IBM just came out with its quarterly report, and this one has the Red Hat cloud and hybrid cloud. IBM did not have a hybrid cloud and because of it was in the cloud minor league.

Because of the Red Hat cloud addition, IBM had the best earnings report I have seen from it in five years and because of Red Hat its earnings and profits went up. But I would not buy the stock now. All of the other IBM’s divisions did not experience a growth in profits. If IBM licensed its cloud like Amazon and Microsoft do, IBM could grow as they have been growing, and next quarter has another winning quarter.

Microsoft, which is number two in the cloud, is the fastest growing cloud company, and one of the most highly recommended stocks. I am not sure if anyone recommends IBM, and if they do, it is for the dividend.

Criticism of the New York Times

In the Jan. 24 edition of the New York Times it has two great stories on the need for an aggressive infrastructure program.

I liked both stories, but they were buried in the business section, instead of being on the front page. You can Google the stories, “New weapon for the pothole brigade,” and “As roads crumble, states want US to ante up.”

Here is a quote, “The surface of the streets in Cambridge have the roughness of a well maintained dirt road.” One of the stories repeats the well-known litany of Trump where are you, and that in order to fund the program will require an increase in the gas tax. Without it the huge backlog of infrastructure projects will continue to grow and grow until you may be driving on dirt roads again. Because Republicans do not increase taxes, expect for the United States to head backwards in a hurry to be a banana Republic.

The United States ranks tied with Germany and the United Kingdom at having the ninth best infrastructure. The Social Progress Index (SPI), which is on Facebook, is not so kind. It ranks the United States as the 25th best country to live in. Italy has a rank of 21st. The United States is not ranked very high as a safe leader as it is a homicide leader and needs tougher gun laws. The SPI indicates that the United States is going backward. You can find SPI on Google or Facebook with its 2018 rankings of 190 countries. The United States is either 1 or 2 with China as the number one emitter of CO2.

Taxpayers may have more questions than answers when they see in a landslide that the United States spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined. We are also number one in deficits.

Vietnam again
The guys who served us in Vietnam are being remembered again. Here is my local story. I was at going away parties to basic training for Hank Schulte of New Paltz and Louie Iorio of Highland. The parties were at P & G’s.

Hank wanted to go. He was going to win the war all by himself. His father, big Hank, supported his going, and his Mother strongly opposed it. He was killed in Vietnam.

After he died the town board wanted to name a park after Hank, and the family, particularly his mother, did not want it. She wanted her son back.

I joined the National Guard. My Mother was responsible for that. How? She called the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. An assistant secretary called her back and then sent the application to my mother. She filled it out and submitted it immediately to (I believe) the defense department. It came back and I was contacted to go to Albany for a physical. I passed it. I was assigned to the 169th Artillery in Kingston. When I showed up there, I was told they had never seen an application like mine. On the first week of March 1965 I was off to Basic Training at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

As for my mother, Adelaide McKinney, she was a driver; she was the founder of the (Michael) Moriello Park in New Paltz. My brother Bruce named his daughter Adelaide. She, too, is a driver. Adelaide McKinney Wallace, and her husband Brett Wallace, are graduates of the Harvard Business School. My son Anthony’s best friend is attorney Michael Moriello, a grand nephew of Michael Moriello.

My brother failed his physical when drafted by the Army. It was a knee injury, which he got playing basketball. There was no celebration at the family homestead, not even a pizza pie. I realize now that my mother was very happy. I was also at the going away party for Louie Iorio of Highland. Louie did not want to go. Nine months after Louie’s party, I was writing his obituary. He was an only child. That hit me.

For a while I was an only child after my sister Suzy died in 1943. My brother Bruce was born in 1946, and thank God, my sister, Linda, in 1952. Nine month’s before Linda was born my parents had pizza at Pantony’s. Shortly after that my Mother learned she was going to have one more child, and she wanted a daughter. I am sure after she arrived we had pizza from Pantony’s.

At Davos, the number one concern is climate change
Surprise: at Davos the number one concern of the world’s business leaders was Global Warming. The reason is the fear and reality that it can threaten a company’s bottom line, and turn a profit into a loss.

“Extreme weather events are causing economic havoc. Climate Change could cause the next financial crisis. I have never seen a social issue explode like this,” Paul Tudor Jones of Just Capital said.

One solution is to plant a trillion trees as they eat up CO2.

Hurricanes, fires, droughts, and flooding keep coming at a bigger price. Hurricanes Maria and Dorean wiped out Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. Which place is next?

The United States got a free pass with Dorean, but in 2020 the USA could be hit with a monster hurricane, whose FEMA cost would be so high to financially hurt the United States. People do not want to have their businesses in the path of hurricanes.

The business leaders are from all of the continents. No one is safe anymore and they know it.

It is 218 degree days warmer than normal this winter
It is 218 degree days warmer than normal this winter, and does this mean we are going to have an early spring? I don’t know. The reason I checked the degree-days was that the word was out that natural gas sales were down in the nation because it was warmer this winter. I checked the temperature in Yakima, Washington, the apple capital of the world, and it was 55 degrees in mid-January. An early spring in Yakima, followed by a frost, would mean that our apple farmers would have a waiting list for our apples. But that could happen to us, and it has, and our apple growers got wiped out that year, except for Gene Coy’s orchards on the top of a hill. I will be checking Yakima’s weather every day. I want a scoop.

It also possible that Apple Greens golf course could open at its earliest time in history, possibly in late, late February. I doubt this will happen.

Trump’s water drainage regulation had a horrible story in 2019

The mid west along the Mississippi River had its worst flooding in known history in 2019. It caused fertilizer and pesticide runoff from the flooded farm fields into rivers that flow into the Mississippi or directly into the great river. Those fertilizers and pesticides had a drastic impact on the fishing industry at or near the point that the befouled water flowed into the Gulf of Mexico.

The shrimp harvest lost 85 percent of its crop, oysters, 100 percent, and crabs, 35 percent to 40 percent. Also it was killing sea animals, and causing toxic blue-green algae blooms. Last year it ruined Mississippi’s summer tourist business, as its beaches were unusable.

Trump has plans to make the fertilizer and pesticide runoff permanent. It is good for the farmers, but what about the fishing industry. This is called deregulation. Except there could be a big loser. It was an Obama regulation. There will be a lot of losers.

You could be one if your well is polluted.