Locator: 49940AAPL.
Steve Jobs kept it simple. Like an iceberg.
Link to MacRumors. Scroll through the entries. It is simply amazing.
Apple's 50th anniversary coincides with America's 250th anniversary.
Tim Cook only needs to release this again.
Locator: 49938B.
Fracking: for those who can think -- https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/ive-done-thousands-fracking-jobs-heres-truth-activists-wont-tell.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $63.85.
New wells reporting:
RBN Energy: the sunshine state is a heavyweight in natural gas consumption. Link here. Archived.
Florida is the nation’s fourth-largest consumer of natural gas, but unlike the three states ahead of it — Texas, Louisiana and California — the Sunshine State produces virtually no gas of its own. And get this: Florida’s gas consumption has tripled over the past 25 years, mostly due to the development of nearly 30 gigawatts (GW) of new gas-fired power plants. That buildout spurred the expansion of existing gas pipelines and the construction of new ones. In today’s RBN blog, we examine Florida’s remarkable growth and whether additional pipeline capacity might be needed.
This is an awesome time of year to go to Florida, so long as you’re OK with alligators, long lines at Walt Disney World and $38 hamburgers. Hurricane season is long past, the weather is balmy, and February is one of the driest months, so the odds are good that your round of golf or afternoon at the beach won’t be marred by a nasty thunderstorm. If you haven’t visited in a few years, you’ll be amazed at how crowded it is. The state is now home to more than 24 million (up from 16 million in 2000), and during the winter months “snowbirds” from up north swell the population by a million or so and shorter-term tourists add another half-a-mil, mostly in Orlando and along the coasts.All that growth — and the shift away from coal-fired generation to other sources — has helped to transform Florida’s energy profile, especially gas. Back in 2000, the state’s natural gas consumption averaged just under 1.5 Bcf/d; by 2024-25, usage had 3X’ed to more than 4.6 Bcf/d. Gas consumption there is heavily weighted toward power generation. As shown in Figure 1 below, an astonishing 87% (blue bar segments) is now used to fuel gas-fired combined-cycle and combustion-turbine units the state’s electric utilities have been building with abandon, mostly to keep pace with the double-headed monster of population growth and air-conditioning demand. The rest is split between industrial use (orange bar segments; 8%) and residential/commercial (res/comm; green bar segments; 5%).
Locator: 49937AAPL.
AI prompt:
In my simplified way of looking at things, if Apple is a $4 trillion market cap company, I can break Apple into a $3 trillion market cap company: hardware, software, services. If so, how did Apple get to $4 trillion -- simply more of the same (hardware, software, services) or is there a fourth "division" as it were? AI could be a fourth division but I see AI as embedded in software and services, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe AI needs to be seen as a fourth "division" when trying to sort out how Apple's market cap is segmented?
Gemini:
Locator: 49933SPORTS.
Amazing how I've changed over the years. Ten years ago never would this have happened, but today, I'm more interested in the PGA golf tournament in Phoenix than the Super Bowl in Santa Clara.
Regardless, the PGA golf tournament will be well over by Super Bowl kick-off. Most exciting: one of the winners today will be his first PGA championship.
But if I could be anywhere today, it would be on the road to Oatman.
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The "Book" Page
T.S. Eliot's Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, 1939. Link here.
Another "Mungo Jerry."
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Lana Del Rey
Some days the only music that "works" for me is Lana Del Rey.
From the day I first heard this song, it continues to haunt me ...
Updates
April 18, 2026: "getting ready to lay track" for the 119-mile Merced-to-Bakersfield (Central Valley) segment.
The state hopes to have this segment operational between 2030 - 2033, or in other words, by 2033 -- that's seven years from now. Laying 119 miles of railroad track on flat land with no major obstructions can take anywhere from a few months to over a year, depending on whether the timeline includes only the physical laying of track or the entire project, including surveying, permitting, and grading. My understanding is that all the preparation work has begun.
Original Post
Without this project, neither California nor Governor Newsom have any marketing photo ops.
Definition of a railhead: simply a staging area for material. It may or may not have any rail. In this case, there is yet no rail laid for the actual project.
In early February, 2026, Governor Newsom announced a major milestone for the California high-speed rail project, a railhead in Kern County, to begin staging material to complete a 119-mile segment of the "bullet train" route through the "central valley," from Merced to Bakersfield, combined population, 500,000.
Governor Newsom says the projects hopes to be a fully operational high-speed rail segment by 2033.
Current cost estimates for the rail from "Los Angeles" to "San Francisco" is $135 billion; original estimates, $33 billion, made in 2008. There are no time-of-completion estimates for the entire "LA-to-SF" project," but it now well accepted it will be well beyond 2040, assuming it is even completed.