’s Prime loyalty program, according to a notice to users. “Prime Video is the new exclusive home for Freevee TV shows, movies and Live TV,” the notice states.
Middle East: Trump and Netanyahu are re-drawing the maps and allegiances across the Mideast. Link here.
Trump's new moniker: "Lawrence of Arabia" obviously doesn't work, so in the Levant and Persia, POTUS will simply accept "The Don Of the New Mideast." Or "the dawn of the new Mideast." We'll wait for Judge Boasberg to weigh in.
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Trump Accounts For Newborns
Original post: Trump Accounts For Infants And Children: The "$1,000 Trump Accounts" program proposed by President Donald Trump would be tax-deferred investment accounts for newborns, intended to give children a financial head start.
In fact, these accounts are god-awful. Absolutely worthless. They are way too limited, too many strings attached, only allow eight years total investment (birth to age eight), and when tapped, taxed at regular income rates. "529s" are so much better.
We may discuss this again later, once the bill passes, assuming it does (pass).
Updated: July 21, 2025.
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HVD
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $67.29.
Active rigs: 30.
Nine new permits, #42077 - #42085, inclusive:
Five permits renewed:
Six permit cancellations:
Locator: 48643ARCHIVES.
Updates
July 5, 2025: The WSJ today. Whoo-hoo! They're reading the blog! My passport arrived today; photos pending. Couldn't be happier.
Original Post
I applied to renew my expired passport online less than ten days ago. Took me about twenty minutes to complete the online application.
Same day response from the US State Department that they had received my application and would begin processing my application once the credit card payment cleared.
Two days later, I received a note from the US State Dept letting me know that the payment had cleared and they had began processing my application.
Today, I received an e-mail saying the passport and the passport card had been completed and both have been mailed, and mailed separately. I think the whole process took less than ten days and three - five days of that will be due to mailing the documents. Truly amazing.
My passport expired in 2023 and I thought I would have to do a whole lot more to get a new passport, but if a passport is expired less than five years, it can be simply renewed on line.
Amazing.
By the way, I let my passport expire because I thought I would never need it again; I'm done traveling overseas. But it turns out, everything I do, it seems, "someone" asks me for my passport -- including when I went to renew my Texas "Real ID" driver's license. Say what you want, this country does pretty well in the big scheme of things.
Advice: the most important thing -- get your passport photo taken by someone who knows what they are doing. I had no problem with my passport photo but I can say without qualification the photo was the most challenging part of the process.
Submitted June 24, 2025, on-line:
June 24, 2025 -- July 9, 2025: 16 days -- less than three weeks.
Locator: 48642ARCHIVES.
This has nothing to do with the Bakken or the market. This is simply some rambling.
The best thing I ever did was start a blog.
Now, I see that Apple has added a new app: journaling. Interesting.
Journaling.
I looked at the app the other day.
I'm thrilled that Apple is encouraging folks to journal. I think it's the most important thing folks can do. I prefer that folks journal the old-fashioned way -- pen and journal but, I assume, an e-journal is the way-to-go for the new generation.
At night, when I can't sleep, and I don't want to read the news, I find myself reading my own e-journals, or rather, my various blogs.
My favorite blog is my "literature" blog.
I think, in the big scheme of things, the best website I ever did for me personally was the blog on literature.
It's amazing how much original material I have. I will use it as a jumping off point when studying literature (and history) with Sophia.
ChatGPT (or the AI of your choice) has become a huge, excellent complement to the blogging process.
I have learned the importance of scaffolding when studying an issue. We'll talk about scaffolding later. I've already discussed the concept with ChatGPT. It is absolutely amazing how quickly ChatGPT becomes your best friend. Absolutely scary. LOL.
By the way, I forwarded the list below to ChatGPT and asked ChatGPT, based on the book list below, what she recommends I read next. She gave me four suggestions. Truly amazing. And she read and analyzed my list in a nanosecond.
My hunch: a college student could submit an essay to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to grade and critique it before submitting it for a grade. LOL.
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Summer Reading Program
Summer reading program: 2025
Locator: 48641JOBS.
I really have little interest in the jobs reports -- don’t take that out of context -- so this is for the archives.
First of all: CNBC talking heads say the ADP numbers and the government numbers, to be released tomorrow, often diverge, and often diverge significantly. Most recently ADP numbers have diverged much more than the estimates -- some talking heads suggesting ADP numbers are simply "wrong." Whatever that means.
Today:
There was a lot of "talk" on CNBC when these numbers came out today, but I certainly don't recall anything of note to explain why ADP "badly missed expectations."
There are two stories here:
Private payrolls lost 33,000 jobs in June, the ADP report showed, the first decrease since March 2023. Economists polled by Dow Jones forecast an increase of 100,000 for the month. The May job growth figure was revised even lower to just 29,000 jobs added from 37,000.
But wow, that was quite a miss.
In our area, the sector seeming to lose the most jobs: restaurants. I've never seen so many restaurants closing in this tourist-destination area of Texas. It's so bad, that the local (daily) community impact media outlet is now tracking all the restaurants that have recently closed and announcements of future closings.
I've always thought restaurants overbuilt in the local area but a lot of iconic restaurants in the area have announced closures.
More broadly, tech companies have been announcing job cuts across the board, and some vehicle manufacturers are now also cutting jobs.
So, what's the denominator (which is not mentioned in any of the stories today):
The most recent available data shows thetotal non-farm employment in the US was 159.56 million in May 2025. This figure is up from 159.42 million in April 2025 and 157.83 million in May 2024, indicating growth over the past month and year. The month-over-month increase was 0.09%, while the year-over-year increase was 1.10%.
So, 100,000 / 160 million = 0.000625 = 0. 0625%.
Drop all the zeros: 1 / 1600.
As always, I consider monthly job numbers changes nothing more than headline opportunities for business news outlets. Don't take that out of context.
Locator: 48639INTEL.
Locator: 48639INTC.
See disclaimer (briefly, posted at bottom of this blog).
A reader sent me an Intel press release stating that Intel is considering taking a huge writeoff to dump their focus on 18A chips and switch to 14A chips:
Three things:
So, I asked ChatGPT: Compared to the rest of industry, how is Intel doing under its new CEO?
The answer was incredibly long. The four screenshots I took (I could have easily taken several more):
My comments, for the reader who sent me the Intel press release. Remember: this is not an investment site. These comments are meant for no one other than the reader and my extended family members who would ask me about Intel as an investment:
My comments:
This blog on Intel is / was not ready for prime time, but ...
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Disclaimer
Brief
Reminder
Briefly:
Locator: 48638APPLE.
Apple: link here.
Shipments of desktops and notebooks to the United States reached 16.9 million units in the first quarter of 2025, representing a 15% increase compared to the same period last year.
Apple shipped 2.705 million units, up from 2.102 million in the first quarter of 2024.
Apple's gain was the highest among the top five vendors, outpacing Lenovo's 19.9% growth and significantly exceeding Dell's 8.3% and HP's 13.1%.
Apple was the only top-five vendor to grow its U.S. market share by more than 1.5 percentage points during the quarter.
Locator: 48637B.
Amazon: announces one-millionth robot joins the workforce. Amazon's goal: to have more robots then union members.
Tesla's 2Q25 numbers: in line with estimates; shares popping 6%.
Apple: link here.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $66.04.
New wells:
RBN Energy: Keyera goes nationwide with purchase of Plains Midstream Canada's NGL business.
Canada’s energy industry has seen more than its share of merger-and-acquisition activity this year. The latest big deal involves the midstream sector, with Keyera agreeing on June 17 to buy Plains Midstream Canada’s NGL business in Canada for C$5.15 billion ($3.75 billion). The purchase will transform Alberta-focused Keyera into a nationwide NGL machine and caps its very busy first half of 2025. In today’s RBN blog, we take a closer look at the agreement and how it ties into other recent initiatives by the Canadian midstreamer.
There’s been a flurry of M&A up north. Small property and production asset purchases/sales that barely make a flash on the radar of the industry’s press have been commonplace, but the recent blockbuster C$15 billion ($10.7 billion) merger between oil and gas producers Whitecap Resources and Veren Inc. set the Canadian oil and gas producing sector abuzz. And all of this is happening in an environment where Western Canada’s natural gas prices have been, at times, trading at mere pennies per MMBtu this summer as crude oil prices swing wildly on U.S. tariff zig-zags and recent geopolitical turbulence in the Middle East.
Not to be outdone, Canada’s midstream space, often quietly working behind the scenes to process, store and transport natural gas, NGLs and crude oil, saw its own large-scale transformative acquisition announced a couple of weeks ago. Keyera’s plan to buy substantially all of Plains Midstream Canada’s NGL assets in Canada, while subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals, is expected to close by Q1 2026. Before we get too deep into the details of the deal, let’s take a very quick tour of both companies in terms of their operations and footprints across North America, starting with Keyera.
Keyera Corp. is a Calgary, AB-based midstream company that operates 12 natural gas processing plants, NGL fractionation plants, pipelines, storage, and rail- and truck-loading terminals as well as the Alberta EnviroFuels (AEF) plant, a manufacturer of iso-octane, an important component of motor gasoline — all located in Alberta. The company also operates two storage sites, one for crude oil (Wildhorse Terminal) at Cushing, OK, and the other for NGLs (Oklahoma Liquids Terminal) near Tulsa, OK.
