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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't call it "hidden", it's public knowledge. It needs to be filled however because oil is so cheap.

And for the keyboard nay-sayers that are typing on a keyboard made of ABS, walking their down on a nylon leash, holding their iPhone in a TPU case, drinking from a polycarbonate reusable water bottle, wondering how we're going to refine steel for wind turbines, oil is an incredible useful substance.

Let's learn from the N95 mask shortage. It's incredibly important to have national stockpiles to decouple ourselves from the events in the world (like the one happening now).

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Please don't post flamebait to HN. Your comment turned the thread into a generic (I really want to say stupid) flamewar, which got more tedious and nastier as it went along, as such things predictably do.

Worse, it sat at the top of the entire page, sucking oxygen away from everything else, because indignation routinely attracts upvotes. HN readers belong to the same species as Jerry Springer attendees. I've flagged it and marked it off topic now.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

I don't think any of the "keyboard nay-sayers" are saying that petroleum isn't useful, and it's worth engaging with their actual arguments.

That comic is a terrible Reductio ad absurdum. The first one is a fair point – Apple products are not a necessity. Therefore if you think the company behind them is behaving unethically, don't buy their products in order to not support their activities.

The other two examples – not so much.

Sure, but

1. The validity of the argument isn't affected by whether one is a hypocrite. If Apple is indeed behaving unethically, it's still behaving unethically even if I own an iPhone. If Apple isn't behaving unethically, then you should be able to argue that on grounds other than "you bought an iPhone." The poster in this case made specific, refutable claims - that Apple dodges taxes and can't pay decent wages to their Chinese factory workers. A legitimate counterargument is that they don't in fact dodge taxes or do in fact pay decent wages (or perhaps that their current behavior is okay), not an attack on the person making the argument.

2. Apple products are not a necessity, but in the current era, a smartphone is very close to a necessity (yes, there are people who steadfastly avoid them, and there are also people who live in the forest, that's not what "necessity" means). And there are relatively few options for good smartphones, none of which come from morally blameless companies. (Personally, I find security valuable, and Apple has the best track record of producing phones with long-term security support, which means you can buy fewer Apple products than anything else.) It might be hypocritical to buy a product from company X while steadfastly believing that company X is behaving unethically, but it's hardly a sign that you don't in fact believe that company X behaves unethically. You might simply have weight the alternatives and decided that buying from company X is the best of several bad options.

Sure, but life is busy. If you don't care enough about your beliefs to bother doing anything for them, why should those of us that don't necessarily even hold them give a shit?

It's okay for you to dismiss arguments, but if you're going to make counterarguments, clearly life isn't that busy.

(But to the actual point - it's hard to infer whether someone "cares enough" about their beliefs. I personally care about Apple's labor practices; I also care a lot about Google's security practices, which are also contributing to serious human rights violations in China. I'm allowed to care about more than one thing at once.)

How are Googles security practices contributing to human rights violations im China?

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/11/bad-binder-an...

I think I mixed up things in my head, sorry - I don't think there's a claim of that exploit being used in China in particular. (I was probably confusing it with https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-d... / https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/31/china-google-iphone-uyghur... , which is about iOS, in fact - but IMO there's a big difference between new bugs being discovered and "CVE-2019-2215 permits attackers to fully compromise a device with only untrusted app access or a browser renderer exploit and despite the patch being available in the upstream Linux kernel, it was left unpatched in Android devices for almost 2 years." I don't think either Apple or Google is doing an adequate job here at all, but Apple still seems to be a bit better, between the options.)

1. I think the issue is that "unethically" is a very subjective standard. The hypocrisy does not invalidate the argument, it merely brings into question whether this is an "accurate" moral judgement if it is not serious enough to warrant a (relatively easy) change in behavior from the person espousing it. In other words: morality is very inherently subjective, so hypocrisy does matter. It's not about convincing me that something is happening (like sweatshops). Facts are easy. The problem is convincing me that the thing that is happening is bad. And you're not going to do that if you can't put your money where your mouth is. If you're a hypocrite about issues of morality, you're either preaching to the choir, or you're not going to convince anyone.

2. If I truly believed Apple and every other smartphone manufacturer was causing human suffering to produce their smartphones, my own morality would dictate that my "need" for a smartphone still does not justify the purchase of one. It's a null point to me though, because A. I don't actually believe that Apple's manufacturing practices are "wrong", and B. I know plenty of successful people that get by without smartphones in the current era.

Hypocrisy is relevant (even if bringing it up is offensive) to whether an opinion is genuine when a person fails to solve a personal problem according to what they claim they believe.

It's not relevant when the problem is collective.

Your opinion (2) doesn't make any sense to me, because if you did grant that the manufacture of all smartphones involves massive human suffering, how could manufacturing of everything else not?

Not sure I follow? Certain things are made in sweatshops, which many people consider "bad". Not everything is manufactured in a sweatshop.

Are the working standards to a level you would feel comfortable working in? Would you personally be okay putting together smartphone products and/or pulling rare metals out of the ground?

The alternative to a smart phone is a feature phone made in a similar factory, and the alternative to that is a landline, also made in a similar factory, and the alternative to all that is maybe a laptop with VoIP, also made in a similar factory... It's exploitation all the way down.

When the markets only way to offer prosperity to some is to exploit and shaft others, while maintaining the position of elite classes, there is a problem.

You say exploitation, I say more opportunity than they had before.

That doesn't answer the question at all. It sounds like you are saying you wouldn't work in those conditions. Why? Because the conditions are poor. Poor conditions with little alternatives... Hmm, one could say such situations are ripe for exploitation.

Just because the alternative is potential death, it does not excuse exploitative practices.

I wouldn't work in a plethora of roles. In fact, the vast majority of "jobs" that have existed in the history of humanity I would prefer not to do.

That doesn't mean anyone doing them is being "exploited". And if that is your definition of exploitation, you've reduced the word to be effectively meaningless.

> I wouldn't work in a plethora of roles. In fact, the vast majority of "jobs" that have existed in the history of humanity I would prefer not to do.

Examples and why would you prefer not to do them? Are they legally allowed in your country anymore? Is there a reason for that? Perhaps because they are now considered exploitative?

> That doesn't mean anyone doing them is being "exploited". And if that is your definition of exploitation, you've reduced the word to be effectively meaningless.

It sounds to me like you don't even have "exploitation" in your vocabulary, as your bar is so low, you wouldn't consider anything exploitative.

Literally multi-nationals exploit labor law differences to extract cost savings, and obfuscated supply chains to launder the blood off the raw materials they put into products. This is exploitative. Perhaps you should just come to terms with the fact that you are OK with it.

Not buying is not an option.

A minority of rich can extract the planets resources.

The species does not have to abide that minorities ideological demands literally.

Avoiding figurative harm of the self righteous is walking the path authoritarianism.

A big number in a bank DB is not irrefutable proof of value to the species.

Westerners and the monied are outnumbered. Environmental collapse from chewing up resources for disposable shit that rots, doesn’t last for the next generation, does not have to be tolerated.

Maybe if we just focused on making sure our biological similarities are cared for as a society, we’d have more time to wank our customized imaginings of our individual importance in private, but otherwise be unable to achieve political leverage to drive us off a cliff, leaving others to stably consider their ideas.

But no... we have to bend over to pleasure the grifter class.

Where are the posts by all those people without those phones they're boycotting?

His point is the first part ... i don't believe the reservoir of oil is the issue, but the lack of progress towards a greener future. We have no other choice, and little control over government, beyond peaceful criticisms.

So let it be.

Don't pick and choose, own up. Im sure there’s a latin phrase to what you do, too, but were not here to squabble! Not during these times ..

Cars were not a necessity when they first arrived -- they were a luxury item.

> The first one is a fair point – Apple products are not a necessity

Apple products are not a necessity but cell phones pretty much are today. And nearly all phones are made in countries with looser labor and environmental laws than we'd accept in Western nations.

Yeah, the post you're responding to feels like a huge internet trend where people are absolutely desperate to grasp at straws to make complete strangers look like stupid hypocrites and rely on projections to do so.

I'm not sure if people are more filled with angst because they're cooped up at home, but it seems to border on a mental disorder if you're sitting behind your keyboard all day screaming at people who are "hypocrites" because they both don't like oil being drilled, and also live in a society where they use some oil.

I saw a video a few months ago mocking "anti police protesters asking for the police to help them when they were being attacked". And the premise seemed to be "haha, if you hate police so much (they don't), isnt it ironic that you need their help?" No, not really. They pay the police's salary though taxes. Its not like them protesting takes that funding away. Apparently its hypocritical to not mindlessly agree with everything police do if you will ever need the police to help you. Same shit here, just endless angst and hate for stranger based on made up projections. Why? What is the use for this?

Not sure, I wondered if the comic actually was also trying to show the growth of "necessities" over time. Like a car at first was a luxury and not a necessity. A phone today might be a necessity. And the last strip doesn't even bring up necessities, it makes a case of the difficulty of fighting the system you complain about when being in it, which to me is also a point about necessities.

Like one could argue society makes it harder and harder for you to be ethical as time goes on. Making the path of resistance ever so harder and requiring more risk from you. And this can be used as a tool later to justify societies unethical choices. Like, hey, if you can't even be ethical yourself, why do you expect society to be and say we should?

And maybe this is the point of the comic?

Oil is very useful, and that is precisely why we shouldn't waste it on things that don't need oil, e.g., power generation, vehicle fuel etc.

I think the stockpile argument made sense when the US was a net importer of oil. As an oil exporter nation, it's harder to defend.

That said, a price war is of course the right time to bunker up, economically.

Oil is useful. I get it. How much oil is burned in comparison to oil used in manufacturing? When we typically talk about eliminating oil we are talking about not burning it anymore.

I'm 100% for filling up and even drastically expanding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I'm also for ending fossil fuels (we can synthesize plastics without fossil fuels) and keeping as much fossil fuel as possible underground. The Strategic Reserve's whole purpose is to sit underground for the most part, so it's compatible with an anti-fossil-fuel perspective.

One way a massive Reserve could help fight fossil fuel production is because it devalues arguments that we need to expand drilling permits. With a big enough reserve, we can reduce permits on federal lands to just about nothing with plenty of time to drill them in case of an emergency like a war or something.

Indeed it is useful. It's usefulness was never in debate(it is it's ability to pollute that's the problem) but most of the things you named has a substitute made from other materials exist.

Can entire supply chains switch over that quickly? I would imagine that if something catastrophic were to occur and supply chains had to switch, we would need some buffer.

And yet neither you nor the companies selling to you have despite everone worried about the climate emergency

The US has nearly a trillion barrels worth of oil in the ground, but we should bail out oil producers by trying to fill a different hole with less than a billion barrels of oil at government expense?

I haven't seen many people that say oil isn't useful. It's the burning of this valuable substance that is the problem when it could be used for all these things you list.

It's already 80% full, isn't it?

when people speak ill of oil are they not actually talking about emissions?

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