Let's see if by chance anything at all unrelated to royal babies or Anthony Weiner's cock might be happening in this crazy planet of ours, shall we? Maybe there's a reason we're hearing about those things instead of these things:
Apparently the slithering evil that is Halliburton continues its unholy bargain with the Elder Gods of R'lyeh, in that they have admitted to incompetence and the destruction of evidence that may very well have cost 11 men their lives and poisoned the Gulf of Mexico for years to come, yet pay a whopping $200,000 fine for all that. They may yet take a hit in civil court, but we're talking about a company that routinely pulls down $7bn in revenues quarterly.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafhCheneyCthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn, indeed.
Kids, are you up on all the latest super-awesome oil-extraction technologies? If you love 'murka, then you are down with fracking and tar sands like Lindsay Lohan chasing a dime bag of bathtub crank. Ah, except for the fact that tar sands EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is usually 25-50% of conventional oil EROEI, which may not be a dealbreaker, but is still substantially less than ideal. That and the problematic issue of the breakeven costs of tar sands range at $65-70/bbl for in situ (steam) and $90-100/bbl for mining.
IOW, the promises of petroleum plenitude for all are belied by the fact that those methods are only cost-effective at higher price ranges -- that is, if there's a scarcity. So either there's a scarcity or there isn't.
Also, too, the small problem of increasing environmental issues. Yeah, who'da thunk something would go south with injecting pressurized steam into substrata in order to melt and steam tar out of the topsoil. Jesus H. Christ, how could anything possibly go wrong there?
Which brings us to fracking, and as always, the day any of its bought-and-paid-for proponents agree to have it done in their backyards, with their water tables and aquifers, then I guess we can all be okey-doke about all that. Till then how 'bout them crickets you hear?
All of these things are just parts of a greater looming environmental issue, as the oceans acidify and fishing stocks continue their decline, at faster and faster rates. But we got what we paid for, which was "cheap" oil, without the bother of innovating truly renewable technologies. The U.S. government dumped half a billion dollars into Solyndra, while the Chinese gov't poured over $30bn into the same tech, and all we could do when Solyndra inevitably failed (in no small part due to health insurance costs, like every other American industry these days, held hostage to the most pernicious racket of all) was hold our dicks and scream about sociamalism.
And hey, speaking of which, how about the "revelation" that the parasitic financial class is manipulating commodities prices? You're shocked, right? The real issue here is not that Goldman Sachs jacks up the price of a can of Coke by a tenth of a cent by scooting tons of aluminum from warehouse to warehouse, but that they make billions of dollars by not producing a fucking thing.
Seriously, when I say that this is parasitism, I fucking well mean it. These people do not produce a goddamned thing, they simply broker and hedge and take bets and game the system. Because it's their system, you're just forced to participate in it, bunky. They own it all, and they rent the people who make laws and policy, and fuck you in the neck if you have a problem with any of that.
Investing used to mean that you participated in the creation of wealth and value, by collaborating in a financial endeavor that produced an item that a mass of human beings would want to buy. An innovation, an invention, a new item or service. Read any "get rich" volume from the uniquely American cult of "self-improvement" books. One thing they will all tell you is that you need to analyze and profile who you expect your customer base to be, and then to provide them with something of value.
Take my own example that I've undertaken this year -- I've played guitar at a decent skill level for a couple of decades now, and taught at various times throughout, so I constructed tabs, wrote text, and created books for people wanting to improve their game. The market will ultimately decide whether or not those things add value to the desires of the customer base.
But the bottom line is, for better or worse, I created something. I didn't hoard a vital commodity in order to leverage prices and game the system, and then skim a commission off the top. That is the Tony Soprano approach to economics, I don't care what these leeches try to rationalize this bullshit with. They're nothing but thieves and vipers. Instead of innovating and creating, people get rich these days simply by making book, taking bets, gaming systems for their own benefit at the expense of the unrich.
This is the system that they've bought and paid for, and contrary to popular plaint, that system is not at all broken, it's fixed. Keep that in mind at all times, when you're not distracted by the deliberate inanity of the corporate mockingbird.
Apparently the slithering evil that is Halliburton continues its unholy bargain with the Elder Gods of R'lyeh, in that they have admitted to incompetence and the destruction of evidence that may very well have cost 11 men their lives and poisoned the Gulf of Mexico for years to come, yet pay a whopping $200,000 fine for all that. They may yet take a hit in civil court, but we're talking about a company that routinely pulls down $7bn in revenues quarterly.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh
Kids, are you up on all the latest super-awesome oil-extraction technologies? If you love 'murka, then you are down with fracking and tar sands like Lindsay Lohan chasing a dime bag of bathtub crank. Ah, except for the fact that tar sands EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is usually 25-50% of conventional oil EROEI, which may not be a dealbreaker, but is still substantially less than ideal. That and the problematic issue of the breakeven costs of tar sands range at $65-70/bbl for in situ (steam) and $90-100/bbl for mining.
IOW, the promises of petroleum plenitude for all are belied by the fact that those methods are only cost-effective at higher price ranges -- that is, if there's a scarcity. So either there's a scarcity or there isn't.
Also, too, the small problem of increasing environmental issues. Yeah, who'da thunk something would go south with injecting pressurized steam into substrata in order to melt and steam tar out of the topsoil. Jesus H. Christ, how could anything possibly go wrong there?
Which brings us to fracking, and as always, the day any of its bought-and-paid-for proponents agree to have it done in their backyards, with their water tables and aquifers, then I guess we can all be okey-doke about all that. Till then how 'bout them crickets you hear?
All of these things are just parts of a greater looming environmental issue, as the oceans acidify and fishing stocks continue their decline, at faster and faster rates. But we got what we paid for, which was "cheap" oil, without the bother of innovating truly renewable technologies. The U.S. government dumped half a billion dollars into Solyndra, while the Chinese gov't poured over $30bn into the same tech, and all we could do when Solyndra inevitably failed (in no small part due to health insurance costs, like every other American industry these days, held hostage to the most pernicious racket of all) was hold our dicks and scream about sociamalism.
And hey, speaking of which, how about the "revelation" that the parasitic financial class is manipulating commodities prices? You're shocked, right? The real issue here is not that Goldman Sachs jacks up the price of a can of Coke by a tenth of a cent by scooting tons of aluminum from warehouse to warehouse, but that they make billions of dollars by not producing a fucking thing.
Seriously, when I say that this is parasitism, I fucking well mean it. These people do not produce a goddamned thing, they simply broker and hedge and take bets and game the system. Because it's their system, you're just forced to participate in it, bunky. They own it all, and they rent the people who make laws and policy, and fuck you in the neck if you have a problem with any of that.
Investing used to mean that you participated in the creation of wealth and value, by collaborating in a financial endeavor that produced an item that a mass of human beings would want to buy. An innovation, an invention, a new item or service. Read any "get rich" volume from the uniquely American cult of "self-improvement" books. One thing they will all tell you is that you need to analyze and profile who you expect your customer base to be, and then to provide them with something of value.
Take my own example that I've undertaken this year -- I've played guitar at a decent skill level for a couple of decades now, and taught at various times throughout, so I constructed tabs, wrote text, and created books for people wanting to improve their game. The market will ultimately decide whether or not those things add value to the desires of the customer base.
But the bottom line is, for better or worse, I created something. I didn't hoard a vital commodity in order to leverage prices and game the system, and then skim a commission off the top. That is the Tony Soprano approach to economics, I don't care what these leeches try to rationalize this bullshit with. They're nothing but thieves and vipers. Instead of innovating and creating, people get rich these days simply by making book, taking bets, gaming systems for their own benefit at the expense of the unrich.
This is the system that they've bought and paid for, and contrary to popular plaint, that system is not at all broken, it's fixed. Keep that in mind at all times, when you're not distracted by the deliberate inanity of the corporate mockingbird.
3 comments:
"Investing used to mean that you participated in the creation of wealth and value, by collaborating in a financial endeavor that produced an item that a mass of human beings would want to buy."
Silly rabbit! Every business school in America teaches that the purpose of starting a business isn't to "produce" things; it's to make money for the shareholders. If they can make money for the shareholders by, say, rendering the employees down for their fat, they will -- and if they can make the employees pay for the privilege of being rendered first, they'll do that too.
Great stuff as usual, I hope you don't mind that I quote you!
Tehanu:
Yes, in one of my MBA classes, I got into it with another student, a self-described (female) conservative, on that particular issue, after I led a group presentation on a company that (gasp!) believed in the ethical responsibility of paying employees a wage they could actually survive on (although that point was actually peripheral to the focus of the presentation). She sincerely felt that the company should only pay the employees one cent more than what it would cost them to produce overseas.
I think she felt that her line of work (paralegal or accountant or teacher, something along that line) could not be outsourced, but I reminded her that pretty much anything can be outsourced nowadays. That seemed to sink in.
But you're right -- generally speaking, business schools are incredibly short-sighted, endorsing the long con for the grail of optimizing short-term gains. It's as if none of them expect to ever have children -- or like most morons, they assume that they can engineer reality to impact everyone but themselves.
Sean:
Quote away, bro!
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