The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil
ft.com
ft.com
"After the Ekofisk find, he had to train new recruits. “I, of course, accepted that I am teaching people so that they can make my existence unnecessary … What choice did I have? I had only one hope, and that is that through my contribution, I would become indispensable, which I did.”"
Most successful people contribute their success to luck - maybe that's why they are so lucky.
I wonder how many things in life end up being like this. Of course, I suppose you could take the anthropomorphic viewpoint, but I'm not fond of that.
On the other hand, since we're on the subject of Middle Eastern immigrants to Norway, here's something from Bruce Bawer, a gay American who moved to Norway to marry his partner:
"Here in Oslo, a gay couple who were holding hands in the largely Muslim neighborhood of Grønland were physically assaulted by a man who told them: "This is a Muslim neighborhood." In a follow-up story, Dagbladet interviewed a local man, born in Pakistan but resident in Norway for ten years, who argues that "Grønland is a multicultural environment where there are many people who don't like homosexuals, so they shouldn't hold hands." He says such things are OK in west Oslo, where there are few Muslims, "but here in Grønland they shouldn't do it. Ideally, it should be forbidden to practice homosexuality in this area."
What matters is the value system of those immigrants, and it keeps mattering regardless of how desperate the politically correct are for an external source of self-worth. (I'm not saying that's you. I am saying that it is a great many such people.)
If you solve the problem of income-segregation by somehow generating a city where rich and poor live side by side, then I think you go a long way to tackling the source of ghetto-formation, both for immigrants and the local poor.
I have seen several cities where this has been achieved, though I have no idea why it occurs in one area and not another. I have a suspicion that it is tightly related to the density of development. A city with lots of skyscraper apartment blocks (both fancy and simple) can fit so many people in such a small area that even if the rich and poor live in different buildings, the buildings may be so close together that they share the same services (schools, hospitals, restaurants, etc).
As a concrete example, I live a short 5 minute bicycle ride from a friend of mine. My 8 story apartment building has about 24 units, all of them relatively modest. My friend lives in a million dollar condo in a building with probably 30-40 units as well. This is in the very heart of the city.
IMHO people often attribute to luck what is in fact created by themselves.
On another note, Norway's oil production is now in sharp decline:
http://www.norway.org/NR/rdonlyres/3AE52C92-D215-419D-8131-9...
http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/a-decline-rate-stud...
As it stands, this makes no sense. If a cost-benefit analysis showed that investing in technology to increase extraction efficiencies would pay off (given the volatitlty of future prices, etc.), then it should have been done regardless of his urgings. If it didn't, he should never have pushed the idea. In the first case, StatOil would need new managers. In the second, the subject of the story would be wrong.
You'd think that the editors of The Financial Times would have pursued that issue in a bit more depth.
The incentive structure for a CEO or other executive at a large multi-national oil firm is likely such that he/she would much rather have a lot of oil drilled in the short-term, rather than a smaller ammount of oil in the short-term and a larger total ammount over the long-term. The same goes for the board members and investors.
"Long-term" here is decades, possibly generations, not next quarter. That means that a large chunk of the profits may be realized well after you're retired (or dead), which is not so great for your bonus structure, promotion schedule, or the ROI timeframes that most investors are concerned with (but fantastic for a nation-state). Furthermore contract structures over that kind of timeframe become a bit unpredictable, especially contracts with a sovreign nation, so better to get what you can now and get out.
This kind of long-term thinking is where corporations fall short. Even if it's the best interests of the 'corporation' to invest in the long term (which clearly ended up being the case here), it's not in the best interests of the individuals working there. Very few institutions are capable of that mode of operation (nations, monarchies/family dynasties).
The incentive structure for a CEO or other executive at a large multi-national oil firm is likely such that he/she would much rather have a lot of oil drilled in the short-term, rather than a smaller ammount of oil in the short-term and a larger total ammount over the long-term.
That seems to me a bit of a strawman, though I confess I know little about how the oil business works. The issue here comes down to a present value calculation for proposed investments. You seem to be implying that the Iraqi engineer pushed for short-term maximization thru the use of new technologies. But those technologies cost money, now. That would reduce the company's profit and (if he's a shareholder) his (short-term) return.
I confess I know little about how the oil business works
Since he was responding to an argument with even less basis, it's curious that only the response rated the above comment.
And do you think that calling someone's position names (free-market fundamentalism) is a strong argument?
Take water injection for instance, which is a standard method for maintaining reservoir pressure, ie. the pumping of water into the oil/gas reservoir to raise the pressure. In order to implement such a scheme, a well slot would be needed for the source water pump, and at least one other well slot for the injection well. Typically, these are done on separate water injection platforms. Add the cost of the workover drill rig to drill the wells and the increased cost of water/oil separation on the production platform, and it's a very expensive exercise... especially if it may not actually work (which is what is implied in the article with water injection in chalk reservoirs, which could potentially cause reservoir fracturing).
An oil company, especially a relatively new one like Statoil in the 70s/80s, would be justified to balk at costly experimentation with their fields, and would probably wait for others to prove the concept first. This is even more justifiable when the field is gigantic (like the Ekofisk field). Oftentimes, cutting edge technologies are used on smaller, marginal fields with relatively high lift prices, and where oil price volatility is the difference between profit and loss (I worked on a project in 2002/3 when oil was around $25 a barrel and this field was only profitable at a price of $30 per barrel... the field actually needed water injection right from first oil, which means that it was definitely marginal... so they were lucky when oil prices shot past $100). In any case, you don't see much innovation happening in the huge saudi fields that have very low lift prices.
Or are they just filtering access to that page from norway where the servers serving opera mini seem to be located, judging from the mislocalized adsense stuff google tends to show me?