Congratulations to Prime Minister Mark Carney and to the people of Canada with their election results.
Headlines from the Washington Post, with a pictures from Reuters.
P.S. There was this post on Truth Social (read: anti-truth, anti-social) from the President of the United States this morning. Illuminating. Hallucinating.
Good luck to the Great people of Canada. Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power, for free, to the highest level in the World, have your Car, Steel, Aluminum, Lumber, Energy, and all other businesses, QUADRUPLE in size, WITH ZERO TARIFFS OR TAXES, if Canada becomes the cherished 51st. State of the United States of America.
No more artificially drawn line from many years ago. Look how beautiful this land mass would be. Free access with NO BORDER.
ALL POSITIVES WITH NO NEGATIVES. IT WAS MEANT TO BE!
America can no longer subsidize Canada with the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year that we have been spending in the past. It makes no sense unless Canada is a State!
I walked around downtown’s Third Avenue this afternoon, and took a few pictures of the new First Light 48-story condominium complex at the edge of Belltown neighborhood. I had no access to go inside, but just look up “First Light Seattle” for glamorous pictures of the pool deck, and views of Puget Sound and the Space Needle.
It has 459 units that range from studios ($650k and up) to 3-bed, 3-bath penthouses ($3m and up).
This is Virginia Street, with 3rd Avenue at the traffic light. The First Light condo tower has 48 stories. That cantilevered structure at the top is a deck with a swimming pool and a hot tub.Third Avenue is on the route for several buses; also the C-Line Rapid Ride. Great for the condo residents and their visitors to have bus stops right there, but one has to wonder how many will actually use it. There is an 8-level parking garage with 373 parking spaces below the tower!Looking up, standing on 3rd Avenue. The City of Seattle has made great strides at keeping the downtown streets tidy and clean. There actually were cleaners out and about today with their three-wheel bikes fitted with large baskets with brooms and cleaning supplies.The base floors of the building have these strands of cables fitted with disks of glass. The First Light website says designer John Hogan’s “veil” of strung glass disks by the office floors diffuse the bland looks outside (parking garages and brick walls), and at the same time increases the privacy inside.So yes: in the immediate vicinity of the First Light building (looking south down 3rd Avenue), the old parking garages and brick buildings do not offer a whole lot to look at.
I touched up my stamp album pages for Namibia today, and noticed that there is a mineral on the R5 stamp named after me*: Willemite.
*Actually, it is named after King William I of the Netherlands 😁.
Willemite is a silicate mineral (Zn2SiO4), discovered in 1829 in the Belgian Vieille-Montagne mine. Mineralogist Armand Lévy was shown samples by a student at the university where he was teaching, and he named it after William I. It is occasionally spelled villemite.
[From Wikpedia]
These stamps were issued in 1991 and 1992, and are still denominated in South African rand. The Namibian dollar (NAD) was introduced in 1993, replacing the country’s use of the South African rand (ZAR). South African rand is still widely accepted in Namibia, though.On Mar. 21, 1990, the territory called South West Africa became independent from South Africa, and a new country called Namibia was established. Here is the front page of the New York Times reporting on it.
Happy Friday.
I got up early this morning and went outside to look for the crescent moon, Venus, and Saturn close together in the sky, but didn’t see anything.
They might have been too low on the horizon for me to see here from my house.
This is an image generated by Stellarium’s planetarium software for April 25, 2025, at 5:30 a.m. CDT, of the conjunction of the crescent moon, Venus and Saturn. These three together, form what has been billed as a cosmic “smiley face.” It takes a little imagination to see the smiley face, but OK— we’ll go with it. I believe the red E at the bottom of the image stands for Earth. [Brenda Culbertson via Stellarium]
The cartoonist is Dave Blazek. [Hint: That is a gnome and a gnu*, sitting at the bar]. *Gnu— a wildebeest, a large antelope native to eastern and southern Africa.
The video is short — just 19 seconds — and not particularly compelling. A viewer would be forgiven for clicking away before it ends.
The grainy footage, uploaded on April 23, 2005, of a man standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo — “All right, so here we are in front of the elephants” — does not look like the sort of thing that would touch off a video revolution.
And yet, two decades after that inauspicious start, YouTube is now a cornerstone of the media ecosystem. It’s where people go for music videos and four-hour-long hotel reviews. It is a platform for rising stars and conspiracy theorists. It’s a repository for vintage commercials and 10 hours of ambient noise. It has disrupted traditional television and given rise to a world of video creators who make content catering to every imaginable niche interest.
-Amanda Holpuch writing for the New York Times
Text by the New York Times and video still image from YouTube. Says the narrator, Jawed: “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that’s cool”.
Headlines and graphic from the Wall Street Journal online.
Another Monday, and another big down day in the US stock market.
The latest is that Trump is threatening to fire Fed chair Jerome Powell. (Can he do that? Powell, has repeatedly stressed that his firing is not permitted by law, but I don’t think that will stop Trump).
Here are excerpts from Heather Long’s opinion piece in the Washington Post, titled ‘There’s only one way the U.S. avoids a recession”
The alarming signs just keep coming since President Donald Trump announced massive global tariffs on “Liberation Day.” The price of gold has soared to an all-time high as people rush for the ultimate safe asset. The U.S. dollar has tanked to a three-year low as investors would rather own about anything that isn’t American. As if the tariff chaos wasn’t enough, Trump is also threatening to “terminate” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell, one of the only trusted economic leaders the nation still has. … The United States is probably not in a recession today, but it’s looking inevitable that it will be soon unless the White House dramatically shifts on trade. There’s only one way the U.S. avoids a recession: if Trump stops the tariff madness.
Trump has ushered in an economy of distress, even among the rich. His tariffs are the highest since the Great Depression. Americans are terrified that prices are going to spike again, and they might lose their jobs. Businesses are equally alarmed and entering an almost-comatose state as they wait to see what happens with trade, budget cuts and taxes. Traffic at the Port of Los Angeles, the major hub for Asian imports, has dried up so much it resembles early covid days.
… “I think we’re going into a recession,” said Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research. “What’s the upside case for the economy? Even if we go back to where we were before the trade stuff and Trump just declares victory, so much damage is done, it’s hard to undo.”
There’s no safety net left to stop a downturn. The Fed isn’t going to come to the rescue and cut interest rates to prop up the economy because there’s too much concern about inflation returning. Trump is slashing government spending, especially on many areas that help the poor. Congress isn’t going to do a big stimulus package with “stimulus checks” for most Americans as it did during the pandemic. Meanwhile, consumers no longer have a ton of savings to cushion price hikes or job losses as they did coming out of covid. And the bond market freak-out has only made it more difficult — and expensive — for anyone trying to refinance their loans.
If layoffs really start to pick up, consumer spending will nosedive and a downturn is almost certain. Already, there’s been a surge in Americans who are paying the bare minimum on their monthly credit card bills — an early sign of widespread distress. The number of “minimum payers” is at a 12-year high, according to the Philadelphia Fed.
Happy Friday, and Happy Easter.
We had sunny weather all week here in the city, and today the temperatures touched 70°F (21°C).
It will be cooler with a little bit of rain over the weekend.
A few sun-seekers are soaking up the late afternoon sunlight, while relaxing on the lawn at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill. It is 6 o’clock, and sunset is still two hours away.
Here’s a cute cartoon that was published in The New Yorker magazine from March 31.
The cartoonist is Joe Dator. Joe Dator has been a cartoonist for the New Yorker since 2006 and has also contributed cartoons to MAD magazine and Esquire. He is a recipient of the National Cartoonists Society’s Silver Reuben Award and has been featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes.
From NOAA’s website: Plankton are incredibly important to the ocean ecosystem, and very sensitive to changes in their environment, including in the temperature, salinity, pH level, and nutrient concentration of the water. When there are too many of certain nutrients in the water, for instance, harmful algal blooms like red tides are the result. Because many zooplankton species eat phytoplankton, shifts in timing or abundance of phytoplankton can quickly affect zooplankton populations, which then affects species along the food chain. Researchers are studying how climate change affects plankton, from the timing of population changes to the hardening of copepod shells, and how those effects ripple through ecosystems.
While inspecting K2-18b, Dr. Madhusudhan and his colleagues discovered it had many of the molecules they had predicted a Hycean planet would possess. In 2023, they reported they had also detected faint hints of another molecule, and one of huge potential importance: dimethyl sulfide (CH₃)₂S, which is made of sulfur, carbon, and hydrogen.
On Earth, the only known source of dimethyl sulfide is life. In the ocean, for instance, certain forms of algae produce the compound, which wafts into the air and adds to the sea’s distinctive odor. Long before the Webb telescope was launched, astrobiologists had wondered whether dimethyl sulfide might serve as a sign of life on other planets.
–Carl Zimmer writing for the New York Times
Headlines and artist’s conception from the New York Times. Red dwarf stars are the most common type of star in the universe and are characterized by being the smallest and coolest main-sequence stars. They are significantly smaller and cooler than our Sun, typically ranging in mass from 0.1 to 0.6 solar masses and having surface temperatures between 2,000 and 3,500 Kelvin. Due to their low mass and temperature, they burn their fuel very slowly and have exceptionally long lifespans, potentially lasting trillions of years. – Google Search Labs | AI Overview A hycean is a warm ocean of water, wrapped in atmospheres containing hydrogen, methane and other carbon compounds. An exoplanet is any planet outside (beyond) Earth’s solar system.
It was time for a jaunt to U-district on the light rail today.
The books are from Magus second-hand bookstore and the other pictures are all from around University Way NE.
Here’s the new Tesla Model Y, a pearl white one that I spotted on the Denny Way overpass over I-5 today.
I was on the sidewalk and I should have swung around to take a picture of the rear end of the vehicle as well— but I didn’t.
Tesla’s website says these are ‘Available Today’. It will set you back $50,630 ($43,130 if you are eligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles).
Meanwhile, Tesla’s website in China no longer offers the Model S and Model X (imports from the USA), after Beijing raised tariffs on U.S. imports in response to President Trump’s levies against the country.
The Model S and Model X are expensive cars and not big sellers in China, though. Even so— China’s tariffs on US goods are now at 125%*, after President Donald Trump’s decision to hike duties on Chinese goods to 145%.
*Observers say China does not need to raise tariffs any higher than this. This is effectively an embargo against imports from America.
Although stamps for railway parcels and newspapers have been in use in this country for over a century, they have received scant attention from philatelists.
— From the preface to the book ‘Railway Stamps of South Africa’, published by The Philatelic Federation of Southern Africa in 1985.
My spectacular* book about South Africa’s railway stamps arrived today (from South Africa, of course).
*Spectacular, because almost none of the information in it is available online, nor in any of the standard stamp catalogues.
Railway Stamps of South Africa (1985) by H.S. Hagen and S.P. Naylor.The first of the railway stamps in South Africa were issued in 1880 (those at the top). The Central South African Railways (CSAR) was (from 1902 to 1910) the operator of public railways in the Transvaal Colony and Orange River Colony. At unification of the four colonies into the Union of South Africa in 1910, the unified rail network was named and operated as South African Railways. The ‘Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg Maatskappij’ (South African Railway Company) was established in 1887. The company was based in Amsterdam and Pretoria, and operated in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (South African Republic) during the late 19th century. Abbreviations on the stamps: C.T.R.—Cape Town Railways; N.G.R.—Natal Government Railways; C.G.R.—Cape Government Railways; S.A.R.—South African Railways; Z.A.S.M.—Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg Maatskappij.At the top: more stamps for South African Railways (S.A.R.), denoted in South African pennies, shillings and pounds and used until 1961. The first bilingual stamp sheets were printed in 1929 with alternate Afrikaans stamps (S.A.S. for Suid-Afrikaanse Spoorweë) and English stamps (S.A.R.). Middle of the page: the pair of bright turquoise stamps are “bantam” stamps: half-sized stamps printed during World War II, when paper supplies were limited. Bottom row: In Feb. 1961, the South African rand was introduced as currency (one hundred cents to a rand). The denominations on the post-1961 stamps were no longer part of the main design of the stamp, but overprinted in black ink...An explanation of some of the finer differences in the fonts used for the overprints on some of the stamps.At the back of the book: an index of abbreviations for the railway station names. Sweet! No more blood, sweat and tears for me to figure out the station names for the abbreviations printed on the stamps.
LONDON, April 9, 3:16 AM PDT (Reuters) – Global markets took a beating again on Wednesday as U.S. President Donald Trump’s eye-watering 104% tariffs on China took effect, and a savage selloff in U.S. bonds sparked fears that foreign funds were fleeing U.S. assets.
So what happened today is that the US bond market started to melt down early this morning New York time. (If you don’t know what that means: investors around the world started to question the global safe-haven status of the United States by dumping their US Treasury bonds. Do we really want a start another 2008-style global financial crisis?).
Trump backed down (some) from the tariffs, and the day ended with the Dow Jones up 7.8%, S&P 500 up 9.5%, Nasdaq up 12.16% today.
What’s not to like about that? Let me tell you.
The original Trump Tariff Tantrum that started all this turmoil is only on a 90-day timeout. The 10% tariff that remains in place right now with US trading partners, is far, far higher than for any other OECD country. The trade war that Trump had started with China has arrived at a stunning 125% for imports from China and a stunning 84% export tariff to China. (In reality: a trade embargo between the countries with far and away the world’s two largest economies).
The American consumer is going to get killed.
Apple’s, Walmart’s and the profits of countless other companies big and small, in America and in China, will be obliterated.
Millions of Americans are going to lose their jobs.
The only question to ask is when the 2025 Trump Recession will start.
Or has it started already, because nobody has any confidence that this clown’s show 🤡 will ever end?
I watched way too much CNBC this morning, and still checked in at the start of Jim Cramer’s Mad Money show at 3.00 pm local time to see what he would say. Jim Cramer on ‘What we’ve learned from the tariff turmoil’: 1. Nobody Ever Made a Dime Panicking. (Do not make investments, or get out of investments because of rash, fearful or irrational emotions.) 2. Bulls Make Money, Bears Make Money, Pigs Get Slaughtered. (Don’t be greedy. If you had taken an investment position and made a reasonable profit on it, be happy and stay put. Or sell it, and don’t regret later that you did not make even more money.) 3. The President Likes Drama — You Won’t Get Certainty. (Translation: The President that had run casinos into the ground as a “businessman”, likes to gamble with your life savings and your retirement money on the world’s financial markets.) 4. Don’t Bet Against Good Companies. (Companies like Apple and Microsoft and Walmart have been around a very long time and have weathered many storms. They will find a way around the tariffs, or become profitable again after taking a hit.) 5. Staying The Course In The Markets Is Always The Winning Strategy. (There are huge down days and huge up days in the market, which cannot be predicted. So do not try to ‘time the market’ and to miss the down days and catch the up days.) [Screenshot from CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Cramer’]
