Defense department spending in fiscal 2025 is estimated to clock in at $873 billion.
Wednesday, June 4, 2025
Burning cargo ship bound for Mexico from China with 800 electric vehicles on board abandoned off the coast of Alaska lol
... Fires across all vessel segments hit the highest level in a decade in 2024, according to insurer Allianz Commercial. ...
More.
Gee, I wonder why.
Don't park one in your garage.
Tuesday, June 3, 2025
Low-inertia renewable energy systems are prone to blackouts such as in Spain in April because they cannot maintain stable frequencies in the absence of high-inertia fossil fuel, hydro, and nuclear energy systems
When
a grid failure plunged 55 million people in Spain and Portugal into
darkness at the end of April, it should have been a wake-up call on
green energy. Climate activists promised that solar and wind power were
the future of cheap, dependable electricity. The massive half-day
blackout shows otherwise. The nature of solar and wind generation makes
grids that rely on them more prone to collapse—an issue that’s
particularly expensive to ameliorate. ...
Grids
need to stay on a very stable frequency—generally 50 Hertz in Europe—or
else you get blackouts. Fossil-fuel, hydro and nuclear generation all
solve this problem naturally because they generate energy by powering
massive spinning turbines. The inertia of these heavy rotating masses
resists changes in speed and hence frequency, so that when sudden demand
swings would otherwise drop or hike grid frequency, the turbines work
as immense buffers. But wind and solar don’t power such heavy turbines
to generate energy. It’s possible to make up for this with cutting-edge
technology such as advanced inverters or synthetic inertia. But many
solar and wind farms haven’t undergone these expensive upgrades. If a
grid dominated by those two power sources gets off frequency, a blackout
is more likely than in a system that relies on other energy sources. ...
Just a week prior to the blackout, Spain bragged that for the first time, renewables delivered 100% of its electricity, though only for a period of minutes around 11:15 a.m. When it collapsed, the Iberian grid was powered by 74% renewable energy, with 55% coming from solar. It went down under the bright noon sun. When the Iberian grid frequency started faltering on April 28, the grid’s high proportion of solar and wind generation couldn’t stabilize it. This isn’t speculation; it’s physics. As the electricity supply across Spain collapsed, Portugal was pulled along, because the two countries are tightly interconnected through the Iberian electricity network. ...
TACO Trump strikes again
Trump always chickens out, aka paper tiger, etc.
Social Security recipients do not need to worry about their benefits being garnished due to their defaulted student loans, at least for now. The development is an abrupt change in policy by the administration, which had announced in April that it would be resuming collection activity on defaulted student loan borrowers. The Education Dept. had said that Social Security benefit offsets could begin as early as June.
(June 3) Deutsche Bank raises S&P 500 forecast on ‘TACO’ theory: ‘We will get further relents’
(May 29) 10 times Trump has threatened, then backtracked on, tariffs as 'TACO trade' jab gains traction
(May 31) Trump Raises Steel Tariffs To 50%—Here Are The 21 Times He’s Changed His Mind
(May 28) Trump was asked about the "TACO" trade and called it a "nasty question." Here's what it means.
(The guy who started TACO May 2) The US market’s surprise comeback, and the rise of the ‘Taco’ trade theory
... the US administration does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain. This is the Taco theory: Trump Always Chickens Out. ...
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Ah, so Republican pinhead Joe Concha thinks a Democrat win in 2026 would be a loss lol
Joe Concha never really does get to his point in this column, but he does spread a lot of nincompoopery about like so much manure on a field.
This is the guy who masked himself and his kids while outdoors during COVID-19 because his wife is a doctor and told him he had to, which is very amusing given Joe's interest in Democrats' inability to "connect" with young men.
Joe Concha lives in an imaginary world of fanciful creation and takes his marching orders, repeating stupid.
Trump's mandate, for example, "the greatest verdict in history" he says, in 2024 was actually smaller than W's in 2004.
Even Jimmy Carter's was bigger in 1976 than Trump's was in 2024.
Core pce inflation released this past week came in at 2.52%, not 2.1% as Joe says. Joe wouldn't know core if he ate an apple.
Just 49.6% had full time jobs in April 2025 vs. 50.4% in April 2023, 0.8 points lower than two years ago.
Also two years ago, unemployment was 0.8 points lower at 3.4% than Joe Concha's current "historically low" level, again having touched a level under Joe Biden not seen since May 1969.
Joe stealing glory from Joe. Tut-tut.
Democrats may have had trouble connecting with young men in 2024, but the Biden administration really did drop the bigger ball of communicating its record of historically low unemployment. The Wall Street Journal trumpeted it for them in 2023, but you'd hardly remember the fact.
Meanwhile Joe Concha's "respected" GDPNow model got 1Q2025 GDP wrong by 2.4 points lol.
With an actual negative print now at -0.2% for the first quarter, the set-up for a dead cat bounce in 2Q would seem obvious.
But you never know with Trump in charge, and for my money you have to bet against Mr. Unpredictable.
If Jonathan Swift were here, he might say that it is the Republicans who are led by a changeable female mind, not the Democrats, which may be why Joe Concha likes him so:
The current of a female mind stops thus,
and turns with ev'ry wind;
Thus whirling round, together draws
Fools, fops, and rakes, for chaff and straws.
Saturday, May 31, 2025
One of Elon Musk's DOGE wizards got the boot for finding that the government works and is not as inefficient as he was expecting
No good deed goes unpunished.
... “I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” Lavingia told Fast Company in the piece, which also noted that he noticed the number of mission-driven people working in government. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” ...
More.
Friday, May 30, 2025
The core pce inflation rate in April 2025 at 2.52% year over year is still almost 65% higher than the 2008-2020 average at 1.53%
The rate was last lower than in April 2025 in March 2021 at 2.20% yoy, which is good news.
The customers, naturally
After Trump order, who will pay to keep Michigan coal plant on life support?
... While the details still remain unclear, utility customers will ultimately be the ones to pay it, they say. ...
The 1935 law Trump administration officials used to order the plant stay open — more commonly deployed for emergencies like hurricanes, wildfires or extreme heat — entitles Consumers to recover its expenses as it complies, according to Dan Scripps, chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities in the state. ...
The same day this story was published Consumer's Energy informed me my budget plan payment amount will rise by $48 monthly for the next year.
We are already paying.
Thursday, May 29, 2025
CNBC avoids the story like the plague: Real GDP for 1Q2025 was revised up to -0.2% from -0.3% in today's second estimate for 1Q
No one wants to talk about this. Crickets pretty much everywhere. CNBC had Rosie on to discuss, but there was no article.
These lunatics are their own worst enemies
The guy with the common sense about the national debt who stands in the way of Trump's Big Beautiful Bill wants to re-litigate 9/11.
Few people consider that the Great Depression of the 1930s was the unwind of the Great Inflation of WWI
Economics is mean-reverting.
We've been liberated from Liberation Day by two Republicans (one appointed by Trump) and one Democrat on a court handpicked by Trump to adjudicate his tariffs lol
The U.S. Court of International Trade on Wednesday blocked steep reciprocal tariffs unilaterally imposed by President Donald Trump on scores of countries in April to correct what he said were persistent trade imbalances. ...
In its ruling, a three-judge panel on the Court of International Trade said that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Trump invoked to impose the tariffs, does not authorize a president to levy universal duties on imports.“The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority
granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of
tariffs,” the judges wrote.
And separate, specific tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China related to drug trafficking “fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders,” the panel wrote.
Implementing tariffs typically requires congressional approval.
But Trump chose to bypass Congress by declaring a national economic emergency under IEEPA, which became law in 1977, and then using the purported emergency as justification for cutting Congress out of the process.
The panel not only ordered a permanent halt to the tariffs at issue in the case, but it also barred any future modifications to them.
The Trump administration was given 10 days to make the necessary changes to carry out the judges’ orders. ...
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Different parties, same hopium: In September 2012 Barack Obama accepted the Democrats' nomination saying Hope Needs More Time, now Trump says he needs another two weeks to see whether Putin really wants peace in Ukraine
Like Putin's record three-day bombardment of Ukraine last weekend wasn't an answer.
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