Been fascinated by the world’s largest conveyer belt, the Bou Craa in Morocco which transports phosphates over 60 miles and can be seen from space. It seems Texas now has the second largest, the Dune Express which transports sand for fracking over 40 miles. Really. From Texas Monthly.

The World’s Second-Longest Conveyor Belt Is Rolling in West Texas

Just a story I ran across in the local New Orleans newspaper. Could you cram more history, and intetesting history, in a single newspaper article?

This vacant Storyville corner store was once the stage for a New Orleans musical pioneer

I’m fond of the less grammatically, and perhaps logically incorrect version: Nobody know nothing. From The Big Picture. I do think they are being a bit hard on phrenologists though.

“Nobody Knows Anything,” Wall Street Strategist Edition

Novo Nordisk, the Danish drug maker, is now the largest European company by market cap at over $500 billion. This is larger than the GDP of Denmark, the country where the company is based. There is also no reason to think sales of drugs such as Ozemoic and will not continue to grow rapidly.

Ozempic maker now worth more than $500 billion

Yesterday I was idly wondering how wealthy is the US? I mean add up all the cash, stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets. I suppose subtract out debt (but I’m not really sure about that — that would just seem to indicate ownership, not value. But I’m not certain).

A quick google shows a Wiki page that does all the work for me.  Financial position of the United States says about $124 trillion, only less than a decade of GDP, which surprises me. I was also wondering what happens if we just divide it all up among the 330 million people in the country. By my numbers it comes to about $375k per person. Not as much as I thought, but probably more than a lot of places in the world.

A recent study linked “Natural Gas” (methane) burning stoves in homes as a cause of asthma. In fact the study says 13% of childhood asthmas are caused by burning gas in homes. This was picked up by the popular press (NBC, LA Times, many others). Googling today shows a bunch of sponsored links “refuting” these claims. But they are from places like The Government Accountability Project and Truth In Science. The American Gas Association predictably weighs in. What is more disturbing is several .gov sites seem to line up with the pro-gas folks, or at least add to the confusion (NIH, others).

What seems to be factual is that burning gas gives off toxins known to cause breathing problems. Actual measurements of gas stoves show high levels of these compounds. The push back basically comes of the form that the study isn’t “scientific”. Well. Yes. You can’t go exposing children to toxins to see how many get asthma. At least not today in America. So I’m going with “breathing burning gas vapors bad, especially for kids”.

This all started as a small data point on induction cooking. Even without the asthma and the global warming and the barrage of misinformation, the cooking experience is superior on induction. If you want to read more about the asthma connection, Scientific American seems fairly FUD-free.

The Health Risks of Gas Stoves Explained

I’ve been seeing news stories about how the rise in the minimum wage in California in particular, is causing the fast food industry to shed jobs. I have been skeptical, because this doesn’t line up with other, um, reality. Are fewer people eating fast food? I haven’t heard of this. So how are workers keeping up with the increased workload? I joke that maybe McDonalds will have to stop selling French fries. Are profits down? Are stores closing? I haven’t heard of any of this, particularly in the articles talking about the damage the higher minimum wage is doing. Now we learn that the billion dollar Hoover Institute at Stanford has been puting out fake data, and it has been picked up far and wide by news services. Hoover is posting retractions. Will news services? I suppose much of the damage of this false narrative has already been done. From Drop Site.

The Minimum Wage Claims You Keep Hearing Are Totally Fake. We Can Prove It.