I the past several months I have posted a few of my favorite HDR pictures of NYC, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles, but the city that I have the most digital pictures of is San Diego, where I lived from 2003 until July, 2014. I have finally selected a few of my favorite shots from America’s Finest City and applied the Snapseed HDR filter to them. Frankly, it was hard to pick just a few pictures and declare them my favorites, but I will say that these five are among my favorites for sure…more to follow at a future date.
La Jolla
La Jolla’s reputation for seaside beauty is certainly well deserved. Heading out to Sea
I took this picture from Shelter Island as an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which I believe was the USS Higgins, was headed out of the port of San Diego and toward the Pacific Ocean.
The view of Pacific Beach from the Crystal Pier
This picture captured the waves rolling into Pacific Beach from the Crystal Pier in PB, where you can sleep above the waves if you want to. There are bungalows built right on the pier that are available for rental.
Newport Ave., Ocean Beach, San Diego
Newport Avenue is the main drag in the Ocean Beach section of San Diego. OB is one of my favorite neighborhoods in San Diego. Gritty, bohemian, unconventional, working class, it is quite different than many of SD’s wealthier neighborhoods, but what it lacks in wealth it makes up for in character.
I have been monitoring the collapse of the price of oil the past few months, but I did not fully appreciate the magnitude of the decline until I constructed the monthly chart above so I could compare this decline to previous declines over the course of the past 30 years. I added the S&P 500 to the chart to show the divergence that has occurred between oil and equities in the past several months. As the chart illustrates, we haven’t seen oil and equities diverge in such a pronounced fashion in the last 30 years. The vast majority of the time during the last 30 equities and oil have basically moved in the same direction and it is usually with equities leading the moves up and down. Interestingly, oil and equities started to diverge in a pronounced way back in 2012, when the S&P made a higher high, but oil failed to do so. The spread continued to widen as the QE fueled stock market continued to ascend and the oil market, while taking wide swings, basically went sideways until the totally breaking down in the 2nd half of 2014.
Now, the big question is how long it will be before oil and equities resume the traditional trading relationship they had and which market will “correct” to a greater degree in order to come into an alignment that has more closely resembles the relationship that has been common during the past several decades. Will equities experience a massive sell off? Will oil bottom out soon and proceed to rally?
Or will we see something completely different this time, with oil and equities trading in a more independent fashion for an extended period of several more months or longer? I don’t think the answer is an easy one due to the complexity of the current oil market and the unprecedented circumstances influencing prices. With few exceptions oil has followed equities during the past several decades and that was certainly the case during the last major crash in oil, which followed the great stock market crash of 2008-2009. This time things are very different.
In the past OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, was able to boost oil prices simply by cutting production, but pressure by US based Shale producers have significantly reduced the ability to control the market. It appears that SA is now attempting to lower prices to a level that are unprofitable for Shale producers. But it also appears that the Saudi’s likely have geopolitical reasons for engineering this decline in the price of oil and that may in fact be the more important reason to them. Sub $60.00 oil certainly hurts the Shale producers, but it also really hurts the finances of Russia and Iran, two strategic foes.
How low will oil go? Good question. I’m not sure where exactly the bottom will be, but I think it is a fairly good bet that oil will stage a fairly significant rally once it consolidates when this sharp sell-off finally runs out of steam. However, barring another war in the Mideast that takes a LOT of supply offline I think it will probably be a long time until we see sustained $100 plus per barrel oil, because the technology to extract Shale oil isn’t going away, it will only get better in the future.
I visited New York City last week and had an opportunity to see the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center for the first time in well in quite a few years, because I had been living in California since 2003. The magnificent 2014 Tree is an 85 foot Norway Spuce which was imported from Danville, Pennsylvania. It was almost a surreal image when I first viewed it from Fifth Avenue, given the way it was framed by the surrounding buildings at Rockefeller Center and the Angels you see in the foreground of this picture. As you you can also see from this picture, quite a few other people were also interested in capturing this beautiful image.
I only recently found out that Twitter greatly expanded the number of Lists each account can maintain and the number of accounts that can added to each list. When Twitter first introduced Lists a few years ago each account could only have 20 Lists and each of those lists was limited to 500 other Twitter accounts. Twitter bumped up the number of Lists to 1,000 and the max number of accounts in each List from 500 to 5,000. Twitter increased the limits last year, but I had no idea. A few weeks ago I decided to try to add a 21st List for my account just for the heck of it and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that Twitter let me add it. I added another to bring me up to 22 Lists in total. I figured that Twitter might have finally doubled or tripled the List limits, but then I researched the matter and found out that Twitter went far, far beyond that. Awesome!!
I love my Twitter Lists. It makes Twitter much, much more useful in my opinion. I am now up to 26 Lists and counting. I will now be able add many Lists that are very specific. I think it safe to say that I won’t need anywhere near 1,000, but I could see ultimately adding a few dozen more Lists so that I can more effectively follow the Twitter accounts related to my favorite people, places and things.
gmf journal 