"The disruption con: why big tech’s favourite buzzword is nonsense"

From The Gueardian:

How one magic word became a way of justifying Silicon Valley’s unconstrained power 

There are certain phrases that are central to the sway the tech industry holds over our collective imagination: they do not simply reflect our experience, they frame how we experience it in the first place. They sweep aside certain parts of the status quo, and leave other parts mysteriously untouched. They implicitly cast you as a stick-in-the-mud if you ask how much revolution someone is capable of when that person represents billions in venture capital investment. Among the most influential of these phrases is undoubtedly “disruption”.

The concept of disruption is a way for companies, the press or simply individuals to think about questions of continuity and discontinuity – what lasts and what doesn’t, what is genuinely new and what is just the next version of something older. There is a lot at stake in how we think about these issues. Are the changes the tech industry brings about, or claims to bring about, fundamental transformations of how capitalism functions, or are they an extension of how it has always functioned? The answers to such questions will determine what regulatory oversight we believe is necessary or desirable, what role we think the government or unions should play in a new industry such as tech, and even how the industry and its titans ought to be discussed.

When we speak of disruption, we are usually thinking about the perils of continuity; we express the sense that continuity works fine until it doesn’t. To some extent, this sense that things staying the same for too long is dangerous and makes us risk falling behind, is characteristic of modernity – not in the sense of a specific time period so much as the condition of being modern, living in a modern age. As the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in the 19th century, when the world around him was modernising at a breakneck pace: “The form of a city / changes faster, alas, than a mortal’s heart.” Keep living the way you’re living, and soon enough you’ll find yourself living in the past.

More specifically, though, disruption resonates with our experience of capitalism. Think of all the companies and products that you remember treating as seemingly permanent, inextricable fixtures of your everyday life, that nevertheless slid right out and disappeared with time. Recall, if you’re of the right age, the act of respooling a cassette tape with your pinkie finger, or the phrase “Be kind, please rewind”. Or, for a slightly younger generation, the whistles of a dial-up modem or the mastication of a floppy disk drive. Disruption tells a story that explains how things that seem as if they will last forever nevertheless come to be short-lived.

Neither those who argue for continuity nor those who are in favour of discontinuity are disinterested parties – everyone has a stake in these things. I have to include myself in this. I confess to being very wary of claims of disruption, but then again, as a professor of literature, I’m in a profession that pretty much depends on the idea that the past matters a lot and that messing with it in any meaningful sense entails spending a lot of time studying it. As Mandy Rice-Davies put it when she was told that the politician Lord Astor denied having an affair with her: “He would say that, wouldn’t he?” And I would argue that stewardship of the past is more important than riding roughshod over it, wouldn’t I?

Nonetheless, I think at least some of the rhetoric of disruption depends on actively misunderstanding and misrepresenting the past. We can call this the infomercial effect. You don’t see quite so many of them today, but they were once ubiquitous, and they would follow the same template: “Don’t you hate it when,” they would ask, and name an extremely minor problem with some mundane task you honestly couldn’t say you had ever encountered. Then they’d offer their revolutionary solution to the problem they had invented about 30 seconds prior. The infomercial deliberately misinterpreted whatever it was seeking to disrupt. One of the greatest works of collective satire of the internet age are the 6,069 and counting Amazon reviews for the Hutzler 571 banana slicer, which mock exactly the mania for buzzy solutions in search of a problem – “No more paying for those expensively sliced fruits- i can just stay at home,” joked one user.

The reason infomercials use this template is that it taps into a pretty pervasive sense of boredom. We get excited when things get shaken up, for the big and powerful to get taken down a peg. There is a joy in seeing “the system” shaken up, old hierarchies up-ended, Goliaths falling to Davids. Such narratives play to our impatience with structures and situations that seem to coast on habit and inertia, and to the press’s excitement about underdogs, rebels, outsiders. If you look back at coverage of Theranos, until the fateful article by John Carreyrou in the Wall Street Journal that brought the company down, few journalists really bothered to ask whether or not Theranos could do what it claimed to be able to do – they asked what would happen if it could. Disruption is high drama. The claim that “things work the way they work because there’s a certain logic to them” is not.

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The idea of disruption has a particularly strange backstory. Probably its oldest ancestors are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who wrote in the Communist Manifesto that the modern capitalist world is characterised by “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions”, so that, as they put it, “all that is solid melts into air”. Whereas the premodern world was defined by a few stable certainties, by centuries-old tradition, and governed by ancient habits of thought, in modernity all fixed relations “are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify”. You can sense their giddiness, even though the situation they describe is disorienting and ultimately nightmarish. And yet they are giddy, because they feel that this accelerating cycle of constant destruction and replacement ultimately destroys itself.

This idea made its way from the Communist Manifesto into business jargon by way of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who, in a 1942 book, coined the phrase “creative destruction”. Although hardly a communist himself, Schumpeter derived the term from Marx and intended it to be descriptive rather than affirmative. Born in Austria in 1883, Schumpeter was steeped in both Marxian economics and in the work of classical liberal economists such as Ludwig von Mises. He became one of the great analysts of the business cycle, but also of its social ramifications. In 1932, he became a professor at Harvard. Schumpeter thought that capitalism would almost gradually lead to some kind of state socialism, a fact that he didn’t exactly welcome but thought inevitable....

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News You Can Use: "How to Escape From a Volcano Eruption"

Today's word is alacrity, alac·​ri·​ty:  

promptness in response : cheerful readiness 
—Merriam-Webster

From Wired:

Let’s say you were visiting the Roman town of Pompeii on the morning of August 24, 79 AD. And let’s say you arrived sometime between the hours of 9 and 10 am. That should give you enough time to explore the port town and maybe even grab a loaf of bread at the local bakery (see map below for directions). But it would also put you in Pompeii in time to experience a 5.9 magnitude earthquake, the first of many, and watch the black cloud rise from Mount Vesuvius as the mountain began to erupt 1.5 million tons of molten rock per second and release 100,000 times the thermal energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. All while you were standing a mere 6 miles away.

Your situation would seem challenging–but, surprisingly, not hopeless! When I emailed Pier Paolo Petrone, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Naples Federico II, asking if any Pompeiians survived the eruption, he wrote back to say that many did. “But likely only those who took immediate action.”

Unfortunately, instead of immediately evacuating, some Pompeiians took shelter from the falling ash. This may seem prudent, but it is a mistake. Buy that bread. And get it to go.

You have some time, because the initial stages of Vesuvius’ eruption were not the most dangerous. The pressurized magma beneath Vesuvius contains dissolved gasses, and cracking Vesuvius’ vent has the same effect as cracking a gargantuan can of soda. The hot gases rush out of solution and through the narrow vent. The effect is like a jet engine. The forceful eruption blows lava pieces and gas a few miles high, sucking in and heating surrounding air to create a light, hot cloud lifting high into the atmosphere.

This is good. The cloud is hot enough to melt lead, and the high atmosphere is the safest place for it. The molten rock chunks blasted up and out will eventually cool and fall, and because the wind at both lower and higher altitudes over Vesuvius on August 24 blew south-southwest, they will drop on Pompeii. Though the initial pieces are small and will fall like rain, eventually these pieces of pumice come down with enough size and ferocity to collapse houses–but not yet. You still have time.

But do not linger. Within Mount Vesuvius, a dangerous process is beginning to take place. Because the gassiest magma exits first, as the eruption enters its later phases, less gas is forced through Vesuvius’ vent and its jet loses power. This may sound like a positive development. It is not. Instead of rising miles into the atmosphere, the dense mix of searing hot ash and gas will rise only a few hundred yards and then fall, picking up velocity so that when it reaches the ground, it hugs and flows like a superheated sandstorm moving at autobahn speeds. These “pyroclastic flows” can be 1,800 degrees F, dense enough to suffocate you, and they flow for miles. In the early morning hours of the 25th, a surge will kill everyone remaining in Pompeii. You need to leave long before then.

As to where to go, you have two choices. Mountains block your path to the east, and the Mediterranean Sea blocks your escape to the west. You could try to wait for a boat at the beach, but (a) archaeologists have found a large group of bodies in a boathouse in nearby Herculaneum who appear to have attempted that, (b) the prevailing winds are against you, and (c) tsunamis.

That leaves north, toward the volcano and eventually Naples, or south, toward the town of Stabia. These are your only two viable options Petrone tells me, though he says even then there are issues with both.

Fortunately, none of those issues involve melting in a river of lava.

This fear is natural in any eruption, but generally misplaced. Depending on its composition, lava ranges from 10,000 to 100 million times as viscous as water. This means even the runniest molten rock has the viscosity of room temperature honey. Unless you’re on a very steep slope, you can generally outrun it. Stationary objects like houses can be flattened by these fiery rivers, but “usually people can move out of the way,” says Stephen Self, a volcanologist at UC Berkeley.

Instead, it’s the magma beneath the mountain, and its precise composition, that should deeply concern you. The more viscous the magma, the more gases it contains and the more explosively it will erupt. Unfortunately for you, the magma inside Vesuvius was unusually viscous, which partly explains why its eruption registered as a formidable 5 out of 8 on the logarithmically scaled volcanic explosivity index....

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TL;dr: You can do it

Coronavirus May Be Evolving To Defeat Mask Wearing, Handwashing

From the New York Post:

A new COVID-19 mutation appears to be even more contagious, according to a study — and experts say it could be a response by the virus to defeat masks and other social-distancing efforts.

Scientists in a paper published Wednesday identified a new strain of the virus, which accounted for 99.9 percent of cases during the second wave in the Houston, Texas, area, the Washington Post reported.
The paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, said people with the strain, known as the D614G mutation, had higher loads of virus — suggesting it is more contagious.

Though the strain isn’t more deadly, researchers said it appeared to have adapted better to spread among humans....MORE

And in other 2020 news:
Massive pack of hungry raccoons taking over San Francisco park

"Moments in money: The first tax haven"

From Spear's Magazine:

Some academics believe that tax havens have existed almost as long as the concept of tax. The earliest example appeared in 166 BC, during the reigns of Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus (they overlapped), in the Aegean island of Delos. The Romans set it up as a free port with no taxes or customs duties, in order to undercut nearby Greek island of Rhodes, which had not yet submitted to the Pax Romana.

As a result Delos prospered as a centre for trade in ivory, textiles, wine, wheat and spices from Africa and the Middle East, and Rhodes took a slide. The real ascent of tax havens began after the First World War, however, when European countries in particular began raising levels of tax to pay for the war and reconstruction. While in the US New Jersey and Delaware introduced attractions for ‘non-resident’ companies, it was neutral Switzerland that emerged in the 1920s as the world’s favourite tax haven.

In 1913, Swiss banking holdings were 26 per cent those of France; by 1929 that was 79 per cent. A League of Nations report noted that the banking assets per head of population in Switzerland were $714, compared to $438 in the US and $292 in the UK. In fact, the true fi gure was perhaps twice that, as many assets were held off-balancesheet – small wonder this has been described as the ‘golden age’ of Swiss banking....

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Risk: What They Call Market Making Sure Smells Like Prop Trading

From FT Alphaville:

The prop trading that got away

The Bank of England’s proprietary trading review came out this week, but it has largely gone under the radar. That’s a shame because among its findings is this (our emphasis):

There is evidence that other activities falling within the statutory definition of proprietary trading are substantial for some firms, but these activities arise in the context of the wider business needs of the firms concerned. Many firms, especially larger firms, continue to serve their clients through market making and related activities. Firms’ liquid asset buffers (LABs) hold material amounts of financial instruments, although these are largely cash, central bank reserves, or low risk government bonds, and interest rate risk in the LAB is often largely hedged. Furthermore, firms hedge the risks arising from serving clients in both trading and banking books through own-account positions in financial instruments and commodities.

The Bank’s conclusion is that this sort of activity is AOK because new capital and liquidity requirements for banks, as well as tougher internal controls, have diminished most associated systemic risks.

But to those in the know, especially with respect to how traders themselves view market-making risk, that feels like a regulatory a cop out sitting in plain sight.

In the exact same report the BoE also finds that there is evidence of substantial activities falling “within the statutory definition of proprietary trading” precisely under the market-making name. It goes on to disclose that it remains hard to separate market making from proprietary trading, since both activities involve holding positions for the bank’s own trading account, with the only real distinction being intent.

In case you’re confused about what falls under that statutory definition of proprietary trading, here’s a convenient diagram from the Bank:

 

Worryingly, the BoE says firms’ hedging activities and liquidity investments (the fuel that powers the market-making desk) are substantial and have not declined even as market risk has. But, again, the BoE is not worried because hedging is supposed to reduce risk -- and there’s some evidence from both regulatory and firms’ own risk measures that they do, they say....

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"Corporate Profit Strategies and U.S. Economic Stagnation"

Some seriously deep thinking on what ails the U.S. economy
From American Affairs Journal:

Government responses to Covid-19 will reshape the U.S. economy for the next decade. But why did America’s economy deliver such slow growth during the previous decade, as well as before the 2008 global financial crisis? Why has the U.S. economy consistently generated rising income inequality and sluggish investment for so long? Answering these questions helps establish the baseline for understanding how the Covid shock might change economic structures and outcomes.

Most explanations for slow growth, both before and after the financial crisis, focus on singular causes—like aggregate income inequality, or the rise of a shareholder value model for corporate governance, or increased trade competition (globalization), or the financial sector’s disproportionate power and profitability (financialization). These explanations are important, and in many respects correct. Yet they are also largely incomplete because they ignore the sources of profit, even when they discuss the rising share of profits relative to wages, or of “financial sector” profits relative to “manufacturing sector” profits.

In understanding American capitalism, the origin of—and distributional conflict over—profits matters as much as the distributional conflict between profits and wages. Looking at firms’ profit strategies, and the organizational structures they construct to pursue profit, explains the dynamics and malaise of the U.S. economy.

Put simply, changes in corporate strategy and structure from the postwar era to the current era changed the distribution of profits among and within firms and led directly to our present problems. While the distribution of profits across firms was highly unequal in both eras, changes in corporate strategy and structure have concentrated profits in firms with small labor head counts, a low marginal propensity to invest, and relatively easy tax avoidance. Reduced investment and worsening income inequality in turn slow GDP growth and aggravate social and regional tensions. While these changes are generic to the rich countries, they have gone furthest in the United States. As William Gibson has put it, “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.”

From Fordism to the Information Economy
Broadly speaking, firms in the mass-production era (or as academics like to call it, “Fordism”) sought oligopoly profits by controlling asset-specific physical capital—that is, machinery that could not easily or profitably be redeployed to other uses. This specialized equipment was extraordinarily productive relative to more generic machinery, enabling huge economies of scale. High productivity deterred potential competitors from entering the market, because incumbent firms could easily ramp up production and lower prices, starving potential rivals of profits. Yet with asset-specific physical capital, profitability, to say nothing of profit maximization, required uninterrupted production at near full capacity. Otherwise a firm would have expensive equipment sitting idle and suffer diseconomies of scale. This imperative of uninterrupted production had three important consequences.

First, firms vertically integrated—or brought production of components going into final products in house—to assure a continuous and timely flow of the parts they needed. Even something as simple as a can of soup requires a wide range of inputs. More sophisticated products like the automobiles eponymous of Fordism typically require ten thousand discrete parts. Missing any single part could halt production. After the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, for example, shortages of plastic speedometer needles, among other things, caused car assembly factories worldwide to halt production. As late as the 1970s, GM was making 70 percent of the value of its cars inside its own factories.

Second, as a consequence, these large, vertically integrated firms necessarily had many direct employees. But in-house production of components, and even more so the need to run assembly lines continuously, gave workers a credible threat to firms’ profitability: strikes that interrupted production. Sit-down strikes in the 1930s, legislation legalizing collective bargaining, and a second wave of strikes immediately after World War II produced a temporarily stable bargain. Basically, firms agreed to share oligopoly profits with direct employees if workers ceded control over production to management. The 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” between the UAW and GM exchanged a five-year, no-strike contract for wage hikes in line with average productivity growth and inflation.

Third, big capital investments and big unionized workforces had positive macroeconomic consequences. Gross domestic product is conventionally divided into consumption (including government transfer payments, like Social Security), government spending net of transfers, and investment. GDP growth is thus the growth of any or all of these components. Firms’ high labor head counts combined with unionization to flatten the income distribution, boosting aggregate demand as workers consumed more each year. Firms’ strategic use of large fixed investments in physical capital, which served as a barrier to entry, generated continuous investment. This had strong multiplier effects, again bolstering aggregate demand. Finally, as John Kenneth Galbraith argued in 1967, firms’ desire for stable inputs and demand in largely national markets oriented their political behavior towards seeking macroeconomic stability and predictability.¹

Capitalism has winners and losers, though; not all firms succeeded in creating an oligopoly or inserting themselves into the public or corporate planning routines that Galbraith charted. Fordist-era firms thus tended to polarize into two groups: larger, more profitable firms with stable markets, and smaller, less profitable firms in unstable or marginal markets. In a complementary fashion, markets and employers also sorted workers into two groups: largely male, white workers with stable, higher-wage employment in large firms, and largely minority, immigrant, and female workers with unstable, lower-wage employment in smaller, less profitable firms.

Planning, rent sharing, and a dual labor market generated tensions that undid the mass-production era. To be sure, advances in automation and communication technologies enabled some of the changes described below, but the major drivers of change were social and political conflicts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Compliance with corporate routines and the status quo broke down in a wave of strikes and social movements. Put simply, young workers entering factories rejected mindless production routines and constant assembly line speedup; women rejected confinement to marginal labor markets and marriage; African Americans rejected exclusion from normal American civil and economic life; and newly independent oil producers rejected subservience to giant U.S. and British oil firms.

Strikes and resource price shocks in food and energy disrupted corporate planning, highlighting the vulnerabilities of production strategies that relied on large volumes of fixed, product-specific equipment. Of the two, the strikes were more important in motivating firms to change strategies, and companies began looking for ways to shift labor risks away from themselves and onto to other firms.

From 1964 to 1974, the wage share of value-added per U.S. manufacturing employee rose by 5.9 percentage points.² Firms responded with public and private strategies to reduce the wage share and regain control over the factory floor. U.S. firms became more politically active in promoting business interests, following a strategy outlined in the 1971 Powell Memo, and in supporting the economic policy agenda embraced by the Republican Party over subsequent decades.³ Privately, firms began to disperse concentrated production and shed legal responsibility for their workers by de-merging, moving production offshore, contracting out (both on- and offshore), dispersing production geographically, and adopting variants of the franchise format.

IBM, for example, shed 40 percent of its workforce between 1990 and 1994, abandoning most manufacturing in favor of R&D, software, and patent licensing.⁴ Similarly, both GM and Ford spun out their parts production as the independent firms Delphi and Visteon in 1999 and 2000. By 2008, both Delphi and Visteon had more Mexican than American employees.⁵ Where the old GM had generated 70 percent of final value in house, and Ford 50 percent, almost all automobile firms were down to 20 percent by the 2000s. Contracting out created smaller firms and smaller factories, both of which are harder to unionize. Furthermore, the franchise format removed the legal responsibility to provide benefits and protected an emergent group of highly profitable firms from liability for abuses.

Firms’ new profit strategy sought monopoly profit via control over intellectual property (IP) via intellectual property rights (IPRs), like patent, brand, copyright, and trademark, while ejecting workers and physical capital. IPRs convey an exclusive right to extract value from a given production chain. For example, Qualcomm’s patents on the technologies linking cellphones to cell towers and Wi-Fi enable it to levy a 2 to 5 percent royalty on the average selling price of almost all cellphones.

Unfortunately, to steal a phrase, the more IPRs we come across, the more problems we see. These corporate and political responses transformed the two-tier Fordist economy into a new three-tier economy. Since not all firms can succeed in capturing oligopoly or monopoly profits via IPRs, competition produced three different generic firm types: (1) human-capital-intensive, low-head-count firms whose high profitability stems from robust IPRs; (2) physical-capital-intensive firms whose moderate profitability stems from investment barriers to entry or tacit production knowledge; and (3) labor-intensive, high-head-count firms producing undifferentiated services and commodities with low volumes of profit.

Naturally, some firms blend characteristics of each level. Intel, for example, blends the top two levels of IP ownership and a massive physical capital footprint in its semiconductor fabs.

“Tech” is the obvious epicenter of the new, IPR-based economy. But two caveats matter here. First, IPRs are nothing new. Formal IP was also present in the Fordist era and, indeed, before that.

Critically, IP was embedded in large organizations, and generated by the dedicated internal research labs that former RCA Labs engineer Henry Kressel has described.⁶ Second, many firms outside of tech have pursued an IPR-based strategy. Franchised restaurant chains are the most obvious “low-tech” example, with a high-profit brand owner licensing the use of its brand and production methods to smaller, lower-profit owner-operators in the bottom tier. In both high-tech and low-tech industries, the general pattern is vertical disintegration and the segregation of IP ownership into a small number of legally distinct and highly profitable firms. This largely involves a rearrangement of legal boundaries, not production as such.

The best way to see this is to imagine two different automobile factory tours, one in 1965 and one in 2015. During the 1965 factory tour you would see many different people doing direct and indirect production tasks. The iconic semiskilled workers on the assembly line would loom large. But surrounding them were specialist toolmakers, engineers, designers, janitorial staff, and logistics workers. Farther out—caterers, guards, groundskeepers, accountants, white-collar management, and a second set of logistics workers unloading parts coming from components factories. All these workers were typically legally inside the firm as employees and, white-collar workers aside, union members.

The 2015 tour reveals many of the same kinds of workers—with more racial and gender diversity—doing similar jobs. Automation would have replaced many semiskilled workers, but the logistics personnel, caterers, security, accountants, designers, engineers, and so on remain. The critical differences are largely legal and organizational: where everyone used to be an employee of the core firm, workers doing logistics now might be employees of XPO Logistics, DHL, or UPS; security guards might be employees of Securitas or G4S; caterers might be employees of Aramark or perhaps small local firms. Astoundingly, between 20 and 30 percent of line workers are now typically contracted-in or temporary employees who are technically not employees of the automobile firm, and certainly not unionized. Where firms once did much of the component production in house, they now buy in many parts, some design work, and a considerable volume of the software and electronics (which now constitute about 20 percent of a vehicle’s total cost) from external suppliers. From a production point of view, these essentially legal changes have not impeded increases in productivity.

But from a macroeconomic point of view, or with an eye towards income inequality, the shift in the legal boundaries around workers is enormously consequential.

Franchise-based industries provide an even clearer example....

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"Kids can play with Alexa in their very own $300 pretend kitchen and grocery store CNET reports"

Isn't that a dream come true.
This is date February 22, 2020 but got lost in the queue, probably something to do with the pandemic.
From c|net:
The first Alexa toy is a $300 kitchen for kids, packed with dad jokes

We check out a prototype at New York Toy Fair to see how Amazon's voice assistant plays with preschoolers.

Kids can play with Alexa in their very own $300 pretend kitchen and grocery store, with the Amazon voice assistant dishing out cooking advice, shopping help and plenty of goofy toddler humor. The Alexa 2-in-1 Kitchen and Market, from toymaker KidKraft, is making its debut at this weekend's New York Toy Fair .  

The deluxe wooden play set will be sold on Amazon.com next year and includes dozens of accessories that prompt various reactions from Alexa. Not included: Alexa itself, which would come from parents' Echo smart speaker, designed to sit at the center of the play set...MORE 

Headline from and HT to the geeks at SlashDot.
And if you are desirous of a more comprehensive abdication of your life to Bezos, RT informs us:

Amazon Ring unveils tiny IN-HOME DRONE to spy on your property while you’re out

Amazon’s home security subsidiary Ring has released a tiny drone to watch over users’ possessions while they’re gone – capitalizing on paranoia and laziness while further cementing the presence of Big Brother in the home. 

 

The Ring Always Home Cam is a pint-sized drone that syncs up with the user’s Ring home security system to fly around checking on things whenever the user is away. Homeowners can watch it do its thing on their smartphones, but can’t manually control it – which must be frustrating in the event the flying spy does actually catch someone breaking in.

The drone is apparently outfitted with “collision-avoidance technology,” meaning it won’t crash into walls or knock over priceless vases, and hums loudly in order to announce its presence to anyone nearby. When it’s dormant, its camera is supposed to be hidden by the charging station....MORE

Guided-Missile Destroyer "USS Kidd Arrives in Washington Flying a Pirate Flag. Here’s Why It’s Authorized to Actually Do That"

From gCaptain, September 24:

Guided-missile destroyer USS Kidd (DDG 100) pulls into its homeport of Naval Station Everett (NSE), 

September 21, 2020. U.S. Navy Photo

The arrival of the U.S. Navy’s guided-missile destroyer USS Kidd at its homeport in Everett, Washington this week drew quite a bit of attention online, but it wasn’t because of the millions worth of drugs it had seized during its counter-narcotics deployment.

Instead, it was the giant “Jolly Roger” pirate flag it was flying from its mast.

The USS Kidd (DDG-100) arrived at Naval Station Everett on September 21 following its deployment to the U.S. 4th Fleet area of operations for enhanced counter-narcotics operations missions in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.

During their deployment, Kidd’s sailors aided in the recovery of 805 kilograms of suspected cocaine worth over an estimated wholesale value of $30 million; rendered assistance to a fishing vessel in distress, towing the vessel over 200 nautical miles to safety; battled a bout of COVID-19; and participated in a passing exercise (PASSEX) with the El Salvadoran navy.

So why the skull and crossbones?
The story actually dates back to the first voyage of the original vessel to bear the Kidd name, USS KIDD DD-661, Fletcher-class destroyers launched in 1943 by the Federal Shipbuilding & Dry-dock Company in Kearny, New Jersey....

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National Hurricane Center: The Atlantic Basin Map Is Blank

A rarity this season.
From the NHC:

"Amazon takes another major step to abandon Seattle" (AMZN)

Sooner or later the politicians in Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago and the rest of the northern cities are going to realize they've destroyed the goose that laid the golden eggs and in particular the last two cities, that they have been coasting on the fumes of past glory.
But the realization will come too late.

From MyNorthwest (KTTH Radio 770 Seattle), September 10:

Tech giant Amazon is taking additional steps to abandon Seattle, choosing not to renew its lease for the top eight floors of an office building in South Lake Union. The space reportedly totals over 180,000 square feet.

An Amazon source tells the Jason Rantz Show of the decision to abandon the space at 2201 Westlake. (Update: Amazon confirms to the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH that they are leaving this property in December of this year.)

Citing three sources, the Puget Sound Business Journal first confirmed the details.
Rumors have swirled that moves like this were going to happen, but few predicted it would happen this quickly. And, a source suggests more actions by Amazon may happen in the coming months.

Amazon’s slow farewell to Seattle
Amazon, which leases over six million square feet of office space in Seattle, recently announced another significant move. In addition to the 15,000 previously announced jobs, Amazon said it will be bringing another 10,000 jobs to Bellevue....

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If interested see also:
May 2018
Gillian Tett: "Tech lessons from Amazon’s battle in Seattle" (AMZN)

There are a lot of moving parts in this story.

The rising use of opioids and all the other predisposing factors that culminate in homelessness combined with the hollowing-out of the middle-class/economic stratification seen in boom cities, San Francisco, London, Seattle et al combined with local policy/politics which in Seattle means the spendthrift city council juxtaposed with Amazon's strategy of not having taxable income and Chairman Bezos' spearheading the fight against the Washington state 2010 personal income tax measure along with house price increases that guarantee a permanent underclass that will never get on the first rung of the inter-generational wealth building ladder, which price increases are caused in great part by city and regional policy against "sprawl" and well, it's complicated....

March 2019
"Seattle Is Dying"
November 2019
"Big Tech’s battle with Seattle is just getting started — and it could have implications nationwide" (AMZN; MSFT; EXPE)
Microsoft is in Redmond but close enough....

August 2020
"Palantir and Amazon pick Denver"
Not Portland or Minneapolis?
Sarcasm aside, I'm starting to think Bezos is fed up with Seattle....

And many more, use the 'search blog' box upper left if desirous of the whole schmear.

"A New Era of Media Begins With Tokenization"

CoinDesk is nothing if not persistent in their search for a cryptocurrency use-case.
I suppose it's the old "Throw enough **** against the wall and some of it will stick" approach but I'm not sure this is the use-case that sticks. Some very smart people have worked on micro-payments-for-media for the last 15-20 years but to-date the public is still resisting.

From CoinDesk, September 25:

Media on the incumbent web is in crisis. It turns out that paying publishers for clicks, endless loops of “content” and ads, all served on platforms far beyond their maximum-viable scale is ideal for misinformation, disinformation and the decay of trust. 

The solution, according to various media innovation prognosticators, is the “passion economy.” The argument goes that, since anyone can create content now, it follows that the lumbering media institutions of the past will be unbundled and replaced with a swarm of individuals: Smart, sharp, upstart newsletter writers, podcasters and maybe even TikTokkers. Substack will save us… hopefully. 

Joon Ian Wong is a member of Seed Club, the social token incubator. He started the Consensus conference in 2015 and has been a reporter at CoinDesk, Quartz and elsewhere. This post is part of CoinDesk's "Internet 2030" series about the future of the crypto economy.

But there’s just one problem. The tooling of the legacy web isn’t fit to usher in this new era of publishing. If we believe that first we make our tools, and then they make us – that aphorism so often misattributed to Marshall MacLuhan – we must examine each layer of tooling involved in creating and distributing our stories. This is the media stack, as the polymath provocateur Balaji Srinivasan calls it.

And the media stack as it exists today is found wanting. The most powerful layers of distribution, payment and production remain entangled in oligopolistic platforms where the platform’s owners – not the creators fueling those systems profit the most....

....MORE

"...A Massive Bubble Is Forming In The Rare Plant Market"

Who knew?
From ZeroHedge:

It isn't just the stock market that's experiencing a "rising tide" of both trillions in liquidity and inflation - it has now found its way to the rare plant market. 

Plants had been booming with millennials prior to the pandemic, as we noted in this piece last year. Now, with people cooped up in their house due to Covid, their popularity has skyrocketed. And where prices rise, speculators show up.

Jerry Garcia, who is 27 and collects tropical plants, told the Wall Street Journal  he had been "besieged" by people looking to buy his collection. He has sold cuttings of one ariegated Monstera Adansonii plant for $2,000 each. People pay can even pay up to $250 per leaf for the plant.

Garcia told the Journal: “It’s better than the stock market. I got a bunch of these plants when they were in the double digits, and now they are in the four-digit realm.”

One grower in Plantation, Florida, said she was working 12 hour days, 7 days a week to keep up with the "highest volume of orders" she has seen in two decades....

....MORE (pics)

Thomas Edison on Batteries

Via CalTech:

"The storage battery is, in my opinion, a catchpenny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling the 

public by stock companies. The storage battery is one of those peculiar things which appeals to the 

imagination, and no more perfect thing could be desired by stock swindlers than that very selfsame 

thing. ... Just as soon as a man gets working on the secondary battery it brings out his latent capacity 

for lying." 

—Thomas Edison in The Electrician (London) Feb. 17, 1883, p. 329, 

The FT's Izabella Kaminska Uncovers a Treacherous Plot

There must have been something in the water* at Alphaville Towers.

First, Paul Murphy and Dan McCrum, Ms Kaminska's former playmates in the mosh pit sandbox that is FT Alphaville break the Wirecard fraud story and now this, which, since it is early days and naming rights are still inexpensive I shall call The Circadian Conspiracy:

Anyone else receiving marketing from restaurants saying they will be opening 1 hour earlier due to the new 10pm rule? If so, I think we need to seriously evaluate the TRUE AGENDA of the regulation. Is Britain being put on CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME by stealth? Ceci: Brexit betrayal

— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) September 24, 2020

The story apparently begins in the High Tatras, now known as a winter playground along the Slovak-Polish border....and the site of an ancient monastery....
But that is not our story to tell.

Ours goes like this:
August 2, 2018
There Has Obviously Been A Coup d'Etat at FT Alphaville (TSLA)

Or is it a counter-coup?
Or counter-counter-coup?
The story thus far:

As we've pointed out over the years, the tactics from Luttwak's Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook, begin with seizing the means of communication.

1

Izabella Kaminska overthrows the tyrannical reign of Paul Murphy

(think William Tell v. Gessler)

II

Before she has even settled into her comfy editor's chair Dan McCrum declares a new day in the Ville

(think General Haig when Reagan was shot)

Mr. McCrum consolidates his power and ripping a page from the Kaminska playbook takes to video:

There are however two loose strands in this otherwise simple and straightforward recitation:

1) Mr. McCrum has been, how do you say in English, dubious of Elon Musk and Elon's promises and projections, yet in the video above he appears to show empathy for the billionaire.

Dan, if you are being held against your will or are being coerced into making this video, blink twice.

2) What role has David Keohane played in the power struggle? Although ostensibly in Paris and no longer a denizen d'Ville his mysterious comings and goings and travel itineraries worthy of James Bond himself raise troubling questions. Plus we have documentation of his throwing in with Izabella in a couple earlier abortive takeovers.
(think House Tully and House Stark alliance in Game of Thrones)

If we are witnessing a counter and not a counter-counter this is the predicted schedule of events:

DURING the past 23 years, more than half of the world's governments have been overthrown by coups d'etat. Conspirators are increasingly aware that complex societies are vulnerable to attack. Slash a wire, start a rumor, dump LSD into reservoirs:* today any determined guerrilla can stop The System. One man with one bullet can change history. A handful can take over a country.
-TIME

Acid in the FTAV reservoir?

Here's a review of  Luttwak by one of the great Cambridge Marxists of the '30's:

How to Plot Your Takeover
-Eric Hobsbawm at the New York Review of Putsch's

And the actual reason for this post, a cleaned up version of yesterday's Tesla earnings call liveblog:

Tesla Earnings Live, 1st August, 2018

The stock is up.
$343.29 +42.45 (14.11%)....

We'll be back tomorrow with more from Ms Kaminska including Risk, Prop Trading, and a Coded Message.

Volkswagen and Bill Gates Backed Battery Company Coming Public via SPAC

Here's Reuters, September 15:

VW-backed battery maker QuantumScape to go public at $3.3 billion valuation

QuantumScape, the 10-year-old Silicon Valley battery startup backed by Volkswagen AG, said on Thursday it plans to go public through a reverse merger with Kensington Capital Acquisition Corp with an enterprise value of $3.3 billion.

San Jose-based QuantumScape, a 2010 spinout from Stanford University, said it will form a joint venture with VW to produce solid-state battery cells, starting in 2024, for the German automaker’s electric vehicles, and eventually for other carmakers.

“Our ambition is to be a (battery) supplier to the industry as a whole,” QuantumScape founder and Chief Executive Jagdeep Singh said in an interview.

QuantumScape is the latest transportation startup to tie up with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Recent SPAC-backed transactions include Lidar maker Luminar, electric truck maker Nikola, electric shuttle maker Canoo and electric car maker Fisker....

....MUCH MORE

And a warning from InvestorPlace, September 25:

Kensington Capital Stock Looks Risky at This Point 

New, highly promising technologies often fail to pan out 

The fate of past, very promising technologies makes me wary of investing in Kensington Capital (NYSE:KCAC) at this point. The relatively high valuation of Kensington Capital stock and the recent tech sell-off also gives me pause.

For the uninitiated, those who buy Kensington Capital will eventually own the shares of battery development start-up QuantumScape.

A developer of a new type of batteries for electric vehicles, QuantumScape is currently privately held and is expected to have an enterprise valuation of $3.3 billion when it goes public later this year.
Among the investors in QuantumScape are Volkswagen (OTCMKTS:VWAGY), which has agreed to put over $300 million into the company; Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) founder Bill Gates; and the Qatar Investment Authority. Those are very impressive names.

According to QuantumScape, its solid-state batteries can reach 80% of capacity in 15 minutes. The company added that its batteries, which it does not expect to reach the market until 2024, are also safer than the current batteries used by EVs.

Up-and-Coming Technologies Have Disappointed in the Past
In 2013, I heard a lecture by an investment adviser. During his presentation, I remember he mentioned graphene, which is essentially tightly bound carbon. The material is extremely thin and powerful and it’s a great conductor of electricity. I kept an eye on a couple of graphene stocks for a short time; needless to say, graphene did not become very widely used, and all the graphene stocks I can find now trade well below $1....

....MUCH MORE

 

Previously on Mr. Gates and batteries:
April 2015
Gates, Pritzkers vs. Musk: "The $5 Billion Race to Build a Better Battery" (TSLA)
October 2015 
Bill Gates: ‘We Need an Energy Miracle’

Here are a couple posts at Mr. G's blog, Gates Notes:

July 29, 2015

We Need Clean-Energy Innovation, and Lots of It

June 25, 2014

We Need Energy Miracles

 

We have posted quite a bit on Mr. Gates' thinking:

Energy: "The man who’s tutoring Bill Gates … " 

Bill Gates On Energy

Bill Gates On Innovation

Follow-up--Q&A With Bill Gates: Robots, Uber and the Role of Government 

Vaclav Smil On Energy: "Revolution? More like a crawl"

"Bill Gates’ Children Mock Him With ‘Billionaire’ Song"

And more generally:
Batteries: The Venture Capitalist's Holy Grail
Metamaterials May be the Next Big Thing: Gates, Allen Bet On Echodyne
The Dream of Next-Gen Batteries All Hangs On an Apple Watch
The most intractable problem in tech. As is also true in the fusion energy biz "We're just ten years away from a breakthrough"
For the last fifty years.
"Boston-Power Aims to Rival Tesla With Gigawatt Battery Factories" (TSLA)
Short Seller Muddy Waters Goes Long a Battery and Electric Vehicle Play
A123 IPO Roundup (AONE)
Batteries: A123 Stock Hits New All-time Low (AONE)
The Future of Batteries (2009)
Technology Review: "A Guide to Recent Battery Advances" (2010)
"A Quantum Leap in Battery Design" 10 Times the Energy Density of Lithium-ion
In search of the perfect battery (JCI) (2008)
Besides Using All the Lithium In the World, "Will Tesla’s $5 Billion Gigafactory Make a Battery No-One Else Wants?" (TSLA)
The status quo of electric cars: better batteries, same range

Electric Vehicles: Same Range as 1908, Wheee!
Stimulus Big Winner: Battery Manufacturing
Researchers predict 'nanobattery' performance
"A Contrarian's Take On Goldman's Advanced Battery Report" (AONE; ENS; HEV)
"A Nation Sized Battery"

And hundreds more. 

"Will The Great American Migration From Cities Last?"

From Upfina: 

....The Great Migration
This spring we all were wondering if people actually were moving to the suburbs like some feared. We only had anecdotal evidence. Plus, we had basic logic that people might want to avoid COVID-19. It’s also notable that millennials are getting into their 30s which is when most people start families. Families are usually raised in the suburbs rather than the city because there is more space in the suburbs and it’s cheaper. That’s an additional layer that few discuss. This migration may have happened anyway. COVID-19 is just causing it to happen all at once.

Rockin' the suburbs, just like millennial homebuyers did.

We'll show ourselves out. pic.twitter.com/XeQOkOAhAj

— Ensemble Capital (@IntrinsicInv) September 23, 2020

 

We now have hard evidence that Americans are actually moving away from cities. As you can see from the chart above, the survey preference of home buyers shows there was an 18 point jump in those wanting to move to a rural area, the suburbs, or a small town from before the pandemic to late-July. There will probably be some reversion in this data once the pandemic is over....

....MORE

EIA Natural Gas Weekly Update

As mentioned yesterday, for the next few weeks of the injection season temperature is mor important than production. But first, a look at the sector that tripped us up last week:
From the Energy Information Administration:

In the News:
Industrial sector consumption of natural gas falls amid slowing economy

Natural gas consumption in the U.S. industrial sector declined from 25.4 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in January 2020 to 20.1 Bcf/d in June 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Natural Gas Monthly. Industrial natural gas consumption in June 2020 was nearly 1.0 Bcf/d lower than its year-ago level. The decline in industrial sector natural gas consumption compared with the previous year began in March 2020, amid responses to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that resulted in a global economic slowdown. Industrial sector consumption reached its lowest point in May 2020, falling by 8% compared with 2019 levels. May 2020 consumption of natural gas by U.S. industry marked the largest year-over-year decline since July 2009, during the 2007–2009 recession. Before this year, average U.S. industrial natural gas consumption grew 5.4% in 2018 and was relatively flat (growing 0.1%) in 2019.

Beginning in March 2020, efforts to mitigate COVID-19 began in the United States. Responses to the virus, including stay-at-home orders and temporary closings of nonessential businesses, contributed to a slowing U.S. economy. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the value of goods and services produced in the United States, known as gross domestic product (GDP), decreased by 9.1% in the second quarter of 2020 compared with the same quarter a year ago. A slowing economy as a result of COVID-19 mitigation efforts also affected GDP in the first quarter of 2020, which grew 0.3%. Last year, the U.S. economy grew 2.2%.

According to the September 2020 Short-Term Energy Outlook, EIA expects annual consumption of natural gas by U.S. industries to decline by 4.4% in 2020 and then grow 1.1% in 2021. EIA forecasts U.S. industrial natural gas consumption to increase in 2021 because of expected growth in the overall economy and the natural gas-weighted industrial production index. The index reflects the growth of the underlying manufacturing subsectors and the relative importance of those subsectors to total natural gas consumption.
A recent Today in Energy article provides more information about recent industrial natural gas demand trends....

*****

....Demand rises, driven by use in buildings. Total U.S. consumption of natural gas rose by 1.0% compared with the previous report week, according to data from IHS Markit. Natural gas consumed in the residential and commercial sectors increased by 2.3 Bcf/d, or 27.9%, week over week amid cooler temperatures on the East Coast. Power generation declined by 6.7%. Industrial sector consumption increased by 2.3% week over week. Natural gas exports to Mexico increased 3.9%. Natural gas deliveries to U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities (LNG pipeline receipts) averaged 6.0 Bcf/d, or 1.0 Bcf/d lower than last week. LNG pipeline receipts fell to nearly 4.0 Bcf/d on Tuesday as Tropical Storm Beta moved through the Gulf of Mexico, disrupting LNG tanker movements. Dominion Energy also announced that its Cove Point LNG facility began annual maintenance on September 21.

U.S. LNG exports decrease week over week. Ten LNG vessels (four from Sabine Pass, three from Corpus Christi, two from Cove Point, and one from Freeport) with a combined LNG-carrying capacity of 37 Bcf departed the United States between September 17 and September 23, 2020, according to shipping data provided by Marine Traffic.....MUCH MORE

And finally, the temperature anomaly map:

"France cooks up new green recipe: Nukes and hydrogen"

We've looked at the French plans a few times, some links after the jump.
From PoliticoEU, September 9/16:

Paris wants homemade hydrogen to power its clean transformation.

France has a green vision for its nuclear fleet: Use the electricity it generates to make emissions-free hydrogen.

That would give France a big edge in the growing race to develop "green" hydrogen, seen as key in decarbonizing industries such as heavy transport and steel.

Finance and Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire on Tuesday unveiled plans to invest €7 billion by 2030 in hydrogen fully made in France — pooh-poohing other countries’ plans to import foreign hydrogen.

“We are helping so there will be jobs. We are helping so there will be factories. We are helping so there will be industrial relocalization," he told an assembly of hydrogen executives. “We are helping at the level of €7 billion to be the best — not second or third. The best.”
“Together with Germany,” Le Maire added after a pause.

The new French plan one-ups that goal by aiming for 6.5 GW of electrolyzer capacity by 2030.

In June Germany adopted a €9 billion hydrogen plan, with Energy and Economy Minister Peter Altmaier at the time saying, "We want to be No. 1." The plan set a goal of building 5 gigawatts of electrolyzer capacity by 2030.

But making hydrogen with electrolyzers — by jolting apart water molecules — is only as low-carbon as the electricity used to power the machine. Recognizing that it doesn't have enough domestic renewable electricity to power all that production, Germany announced partnerships to produce hydrogen in sunny African nations like Morocco.

The new French plan one-ups that goal by aiming for 6.5 GW of electrolyzer capacity by 2030.
Le Maire has made it a point this summer to hammer home that France's low-carbon electricity mix, three-quarters of which is generated by nuclear power, means it doesn't have to wait for new wind and solar to come online to start using electrolyzers at home....

....MUCH MORE

Previously:
"French Hydrogen Lobby Seeks $12 Billion in Aid to Boost Use"
FrenchTech: "Hyundai opts for Faurecia systems for fuel cell trucks"
And in particular Faurecia's joint venture with Michelin called Symbio:
Hydrogen: Michelin—Faurecia Joint Venture To Establish Europe's Largest Fuel Cell Plant in Lyon
Meanwhile in France: "Hydrogène: Symbio choisit la métropole de Lyon pour implanter son usine de production"

If Generation Z Won't Eat It Maybe Cats & Dogs Will: "Could Cultured Meat’s First Mass Consumers Be Pets?"

Following on September 10's "Generation Z Not That Keen On Lab Grown Meat".
From AgFunder News:

From Burger King to Saudi prince: Bond founder on why cats & dogs could be cultured meat’s first mass consumers

Providing advertising makeovers and comms tips to a fast food giant used to gnaw at the moral fiber of former brand strategist Rich Kelleman.
“I was a vegan at Burger King,” he explains to AFN.

This was a decade ago, long before the days of vegan Impossible Whoppers. He felt sheer awkwardness and cognitive dissonance in helping to mass market something he personally objected to, he says. This feeling was at its most acute during meetings with his premier client, where steaming trays of meat-based products would float into boardrooms to be offered to all attendees – only for Kelleman to coyly refuse, before collaborating to convince others to gorge on them.

Eventually, he succumbed to Shakespearean advice: To thine own self be true. He left the ‘royal household,’ but stayed in the same city — Boulder, Colorado — where he and his wife bought a dog named Rumples.

That dog, though, was persistently carnivorous; Kelleman began to wonder each day, as he spooned out large and low-grade chunks of meat for Rumples’ delectation, if there might be a healthy way for pets like his to be vegan too.

There were reasons for avoiding the plant-based route. It’s harder for naturally carnivorous dogs and cats to get the right nutrients with plant-based options like soy, which could in fact block absorption and hamper digestion.
Inspired by early cultured protein trailblazers like Memphis Meats, Kelleman thought: “What about cultured meat for pets?”

The name’s Bond. Bond Pet Foods
By 2017, Kelleman founded cultured pet food company Bond Pet Foods, where he now serves as CEO.

Fast forward to September 2020, and the startup has just closed a bridge round of funding to accelerate its work, with follow-on capital from its seed investors Lever VC and KBW Ventures, and Stage 1 and Trellis Road coming aboard for the first time.

These investments, combined with the $1.2 million seed round previously reported by AFN, equates to a total of just under $2 million to date. The presence of KBW Ventures brings Kelleman under the auspices of a royal household very different from Burger King; KBW is an early-stage VC firm founded by the Saudi Arabian prince Khaled bin Alwaleed bin Talal....

....MUCH MORE

I still think there is still potential in the solution proposed in the Gen Z post: reeducation camps for the reluctant.
And Greta. She seems sad these days what with Covid-19 sucking all the air out of the room.
Greta might want to run the camps.
She seems tough enough. Maybe in a few years jodhpurs and a riding crop, molding young minds.

"Despite major technical troubles, Russia's new icebreaker Arktika sets course for Barents Sea"

I've seen reports that this new series of ships are the world's most powerful icebreakers but where it counts, getting through the thick stuff, if memory serves the 50 Years of Victory is still the top dog.
From The Barents Observer:

With only two of its three engines in operation, Russia's new nuclear-powered icebreaker is on its maiden voyage to icy waters. 

The ship on the 22nd September set out from the Baltic Yard in St. Petersburg with course towards the north. Before it arrives in home base Murmansk, it will break through sea-ice north of the Franz Josef archipelago, Rosatom informs.

According to the shipowner, the Arktika is due to arrive in Murmansk in about two weeks.
The sailing to Murmansk has been disputed by experts as the ship has only two of its three engines working. It was during sea trials in the Baltic Sea in February this year that a short circuit caused serious damage to the winding in one of the three electro engines.
Consequently, one of the ship’s three propellers is not working.

In a comment to the Barents Observer, Director of Bellona Murmansk Andrey Zolotkov in April 2020 underlined that the Arktika should have remained in St.Petersburg until the engine is fixed.

Zolotkov questions the maneuverability of a ship when one of three propellers is not working.
“Other nuclear-powered icebreakers always have spare blades on board ready to replace damaged ones while sailing in the Arctic.”...

....MORE

The Barents Observer goes on to say the new ship can get through 2.2 meters of ice, and some Russian media says 3 meters.
However, from May 2019:
Russia Floats Another Nuclear Icebreaker 
Launch of icebreaker «Ural» will give boost to year-around Northern Sea Route shipping

***** 

This is the current world heavyweight champ, 50 Years of Victory:

Although not as powerful as the new ships it has superior ice breaking capabilities: up to 5 metres (16 feet) by ramming versus 3 metres (10 feet) for the new machines,

As noted in the January post on the new Russian icebreaking submarine:

For the big guy, "50 Years of Victory", the Rosatom people advertise its "1300 rooms" which sounds a lot like a troop transport to me, big enough for an entire Russian naval infantry brigade with room to spare. 

"Marine Insurers Shun Russia’s Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream Projects"

From Reuters via gCaptain:

The world’s largest group of shipping insurers will not insure vessels involved in the Russian-led Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream gas pipeline projects because of the threat of U.S. sanctions.

Associations belonging to the International Group of P&I Clubs, including the Shipowners’ Club and the London P&I Club, said in a circular on Monday that it would not provide cover “for any activity involving or related to the Nord Stream 2 or TurkStream construction projects.”

It said members were “strongly urged to assess and mitigate the risks of entering into contracts on the Nord Stream 2 or TurkStream construction projects and exercise the fullest possible due diligence to avoid exposure to sanctions or enforcement actions.”

The International Group of P&I Clubs represents the world’s top 13 ship insurers and covers nearly 90% of the world’s ocean-going tonnage. The notice carried by its members said that all clubs had issued similarly worded circulars regarding Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream.

Led by Russia’s Gazprom, the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline project to double the capacity of the existing Nord Stream 1 link is more than 90% complete and scheduled to begin operating next year.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to curb the Kremlin’s economic leverage over Europe and Turkey and has warned investors in the two natural gas pipelines could face sanctions.

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is chairman of Nord Stream’s shareholders committee. Gazprom holds a 51% stake alongside German energy companies E.ON and Wintershall Dea, Engie of France and Dutch firm Gasunie....

....MORE

We've pointed out a few times:

...As the kids say: Find someone to look at you the way Putin looks at Gerhard Schröder.

They also hug a lot.
 A lot.

Herr Schröder was Germany's Chancellor before Mutti came in.
Gazprom has paid him a lot of money.

"Pompeo: 'We are Building A Coalition Against Nord Stream 2'"

From OilPrice, September 22:

The United States is building a coalition aimed at preventing the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will substantially increase the flow of Russian gas into Europe, the U.S. Secretary of State told German daily Bild in an interview.

“From the US point of view, Nord Stream 2 endangers Europe because it makes it dependent on Russian gas and endangers Ukraine - which in my opinion worries many Germans,” Pompeo said. “We hope Nord Stream 2 will not be completed and we are working on a coalition to prevent this from happening. We hope that the German government will also come to this assessment, be it because of what happened to Mr. Navalny or because of the security implications that dependence on Russian gas brings."

The interview comes days after another report in German media said the German government had tried to appease Washington about Nord Stream by offering to build two liquefied natural gas import terminals worth $1.2 billion if the U.S. stopped opposing the pipeline.

Germany will be the receiver of most of the gas that will flow through the expanded Nord Stream pipeline amid an expected surge in demand for natural gas as it closes coal and nuclear power plants. The U.S., however, is against it, claiming it will only increase Russia’s influence in the energy supply of the EU, which would be unwise. Of course, there are also the U.S. gas interests as a major LNG exporter....MORE

"ChargePoint, the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) charging network, to go public at $2.4 billion valuation"

We have no interest in IPO's as investments but as sources of informatin, bring 'em on!
From TechStartups:

ChargePoint is a San Francisco-based clean energy startup that develops and manufactures technology for its network of electric vehicle charging stations. ChargePoint is also the world’s leading electric vehicle (EV) charging network. Just last month, ChargePoint raised $127 million in funding to accelerate the expansion of ChargePoint’s global commercial and fleet businesses. Its last fundraise brings the company’s total funding to $660 million.

Now, the 13-year old startup is ready for IPO. Today, ChargePoint said it will go public by merging with Switchback Energy Acquisition Corp in a deal that values the company at $2.4 billion. Switchback is a blank-check company, sometimes called special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), that raised $300 million in an initial public offering in July 2019.

As we explained last week, a SPAC is a shell company or blank-check company that raises money through an initial public offering to buy an operating entity, typically within two years. According to a report from Reuters, citing people familiar with the ongoing talks, ChargePoint will raise about $493 million in proceeds from the deal, which the company said it will use to expand in North America and Europe. The deal includes $225 million from Baillie Gifford, Neuberger Berman Alternatives Advisors, and other institutional investors. Baillie Gifford is one of the largest shareholders in EV segment leader Tesla.

Founded in 2007 by Dave Baxter, Harjinder S. Bhade, Milton T. Tormey, Praveen Mandal, and Richard Lowenthal, ChargePoint brings electric vehicle (EV) charging to more people and places than ever before as the world’s leading EV charging network. These stations are available as public charging stations, consumer subscription plans and utility grid management technology for electric utility companies to smooth electric demands on the grid....

....MORE

China’s State Council Bans Traders From Storing Grains

From the South China Morning Post, September 24:

China’s surging corn prices blamed on speculators as Beijing plays down fears of grain shortage

• China’s agriculture minister Han Changfu says sharp increase in corn prices is the fault of ‘market speculation and irrational hoarding’
• Typhoons and floods have recently hit the nation’s main corn growing regions, raising concerns about shortages

China’s agriculture minister has blamed speculators for skyrocketing corn prices, as Beijing continues to reassure the public the world’s most populous country is not facing a grain shortage.

Corn price recently hit an eight-year high following typhoons and floods that damaged the nation’s corn belt. A trip to the area by the South China Morning Post this month found swathes of

cropland had been flattened, fuelling concern among local farmers about a steep drop in output.

 

China’s imports of corn, which are mainly used in animal feed, hit their highest level in nearly three decades in the first eight months of 2020, adding to anxiety over a domestic supply gap.

But Han Changfu, the nation’s Minister of Agricultural and Rural Affairs, said the surging prices were caused primarily by “market speculation and irrational hoarding”, according to an interview transcript published on the ministry‘s website.

New corn will enter the market soon, the supply will further increase Han Changfu

 

In the interview with state media, Han said the country had ample stocks of the grain and was set to have another bumper harvest in autumn, despite the impact of natural disasters in Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces, which together account for a quarter of China’s corn output.

“New corn will enter the market soon, the supply will further increase,” he said. “Corn prices have started to stabilise.”....

....MUCH MORE

EIA Natural Gas Storage Report: Well Here We Are Again

Today's word is contango, con-tang-o
First up, the estimates going into the release, from FX Empire:

..."A Bloomberg survey found estimates ranging from 68 Bcf to 82 Bcf, with a median of 77 Bcf, while estimates in a Wall Street Journal poll ranged from 71 Bcf to 85 Bcf, with an average of 77 Bcf. A Reuters poll of 13 analysts showed estimates ranging from 68 Bcf to 96 Bcf, with a median of 76 Bcf. NGI projected an injection of 71 Bcf.”...

And from the Energy Information Administration:

Working gas in storage was 3,680 Bcf as of Friday, September 18, 2020, according to EIA estimates. This represents a net increase of 66 Bcf from the previous week. Stocks were 504 Bcf higher than last year at this time and 407 Bcf above the five-year average of 3,273 Bcf. At 3,680 Bcf, total working gas is above the five-year historical range. 

That is bullish compared to the guesses but gas in storage is still above not just the median but the 5-year high:

Meaning temperatures are more important than production for the next few weeks, just to get past the seasonal storage peak and allay fears of storage capacity running out and recreating the problems oil faced at Cushing last spring.
Finally, prices, this is one steep contango:

October       2.247  +0.122
November    2.872  +0.078
December    3.307  +0.078

The last two week's price action in the rolling off October contract that had me thinking how peaceful bee-keeping would be: