Word for the day: ullage.
All that talk about China taking less oil this month (or was it last month?) and all that floating storage off-shore from China needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Link here.
Best aroma in the kitchen.
Yesterday I posted this on the blog:
There are so many opportunities out there. I just can't believe it. One needs to remember, if the economy comes back:
Three "logistics" stories currently running in The Wall Street Journal:
Next on the list:
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.
From the second-linked story above:
Container imports are flowing back into the U.S. after a six-month hiatus, with U.S. retailers knocked back by pandemic-driven lockdowns now stocking up before the holiday season.
The demand is filling up container ships across the Pacific and operators are restoring cargo-vessel sailings that were cut by as much as a third at the height of the pandemic closures from March to June.
August “will more than likely be” the best August in the history of the Port of Los Angeles, Gene Seroka, executive director of the port, the largest U.S. gateway for seaborne container imports, said this week.
Vessel bookings for the coming weeks suggest “September will be strong as well,” he said. “Retailers are currently restocking and redeveloping their inventories at their distribution centers and on their store shelves.”
The Port of Los Angeles said dockworkers there were handling 15 container ships on Thursday. In the spring, the average daily number of ships was about half that amount.
“Capacity from Asia to the U.S. West Coast is 25% higher than it was in May and around 7% on year,” said Jonathan Roach, a shipping analyst at London-based Braemar ACM Shipbroking. “We have seen a surge in short-term demand out of America.”
And more:
Trade-data-analysis company Panjiva Inc. said U.S. sales of household appliances soared 50% in the first half of the third quarter from a year earlier, while consumer-electronics imports rose 5% in the period. Imports of televisions by Best Buy rose 11% over the same period, Panjiva said.
“July was the best month since January,” said Sam Ruda, the port director at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. “E-commerce is dominant and August will be stronger. We see rising volumes coming in from the home goods stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s and from electronics retailers.”
At the facility overseen by Mr. Ruda, the largest container port on the East Coast, cargo volumes fell 7.9% in the first seven months of the year from a year earlier, including a 22% drop in loaded container imports in May. But the overall box tally jumped in July by 100,000 from the number handled in June.
The usual disclaimer applies.
Texas, North Dakota, and South Dakota have each had a recent spike in cases. That's to be expected. I would be surprised if otherwise.
Following the Sturgis rally, August 7 - August 16, 2020:
Link here to coronavirus stats by state.
Wrong link. Sorry. Here's the correct link.
Be sure to set the search criteria to "yesterday."
Then, deaths / one million population.
In a league of their own:
Not far behind:
That rounds out the top 10. Others, ranking and deaths / one million population:
Where it all started:
Of note:
For all the attention they get, cruise ships look pretty safe, and then one has to factor in the average age of those on ship.
One of several reasons I don't follow cases: link here.
They're reading the blog. LOL.
The original post over at "House of Saud in Extremis" was dated: Monday, May 9, 2016, more than four years ago.
Today, over at oilprice:
Why Prince Salman's Vision 2030 will fail, January 14, 2017.
Oil extends drop after Saudi cuts official sales price; previously posted.
WTI; $38.78 -- as reported by oilprice, September 6, 2020, Sunday, Labor Day weekend.
I forget when I first posted these numbers but I assume it's been at least a year:
I was tempted to break that down by two different plays (Bakken vs Permian) and adjust the dollar amounts accordingly but I've decided to leave it as is. Too many variables.
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Continental Drift
Of the many videos I've seen on continental drift, this is one of the better ones. As you move into the Permian, or thereabouts, the cartoonist has under-laid the continents, and if you look really, really closely you can see where "North Dakota" would have been 300 million years ago. Mostly under water.
This one is an updated Scotese video but doesn't include the boundaries of the underlying US states. However, the geologic calendar banner is really, really nice.
For mammal evolution, I think the most interesting period was the peri-Permian Mass Extinction event -- perhaps starting with the swamp in the last ten million years of the Carboniferous period before the PME event and progressing into the desert-like Triassic period ten million years past the PME event.
It's difficult to keep the various groups, classes, and clades straight, especially now that there is a major revision underway regarding mammalian evolution "across" the Permian. So, this may be not entirely correct.
The two major groups of animals competing for diurnal resources in the Permian were the Sauropsids and the Synapsids. The Sauropsids survived the PME event; the Synapsids did not. The therapsids did survive and this is where it gets confusing for me and where different authorities seem to diverge. Some say the Synapsids did not survive the PME event, but others say the Therapsids, which did survive that event, were an "advanced" group of synapsids.
I think this is a lot of semantics, but over time, the experts will come to some type of agreement.
The bottom line for me: the Permian is an incredible transition period from the swampy, hot Carboniferous to the hot, dry Triassic, punctuated with a major extinction event. We're lucky we're here, I guess.
Again, I may be way wrong on this but I'm learning. I need to keep up with Sophia.