Locator: 48676B.
WTI: $63.34.
Active rigs: 30.
Two new permits, #41976 - #41977, inclusive:
Two permits renewed:
Locator: 48675INVESTING.
Tag: Ford, Apple, Broadcom, tech, chips.
Overall sales up 16%.
Electric vehicle sales experienced a 25% decrease to 6,723 units, including a 42% decline for the F-150 Lightning.
Metrics:
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Other Business And Economics News Today
US equity markets surge.
Moats:
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Broadcom Family Of Chips
Too long to list. If interested, ask ChatGPT.
Today, Broadcom unveiled two significant advances in its semiconductor portfolio, both aimed at enhancing AI infrastructure and data center capabilities:
So, we have:
Apple suppliers, this is an old screenshot, shown many times on the blog. Search Apple iPhone suppliers.
Locator: 48674INVESTING.
From The NYT. Link here.
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
Locator: 48673CA.
I think there's a bigger story here than simply "California is broke."
Medi-Cal:
The US House last month approved a Republican budget plan that could shrink Medicaid spending by $880 billion over 10 years, only partially paying for an extension of expiring tax cuts from President Donald Trump’s first term, plus some new ones he has promised, totaling as much as $4.5 trillion.
What cuts could mean for California: A spending cut of that magnitude would have a huge impact in California, with nearly 15 million people — more than a third of the population — on Medi-Cal (which is California's name for its Medicaid program). More than half California's children are covered by Medi-Cal. And over 60% of Medi-Cal’s $161 billion budget comes from Washington.
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Racial Quotas
In a motion in federal court in Kentucky, the Justice Department said the Transportation Department’s longstanding Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program (DBE) violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. This is the program that sets aside federal contracts for women and minorities. The DBE program doles out some $37 billion in contracts over five years.
The case was brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), which sued the federal government in 2023 on behalf of Mid-America Milling and Bagshaw Trucking. The companies say they were denied contracts because they weren’t minority- or woman-owned. In September 2024 federal Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove issued an injunction and said the case was likely to succeed on the merits.
Race and gender quotas have warped government contracting since the early 1980s, and the DBE requirements were most recently authorized by the Biden Administration. They required states to administer a federal formula that set aside roughly 10% of contracting dollars for everyone from architects and engineers to companies that lay the asphalt and provide the steel.
In many cases that raised costs for taxpayers. According to an MIT study of California, the cost of state-funded contracts fell 5.6% relative to federally funded projects after the state passed Proposition 209 that ended racial preferences in state contracts.
Wednesday’s change follows through on President Trump’s January executive order to “terminat[e] illegal discrimination in the federal government.” The impact of the change shouldn’t be underestimated. DBE contracts cover American infrastructure from roads in Alaska to airplanes from Boeing. WILL’s Dan Lennington says about 10% to 15% of U.S. GDP flows through government contracting.
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Never Served In The Military,
Still Thinks He Understands Warrior Spirit
Musk and SpaceX, link here.
Starship is SpaceX’s fully reusable launch system in testing today. It’s the most powerful rocket ship ever built by humans, standing some 400 feet tall on a launchpad. SpaceX can make a Starship every two to three weeks. That’s an amazing tidbit in and of itself. Musk, however, wants to produce 1,000 a year.
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Apple M4 Computers Are On Sale
