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.

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 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).

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!".

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I should go be an oil boy.

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...

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.

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.