The recent hailstorm destroyed our roof. The roofing guy said it was one of the worst he had ever seen. We were stuck at the airport but neighbors told us it was golf ball sized hail for about ten minutes. Everyone said it was the worst storm they had even been in. Glad we weren’t home.

i checked my new solar panels, which were horizontal and right out in the open. They took a direct hit but were fine. This didn’t surprise me but it did surprise my neighbor. He seemed to really not believe the storm that dented the heck out of his cars and wrecked roofs didn’t take out solar panels. Told him he could look but he wasn’t interested. I also had a look around the neighborhood. A few folks have rooftop solar. None appeared damaged.

i joked that we should just build roofs out of this stuff. Then I wondered, would that make sense? So just ballparking it my new roof is going to run maybe $10 per square foot. Seems reasonable. But what do solar panels cost? A quick Google says $4 – $10 a square foot. And they will survive the next hailstorm. And make lots of electricity. Why aren’t we doing this?

I’ve seen this called “jaw dropping” and “eye popping”. Just a good old fashioned consumer ripoff, but a huge one. And nobody in charge is making the slightest move to do anything about it. I’m dreading this winter already. From the San Antonio Express News.

ERCOT program to boost reliability caused ‘artificial shortages’ costing utilities up to $10 billion

A story from the New York Times about a small power company in Vermont that is hoping to install batteries in customers houses. This is the equivalent of putting in a water tank instead of bigger pipes. Makes lots of sense, unless you are in the pipe business. It is hard to imagine an electricity future that doesn’t rely heavily on batteries.

I am a regular reader of Kareem Abdul-Jabbars Substack. If I have any criticism it’s probably that I tend to agree with him a bit too often. I hesitated to read his piece on the recent Mideast conflict, though. But again he seems to be informed and reasonable. First his plea is for peace. Check. Then he mentions the thing nobody mentions. The recent realignment in the region, IMO driven by the coming end of the fossil fuel era. The Saudis, always seemingly ahead of everyone else, have begun talks with the far right government of Israel. This seems to be the match to the tinder. What happens next is really anyone’s guess.

“In this case, Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon (with Iran’s help) chose the timing to derail talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel that would have undermined Iran’s economic and political influence in the region.”

Always fearless, Kareem also gives us his take on Taylor Swift and the NFL.

My Thoughts on Israel, Hamas, and a Deeper Look at Taylor Swift

An entertaining read on a cyber crime incident. From Business Insider.

The Great Zelle Pool Scam

I get the daily New York Times Dealbook email. Nothing that I would usually post here, but today there was a short piece about oil prices turning due to slowing demand. This is after big production cuts intended to drive the price above $100 a barrel. Oddly I went to the web site version of the mailer to find a link to the story and there was none. It’s short so I will just have to cut and paste it here.

An abrupt turnaround in oil prices has quieted a chorus of predictions that crude would soon top $100 a barrel. The apparent culprit: slowing global demand. Brent crude, the global benchmark, is trading at around $84 a barrel this morning, and is on pace for its worst weekly decline since March, Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in an investor note this morning. Brent is down roughly 13 percent since surpassing $96 a barrel on Sept. 27.

New York Times Dealbook October 6, 2023

I spent much of my career in tech working with FPGAs. It was no big surprise almost a decade ago when Intel bought Altera. Altera makes very (physically) large chips that are also very regular in structure and very good for testing out semiconductor processes. Intel has some of the biggest most expensive semiconductor fabs in the world, so it made sense. As a bonus, the Altera parts were very high margin. Seemed like a no-brainer, really.

Of course Intel could have bought Xilinx or even a smaller semiconductor start-up. But the final deal was with Altera. Many year later, AMD bought Xilinx, for reasons that are less clear. AMD doesn’t have fabs anymore, but I suppose the CPU + FPGA combination made sense to someone at AMD. Now it seems that less than a decade later, the Intel FPGA group will be spun out. I wonder if they will go retro and call it “Altera”. From EE Journal.

Intel plans to spin off FPGA group as an independent company nine years after buying Altera

I was in New Orleans this weekend and everyone is freaking out over this. With a massive drought in the middle of the country and rising sea levels, salt water is moving up the Mississippi river and is about to hit the water intakes for the city of New Orleans. I can’t help but add that this was predicted a long time back, perhaps decades ago. I will say it again, we aren’t prepared for what is coming.

New Orleans residents brace for salt water intrusion as Biden declares national emergency