Locator: 50001AG.
AI prompt: Besides the volatility in the price of silver there seems to be something else going on with silver. To what degree is AI infrastructure affecting demand for silver?
Google Gemini:
Why hasn't President Trump announced a US strategic silver reserve? I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count.
If you're going to San Francisco .... we were so lucky to have "lived in" San Francisco when we did ....
Locator: 50000LDCS.
Disclaimers: so many I can't list them all. See the blog's disclaimer.
Meta plans to add ten LDCs each year on average for the next three years.
META plans to add an additional 10 LDCs per year for the next three years. Sounds like a lot. Do the math. 30 / 4010 = 0.7% -- that's less than 1% of existing LDCs in the US right now.
In the past year:
Various ways of looking at the addition:
Texas (397), Ohio (195), Louisiana (22) = 614 in those three states.
Change in less than a year:
State, April, 2025 --> February, 2026:
LDCs:
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A Musical Interlude
Locator: 49999LDCS.
Link here, December 2, 2023 -- Nvidia's Grace Hopper 200 chips.
Now, take a look at the announcement today. Link here. Link here.
META / Nvidia partnership: link here. By 2028 -- only three years from now --
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We Will Rock You -- We Are The Champions
Locator: 49998CHER.
The numbers haven't changed for years. Analysts still estimate that Saudi Arabia's oil will last another 60 - 70 years.
Cher's Believe hit #1, Top of the Pops, October 25, 1998, and stayed at the top sport for seven weeks in the UK.
1998: almost thirty years ago.
Locator: 49997TECH.
Jargon:
AI prompt:
At one time we talked about AI factories, large data centers, and supercomputers. At one time, their differences seemed fairly clear cut, but more and more it seems that boundaries are blurring, especially between large data centers and supercomputers. They may each have separate functions but at the end of the day, aren't they really the same thing, just serving different purposes? Or is this too simplified?
Google Gemini:
Locator: 49996META.
META / Nvidia partnership: link here. By 2028 -- only three years from now --
Locator: 49995B.
META / Nvidia partnership: link here. By 2028 -- only three years from now --
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $62.33.
Active rigs: 29.
No new permits.
Three permits canceled:
Locator: 49994COPPER.
Tag: BHP SCCO FCX
Tickers:
BHP:
SCCO: dropped $10 today! But for the year:
Locator: 49993BUFFETT.
Sold:
Initiated:
Bought:
Top five holdings:
Cash on hand: a record $381.7 billion.
Compare Apple's cash on hand: $66.9 billion; 24.4% increase y/y.
Locator: 49993NRL.
Tag "National Research Labs"
A first post with this subject matter although I've "danced around it" for quite some time.
Now, reading Code Breaker time to to have a specific post on National Research Labs.
An overview:
Vannevar Bush, wiki.
Mentioned: Code Breaker, Walter Isaccson. Link here.
See Genesis Mission post, link here.
Since Bush, the three-legged stool has become a four-legged chair with the addition of:
Caribou/Doudna: received funding in 2020 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to use CRISPR to detect coronaviruses. Link here, p. 118.
Locator: 49992INVESTING.
The equal-weight S&P 500 is outperforming the cap-weighted benchmark on a year-to-date basis by the widest margin since 1976.
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Cap-Weighted vs Equal-Weighted
Locator: 49991APPLE.
Tag Mag 7 META GOOGLE AMZN Amazon
Disclaimer: I often make simple arithmetic errors. None of this has been fact-checked.
For background, link here, Apple's annual revenue:
Locator: 49990APPLE.
Is Apple pivoting toward adding lower cost, playful color and mass appeal to its growing stable?
Is it unusual for Apple to hold events in March?
According to Google:
Expect a lot:
Disclaimer: definitely go to the links to fact-check. It is very easy for me to get confused with all the Apple products and specs.
Expectations:
Summary:
These two would be significant upgrades for me:
For Sophia:
For Arianna:
Locator: 49987B.
Jessie Jackson: dead at 84 years of age.
Ten minutes with Jim Cramer: Jim Cramer was off again today. No interest in watching.
Second Take: Shae Cornette sure seems to take a lot of time off.
She was MIA for one week shortly after getting her new gig at "First Take" -- during the NFL post-season!!! Now, today, Ms Cornette is absent again. Sitting in for her is another female. We're not yet in the NBA post-season but it's getting close, and that's what all the talk was about today on "First Take."
NYC: to increase property taxes in 2026 to fill budget gap.
Nvidia's high end Vera Ruvin chips: timeline has been pulled forward by 3 - 6 months.
China's export bans freed up supplier capacity, opening the door to shipments as early as end-2Q26
The equal-weight S&P 500 is outperforming the cap-weighted benchmark on a year-to-date basis by the widest margin since 1976. We'll do a stand-alone post on this.
Iran: says a/c carriers can be sunk. Also: sinking an American a/c carrier would be the end of Iran as we know it today.
How folks watch TV in the US, link here, rounding:
Goldman, Sachs: will comply with Civil Rights Act of 1964. GS will no longer taken race, sexual orientation, other DEI factors into consideration when considering new board directors. WSJ.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $62.79.
New wells reporting:
RBN Energy: refiners could benefit from dramatic shifts across US markets. Link here. Archived.
The U.S. is facing a significant shift in regional refinery prospects and refined product trade flows due to supply, demand and regulatory trends. This is driving the development of significant new pipelines headed west, paired with continued refinery shutdowns along the West Coast and, to a lesser extent, a similar dynamic from the Midcontinent to the East Coast. At the same time, refined product exports are becoming ever more important to Gulf Coast refiners, and a variety of global developments will play a major role in their ability to grow those volumes. All these factors have the U.S. refining industry poised to move into a new era shaped by consolidation, efficiency and market power. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss the major changes reshaping the U.S. refining industry.
Let’s start by emphasizing that there is an upheaval happening across the U.S. — this isn’t your father’s (or even older brother’s) refining industry anymore. Key elements of refining, from the types of crude to the mix of end products to the distances they are being piped (or shipped) to market are changing, dramatically in some cases. But this is more than just logistics. New projects are redrawing the map and altering how large parts of the country — the West Coast, East Coast, and even the middle parts in between — are supplied.
Our focus in this blog is on midstream developments, but projects within the refineries themselves will also be important and discussed in more detail in a future piece. Here are the major projects taking shape in the months and years ahead, each of them discussed in detail in the newly available edition of the biannual Future of Fuels report by RBN's Refined Fuels Analytics practice.
Just two years to the month since its acquisition of refined-products-pipeline giant Magellan Midstream Partners, ONEOK announced in September that it intends to build the Sun Belt Connector. The 24-inch-diameter greenfield pipeline would run from El Paso, TX, to the Phoenix area (dashed orange line in Figure 1 below) and connect to the company’s existing refined products pipeline system, allowing refined products to flow west to Arizona markets from refineries in Texas and Oklahoma. The line is designed with an initial capacity of 200 Mb/d targeted for a mid-2029 startup. This would deepen Phoenix’s structural links to the Gulf Coast and Midcon supply via ONEOK’s existing refined products pipelines (blue lines).
