Wow -- Baylor -- Texas Women Take National Championship -- April 7, 2019

From ESPN:

TAMPA, Fla. -- At this time last year, Chloe Jackson was not on the Baylor women's basketball team. Today, she is its national championship savior and most outstanding player.

Jackson hit a driving layup with 3.9 seconds remaining, lifting Baylor to an 82-81 win over Notre Dame on Sunday night.

Baylor coach Kim Mulkey joins Geno Auriemma and Pat Summitt as the only coaches in women's Division I history with three or more national titles. As the final buzzer sounded, Mul

key broke down in tears as she received a full embrace from her entire staff.

Mulkey and the Lady Bears would not have gotten it without Jackson, who saved her best basketball for the Women's Final Four. Jackson hit a driving layup against Oregon with less than a minute remaining to get Baylor to the national championship game. The graduate transfer from LSU was sensational the entire game against Notre Dame, scoring a team-high 26 points as the key difference maker on both teams.

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NASCAR

How does he do it? Kyle Busch just won again. And earlier it looked like he would not win. Hamlin lost a lap due to speeding penalty entering pit.

Brother Kurt came in second.

Kyle started 12th.

Involved in a (minor) wreck the first second lap.

From NASCAR:

The race winner was involved in a multi-car crash on the second lap of the 500-lap affair, sustaining damage to the rear of his car. But he patiently worked his way back through the field. He took his first lead at lap 384.

The key to the win came late – Busch collected his third win of the season in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series and his eighth overall at Bristol Motor Speedway when he chose track position over fresh tires during the 11th and final caution of the race.

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RMDs

Baby boomers. Richest generation in US history.

Greatest generation: the parents of the boomers. The greatest generation: the first generation to leave money to their children, the boomers.

The baby boomers: 1946 - 1964.

I was born very, very early in the boomer generation.

I will start taking RMDs from IRAs soon -- not this year, not next year, but soon. Once we start taking RMDs, we will take RMDs for 26 years. And I'm at the beginning of that bow wave of those taking RMDs; I was among the early boomers.

I will most likely re-invest those RMDs.

But Uncle Sam will start to collect taxes on those RMDs.

We don't hear much talk about that, but my hunch is that by the time the peak of that bow wave hits, let's say ten years from now, the amount of money Uncle Sam collects from taxes on RMDs will not be trivial.

I thought about that (RMDs) when I read the Barron's headline and part of the story: the bull market could last another decade. 

World's Best Surfing, 2017

Catching Up On Graphics -- Nothing To See Here -- April 7, 2019

Ever since I began blogging about the Bakken I've been fascinated watching the the price of oil (whatever that means with 200+ varieties: WTI, Brent, OPEC basket, etc) and the various metrics that analysts use to track oil. Nothing seems to make sense. But that's fine. It's all fun.

Another metric: weekly US days of supply of crude oil.

I used to think that metric was important. Silly me.

US crude oil supply increasing. Price of crude oil climbing. Price of gasoline definitely climbing.

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Catching Up

After posting that graphic above, I realized I had forgotten to post two graphics, both of which I used to religiously post weekly.

Natural gas fill rate, link here, and so the year begins again:

That graph always reminds me of this song:

Wheel, Jerry Jeff Walker Gasoline demand, link here, one word: boring.

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The TV Cartoon Page

Favorite television cartoon: "Bob's Burgers."

Sophia's parents will not allow her to watch it. But it's my favorite, and Sophia knows it. 

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Flashback: It Was Jeb's Race To Lose

July 22, 2015: this seems so long ago.

It's Not The Headline That's Surprising

There are three story lines with this story. The headline: Hillary losing ground in battleground states. That headline is interesting but not as surprising as "the rest of the story." This is what is surprising:

• look at the spread head-to-head
• this is not against a generic "Republican" but against specific names (each with a lot of baggage)

But most surprising:

• it's being reported on ... CNN.

This is Jeb Bush's race to lose, and he will lose if Trump goes the Perot route.

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In the graphic above, does anyone even remember "Walker"? I don't. 

Aramco's True Breakeven Price -- Oilprice -- April 7, 2019

Updates

April 8, 2019: in the original post I wrote that I assumed Saudi Arabia could increase the size of its bond sale. Apparently it did:

Original Post

Before we get started, my two cents: the budget requirements for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is more important / more relevant than the "true" breakeven price.

From oilprice. Datapoints:

• Aramco information becoming available after the company's bond offering this past week; bond offering --
• $30 billion demand
• proposed offering: $10 billion
• one assumes they increase the size of the offering
• data from the bond filing
• Aramco, 2018, world's most profitable company
• earnings: $111 billion
• revenue: $356 billion
• free cash flow: $76 billion 
• Brent averaged $71.34/bbl
• Apple, second most profitable: $$60 billion
• ExxonMobil: $21 billion
• but note: Saudi Aramco struggled to break even in 2016 when Brent crude averaged about $45 / bbl
• net income: $13 billion
• free cash flow: $2 billion
• conclusion: Aramco's breakeven price is just about $40/bbl
• this author called OPEC's 2016 to open the spigot a "trillion dollar miscalculation"
• I called it a "trillion dollar mistake"
• author's bottom line: "we will likely never again see an extended period of time with world oil prices below $45, because OPEC will have to take action at that point to prop up prices as the cartel did in 2016 

It would be interesting to see some analysis of this. It's hard to believe that the breakeven price for Aramco is $45/bbl when all these years we've been told lifting costs for Saudi Arabia have been around $10/bbl. Something tells me there may be more to this story. As a starting point, does the $45/bbl breakeven cost include the "taxes" the company must pay to the government?

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M*A*S*H Theme Song

Texas Tech Wil Play For The Championship -- Having Trounced Top-Seeded Michigan State -- That Is All -- April 7, 2019 -- Oh, Yes, And A Tesla Re-Posting

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, travel, or relationship decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here.

This deserves to be re-posted:

Tesla: from SeekingAlpha this morning -- (archived) --

• Tesla is moving from a supply constrained into a demand constrained market for the Model 3.
• The North American backlog for the higher priced variants was exhausted in Q4 of 2018.
• Since then, Tesla has been able to pull other demand levers such as the MR, the EU, and China backlog and the SR variant.
• However, these are creating only short-term pockets of demand, the question of whether there is enough sustained demand for 7,000 or even 5,000/week production remains unanswered.

Tesla: After posting the above, a reader sent me a link to a podcast from the Montana Skeptic re: Tesla. One must absolutely listen to this podcast. The SeekingAlpha link above dovetails perfectly with this podcast at ZeroHedge. 

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The Book Page

One of my favorite books, on my "top shelf": The Mistaken Extinction: Dinosaur Evolution and the Origin of Birds, Lowell Dingus and Timothy Rowe, c. 1998.

With all the current excitement coming out of Bowman, ND, and the Hell Creek Formation this past week, I thought it best to pull it down and review some sections.

In cartoon drawings of evolution, of our ancestors migrating from the ocean to land, we always see a linear progression: fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals to man.

It was not linear and amphibians are not on the line between fish and reptiles.

There were at least four challenges moving from the sea to land:

• respiration: obvious
• locomotion: on which almost "everyone" seems to focus
• reproduction: the need to keep eggs moist or viable, either internally or externally
• predation: eat or be eaten

The problem of reproduction, how to keep eggs moist or viable, either internally or externally, was "solved" two different ways. Amphibians had one solution; non-amphibians had another solution. Non-amphibians were called amniotes; amniote embryos, whether laid as eggs or carried by the female, are protected and aided by several extensive membranes.

So, that's one "biggie." Solving the "egg" problem two different ways: the amphibians did it one way and the amniotes did it a different way. We did not evolve from amphibians but amphibians and amniotes evolved from a common tetrapod ancestor. 

 The amniotes comprised at least five groups, some extinct, some still living: "reptilia" and mammals. "Reptilia" is sort of a grab-bag grouping of any tetrapod that is not amphibian or mammal. 

I think it's easy for youngsters to "define" and give examples of amphibians and mammals. It is much more difficult to "define" reptiles, though it's easy to come up with examples.

After much difficulty trying to define "reptilia" by what they are, I finally gave up and, instead, defined them by what they are not. "Reptilia" are tetrapods that are neither amphibians nor mammals. And if one doesn't know what a tetrapod is, then "reptiles" are "animals" (in the sense that most five-year-olds define animals) that are not fish, amphibians or mammals. 

Predation: one of the big differences between fish and tetrapods that evolved into reptiles -- "the earliest amniotes have the beginnings of a sophisticated joint between the head and neck, enabling the head to bend and twist form side to side, and to take items from the ground." -- Dingus and Rowe, p. 155. It is interesting to note that frogs, the quintessential (?) amphibian, have no neck, so they cannot turn their head. Only one species of frog has teeth in its lower and upper jaws.

Of the reptilia, we know that birds are warm-blooded. Dinosaurs? Apparently the jury is still out on this one, but the evidence seems to be accumulating that at least some (all?) were warm-blooded. 

If so, the quality of warm-bloodedness is an example of convergent evolution, or saying it another way: warm-bloodedness evolved independently at least twice. (Another example is the eye: the eye in the octopus evolved independently from the eye in tetrapods.)

From Dingus and Rowe, page 156: "Large brains and endothermy are points of resemblance between birds and mammals that evolved convergently within different hierarchies of amniote phylogeny."

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Egg-Laying Mammals

Later, while trying to sort out the last common ancestor before branching off to amphibians and mammals, I pictured that the missing link must be an egg-laying tetrapod. I'm sure there are many scientific articles on this but I'm still looking. One possibility: the egg-laying tetrapod laid eggs on the ground (or in a tree, etc) but those terrestrial eggs were subject to terrestrial predators. Could it be possible that the amphibians were siblings of egg-laying reptile-like mammals but evaded predators on land by returning to the water. 

This is the theory regarding the platypus, the marsupial, and the placental. All three had a common ancestor but the platypus "broke away" long before the marsupial and the placental separated. The last common ancestor lived on land, but the platypus returned to the water to escape land-based predators.

Wow, This Gets Tedious -- But Someone Has To Do It -- April 7, 2019

Let's see. Is Easter just around the corner?

I'm trying to recall how often we experienced snow/blizzards in Williston at Easter when I was growing up.

Never.

Just joking. I'm sure it happened frequently. I just don't recall any that stood out.

But now, with just twelve years before the end of the earth due to anthropogenic global warming, expect blizzards in the heartland, from iceage now:

Accuweather meteorologists warn of possible heavy snow and damaging winds, even blizzard conditions, from southeastern Montana to Colorado from Tuesday into Wednesday.

They warn that snowfall could “reach or exceed a foot across either the northern or central Plains, depending on the track of the storm.” Snow may also streak along a narrow swath into the Great Lakes, according to AccuWeather Meteorologist Randy Adkins. The storm “is likely to cause severe travel problems in the heartland.”

No mountains in southeastern Montana as far as I know so I suppose we're not talking about high elevation snowstorms.

Wow, it's taking forever for this year's winter to end. Didn't "P. Phil" tell us winter was over months ago? Back in February?

And that was as good a reason as any to stop Amazon from building HQ2 in Long Island City, along with 25,000 jobs, and billions in revenue.

Easter:

• go back to the spring equinox
• wait for the first full moon following the spring equinox
• then, Easter, will be the first Sunday after that first full moon after the spring equinox. Easy-peasy
• is that correct; doing that from memory just for the fun of it