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

After a wait of several years, a new Raspberry Pi is here. I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi 4 as my primary desktop machine for a few years now and will almost certainly switch to the 5. A review from Tom’s Hardware.

Raspberry Pi 5 Live Blog: Whole New Board, Whole New Ecosystem

From former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.

When The Klan Murdered My Protector

So Austin Energy added almost $200 to our August Power bill as a “power supply adjustment”. What a rip off. Thanks ERCOT!

Power Supply Adjustment — The Power Supply Adjustment is a dollar-for-dollar recovery that includes the cost of fuel for our power plants, the cost of electricity purchased from the grid and any net charges experienced as Austin Energy sells power to the grid.

UPDATE: seems these have been on our power bills for at least a year. Probably averaging $150 or so. My contribution to the Friends Of ERCOT fund.

I recall Taylor Swift endorsing Democrats in Tennessee in the 2018 election cycle. With or without Taylor Swift I expect women, especially young women, to be a significant force in the upcoming election. From USA Today.

Taylor Swift has power to swing the presidential election. What if nothing else matters?

Thw New York Times has picked up on the ongoing scam that is ERCOT.

Retired general responds to Republican’s call for Gen. Mark Milley to be ‘hung’

I turned on the my phone last night as the plane was landing. A message from my daughter was waiting saying: stay at the airport! I wasn’t sure what that meant. It seems baseball sized hail was moving through north Austin, heading for the airport. The landing was a bit rough but everything looked fine at the airport. Except there wasn’t a gate available. Really? It’s after 9pm and I know they knew we were coming. Only waited 15 minutes on the tarmac but it made me nervous. No announcements about the weather from the crew.

We had come from a short trip to visit Mom in New Orleans. We joke when we booked it that a hurricane would probably hit while we were there. Something always seems to disturb our travels to visit family. Actually our daughter was supposed to come with us, but she picked up COVID just before we left and wasn’t able to travel with us. Maybe good luck for us. She was the only thing that kept us from getting on the road and driving right into this storm.

There were no warnings and no news at the airport. We hunkered down for about two hours, as heavy rain and light hail moved through. Texted our neighbors and they said our neighborhood was getting golfball sized hail. Plugged in our phones since watching weather radar had run down our batteries. We made it home before midnight to no serious damage to the house that we could see, just leaves stripped off of the trees covering the road and the yard. Oddly, the pool was overflowing. It looks like hail must have hit the butterfly valve on the side of the house that turns on the refill water. Glad we caught that.