Multi-Quakes, Data Dense Thursday, Insurance Gardening

Four notable earthquakes rolled overnight. In descending order:

• 7.5  28 km SE of Yumare, Venezuela
• 7.2  23 km SE of Yumare, Venezuela
• 6.9  30 km ENE of Kuji, Japan
• 5.6  11 km N of Redwood Valley, CA

Venezuela is the serious human-disaster story. USGS put the pair at M7.2 followed less than a minute later by M7.5, roughly 100 miles west of Caracas, with early reports putting the toll at least 32 dead and 700 injured, collapsed buildings around Caracas and La Guaira, aftershocks continuing, and the initial tsunami concern canceled. Additional aftershocks are not just possible; they are the normal follow-on when the crust has just been rung this hard.

When we get quakes around the Earth’s midsection, I always get tingly. The reason is that when — not so much if — the Earth experiences another global crustal shift, it would not be unreasonable, in an Irwin Allen “master of disaster” plot line, for early stress releases to show up closer to the equator.

Now, self-check so I don’t spool up needlessly on too much coffee: the Venezuela mainshock was about 10°26? north latitude, roughly 1,160 km / 722 miles north of the equator. So we won’t scamper to an escape pod just yet. Oil depletion nearby may figure in. Seasonal loading may figure in. We did just pass maximum Earth-axis-tilt day, also known as the Solstice. And then there is the normal crustal stuff, which usually wins the Occam’s Razor contest.

Japan’s quake was large but, so far, cleaner: M6.9 off northern Honshu/Iwate, about 30 km ENE of Kuji, felt widely but without the Venezuela-style casualty profile. The “Mayan angle” is not there with this one. At about 40.3° north latitude, the epicenter was roughly 2,780 miles / 4,480 km north of the equator — not the equatorial trigger-zone my over-caffeinated disaster brain watches for.

California, though smaller, was attention-getting: M5.6 near Redwood Valley in Mendocino County, about 11 km north of town and shallow enough to be widely felt. There were reports of some structural damage and injuries, so it was not a nothing-burger. The eyebrow-raiser is latitude: Redwood Valley came in around 39.36° north, very close to the Japan quake’s latitude.

Well, except: using Japan at about 40.3° north and Redwood Valley at 39.36° north, the difference is only 0.94 degrees of latitude. At about 69 miles per degree, that puts the two quake epicenters only about 65 miles apart in north/south latitude — basically the same latitude band, despite being separated by the whole Pacific.

Over hash browns and bacon, this distills down to: Venezuela is the tragedy, Japan is the big-system stress test, and California is the usual NorCal reminder that the crust still has a twitchy trigger finger. And yes, it is OK to remain politely paranoid.

Next, before we head to the casino, a check of the…

News Compressor

Besides the quakes?  What changed overnight is the business decision environment shifted away from “Middle East energy shock” and toward “inflation/Fed/AI-risk repricing.” Oil eased as more Gulf and Hormuz traffic resumed, including Maersk vessels exiting the Gulf and Reuters reporting crude back near pre-Iran-war levels; that takes some gasoline-panic premium out of the system but does not normalize shipping, insurance, or stranded-cargo risk yet. Markets caught a big AI-chip bid after Micron and Qualcomm revived the “AI buildout still has legs” trade, while the PCE inflation release sitting on today’s tape keeps Fed-rate risk alive.

Now, one more stop before we go over to the casino and the dense data dump of the day.

Dialing Through the Noise Floor

Want me to bore you with my latest SIGINT toy? A Rycom 6040 frequency-selective voltmeter. This will eventually be used as a field-strength meter when I get on the “forgotten ham bands.”

Forgotten ham bands?  630 meters is the U.S. amateur band at 472–479 KHz, secondary-use, low-power, and wonderfully stubborn. Which explains the Rycom: to measure compliance with the FCC limit of 5 watts EIRP — 1 watt EIRP in parts of Alaska near Russia — with up to 500 watts PEP transmitter output, fixed-station operation only, and prior UTC/PLC notification required before you light it up.

In plain English: on 630 meters, 5 watts is the power your station could appear to radiate if the same field strength came from a perfect imaginary isotropic antenna radiating equally in all directions. Using EIRP — effective isotropic radiated power — keeps people like me from “going large” with monster antennas and pretending five watts is still five watts after the antenna system starts doing antenna-system things.

In practice, 630 is a weak-signal, big-antenna-compromise playground for those of us in super-nerd modes: WSPR, QRSS, CW, narrow digital modes, loading coils, ground systems, and all the dark arts of making a backyard antenna behave on a wavelength longer than most neighborhoods.  Wait!  Did I just get off track? So sorry… back into news-noise we jump:

Signal: Space weather is active enough for operational nuisance. Kp 5 and a large active region rotating into view are not catastrophe signals, but they matter for HF, satellites, GPS, and power-system monitoring. Confirmation rises if SWPC posts G2+ watches or repeated R/M-class flares. Confidence: 60.  Still, with four notable quakes over night, polite paranoi—oh, you know.

Signal: Gulf shipping is reopening unevenly. Oil price says “relief,” but shipping reports still say “controlled transits, stranded vessels, insurance, and remaining cargo.” Confirmation rises if inbound traffic, LNG movements, insurance rates, and container delivery backlogs normalize together. Confidence: 80.

Signal: Ebola response is becoming a funding and importation-risk story. WHO’s outbreak concern plus a U.S. supplemental request moves this from overseas health story to homeland-health-security watch. Confirmation rises if additional exported cases appear outside Africa or if health-worker attacks continue. Confidence: 75.

Signal: AI infrastructure is shifting from chips to utilities. OpenAI’s custom chip, Qualcomm’s data-center plan, and water/power pushback all point to the same bottleneck: compute is becoming a grid and water fight. Confirmation rises if local data-center moratoriums, ratepayer disputes, or utility interconnection delays accelerate. Confidence: 70.

Signal: El Niño food stress is not gone because inventories look OK. Reuters reports strong inventories may soften a shock, but weak monsoon risk in India and heat damage in Europe keep the food-price fuse alive. Confirmation rises if India restricts exports or Southeast Asia rice/palm oil yields deteriorate. Confidence: 65.  More in Around the Ranch in a sec, but let’s do the data dump first.

Data Dumpster Thursday!

Do I need to remind you that “investing” is not what paper is?  It’s gambling?  But then so is Bitcoin ($61,208 earlier and it might lead markets lower if we’re not careful in here…).

Durable Goods:

New orders for manufactured durable goods in May, down following two consecutive monthly increases, decreased $15.6 billion or 4.5 percent to $332.1 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau announced today. This followed an 8.5 percent April increase. Excluding transportation, new orders increased 1.3 percent. Excluding defense, new orders decreased 4.6 percent.

GDP Lags Inflation now:

Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 2.1 percent in the first quarter of 2026 (January, February, and March), according to the third estimate released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter of 2025, real GDP increased 0.5 percent. The contributors to the increase in real GDP in the first quarter were increases in investment, exports, government spending, and consumer spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

BEA Personal Income and Expense

Personal income increased $181.6 billion (0.7 percent at a monthly rate) in May, according to estimates released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Disposable personal income (DPI)—personal income less personal current taxes—increased $164.9 billion (0.7 percent), and personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $156.1 billion (0.7 percent). Personal outlays—the sum of PCE, personal interest payments, and personal current transfer payments—increased $159.9 billion in May. Personal saving was $704.2 billion in May, and the personal saving rate—personal saving as a percentage of DPI—was 3.0 percent.

BLS Weekly Unemployment Filings

NOAA (and others) Weekly Drought Monitor

In the latest read, we’re down to 45.9 percent ofx the country being in some state of drought.

And it’s not just hot and dry in (some of) the U.S. France records hottest day ever as Europe suffers brutal heat wave.  Out here in East Texas we are under half of last year and I can’t get up the nerve to dig any deeper into data.

Whew! Time for a coffee break. Make that an iced coffee!

Around the Ranch: Insurance Gardening

We are about to the end of Amazon Prime Days.  Ends on June 27, so only two more days to run.

IF – and we are not selling this as reasonable – IF you like eating here’s how I would stack up food resilience as a plan.

1. Work on high protein storage foods.  We like Base Camp.
2. Supplement with a couple of 20 pound sacks of good white rice.  Beans, soy sauce by the jug, and some salt which with potable water and solid multivitamins would keep you pumping air.
3. Then I’d get some 5-liter size hydroponic units.  With these you can “hatch out” seedlings cheaper than you can buy them at the box stores.
4. Next, I would get 16 of the five gallon DWC (deep water culture) hydroponics kits and get them into production (when the seedlings are ready).  Two of these, for example.
5. Since buckets are for big plants, how about a 36 to 60 plant site kit for the greens? A small 36 plant site unit like this one runs about fifty bucks.
6. Clay balls (for the big DWC buckets) are on sale. And don’t forget the hydroponic plant food (usually an A and B part), an outboard reservoir (black, to keep away algae blooms) for the greens unit which doesn’t come with one…and seeds. DON’T FORGET A TDS AND pH METER!

None of this is free, but here’s the thing: I always look at this kind of spending as a kind of insurance premium. Right now you can buy the insurance. At some yet to expose itself time ahead, we may not be able to.  Everyone makes choices. And it’s OK to be politely paranoi—oh, you know!

Write when you get rich,

George@Ure.net