An oil price reversal

Steven Guccione

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

FPGA Companies

Steven Guccione

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

New Orleans residents brace for salt water intrusion

Steven Guccione

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

“Power Supply Adjustment”

Steven Guccione

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.