Locator: 49589ARCHIVES.
Lots of shopping yesterday.
First, inflation watch:
Random photos:
Ham, braunschweiger ---
Octopus, lobster:
Peppers:
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Winter
Flathead Lake -- northwest corner.
Phoro taken by extended family member, daybreak, Tuesday, December 2, 2025.
Federal troops can be deployed to Portland.
Get out the popcorn.
Game on!
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1931 Chevrolet Farm Truck
To Be Restored
Five-Year-Old Brothers
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $57.44.
Active rigs: 32.
Six new permits, #42410 - 42415, inclusive:
One producing well (a DUC) reported as completed:
Locator: 49130ARCHIVES.
Who wudda thought? Link here.
Cost of oil exploration:
There is no single global average cost of oil exploration per barrel; it varies significantly by region and method, but typical exploration and production (E&P) costs in the 2000s and early 2010s saw a significant increase of about 100% from 2000 to 2012. For example, costs in North America can range from $30 to $70 per barrel, while they are considerably lower in regions like Saudi Arabia, at $10–$15 per barrel.
These costs are influenced by the difficulty of extraction, with deepwater drilling and fracking being more expensive than easier-to-access resources.
GDPNow: estimate today -- 3Q25 estimate rises to a remarkable 3.4%. Wall Street analysts suggest the 3Q25 GDP will come out closer to 2%.
Eleven years ago: bigger sister, Olivia, reading The WSJ to her new baby sister, Sophia.
Locator: 49103FAMILY.
My son-in-law wanted to raise the interior height of an old shed by a few feet (for another project he has in mind).
This was a solid wood building.
This is how he raised it, gaining two-to-four feet in interior height.
The project was done 100% with recycled wood, old pallets that had been discarded, that my son-in-law picked up over the years.
Hopefully he's not thinking about raising his house by two-to-four feet.
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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: 48547WHITTEN.
Vern Whitten would love to hear from you. Vern has sent a wonderful collection of "farm" photos from North Dakota. Something we can think about during the middle of winter!
www.vernwhittenhotography.com.
Vern Whitten
1518 7th Street South
Fargo, ND 58103
Locator: 48443GREEN.
Global climate change economy teeters: Bloomberg link here.
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For The Archives
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For The Archives
I flew with the 525 TFS, Bitburg Air Base, Germany, from 1984 - 1986, and again, from 1989 - 1993, also Bitburg AB, Germany. My primary a/c was the F-15.
In the photo below, the F-15 is the second a/c from the POV of the aircrew member pictured.
Locator: 48432ARCHIVES.
Wow, I'm in a great mood this morning.
We'll have a bit of rain over the next 24 hours but then more than a week of sunny weather and a high of 72°F on the weekend. The days are getting noticeably longer and it's just a matter of time before the swimming pools open up again.
The dip in the stock market -- I love how "they" call it a "dip" -- was another opportunity for young investors. I remain fully invested at all times. I have a rolling 30-year horizon. I don't plan to leave my heirs any money: they will inherit our entire estate of US equities and the dividends that come with those equities. I've already started the process.
I will be off the net for awhile. I walk Sophia to the bus every morning and I'll be leaving in a few minutes. I've been up for a couple of hours updating production data for Bakken wells. A lot of old sites were updated. I've referenced a few of the sites that I updated, but most of the updates were done without bringing the posts forward.
It's getting more and more impossible to keep up with the news. More on that later, perhaps.
I'm looking forward to a cross-country trip or two or three this calendar year. Whether it all plays out or not, hard to say. I'm too comfortable in my apartment. LOL.
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Of Interest
From Forbes this morning:
First up, AI:
Venture firm General Catalyst is leading a $50 million funding round into Onebrief, a startup that makes collaboration software to help Pentagon leaders speed up military planning.
Chris Miller, a former acting Secretary of Defense and co-author of Project 2025, also joined the startup’s board, telling Forbes his role provides a link to the Trump Administration ahead of what Silicon Valley hopes will be a bumper year for startups working with the Pentagon.
Second: in most instances this would be called "price gouging." But I guess "price gouging" only refers to items bought by poor folks. Is it appropriate to use the phrase "poor folks" any more? I've lost the bubble on such things. Anyway, back to "price gouging":
Major U.S. airlines have boosted flight capacity from Kansas City and Philadelphia to New Orleans ahead of the Chiefs-Eagles Super Bowl, and experts recommend booking flights now to avoid the steepest prices. Nonstop tickets to New Orleans from domestic airports are already averaging $979 per round-trip ticket, significantly higher than the average domestic airfare of $294 for a round trip, according to the travel platform Hopper.
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Travel
Wow, wow, wow!
The [London] Telegraph ranks the 1,250 prettiest and ugliest cities in "Britain." Link here.
We lived in England for many years:
It was awesome. Four of the prettiest cities noted by The Telegraph were in the areas that we lived. Most notably, Ripon was one of the four cities and where I spent a lot of time, at the Ripon Cathedral for evensong.
In the immediate area of Ripon was another city that made the cut for being most beautiful: Ilkley, West Yorkshire. Ilkley was a 23-minute drive from where I stayed / worked while in Yorkshire. I have no idea how many times I would have driven through that village. Bolton Bridge, nearby, was a favorite destination. As for hiking, I usually hiked north and west of Menwith Hill which means I probably did not hike through Ilkley.
When on temporary duty, up to four months at a time, I stayed at the Wellington Inn in Darley, just a fifteen-minute walk from the base. Maybe 30 minutes. I forget. I often got picked up by someone driving that direction so seldom had to walk. Occasionally the Air Force would allow me to rent a car while at RAF Mildenhall.
I would usually hike all day Saturday and all day Sunday. I would leave as early as 7:00 a.m. and not return until 7:00 p.m. In general, all my day-long hikes were solitary, but on many outings by car and short walks I generally had one or two female companions from the air base who also shared the joy of ... what do they call it in Germany -- volksmarching. Whereas the latter tends to be larger groups and very well organized, the walks I did in England were anything but.
Locator: 44606TRUMP.
From The Atlantic today. Talk about a misreading of American politics.
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Duck Hunting In North Texas
Our granddaughter and her friend, duck hunting, north Texas.
No dog, so they have to retrieve the ducks themselves.
Locator: 44370EISENHOUR.
Breaking: again, the timing is interesting.
Now that it's someone else's problem, Biden finally shows up. If Ukraine loses, he will say it wasn't because of his policies.
NATO: Meanwhile, Trump selected former acting AG Matthew White as NATO ambassador.
Trump 2.0 is tracked here.
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Missing the Target
Target, Target, Target! Link here. Target is now advertising Thanksgiving turkeys for 79 cents a pound. See below. Was Target price gouging before announcing the new price?
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Inflation Watch: From October 17, 2024
Tag: turkey.
Locator: 48604CRAMER.
Cramer's first hour: a mix of facts, factoids, opinions from various sources -- often not cited -- while listening to Cramer's first hour on CNBC.
Inflation: the data is in -- the evidence is clear cut -- inflation:supply and demand -- nothing to do with government spending
Don't take that out of context.
More later.
But it's obvious.
And the "price of eggs due to inflation due to government spending" is getting tedious. Anyone who talks about the price of eggs in this context is …. shall we say, obtuse?
Housing prices: nothing to do with government spending; everything to do with supply and demand.
Same with rent.
Auto insurance? Nothing to do with government or national deficit.
More to follow.
Everything, everywhere happening all at once.
In This Economy? How Money and Markets Really Work, Kyla Scanlon, c. 2024.
Exhibit A:
October 14, 2024: avian flu -- egg-laying hens hit harder than turkeys -- now, can we move on?
October 13, 2024: Walmart: awesome. Protein at 88 cents / pound is pretty cheap source of protein. Salmon $5 for four ounces, or $20 / lb.
This is an incredible "moment" for Walmart. They love "rolling back" prices and as fast as wholesale prices are falling, Walmart is passing those savings to retail customers as fast as they can. "Our" Walmart was filled with "rollback" tags today. But frozen turkeys is what caught my eye. At 98 cents / pound, less expensive than last Thanksgiving, and now Walmart has rolled back that price to 88 cents / pound.
Speaking of Walmart:
We have a Costco membership and an Amazon Prime membership and we've never seen a need for a Sam's Club membership. I may reconsider for one year. From our local neighborhood flyer:
Nearly two years after a tornado damaged Sam’s Club, doors will be open at the wholesale club starting on October 16, 2024.
This Sam’s Club -- just down the street from us -- will be the first in the country without any registers or cashiers, allowing customers to use their app’s scan and go feature to shop.
The Grapevine location will feature many technology features not in other stores, being the first digital-first store ... that includes a robot that can make 190 pizzas in an hour order custom-made sushi in the app and an e-commerce order area that is four times larger than any other Sam’s Club store.
$50 / year.
Yeah, gonna join. At least for a year. Gotta see the robot. Plus all the
other benefits. Truly amazing. $50 / year = $1 / week.
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Disclaimer
Brief
Reminder
Projections are starting to be discussed.
Some data points:
From that link:
Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 15 series in the second week of September, followed by its availability for purchase a week later.
Now, according to the well-known analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone 15 Pro Max, featuring an exclusive periscope camera lens, is anticipated to become the best-selling model despite its higher price point.
In fact, the iPhone 15 Pro Max alone is projected to account for 35 to 40 per cent of the total iPhone 15 series shipments.
It’s estimated that Apple might ship around 10 per cent more iPhone 15 Pro Max units by the end of the year compared to the current iPhone 14 Pro Max.
Kuo also suggests that Apple could commence shipping the iPhone 15 Pro Max as early as this week.
The company’s shipments for the iPhone 15 series are estimated to exceed 80 million units by the end of this year, with the number expected to rise to 220 million units by the end of 2024.
Search:
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The 2032 US Olympics Jiu-Jitsu Team
Sophia: far left, back row.
Locator: 48380TEXAS.
Ross Perot Jr. gestured out the window as his helicopter circled a 4.5-acre pit alongside the skyline of downtown Dallas. Texas and U.S. flags hung from a crane within it.
The site is where Perot’s real-estate investment company, Hillwood, is partnering to build a $500 million Goldman Sachs tower for more than 5,000 bankers and investors. That will make it the financial firm’s second-largest office, behind New York. As the helicopter swung northwest, windows glinted from two unfinished Wells Fargo office towers, scheduled to open next year. A bit farther away: a fourth office building under construction for Charles Schwab, which moved its headquarters from California to the Dallas area five years ago, and the footprint of a Deloitte campus doubling in size.
The sprawling landscape illustrates an expansion that has brought to North Texas a presence in financial services that now sits second only to New York City in the U.S.
And growth of so-called Y’all Street is accelerating.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Texas investment-banking and securities employment has increased 111% over the past 20 years and 27% since the pandemic, compared with 16% and 5%, respectively, in New York.
The number of people employed in finance overall has risen 13% in Texas since 2019, compared with 2% in New York and 3% nationally.
Dallas now ranks second to New York City among metro areas in the number of workers employed in finance-related industries. Other cities, particularly in the Sunbelt, have seen growth as those services increasingly seek to be closer to customers nationwide.
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Movie Night
Notorious. Alfred Hitchcock.
It begins in Miami. Perhaps the one place in America I have not been. Not to be taken out of context. Ends in Rio de Janeiro. I have been to Rio.
From wiki:
Notorious is considered by critics and scholars to mark a watershed for Hitchcock artistically, and to represent a heightened thematic maturity. His biographer, Donald Spoto, writes that "Notorious is in fact Alfred Hitchcock's first attempt—at the age of forty-six—to bring his talents to the creation of a serious love story, and its story of two men in love with Ingrid Bergman could only have been made at this stage of his life."
In 2006, Notorious was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
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The Book Page
From One Cell: A Journey Into Life's Origins And The Future Of Medicine, Ben Stanger, 2023.
Audience: should be summer reading for high school students -- juniors / seniors -- with plans to attend college to major in the life sciences.
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The Boys
Locator: 48370INV.
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Ready To Quilt
Locator: 48275INV.
Tag: Corning, GLW, California DMW.
Update
Later, 11:12 a.m. CDT: CNBC practically giddy over the amount of money META and MSFT are going to be spending on Nvidia chips. Apparently META is Nvidia's biggest customer, and MSFT is going to spent $85 billion on Nvidia chips this year. Needs to be fact-checked -- heard in passing.
Later, 10:51 a.m. CDT:
Later, 10:48 a.m. CDT:
Original Post
Chicago PMI: 45.3 vs 45.5. Whoo-hoo!
Household cash: link here.
Opening:
Hope you all bought on the dip: Nancy Pelosi.
AMD: long interview with CEO. Shares up 7% today.
NVDA: up 7.5% at the open. Hope you all took advantage of the dip yesterday, or actually this past week.
INTC: up 1.5% today. Down 14% for one full year.
F: pain continues. Down at the open. Trading at 11.78. Down 15% past month.
GM: down 6% past month.
Boeing’s losses astounding. Not likely over even with new CEO. “Kitchen-sink” quarter yet to come.
Delta’s CrowdStrike problem.
OXY vs S&P 500: excruciating.
MSFT investors upset: Azure growth only 31%.
TMUS: huge beat; shares surge. Our carrier. Whoo-hoo! Fiber vs fixed wireless. Five million subscribers in three years. Fan of Apple. Looking for an interesting rollout. Cable streaming.
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Working On Their Aeroplanes
Acrylic on canvas, perhaps my favorite medium.
A lot of subtleties in this painting for a ten-year-old.
Locator: 48242INV.
Wow. The first 300 points were due to reaction to economic data today. Everything else -- short covering!
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Amazon
This is not unusual in our apartment complex, just ten minutes from DFW and multiple Amazon fulfillment centers.
Order something this morning and one will have it by early afternoon. Order something late this evening and it will be at your door tomorrow morning.
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Grammy's Culinary School Graduate
Advanced Degree
Summa Cum Laude
Locator: 48042LNG.
From multiple sources, Saudi wants 25% interest:
SRE: down a bit today; pays 3.3%; probably pays a whole lot for long-term investors.
Batteries = arbitrage, link here.
"Utilities now report that arbitrage is the primary use case for 10,487 MW of battery capacity, making it the most reported primary use," the EIA said.
"In arbitrage, utilities charge batteries by buying electricity during low-cost periods and then sell that electricity when electricity prices increase."
The California Independent System Operator and Electric Reliability Council of Texas accounted for almost three-fourths of US capacity at the end of 2023.
Batteries are most useful whenever and wherever solar capacity accounts for a significant share of load. Solar? Think Texas and southern California. See: does Texas have it all?
CAISO leads the nation in battery-storage capacity with 8.479 GW, or 42.8%, of total US capacity.
However, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas is quickly catching up and added the most capacity in the first quarter 2024 with 1.2 GW, or 55.3%, of all US installation.
CAISO and ERCOT are projected to account for 70% of battery storage capacity in EIA data.
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The Book Page
If you feel comfortable with 5th-century Athens, and interested in more, I highly recommend Peter Green's The Greco-Persian Wars. His history of the region from northwest India / Afghanistan across Egypt to Macedonia prior to the story of 5th-century Athens is incredible. In just a few pages, he provides a breathtaking review of events leading up to the Greco-Persian wars.
But don't even attempt to read it until your mind is ready to read this history again.
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North Texas -- Morning -- Wednesday, June 26, 2024
