First, we want to extend sincere wishes for the well-being of readers in the Lake Chelan, Washington area where the Chelan Hills fire (see map here) has really blown up.
Wildfires are just one of the modern convergences that come with industrialization. It’s early in the fire season – which runs to October (and later, depending on your locale). And they are popping up all over. Aspen Acres Fire in southern Colorado destroys more than 260 homes, sheriffs say, is just another example.
It occurred to me – looking at the fire maps this morning – on InciWeb – the Incident Information System – that we could be seeing conditions – a combination of natural and economic forces – that might some day lead to the end of home fire insurance outside of well-defended municipal zones. Where we could see a national “fire zoning” plan evolve over time.
Not here – yet. But when economics and reality collide, there is only one winner. We’ll just ponder the coffee and remember that well-worn marketing slogan.
“Just add water.”
News Compressor Scan
What changed overnight is Russian strikes on Kyiv and surrounding areas killed at least 28 people (reports vary 19-28+), with widespread damage from a major combined missile and drone barrage. This follows Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil infrastructure.
Ongoing heat, power strain from data centers, and scattered storms noted but no escalation to high-fatality thresholds. Markets saw oil prices firming near $68-70 WTI after Strait of Hormuz incidents amid Iran mourning period.
In other words, the high level view of the planet is “pseudo-normal.”
Looking Ahead from Here
Trump is on the road – which is always a concern: NATO summit begins today in Ankara (7-8 July) with focus on defense spending targets, arms production, and Ukraine support; Trump attendance and pressure on allies expected to dominate. Everybody has their hand out for your money.
Demoticks are blowing up in Maine as pressure mounts on candidate Graham Platner over sexual assault allegation; withdrawal deadline July 13.
Tectonics of Tech are getting interesting:
Rare earth restrictions are spreading from defense/EV talk into broader corporate filings. Japan is the test case for whether China’s mineral leverage becomes a standing economic weapon. Confidence: 40%.
AI-capex boom with labor trimming. Markets like chip news, but Microsoft’s 4,800 cuts show AI spending is also being paired with payroll discipline. Confidence: 40%.
Warm-up?
On the Financial High Board
For markets, do not over-read Monday’s rally. Reuters says chip optimism lifted indexes, but the same story notes Microsoft cutting 4,800 jobs and oil calm depending on Hormuz traffic. Two points to remember: China still wants Taiwan – and Iran’s been acting like “after-the-revolution” AK-firing radicals with their Hormuz targeting – so far. If they serious-up (or learn aiming skills) then we get energy market chaos.
Related, the monthly International Trade in Goods and Services is just out:
Oil watch: As mentioned WTI around $68-69 and Brent around $72 are “calm but conditional.” Any fresh ship damage, insurance pullback, or escort failure can reprice quickly. Bitcoin was back under $63,000 briefly overnight and it’s a good time to watch squash and other local products you can eat now or can for later.
Actionable Intel
Cyber: BleepingComputer reports threat actors abusing Microsoft Teams voice calls to pose as IT support and install malware. Good small-business advice: no remote-access install from an unsolicited call.
Health: for food handlers, Cyclospora reports argue for extra produce washing/sanitizing discipline. Treat as kitchen ops, not fear copy. Main source of risk is raw, fresh produce:
- Fresh Herbs: Basil, cilantro, and parsley.
- Leafy Greens: Romaine lettuce, mesclun lettuce, and mixed salad greens.
- Berries: Raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries.
- Other Veggies: Snow peas and radishes.
One More health note – Measles: CDC shows 1,842 confirmed cases and 25 new outbreaks in 2026, with most cases outbreak-associated. That remains a slow-burn public-health signal. Avoid children like the plague?
Around the Ranch: Daylight Summer Time
The trusty old Citizen EcoDrive will be going back on the wrist this morning.
Because with the gates of hell open, I have taken to literally doing outside work at “the crack of dawn.” Take today, for example: Workable light was up at 6 AM. So, referring to the watch, I was able to do some landscaping work (damn Johnson grass is trying to come up on the front patio). Did a little fire break mowing, as well.
And here’s the interesting thing: The whole reason for “daylight time” is overlooked right now. Because kids should be going to school – butts in chairs – by 7 AM. Just think how much energy (and specifically cooling costs!) could be saved.
Don’t get me wrong – I think that resetting the clock is a fiasco we don’t need – but that’s what clocks do. I’m more a partisan in the “Work as soon as you can, as hard as you can, and quit when done” camp. You never need a watch (or government claiming power over what time it is) to know when a job is done, right, and finished.
We would have hoped – with some of the tech mania – that someone (besides us) could see the genius of CVT Continuously Variable Time. Because that way, the sun would always come around a certain time every day. The astronomical term is sidereal time.
Sure, too complicated to distill into a wrist machine, but with networks and AI…come on, how tough can it be?
There’s a Health Angle to Time
Now, listen up as I walk up to the whiteboard and make notes:
Waking at the same time every day is one of the simplest ways to reduce biological noise.
- The body is not a loose pile of parts; it is a timed system. Cortisol, melatonin, blood pressure, insulin response, immune signaling, gut motility, and even gene expression run on clocks.
- When wake time jumps around, the organism has to keep re-solving the morning: “Are we hunting, repairing, digesting, fighting infection, or sleeping?”
- Regularity lowers that ambiguity.
- In a large UK Biobank study, sleep regularity was associated with materially lower all-cause, cancer, and cardiometabolic mortality risk, and was a stronger predictor than sleep duration alone PubMed.
The sidereal wrinkle is more speculative, but only because the (dumbshitz who are silo-dwellers didn’t think of it first…) but interesting and actually doable.
A sidereal day is about 23 hours, 56 minutes, so waking at the same sidereal time means the clock wake-up would drift about four minutes earlier each solar day. If there is anything to the idea, it would not be because “stars cure disease,” but because the body may benefit from an extremely stable phase relationship to larger environmental cycles: light, geomagnetic background, gravitational orientation, and the daily turning of the planet under the sky. That is woo-adjacent, but not completely insane; biology evolved under layered rhythms, and modern life has done a fine job of smashing most of them flat.
The practical takeaway is safer: disease risk appears to fall when the body gets reliable timing cues. Same wake time, same first light exposure, same meal window, same movement window, same sleep approach. Whether the best anchor is civil clock time, solar dawn, or sidereal phase remains unproven. But the underlying principle is strong: life runs better when the orchestra knows when the downbeat arrives.
A technical note: If you want the sun to come up at the same “watch time,” that is closer to solar time, not sidereal time. Sidereal time tracks the stars and drifts about 4 minutes earlier against the sun each day. But with the roll of planets and astrophysiology still in the investigative stage (where it has been stuck 500+ years) we could just pick one and go with it.
One of the reasons Elaine and I are doing a good bit above average for our age is this: We are regular hours people.
It’s so ingrained in my core that if I forget to set an alarm for 4 AM, I will generally wake within five minutes of that even without the dinger or Alexa going off.
We still have the afternoon wine at 4 PM…but the attraction of CVT would be having it when all the work around here is done – which is generally before noon on hot days.
One or the Road: Boeing Day
7/07 – right?
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