Locator: 48803TARIFFS.
Tonight, 10:45 p.m. CT -- all major US equity indices just turned green.
All things being equal -- i.e., no new news overnight -- the market should surge in the a.m.
The EU has to to be getting nervous. The EU is soon to be the last man standing -- the last country / region to get a deal with Trump.
With regard to Japan: timing is everything.
Does this guy ever sleep? Contrast this with the former president who was always asleep.
Locator: 48802SIR.
Man From U.N.C.L.E. -- 1964 - 1968. I graduated from Williston High School, 1969, which meant I probably never missed one episode of MFU.
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The Sixth Industrial Revolution
Is anyone paying attention? Link here.
Chatbots are becoming the go-to source for online answers for many consumers, chipping away at the dominance of traditional web search and adding another avenue of outreach that brands must cultivate to connect with customers.
An estimated 5.6% of U.S. search traffic on desktop browsers last month went to an AI-powered large language model like ChatGPT or Perplexity, according to Datos, a market intelligence firm that tracks web users’ behavior.
That pales beside the 94.4% that still went to traditional search engines like Alphabet’s Google or Microsoft’s Bing, which have tried to fight off the new competition by adding artificial intelligence summaries to the top of their search results.
But the percentage of traffic that went to browser-based AI search has more than doubled since June 2024, when it was 2.48%, according to Datos, which is part of marketing software company Semrush. It has more than quadrupled since January 2024, when the figure was just under 1.3%.
From the first section of chapter four of The Story of Semiconductors by John Orton, c. 2004.
This is absolutely fascinating. It puts into perspective:
This was done quickly using a keyboard that has a "bad" n. I've tried to correct all the typographical errors but can't guarantee that all typographical errors have been corrected.
Note: below:
Chapter 4: Silicon, Silicon, and yet more Silicon.
4.1 Precursor to the revolution
With the crucial advantage of hindsight, we are very well aware of the sea change consequent upon the invention of the transistor but it should not really surprise us to learn that those struggling to come to terms with it at the time were less readily persuaded.
Yes, it [the transistor] was small and yes, it used far less power than the incumbent device (the thermionic valve -- the vacuum tube) but there were disadvantages too. There was the problem of excess noise and the difficulty in producing devices which could amplify at high frequencies. Needless to say, in its early days, the transistor was seen essentially as a possible replacement for the valve -- many of the companies taking part in its development were primarily valve (or, since they were mainly American companies such as RCA, GE, Sylvania, and Philco, tube) companies whose main business was, and continued to be for some considerable time, either valves or tubes. [In American these were called "vacuum tubes"; in England they were called thermionic valves.]
It is important to recognize that, though solid state circuity was eventually to dominate the market, sales of valves did not even reach their peak until 1957 and showed little sign of serious decline until the late 1960s -- the transistor might be an exciting technical advance but was not at all obvious that it represented a major commercial investment.
The possible exceptions were the small start-up companies, such as Texas Instruments (TI), Farichild, Hughes, or Transitron, who carried none of the tube or valve baggage which encumbered the larger companies but they were, by definition, small and insignificant! They were, however, flexible and enterprising and it was from them that many of the important innovations in semiconductor technology were to come.
Technical innovation might be exciting and full to the brim with promise but, during the 1950s, the chief problem in transistor manufacture was one of reproducibility. We have already touched on the difficulty of controlling the base width in double-doped and alloyed structures which had a direct and crucial effect on cut-off frequency but there was the additional problem of encapsulation which frequently failed to stabilize the device against atmospheric pollution.
Many manufacturers were obliged ot divide their product into "bins" containing high-grad devices which might sell for $20 apiece down to run-of-the-mill (crumby?) specimens which they were lucky enough to offload for 75 cents!
Only with the emergence of planar technology could these problems be overcome -- and this process was not even invented until 12 years after the point contact transistor.
And, needless to say, it took several more years to become widely accepted.
Nevertheless, early transistors did find applications, first in hearing aids where the low power requirement, low weight, and small volume were obvious bonuses (though the excess noise associated with many devices could hardly have been welcomed by users!) and in small portable radios -- the ubiquitous "Transistor" which did more than anything to bring the word into common usage. [This explains the "hearing aid" mania that began in the 60s and to some extent, continues.]
Again, it was on one of the small firms (TI) which saw the opportunity and forged an arrangement with the Industrial Development Engineering Associates (IDEA) to produce the "Regency TR1" radio in October 1954. It was challenged, in the following year, by Raytheon with its own model and subsequently by subsequently by numerous others, including, significantly, Sony who later contributed to the delight of youth (and the chagrin of the elderly!) with its highly successful "Walkman" personal tape player.
Applications in car radios followed soon afterward and, in spite of various sticky patches, by the year 1960 there were some 30 US companies making transistors to a total value of over $300 million (see Braun and Macdonald 1982: 76 - 77.)
Another area of application which attracted immediate attention was that of computers. These were still in a very primitive state of development during the 1950s -- analogue computers had been used in radar systems as early as 1943 but the first general purpose digital electronic coputer (ENIAC -- Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was not built (at Penn State University) until 1946.
It filled a large room, used 18,000 valves and dissipated 150kW!
British computing skills had been honed by code-breaking endeavours with the Colossus machine during the Second World War (Colossus was first introduced in 1943 and by the end of the war there were no less than 10 machines in use) and this experience was probably vital to the development in Cambridge of a rival to ENICAC, known as EDSAC (Electronic Digit Storage Automatic Calculator).
This appeared towards the end of the 1940s, while the first transistorized computer was probably the TRADIC developed by Bell for the US Army in 1954, employing 700 transistors and 10,000 Ge diodes (all hand-wired!), followed by a commercial computer from IBM, containing over 2,000 transistors, in the following year.
The low dissipation and small physical size of the transistor gave it an immediate advantage and its solid state construction offered hope of much improved reliabiliyy -- however, it was initially limited in speed by its relatively poorly controlled base width and once the decision to use digital techniques became generally accepted, this took on a more serious aspect because of the extra speed required for digital processing (see Box 4.1).
Indeed, there was relatively little enthusiasm for the long-term future of such machines -- a US survey at the end of the 1940s suggested theat the likely national need might be satisfied by about a hundred digital computers!
Such are the perils of technological forecasting! In mitigation, one must accept that, at that time, they [computers] were relatively expensive and ponderous instruments.
While the commercial and consumer markets for transistors and transistorized equipment were still in an uncertain state, there could be little doubt of the seriousness of US military interest.
Much military electronic equipment had either to be portable, to be airborne, or to be attached to missiles where size, weight, and ruggedness were at a premium. The transistor therefore came as a heaven-sent opportunity to the military purchasing arm and, right from the word "go," government finance for transistor development was widely available -- indeed, there was more than a hint to suggest that military backing kept the youthful transistor industry afloat during a large part of the 1950s. [I was born in 1951; the history of the computer age and my life are almost exact contemporaries.]
Something between 35% ad 50% all US annual semiconductor production was destined for military use during the period 1955- 63 (Braun and Macdonald 1982: 80).
(It should be remembered, too, that it was largely pressure from the military that led to the early demise of Ge in favour of Si as the preferred transistor material on the grounds of its much better resistance to thermal runaway).
Added to this came the decision by President Kennedy in 1961 to mount an intensive space programme, with the intention to "put a man on the moon by 1970."
Once again, given the modest lifting capability of current US rockets, weight was a vital factor and all electronics must therefore be transistorized.
Ruggedness and reliability, too, were better served by solid state devices than by the older, relatively fragile vacuum tubes.
The European industry, though technically well advanced, received only a fraction of this level of support, and with inevitable consequences -- competition with America was, at best, patchy and generally ineffective.
Nor was this state of affairs helped by some unfortunate technical planning.
An unhappy example lies at the door of the British Post Office (then responsible for telecommunications as well as mail delivery, see Fransman 1995: 89 - 97).
When it became clear, after the Second World War, that domestic and industrial demand for telephone services was soon likely to escalate, the Post Office, in 1956, took the bold decision dramatically to upgrade its telephone switching capabilities by leapfrogging from the rather ancient mechanical switching technology then in use to an advanced, digital " time division multiplexed" (TDM) system, employing fast electronic switches.
This was designed to bypass the more modest technology the being contemplated by most of their rivals, the crossbar switching system and to give the United Kingdom an almost unassailable lead in this important field.
It failed on account of the inadequacy of the components then available -- a complete exchange was installed in Highgate Wood in 1962, only for it to succumb to excess heat from the 3,000 thermionic values employed (see Chapuis and Joe 1990: 62).
At the time when the decision was made to go ahead, the transistor was far too uncertain a prospect (Ge devices were liable to thermal breakdown and Si had scarcely had time assert itself -- it was, in any case, rather slow for digital applications-- see Box 4.1) so the choice of an old, well tried component technology was probably inevitable. (Even though this did contrast with the boldness of the overall project aims!)
Success with similar TDM switching systems had, in fact, to wait until 1970 when suitable integrated circuits (IC) became available. What was worse from the UK industry viewpoint was the resulting attempt to salvage something from the ruins by reverting to he original mechanical switching technology, thus robbing the Post Office suppliers of the opportunity to develop intermediate switch technology, based on transistors and (as they became available) integrated circuits. It was a body blow for UK solid state device technology from which it never quite recovered.
These references to integrated circuits (ICs) serve to bring us back to our mainstream discussion of the development of solid state active devices, for it was the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 - 9 which provide the jumping-point for the real electronic revolution which still shows no sign of slowing. It was clear to many, "wizz kids" of the 1950s that the transistor had the potential for the development of large-scale, though compact, electronic circuits, and several attempts were made to facilitate progress in this direction.
However, it soon became apparent that there was a limitation set by the necessary interconnections -- all of which required individual attention with bonder or soldering iron -- and several people began thinking of way to overcome this. The first public proposal for integration has been credited to an Englishman, Geoffrey Dummer of the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE, as then was) who presented a conference paper in Washington in May 1952, and who, by 1957, has persuaded the RRE management to fund a contract with the Plessey Company to build a flip-flop circuit based on his ideas. This resulted in a scale model which seems to have created considerable interest among American scientists but very little excitement within the United Kingdom! In fact, it was at TI in September 1958 that Jack Kilby first built an actual circuit in the form of a phase-shift oscillator. It used Ge, rather than Si because, at the time, Kilby could not lay hands on a suitable Si crystal and it employed external connecting wires individually bonded to the components but it demonstrated the use of the bulk Ge resistance to form resistors and a diffused p-n junction diode to provide capacitance -- there was no need to add these functions by hanging discrete components onto the semiconductor circuit. As a demonstration of the integration principle, it may be likened to the point contact transistor -- a huge step forward but some way from commercial viability.
The practical breakthrough came from Fairchild Semiconductors in the following year, in the form of a patent application by Robert Noyce claiming a method of making an integrated circuit using the Si planar process and forming the necessary interconnections by evaporating metallic films and defining them by photolithography. This was surely the practical way to go but it was nearly 2 years (March 1961) before Fairchild made their first working circuits based on these principles, closely followed by Texas in October 1961. These two companies were serious rivals, not only with regard to IC manufacture -- a titanic patent battle, also ensured over the question of priority in the basic invention (see the stimulating account given in Reid 2001). It took nearly 11 years of legal jousting [think Charles Dickens, Bleak House] before the Court of Customs and Patents Appeals finally adjudicated in favour of Fairchild -- Robert Noyce was officially declared the inventor of the microchip! Not that it mattered very much -- by that time the world of chips had moved on to such a degree that the issue had become of little more than academic interest and, in any case, the two protagonists Kilby and Noyce were, on a personal basis, more than happy to share the credit. In the year 2000, Kilby was awarded a half share in the Nobel prize and, doubtless Noyce would have joined him had he not died some 10 years earlier. That it should have taken the Nobel Committee more than 40 years to acknowledge a technical development of this magntude must be seen as both remarkable in itself and sad in the extreme in that it prevented Noyce from receiving his rightful share of the honour.
So prodigious have been the ramifications of their invention that one is somewhat taken aback to learn of the initial lack of interest shown by equipment manufacturers in these early circuits. The problem was that they were too expensive -- it was actually cheaper to build the same circuit from individual component, hard-wired together, than to buy the appropriate integrated version from TI or Fairchild. Sales were minimal. Stalemate!
That was until May 1961 when President Kennedy threw down his famous challenge that America should put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Almost immediately it became clear that the required rocket guidance would demand highly sophisticated computer technology and that such advanced circuity could only be realized in integrated form. Hang the expense -- this was the only way to go! Such a dramatic kick-start to a technological revolution smacked of divine intervention by a Higher Being with an unfair interest in the fledgling US chip industry -- certainly no other country ever received a comparable boost. The result was demonstrated by the number of ICs sold: in 1963 the number was a mere 500,000, by 1966 it had risen to 32 million.
Government spending may have been the vital stimulus but the importance of diversification was quickly appreciated. Jack Kilby was put to work at TI to develop a revolutionary consumer product in the shape of a pocket calculator which appeared in1971. No fewer than 5 million calculators were sold in 1972. At the same time the digital watch made its appearance took the consumer market by storm. Ted Hoff of Intel developed the first microprocessor also in 1971 and the first personal computer (PC) followed in 1975 in the form of a Popular Electronics kit! The revolution was well and truly launched and the industry has hardly cast a backward glance.
Progress in increasing complexity of integrated circuits has shown a quite remarkable steadiness -- in 1965 Gordon Moore (a physical chemist working in Noyce's group at Fairchild) made his famous pronouncement which came to be known as "Moore's Law," that the number of components on an IC would continue to double every year and such has almost been the case. A careful examination of the data up to 1997 suggests that the annual increase is actually closer to a factor of about 1.6 but the really striking feature is its long-term consistency, encouraging confident prediction for future increases, at least as far as the end of the first decade of the new millennium.
Solid state circuitry has gone from "small scale integration" (SSI, up to 20 "gates" in the 1960s to "medium scale integration" (MSI, 20 - 200 gates) at the of the 1960s through "large scale integration" (LSI, 5,000 - 1000,000 gates) in the 1980s and what might be called "ultra large scale integration" (ULSI, 100,000 - 10 million gates) by the end of the 1990s.
Moore himself, continued to play a role in these developments -- together with Robert Noyce, he left Fairchild in 1966 to found Intel whose sales rose from $2,700 in 1968 to $60 million in 1973 and in the year 2000 to $32 billion. The basis of this performance has, of course, been the steady decrease in size of the component transistors and we shall look in more detail at this anon. However, we must first bactrack to examine another important breakthrough, the development, at last, of a real field effect transistor (FET).
Locator: 48801CHORD.
Tag: Phoenix Energy.
Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. This is meant for one reader who asked about the market and Chord somehow came up in the discussion. So, it's simply a note with regard to a specific issue; it is not a recommendation for investing.
Background: in a sidebar discussion (via e-mail) with a reader earlier this morning, Chord Energy came up in discussion.
I asked ChatGPT to provide a list of the top producers in the North Dakota Bakken. The first reply was incredibly wrong and I pointed out to ChatGPT that Chord Energy now has three wholly-owned subsidiaries: Oasis, Whiting, and Enerplus. With that information, I asked ChatGPT to re-run the data.
The second answer from ChatGPT failed to note that Grayson Mill was acquired by Devon Energy, so I had to ask a third time, point that out. This is the third "run" by ChatGPT with regard to this query.
So, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of what follows, but here is ChatGPT's list of top Bakken producers, North Dakota, 2024 - 2025. My hunch: it's based on a combination of current and old information and may not be completely accurate:
1. Chord Energy -- Whiting, Oasis, and Enerplus:
2. Devon Energy (acquired Grayson Mill):
3. CLR:
4. Chevron (via Hess):
5. ExxonMobil (XTO Energy):
6. EOG:
It took three attempts with ChatGPT to get this information; I assume the information is fairly accurate but with so many errors by ChatGPT the first two times (and major errors) one wonders.
Thinking out loud / rambling: I owned shares in Chord Energy for awhile after it acquired Oasis but then sold all my shares in Chord when it acquired Whiting. I always felt that Enerplus was the best of the three (Oasis, Whiting, and Enerplus.
In the sidebar discussion with the reader I mentioned that I wish I still owned Chord but I am now so heavily weighted in oil I simply can't afford to have any more energy in my portfolio. However, paying a dividend of 7%; having a P/E of 7; and, being the top producer in the Bakken, Chord is looking pretty good (within the oil sector). I will raise cash (I'm always fully invested) by selling a dividend-paying ETF and substitute that ETF for Chord. I would still be looking at Chord as a takeover target.
That still leaves me with too much energy in my portfolio, so over the next few days / weeks, I will see if there's an energy position I can sell to offset any Chord I might buy.
If that makes sense.
Not mentioned by ChatGPT in this thread, when specifically asked, ChatGPT says Phoenix Operating (Phoenix Capital Group --> Phoenix Energy) is the seventeenth largest operator in the North Dakota (and Montana) Bakken:
Locator: 48800B.
Being announced now: the US-Malaysia trade deal. This was a huge success for the US.
WBNA: we now know how much Caitlin Clark "adds" to the WBNA.
Viewership of this year's WNBA all-star game dipped a whopping 36% from last year.
Last year, Caitlyn Clark played; this year, Caitlin Clark was on the bench due to a groin injury. Sort of takes away from the shirt the WBNA players were wearing: pay us what we are worth. Better? Pay Caitlin Clark what she's worth. LOL.
WBNA: the league would do well to protect their franchise players from injuries just as the NFL protects their quarterbacks.
Today's market, AI:
there is some suggestion that the cash burn being experienced by AI companies may be accelerating, resulting in a pullback in stock prices.
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Back to the Bakken
Director's Cut, released July 22, 2025: data for May, 2025. Link here (won't open in Firefox).
Today's daily activity report:
WTI: $66.36.
Active rigs: 32.
Four new permits, #42149 - #42152, inclusive:
Six permits renewed:
Two permits canceled:
Two producing wells (DUCs) reported as completed:
Locator: 48799GM.
GM.
Earnings are out.
Earlier I said Oracle was the big story for me today.
The big story for the overall market today is the GM story. I don't hold shares in GM (never will) so I am simply a spectator.
Remember: this is not an investment site. See disclaimer. This is for me only, for the archives. Please don't read.
More on this later, if I find the time.
But again, the headline is so unhelpful. Profit shrinks $1.1 billion -- so, what is that in context? What's the denominator. ChatGPT will provide me the story in a nanosecond with the prompt: GM's second quarter 2025 earnings and what does that mea.
It gets tedious. Moving on.
Locator: 48798ORACLE.
There is simply too much going on to cover everything.
For me, today, as an investor, the big story is Oracle.
Remember: this is not an investment site. See disclaimer. This is for me only, for the archives. Please don't read.
Stargate: oh, oh. Exclusive in The WSJ. I track Stargate here. Stargate struggling. This story may have legs, or it's simply one should expect in a $500-billion start-up with individuals at the top with strong personalities.
Today:
Bottom line:
Locator: 48797B.
The S&P 500: yesterday, closed the day above 6,300 for the first time ever. President Trump celebrated his sixth month in office on July 21.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $66.46.
New wells:
RBN Energy: produced water volumes, regulation and innovation in the Permian.
There’s a lot going on in the Permian produced water space lately. Crude-oil-focused production in the prolific shale play is generating vast and increasing volumes of produced water that needs to be recycled or injected into disposal wells. State regulators, concerned about injection-related seismic activity, are tightening their rules, ramping up oversight and cracking down. Produced water gathering systems are being expanded and long-distance pipelines are being planned and built. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the latest developments and where things are heading.
We took our first deep dive (so to speak) into produced water way back in 2017 in Wipe Out!. There we explained that, in addition to producing large amounts of crude oil and associated gas, Permian wells also generate massive volumes of produced water — collectively, many millions of barrels a day of water that is chock-full of petroleum residue, minerals and especially salt (which makes it brine) and that must be dealt with either by the producer or (more likely nowadays) a third-party produced water specialist. We noted that the produced water disposal problem is nothing new; a lot of water has always come along with oil and gas out of a well. A hundred years ago, E&Ps disposed of the produced water simply by pumping it back into the same formation it came from. That approach made the water-disposal problem go away, and sometimes it actually improved well performance –– the water increased pressures at the bottom of the well and drove more oil into the well bore and up to the surface, hence initiating some of the first enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques.
By the early 1970s, wastewater of all sorts was being disposed of by pumping it underground, not only from oil and gas operations, but from all sorts of industrial activity. Addressing public concerns at the time, the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 mandated that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) establish rules for wells used for any wastewater disposal, which became known as the Underground Injection Control (UIC) program. That program designated five classifications of underground disposal wells, of which oilfield produced water wells were designated Class II wells — and often referred to as saltwater disposal wells, or SWDs. Over the ensuing decades, tens of thousands of Class II wells were drilled and used to dispose of produced water from conventional wells, with much of the water pumped back into the very same formation the oil came from, just like in the early years of the industry. The conventional reservoirs were permeable enough to absorb the produced water being pumped back into them.
