Locator: 50647MICRON.
The Windmills of Your Mind. Link here.
Absolutely amazing. Link here. This starts a long, long thread:
Futures: S&P 500 set a record earlier today, and now, futures, the S&P 500 will set another record tomorrow:
One day -- and room to run tomorrow --
One year -- 570% appreciation in one year --
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Reno
See if you can the underlying tune?
Locator: 50646INVESTING.
I've said it many times, and I will say it again:
The other day in a throwaway line to a reader, I wrote: I don't lose sleep when I add new money to any of these three companies: WMT, MCD, or AMZN.
Beth today, link here:
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Disclaimer
Briefly
Briefly:
I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken and I am often well out front of my headlights. I am often appropriately accused of hyperbole when it comes to the Bakken. I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. See disclaimer. This is not an investment site. Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If something appears wrong, it probably is. Feel free to fact check everything. If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them. Reminder: I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken, US economy, and the US market. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. And now, Nvidia, also. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Nvidia. Nvidia is a metonym for AI and/or the sixth industrial revolution. I've now added Broadcom to the disclaimer. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Broadcom. Now, I've added Amazon. Longer version here.
Locator: 50644B.
Broke the record of 92°F set in .... 1987.
Another record: closing price for the S&P 55: 7,174.
US trade: less than 2% of all US trade transits the Strait of Hormuz. If India and China want the strait opened, they need to talk to Iran.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $96.37. WTI up $2.00; up 2%.
Active rigs: 23.
Ten new permits, #42863 - $42873, inclusive:
Locator: 50643BRKB.
Earnings this week, link here.
Didn't Warren Buffett add a huge position in Domino's Pizza?
Reply:
Locator: 50642APPLE.
This is the most current iteration of Apple's MacBook Air.
For perspective, in November, 2020, Apple introduced the M1 MacBook Air 512 GB for $1,299.
So, 25% less expensive and a jump from the M1 chip to the M5 chiplet.
The M5 MacBook Air was introduced March 2, 2026. Link here. It starts at $1,099, $100 more than the previous generation.
More:
Locator: 50641STRAIT.
One of the themes of the blog: every day the strait remains closed, the more irrelevant Qatar (LNG) and Saudi Arabia (oil) become.
I posted that again in the past hour.
Just minutes ago, this post over on x, link here:
Eighty-one percent (81%) of Iran's total trade passes through the strait.
Trade through the strait accounts for the following percent of the following countries:
Meanwhile countries are re-wiring their trade routes.
Locator: 50640MOTNEY.
ARC Resources:
Shell's market cap: $242 billion.
XOM's market cap: $616 billion.
A few paragraphs taken from an RBN Energy blog, dated November 18, 2025:
First, considering natural gas production, Ovintiv was already a sizable player, recording a quarterly average of 427 MMcf/d , making it the second-largest producer on the Alberta side of the [Montney] formation behind ARC Resources and just ahead of Whitecap (the combined Whitecap and Veren output).
NuVista, though at the back of our pack, was punching out 241 MMcf/d. The simple arithmetic of combining the two companies’ gas output would place Ovintiv in the lead at 667 MMcf/d (OVV+NVA, red bar). This would be another feather in Ovintiv’s cap if that lead can be maintained and make it the largest Montney natural gas producer in Alberta and BC. Of the seven companies we have listed, their combined output captured 87% of the gas production from the Alberta Montney, so production concentration will be further increased with the merger.
As for those highly prized condensate barrels, Ovintiv and NuVista were already the second- and third-largest producers, respectively. Their combined output of 66 Mb/d would close the gap with front-runner ARC Resources, a company very much focused on growing its natural gas and condensate output. Production concentration will be further enhanced with the companies in our list accounting for a combined 93% of Alberta Montney condensate output.
Every day the strait remains closed, the more irrelevant Qatar (LNG) and Saudi Arabia (oil) become.
Locator: 50639HOOVER.
In a long transcription like this, there will be typographical errors. I will correct them as I find them.
Chapter 2.3. Hooverville.
Drawing from his extraordinarily eventful life, Bert pulled together something like a political philosophy.
"Hoover in 1921 saw himself as the protagonist of a new and superior synthesis between the old industrialism ad the new, a way whereby America could benefit from scientific rationalization and social engineering without sacrificing the energy and creativity inherent in individual effort, 'grassroots' involvement, and private enterprise," writes writes historian Ellis Hawley in his classic 1974 study of the Commerce secretariat uder the Stanford engineer.
Hoover turned the fledgling department into Harding's agency for modernity, casting the mold for the relationship between the industries that made America into a superpower and state bureaucracy. Hawley calls it the "associate state" -- note the resonance with the four Sacramento Associates who talked Abe Lincoln into footing the bill for their public-private railroad partnership -- and that's what Hoover built, between his elevation to secretary with Harding's inauguration, in 1921, and his defeat at the hands of FDR in the presidential election of 1932.
And though historians have long portrayed Hoover's three terms (two at Commerce, under Harding, then Coolidge, and one in the presidency) as a bust after the corporatist Roaring Twenites, and indicted by the Great Depression and swept away by the New Deal, the country's turn toward corporate-cabal associative logic in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century suggests that they've understated the Chief's influence.
From our perspective a century later, the difference between the associatie state and the New Deal is subtler than we've been led to believe. In this section I'll trace the ways in which Hoover's associative model built the West Coast's twentieth-century agricultural and aeronautical industries, but that was just the beginning; Hoover's impact on the real estate and radio sectors was just as decisive and important. If most historians think FDR set the stage for American hegemony, the endurance of Bert's California suggests otherwise. By examining some specifics of the long Hoover adminsitration, we prepare to understand the following hundred years.
The largest uncontested achievement of Hoover's leadership is the one that still bears his name: the Hoover Dam.
By the time he got back to America, the plan to dam the Colorado river and thereby irrigate and power California's Los Angeles "Southland" already existed, but took an organizer of Hoover's skill to bring several state and municipal governments, federal agencies, and private firms into agreement on how to divide such a massive bounty. He needed the entire length of his Commerce terms, but the Chief finally got the damn dam built in his image. First he got representatives from the affected states into a room and hammered out the Colorado River Compact over the course of two weeks.
The interstate accord set the future irection of the river, but was a stacked deck, because the congressional (Senate and House) as well as White House representatives all came from California. That's where the lion's share of the water and power went, too, as well as the biggest construction contracts. After a few years of procedural delay -- a cynical reader might think some of the players involved needed time to secure a bunch of land titles -- the appropration passed, just as President Hoover installed his Stanford buddy Ray LymanWilbur at the Department of the Interior. This was engineering at the nation-building level; it's what the engineer in chief had prepared to do all this life.
Though it was finished in 1935, long after Bert had left Washington with his tail between his legs, the dam was his project, and it bore all the marks of the associative state. First off, it was a massive thing, the largest dam in human history and the biggest known construction project by volume since the Great Pyramids of Egypt. By1940 the turbine generators produced one-eighth of the country's electricity and, along with the aqueducts, made it possible for Los Angeles to rise as Califronia's second city.
Behind the massive wall of concrete was an ad hoc coalition of relatively petty West coast construction capital. They called themselves "the Six Companies" after the Chinese associations in San Franciso during the railroad days, but they were closer to the original Associates.
Most prominent among their number were Warren A. Bechtel and Henry J. Kaiser, and Hoover's dam turned them into famous industrials, The new Six Companies earned their place, building the project during the Depression with modern techniques and an all-American whtie male labor force -- no union required, but Asian workers were banned by contract. The companies kept costs comparativeley low in part by efficiently managing their workers' whole lives at the site, though it wasn't until a few years later that Kaiser figured out a way to incorporate health-care costs into his rationalized production equations by moving employees to a company medical plan. Until Roosevelt took over, the Six Companies paid partly in scrip, and in 1931 when the Industrial Works of the world came by to agitate, site managers rounded them up and shipped them to Vegas. It was, i the word so historian Kevin Starr, a "demanding, if vaguely benevolent, dictatorship," paralleling the insurgent right-wing industrial cultures of Germany and Japan.
See footnote on page 152.
At the end of this win-win dam were California's landowners and speculators, whose job in the whole scheme was to get rich. Behind the Six Companies (Kaiser in particular) wth a big sack of money was A. P. Giannini, whose bank stood to gain the most from an increase in California land values. Hoover's private associates were up and down the project, especially the Southern California Edison chairman Henry Robinson, to whose firm Secretary Wilbur originally appropriated 25 percent (!) of the Hoover dam power output, before criticism forced him to reduce it to 9 percent. Harry Chandler -- conservative publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Stanford dad, and Hoover's confederate on the university board -- became the city's most important capitalist by riding the Hoover real estate and manufacturing boom into the 1930s. These men poured the concrete foundation for what was shaping up to be California's century.
In his last full-time job before committing to public service and passive income, hoover went around reviving "sick" mines with a rationalized approach-- or at least convincing investors that's what he was doing. As a national leader, he endeavored to perform the same function but for whole industries. America was supposed to be the land of dynamism, but number of th country's advanced economy sectors were languishing, especially compared to how quickly Germany andJapan were developing under Neo-imperial systems. Hoover understood that government had to establish a base level of coordination and standardization around novel technologies. Capital was stuck in Yogi Berra's "Nobody goes there, it's too clowded" contradiction: Investors were scared off by reasonable fears of free-riding on research and development, price competition, and a lack of standardization. No one waned to be stuck holding the bag when the new rules come down. This is where the associate model came in: Hoover could provide not just physical infrastructure with water and power, bu also the informational infrastructure new industries needed to become investable. He had a third gift for California, too a gift that would soon provide Palo Alto technologlists with their new frontier.
When Hoover formally entered the cabinet, the American airplane industry was severely underdeveloped. The first US passenger had yet to fly, and there was no commercial air sector to speak of. When World War I ended, production cratered by over 98 percent as the market flooded with surplus war planes. Independent pilots "barnstormed" the country and wowed crowds with stunts; flight was more or less an entertainment medium during peacetime. The Europeans, however, turned World War I into an air war by the end, and Hoover was convinced that the country had an existential need for a healthy domestic air industry. At the same time, he believed the government couldn't just build the planes itself efficiently without a profit movie. This sick sector was Hoover's first priority at Commerce, and a solid success for his strategy.
Bert's model was to get the federal government to set flight paths, research weather patterns, license pilots, and otherwise facilitate development in a general way. After some hemming and hawing about the "Air Dictator," Congress gave him the go-ahead in 1926 with the Air Commerce Act. He worked witht the Guggenheim family -- Hoover had almost turned down the cabinet seat offered by Harding to join them in a mining partnership -- after patriarch Daniel Guggenheim offered a $2.5 million fund to train aeronautical engineers, improve the technology, and push the industry as a whole forward in full cooperation with the Commerce Department in light of the agency's new powers.
They were the aiplane Giannini's, bankrolling the industry's shared expenses out of combination of public and private interest, no government coercion necessary. Stanford and MIT (along a few others) got new engineering programs, but Caltech in burgeoning Los Angeles ended up benefiting most, become home to a Guggenheim aeronautics lab that helped make the region into he world's plane and rocket headquarters.
The associative state didn't work without capitalists, and thankfully Los Angeles had its own Associates, among them Henry Robinson of Southern California Edison -- he was also the head of the Security First National banking combine in LA, the only part of the state where Gianninni found himself on the outside looking in -- and Harry Chandler of the Times, who also owned half the cit's best real estate and a large swath of the agricultural Southland. In 1920, Chandler led the financing for an ambitious pilot and aspiring airplane builder who found his way to his office and, like Theodore Judah with his railroad plan, couldn't get any other capitalists interested in his designs. Donald Doublas proved as able as Judah, and Douglas Aircraft won a number o familiar contracts. The experience mast have favorably disposed Chandler toward the industry, and he underwrote pilot Pop Honshu and his Western Air Express a few years later. Another pillar in Hoover' air plan was to spur the industry by awarding lucrative and exclusive mail delivery contracts; Western won the western contract and when the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation sought a firm to run the first experiment in passenger travel, they picked Western, too.
Locator: 50638TRUMP.
It's too bad there are no journalists smart enough to engage in an intelligent conversation with President Trump with regard to what's going on in the Mideast and how it ties in with his Monroe Doctrine and his overall strategy to make America great again.
If one wants to get an idea of what is happening, what Trump is thinking, how Trump is advancing his agenda, one should read Chapter 2.3, "Hooverville," in the 2023 book by Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.
Every US president and every great leader since World War II has supported the anti-proliferation of nuclear weapons and the liberal press has led the charge. Now, all of a sudden, it appears the liberal, progressive press is upset that we finally have an administration that is not willing to kick this can down the road again. A dozen American lives; three months of war; and, somewhat higher gasoline prices. That alone is mind-boggling.
AI query:
Capitalism. US exceptionalism. The first half of the 20th century. I am blown away by how incredibly good "Palo Alto" by Malcolm Harris is. Right now I'm reading about Herbert Hoover, chapter 2.3, "Hooverville." I. had no idea how Herbert Hoover built northern California, then southern California, and from that the modern industrial US state. Is there any similar biography or book on Hoover that covers this individual as well as Malcolm Harris has?
The reply (abbreviated):
What you’re reacting to in Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World is not just biography—it’s synthesis.
Harris is doing something closer to intellectual + economic history, where Herbert Hoover becomes a node in a much larger system (Stanford, mining capital, war mobilization, technocracy, etc.). That’s why it feels so revelatory. The short answer: there are excellent Hoover biographies—but almost none frame him quite the way Harris does. The best ones tend to fall into two camps:
1. The closest match to Harris’s “systems-level Hoover”:
- Herbert Hoover: A Life — Glen Jeansonne
- This is probably the closest single-volume biography that captures Hoover as more than “the Depression president.”
- Emphasizes Hoover as:
- global mining engineer
- organizer of international food relief during and after World War I
- architect of a new kind of technocratic, business-government coordination
- Shows how his “associationalism” (voluntary coordination among firms) shaped U.S. policy before the New Deal
Gives you the sense—similar to Harris—that Hoover helped prototype the modern administrative-capitalist state.Where it differs from Harris: it’s more sympathetic, less structural/critical, and less focused on California as the seedbed.2. The definitive deep-dive (but more traditional):
- Herbert Hoover — George H. Nash
- This is the gold standard—massive, multi-volume, and deeply researched.
- Covers:
- Hoover’s rise from orphan to global mining magnate
- his worldwide network (China, Australia, Europe)
- his role as “Great Humanitarian” before politics
- Explains how he built organizational systems that later scaled into government
- But:
- It’s not interpretive in the Harris sense
- It won’t explicitly connect Hoover to Silicon Valley, racial capitalism, or the long arc of U.S. industrial policy the way Palo Alto does
Think of Nash as giving you the raw material Harris is reframing.3. Hoover-as-system-builder (very relevant to your reaction):
- Herbert Hoover and the Crisis of American Capitalism, Ellis Hawley
- this is a sleeper recommendation—and intellectually the closest to Harris.
- focuses on Hoover’s role in reshaping capitalism itself
- explains his belief that the state should:
- coordinate industry
- stabilize markets
- support (not replace) private enterprise
Essentially lays out the blueprint Harris later interprets as “Palo Alto capitalism” If you’re intrigued by Hoover as a foundational architect rather than just a failed president, this is extremely strong.4. A broader contextual companion (pairs very well with Harris):
- Freedom from Fear, David Kennedy,
- not a Hoover biography per se, but a sweeping history of the Depression and New Deal
- gives:
- the world Hoover inherited
- why Hoovervilles emerged
- how Franklin D. Roosevelt diverged from Hoover’s model
This helps you see how much of the modern state is actually a continuation or mutation of Hoover’s framework, not a clean break.5. Why Harris feels so different (and why it’s rare): Harris is doing three unusual things simultaneously:
- geographic anchoring (Stanford / Palo Alto as origin point)
- ideological through-line (anti-egalitarian capitalism across decades)
- recasting Hoover as central, not peripheral
Most historians don’t center Hoover this way—even though, as you’re noticing, he:built global logistics systems;
- shaped early 20th-century industrial coordination;
- influenced housing, finance, and corporate-state relations for decades.
Bottom line If you want “more Hoover like Harris,” I’d read in this order:
- Jeansonne → best narrative match;
- Hawley → best conceptual match;
- Nash → deepest factual foundation
If you want, I can go one level deeper—there’s a fascinating argument that Hoover is actually a bridge figure between 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism and the 20th-century managed economy, which would connect directly to your earlier questions about AI, infrastructure, and the modern industrial state.
Where I would go next is to compare Herbert Hoover with John Maynard Keynes.
But enough for now.
Locator: 50636TELECOM.
OpenAI IPO: the OpenAI IPO is going to be more than historic, and it will completely change the tech landscape. Telecom, not since we've seen since 1984, is going to be changed like never before. OpenAI will "copy" Apple's iPhone "edge" strategy.
Why QCOM is surging today: by the way, pay attention to the inclusion of MediaTek in the story. We will post a stand-alone post on this. Things are moving very quickly and it can be confusing.
Google TPNs: dual-supplier strategy -- previously posted --
Locator: 50635MARKET.
Why QCOM is surging today: by the way, pay attention to the inclusion of MediaTek in the story. We will post a stand-alone post on this. Things are moving very quickly and it can be confusing.
Top-story: sidebar at the right. Link here.
Tickers that interest me:
Tickers that don't interest me today, but the above list was too short and there's nothing else going on, so:
MSFT: down slightly this morning. Wow, I'm glad I sold my incredibly small position of MSFT.
Ticker BRKB:
Locator: 50634B.
AI has become bespoke journalism. In less then 30 minutes, anyone can publish their own copyright newsletter or newspaper.
Oracle LDC, Stargate, Michigan: reaches goal, $16 billion. Link here. Backstory: Stargate. Additional information, October 5,2025, link here.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $96.12. Up $1.72; up almost 2%.
New wells reporting:
RBN Energy: US propane storage to fall in 2026 as added dock space rebalances market. Link here. Archived.
The U.S. propane market is in a unique position today. Production has continued to grow while domestic demand remains stagnant. The only solution for the market to balance is exports; however, those have been constrained by capacity at the dock. This combination of factors has left propane storage extremely high. In today’s RBN blog, the second in a two-part series, we continue our examination of the factors affecting the propane market and the expectations for storage dynamics through the end of the year.
In Part 1 of this blog series, we reviewed recent supply/demand dynamics of the U.S. propane industry. The three most important takeaways of that post were that (1) production continues to grow but is not expected to surge as a result of the war with Iran; (2) export levels are forecast to increase with the startup of Enterprise’s expansion of its EHT terminal on the Houston Ship Channel; and (3) storage levels are extremely high in today’s market. In Part 2, we will begin by examining export economics and how they are calculated. After that, we will wrap the story up with the outlook for 2026 storage levels.
Export economics are a key metric to watch because they help illustrate how strong the markets to Asia and Europe are. There are four key metrics influencing export economics, measured here as the arbitrage (or spread) between U.S. and Asian/European prices. The first is the cost of U.S. propane, the second is shipping costs, the third is the dock fee, and the fourth is the price of propane in Europe or Asia. In today’s analysis, the focus will be on economics with Asia.
Figure 1. Non-TET Mont Belvieu Propane Price. Source: OPIS
