Tuesday, September 16, 2014

What's Up?

Generally, the hits on this blog fill up a page going back 30 minutes or so (see "Feedjit Live" at the bottom of the blog). Right now, the hits are filling the entire page at 17 minutes, almost twice the usual rate. I have no idea why. The price of oil is up, and the landmark study on fracking was released, but that was about it.

Whatever. I appreciate the interest.

Oh, that's it. I just checked. The hits are twice the usual rate due to Vern Whitten photos being posted. Amazing!

Thank you, Vern.
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United Airlines Offer Flight Attendants $100,000 Buyout

Yahoo!Finance is reporting:
United Airlines, the only major U.S. carrier to post a quarterly loss this year, is offering its flight attendants buyouts of as much as $100,000 as it seeks to rein in costs.
Employees who accept the early-exit plan will be eligible for lump-sum payments, said a spokeswoman, Megan McCarthy, who declined to disclose the formula needed to reach the maximum. United also is recalling 1,450 furloughed attendants, most of whom took voluntary leave one to two years ago, she said.
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ObamaWar
No Boots On The Ground
That was easy.

For Investors Only -- September 16, 2014

Remember: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here.

Having said that, I hope investors took advantage of the recent pullback in the general market, and the oil market more narrowly.

Trading at new highs: BRK-B, CAH.

Talking heads, according to this site, provide two reasons why the market is up today. If I'm in the mood later today, I will comment on these reasons. But right now, too tired.

Biggest Story Of The Year For Fracking? -- September 16, 2014; Holding A Conference And "No One" Attends -- Do You Still Take Selfies?

The AP is reporting:
The final report from a landmark federal study on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, found no evidence that chemicals or brine water from the gas drilling process moved upward to contaminate drinking water at a site in western Pennsylvania.
The Department of Energy report, released Monday, was the first time an energy company allowed independent monitoring of a drilling site during the fracking process and for 18 months afterward. After those months of monitoring, researchers found that the chemical-laced fluids used to free gas stayed about 5,000 feet below drinking water supplies.
Scientists used tracer fluids, seismic monitoring, and other tests to look for problems, and created the most detailed public report to date about how fracking affects adjacent rock structures.
The fracking process uses millions of gallons of high-pressure water mixed with sand and chemicals to break apart rocks rich in oil and gas. That has led to a national boom in production, but also concerns about possible groundwater contamination.
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Flat Earthers Are Staying Home
(Their Phrase, Not Mine)

It's one thing when "no one" shows up, but it speaks volumes when neither the prime minister of the Australia nor the prime minister of Canada NOR the president of ever-green Germany is attending the green energy / climate change conference in NYC. The link does not say whether the prime minister of the UK is attending. However, this source says he is attending but the EU prime minister will not be attending. The fact that neither Germany nor the EU will be sending their leaders -- just coincidental? The EU prime minister will be in NYC at the UN the following day, so it is a thought-out decision for him not to attend the Climate Change Conference. One must remember that much of the EU is heading into another recession (or never recovered from the last recession), much of it due to emphasis on global warming. The French premier plans to attend. It appears the farther one leans to the socialist agenda, the more likely one is to attend. This serves to point out, more than anything else, the "green movement" is simply an anti-capitalist / anti-free-market movement.

A Meeting Of The Flat Earth Society

Vern Whitten Photography -- September 16, 2014

What a gift. What a treat. Again, these make wonderful gifts. 

Vern Whitten has sent links to four new sets of images from North Dakota and Minnesota: two are from the Bakken, one cruise down the Badlands, and the last set covers central Minnesota to the middle of North Dakota.

Summertime Bakken: http://www.vernwhittenphotography.net/wes62914/

Sights and Progress:  http://www.vernwhittenphotography.net/wes8914/

Cruising the Badlands:  http://www.vernwhittenphotography.net/bad8914/

Summertime Sights: http://www.vernwhittenphotography.net/sum2014/

Too much to discuss, but there is an aerial view of the CLR 14-well Atlanta pad southwest of Williston in Baker oil field. I tried getting to that pad but could not.


Contact:


Vern Whitten Photography

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

East Fork oil field has been updated.

Active rigs:


9/16/201409/16/201309/16/201209/16/201109/16/2010
Active Rigs198178193199145

RBN Energy: the challenges of condensate and widely varying quality of oil in the Eagle Ford.

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Doomsday

I track the states over here.
 
Breitbart is reporting:
Among the many metrics that show Obama's home state is struggling to break the Great Recession, a new report shows that applications for food stamps in Illinois is greater than its creation of jobs. [And, of course, that can only go on for so long, I suppose.]
Illinois has had the worst recovery from the recession of any state in the country, the Illinois Policy Institute reported this month: "There are nearly 300,000 fewer Illinoisans working today than in January 2008, and 170,000 fewer payroll jobs. "
"For every post-recession job created in Illinois, nearly two people have enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps," the Institute wrote. “In the recession era, the number of Illinoisans dependent on food stamps has risen by 745,000.
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Staggering

I knew "the number" but I missed the staggering significance. Apple probably sold in excess of 4 million iPhones in the first 24 hours, September 12, 2014. Everyone said that set a record. I guess. That was double the number iPhone 5's Apple sold in 2012 in that rollout. Link here. Apparently analysts were hoping for more. LOL. The stock (AAPL) is down almost 2% today.

On a side note: it's pretty well agreed that not more than four or five million people actually signed up for ObamaCare after several months of intensive marketing and arm-twisting and laws requiring folks to sign up, and yet Apple sold more than 4 million iPhones in less than one 24-hour period. And their website did not falter - though in the first three hours, the website was oversubscribed/down simply because too many folks trying to access the site. But that resolved itself in less than six hours. Ellen DeGeneres was incredulous that as many as 5 million people might have signed up for ObamaCare, and yet many more than that will buy an iPhone 6/6+ in the first two weeks it is offered.

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A Note to the Grandparents

Our 11-year-old starts off the year in her science class studying the periodic table. That is one of her favorite subjects; we've "studied" the periodic table, off and on, together for the last two years. 

One of the things we discovered on our own was the "ability" to predict whether the radius of an element/atom would be be greater or smaller than the radius of the preceding element/atom in the periodic table. I say we discovered it on our own because we had not see that particular subject discussed anywhere. [Yes, one can find discussions of such by googling, but in the general textbooks and general science books we've been reading, we did not come across it.]

She said she was disappointed that they would "only" be studying the first three rows of the periodic table. LOL.

I reminded her that whatever she learns, it builds on the fund of knowledge she already has about that subject, so studying "just" the first three rows would be fine. Even if they studied just one element, she could learn a lot. She seemed to accept that.  

I say all that because two books that seem to "read together" nicely on the subject are: Sean Carroll's  Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, c. 2013 and, Lisa Randall's Knocking On Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, both c. 2011, 2012. The first is short, snappy, and to the point, and includes some nice glossy photographs, even as a softcover. Lisa is a lot wordier, seems to digress a bit too often, and treads (occasionally and unnecessarily) into "religion vs science." I have the paperback and perhaps she added some of that after the initial hardcover release although I doubt it.

Although I don't understand the math and understand very little of the theory, I feel I've come a long way in "getting it."  Forthe first time I feel I have a better grasp on all the hoopla surrounding the Higgs boson. That, and $1.89, will get you a tall dark roast cup of coffee at Starbucks in north Texas.