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The problem here isn't oil but simply the power of the global elite.

I went into this article thinking "So what? The world runs on oil, and oil has a lot of money. Welcome to learning about the economy."

But yeah, it is concerning that private interests that don't share our same niceties about democracy and human rights have power over us.

You willingly put up with the ‘global elite’ though.

Define "willingly".

"willingly" is a bit of a stretch considering the difficulty of doing so, and gives off a different connontation.

Of course it’s difficult, but we all have the means to build social movements, companies or sue if we feel that there’s something terrible going on. But we all like our flights, our cars, our cheaper and cheaper phones, stable policy in the West and perceived security. It’s hard but you can go against it. Just always saying ‘it’s the elite’ and then sitting it out seems really easy to me. Everyone has a conception of injustice, it just depends on how badly you crave that justice.

There is a tremendous amount of intertia that needs to be overcome when starting a competing company or a movement to replace any of those.

A lot of the competing companies have a large vertical integration in their field, and can refuse your supply for any of it

Of course, that’s the whole point. But you can build inertia. Take a look at Europe where there’s tremendous protesting going on regarding Climate Change, and we slowly see some change in for one, public opinion and two in policy making. It’s slow and painful and frustrating but you gotta work and not always blame the ‘global elite’. I know it’s hard to build inertia, I failed in court, I failed at building companies. But we all have to try and not put the blame on someone without doing anything.

You can try and build inertia whilst blaming the global elite too. They also did not hint about their activity in any way.

It can also in many ways to be literally impossible to compete for example due to some direct-or-not regulation.

I think it's not fair to roll the fault on the commenter either, even if it's easier to not think about it that way

Unfortunately, Europe is moving quite westward in terms of politics and ignorance. (I'll just be direct and use the word, karma be damned).

So what has happened in the US is happening elsewhere, on a delay. Fortunately, what is not on a delay is the age of the people doing the self-serving, future-burning deeds. Those people will all die within 15 years of each other. Hopefully those who are left will have a bit more sanity.

How much more apocalyptic can you get? Do you think painting an apocalyptic picture and then blaming some parts of the population on the bad parts of your picture will do anything good?

You build momentum to overcome inertia. Inertia is the tendency of things that are at rest to stay put.

Indeed. This expanded version of your previous comment is accurate. As long as people are still comfortable enough, there will be no change. Unfortunately, it takes great discomfort to motivate people to actually fight for change. (I'm like everyone, so I'm not fighting... yet?)

I do believe the internet and global communication does speed up the process, at least when people get near the tipping point. Knowing that you are not alone in your frustration does help steel people and enable connection and shared-effort. So yes, it's fucked right now, but I think it will improve measurably in the next 20 years. (It does indeed help that many of the most powerful people will die of old age within those 20 years).

Thank you. Apparently everyone on HN loves a contrarian until they see one in the wild.

You should get to work, there’s a lot of stuff to do. Of course we need to protect our precious peace and prosperity, but we also need public opinion to reflect on certain issues. And we need policy makers to implement solutions on said certain issues. We’ll get there but it’ll be really damn tiring and exhausting.

we all have the means to build social movements, companies or sue if we feel that there’s something terrible going on

That's nonsensical. We all have the potential to do such things at some point in our lives, but that is not at all the same as having the means.

Just always saying ‘it’s the elite’ and then sitting it out seems really easy to me.

So there are some people trying to build an anti-elite social movement of the sort you just said anyone had the means to build, yet you're saying they don't crave justice badly enough. I'm getting the impression that you're just saying you don't want to get onboard with anything unless it's already at the threshold of success.

Look I’m trying to build alternatives and help struggling social movements. I just don’t agree that the analysis of “it’s the elite, dumbass” is sufficiently clear eyed.

Yeah, but I'm putting off "taking down the global elite and reworking our entire system" for next Tuesday because I've got some other things on my to-do list.

and we might fear for our lives and the lives of our children.

I don't understand anti-elitism, given the alternative.

Please state what you think the alternative is, since you used the singular. To me, there is a range of alternatives, so it is hard to understand your objection because I don't understand what you are imagining.

One alternative is a French Revolution, part 2. Another alternative is a system of wealth, income, and inheritance taxes that helps prevent concentration of power in a few families. Another is more aggressive antitrust enforcement to reduce political power of any one company. Another is strengthening of unions. There are many others, and there are many combinations of them.

Yeah. People are scared.

There are alternatives to another French Revolution, which no one wants. (Well, no one other than the tyrants waiting in the wings who want to be the global elite.)

Why are people too scared to challenge the global élites? Because they don't acknowledge those alternatives. In my experience, it boils down to being fearful of being ruled by the people who want to be the global élites. Which would be even worse. And, hey, if I'm being honest, they're probably right about that. Thing is, that fear is blinding them to the other completely reasonable alternatives that people are putting forth.

We just need to make more noise about these other, really very low risk options. Options like taxes. Options like strengthening unions. Even out of the box options like thinking about coop type business structures. Etc.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, but we're in the happy position of not even having to skin the cat to get what we want. We just have to get people past that fear of, "Woah! look at those looneys who want to replace the élites! Better the Devil we know!".

Incrementalist low risk solutions have their place, but they are not the whole story. If you found a fire in the kitchen of your home you wouldn't just make a mental note to purchase a new fire extinguisher.

Incrementalism works great in periods of relative stability. In other contexts it can be dangerous and inhibit necessary action.

Wow, I agree and disagree. How to know when the kitchen is on fire? Most revolutions of the past 200 years have been a disaster. We live in a constitutional democracy that supports incremental improvement. The alternative is almost certainly, probabilistically, worse. Entropy and all that.

Well if you look into the kitchen and see smoke and flames then you have a fire in your kitchen...I cannot understand why you think this a difficult decision to make.

Where do you get the idea that most revolutions have been a a disaster? Your concept that only incremental improvement is valid seems counterfactual and naive. You are just dismissing anything that you do not understand out of hand without even considering it.

I think the point people are trying to make is that while revolutions can be good, most of the time they have been bad. Very bad. From the Reign of Terror, to the November Revolution, to Pinochet, to the Khmer Rouge, to Rwandans in central Africa, life has not been good for commoners during and after revolutions. (And I'm being kind by not listing the really bad ones.)

Add to all this the fact that they fail with alarming regularity, and America's collective lack of enthusiasm for that option is perfectly understandable. I mean, historically speaking, for the average person, revolutions either failed, and you were worse off. Or revolutions succeeded, and you were worse off.

It's so bad that, again, people are even a bit skeptical even of low risk options like tax reform and stronger unions. Right now, people seem to view anything that even appears to move away from the status quo as dangerous because of the admittedly horrid track record of revolutions, combined with the off the wall proclamations and actions of certain groups opposed to the élites. (Believe it or not, you don't allay peoples' fears of a reign of terror by shooting up churches and Walmarts for instance.)

The alternative is rule by non-elites. America has been an aristocratic democracy; when that aristocratic ruling culture is replaced by an anti-elitist culture, it might look worse than you think. I'd argue that the "elite" culture is less self-serving and more noble than the alternative.

You are setting up a false dichotomy: you claim the only two choices are rule by elites vs rule by non-elites. What I spelled out was a half way position -- bolstering the strength of the non-elites and weakening the grip elites have on power.

Of course it is difficult to manage precisely because most people with $1B will kick and scream if their wealth is reduced to $900M. But in theory that is what voting can help accomplish, and social movements to help people realize what they are giving up by voting into office people who despise unions and who complain that their 15% tax burden while collecting millions is too much.

I agree it isn't a dichotomy. I just don't understand anti-elitism. Note the difference between the elite and rich. Trump is the latter and won due to anti-elitism.

ExxonMobil has a lot of revenue, but mainly because it has a huge number of people producing a huge amount of product for a huge number of people. Despite nearly 300 billion in revenue, ExxonMobil's profits aren't as big as Google's or Microsoft's or even Facebook's. (At under 7%, Exxon's profit margin is half of Starbucks, and one-sixth that of Facebook.)

In many respects, the American oil industry is the antithesis of "the global elite." It creates a product everyone uses, and provides well-paying jobs for people without college degrees. XOM's CEO, Darren Woods, isn't a billionaire Stanford grad. He's a Kansan that got his engineering degree at Texas A&M and worked his way up the ladder at the company. Exxon can't outsource production overseas, or transfer IP to Ireland, etc.

I hadn't considered this perspective before, thank you.

I agree with your main point, but capital investments in tech are getting significantly larger, and most people in "big" tech don't think $100M is all that much. Google's spent billions on self-driving cars. Many acquisitions are now in the $3-10B range (eg. Doubleclick @ $3B, GitHub @ $7.5B, Motorola @ $12.5B). A new semiconductor fab is around $8-10B.

It's still possible to start a new company with just a laptop and free time in fringe markets like cryptocurrency, VR/AR, or many SaaS markets, but many of the exciting areas in tech today - AI, robotics, self-driving cars, gaming - require very large capital investments.

Not only that, but quarter-to-quarter investors and activist hedge funds often bully companies (tech or otherwise) to issue dividends and/or conduct buybacks instead of investing for the long-run. Google and Amazon are rare cash-cows able to support earnings growth and continue to invest for the long term, and even they get pressure to spend differently.

The average cost for an offshore oil drilling rig is now about $650MM. The ones that can go really deep are even more expensive.

MM=B?

In the financial world MM is used to mean million.

M is 1000 in roman numerals. MM is one million.

I think MM is 2000 in Roman numerals, no?

You are technically correct, financial dudes like roman numerals but somewhere in history someone (probably someone reeeeeally powerful) started using MM for million and thus started the trend.

Aside, swiss watches tend to have a watch maker's four on them instead of the more correct IV... and apparently there are a bunch of other variations out there[1]. Though MM is still quite stupid.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Variant_forms

I believe the thought behind MM is "a thousand thousand", using the roman numeral as if it were a positional digit.

Not sure how someone got the idea to do that...

Algebraically it makes sense I guess (M.M)

I didn't know they were that cheap. A new refinery starts at about $5B.

What kind of things go into a refinery that form that price?

Engineering costs, inspection costs, a lot of stainless steel tanks and tubing, a lot of stainless steel valves/clamps/misc attachments, a lot of stainless steel welding that needs to be certified, redundant failsafes, various safety devices/monitoring systems, etc. I'm sure some bribes are buried/hidden in these costs as well, such as if you allow this oil refinery we'll use your construction company and you can over charge us so any payoff is legal.

Why the moaning about nuclear power plant cost if refineries sit at a similar cost?

Refineries return that money faster.

Human lifespan is short. So things that affect one human lifespan quickly are scarier. Radiation scares people because it can kill them fast. Effects from oil and gas tend to take much longer.

This is misleading though because energy projects produce returns over a much longer timescale (i.e. decades) than the typical tech project (a year or two?). In addition, the typical big tech firm is running a lot more projects than the typical large oil company (which maybe operates a count of oil fields in the hundreds). So it's very much expected that the capital investment per project will be higher in oil.

But the fact of the matter is that Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have double the market capitalization of the largest private oil companies. So yes, they're objectively better capitalized taken as a whole -- even if the typical tech project has less investment and consequently working on tech projects as a low- or mid- level employee feels smaller.

Damn and here I am spending days preparing to justify my requests for a measly $2M to $5M for project spends.

I should go be an oil boy.

Don't wish for it too much... Getting approval for any decision is like pulling teeth. As a project manager in the oil industry you still aren't the final decision maker in most cases, and even when you are, there are decision review boards/etc.

There's a _lot_ of "process" to everything in oil. It's there for a good reason, but it can get out of hand.

I once spent three months getting approval to spend $20 to order some data from the US government. It was exactly the same process that you'd go through for a $10 million purchase. (Didn't help that we were re-buying our own data from 20 years ago because we'd lost it, but that's a different story.) I billed another wing of the company at $465/hr during the entire process... I billed around $50k to get approval to order a $20 DVD with a bunch of old scanned documents on it. Things can get very strange in the oil patch sometimes...

I was at an iron works a while back where I learned that an industrial grade blast furnace was, ballpark, $100 billion. This was built 100 years ago. That day I decided I just didn’t and wouldn’t ever understand capital markets.

> I learned that an industrial grade blast furnace was, ballpark, $100 billion.

That seems like a very large number for the construction of any industrial installation. Just poking around the net the numbers I found were $220/ton of pig iron produced, and another source that claimed a $2.5b cost in 1980 and $5b today. If the $220/ton figure is accurate a $100b blast furnace would be producing 455m tons of pig iron a year. According to wikipedia a modern furnace can produce about 5-6m tons per year.

that doesn't make any sense. the capital to build, and operating expenses, aren't anywhere near $100B (direct costs). $100M makes more sense.

The GDP of the US in 1929 was $105B nominal and $1,109B real. So this blast furnace would have been between 10% and 100% of total GDP. That doesn't seem right.

Off by a couple orders of magnitude. Capital cost of a blast furnace, rule of thumb, is ~$200 per ton of pig iron per year: https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-it-cost-to-set-up-a-bla...

The largest blast furnace in the world is about 5 million tons of iron per year (and was upgraded to that capacity in 2013): http://www.donga.com/en/List/article/all/20130610/406398/1/P...

...so that means the biggest blast furnace in the world has a capital cost of approximately $1 billion.

More than likely the cost (in today's dollars) of that blast furnace you're referring to is $100 million, not $100 billion.

Side note: direct reduction furnaces furnaces are usually cheaper from a capital cost perspective and can use natural gas or even hydrogen for producing steel... We may use more of this tech in the future as we move away from coal for sustainability reasons.... The US now produces about 10% of its raw iron/steel using DRI and 90% by blast furnaces and the rate of DRI growth is fantastic (going from 2 million tons in 2017 to 3.4 million in 2018, pdf page 10): https://www.worldsteel.org/en/dam/jcr:96d7a585-e6b2-4d63-b94... A few years ago, virtually no steel was made via DRI in the US. The fracking boom has changed a lot.

Why don't you learn how the world works so you can confidently write to the intern “pls fix” because that was easy to call bs on