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The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs

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Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs

#131

Post by mardifoufs »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #49
MichaelZuo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is ironic as the vast majority of the human population, including the very same people with such views, are only alive because of substantial amounts of machinery. Such as those used in the Haber-Bosch process.

lol this is literally that "and yet you participate in society. curious!" joke comic?

Funnily enough, your response fits exactly these two memes: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/201/090/208...

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/222/974/b91...

Especially given the context of the thread, where your reply barely makes sense. There is a difference between criticizing extreme industrialism and rabid growth and villifying the very thing we all depend on. Which is totally different from just wanting to improve society somewhat ;)

But westerners are so detached from everything that goes into sustaining their lives so there is oddly little awareness of the massive industry needed since it is all outsource over seas. Makes it very easy to dislike it from far away, especially when memes can be used to rationalize away the hypocrisy and pretend the privilege they enjoy doesn't exist

(the meme basically amounts to "yes I'm privileged, but stop pointing it out! There's nothing I can do about my own privilege, I HAVE to own that iPhone too bad for the workers lol" and is the ultimate witty retort from privileged, usually white liberal people. Which is funny since those are the people who usually like to speak about privilege, but obviously not when they are called out on it themselves.)

Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs

#132

Post by friend_and_foe »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #49
MichaelZuo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is ironic as the vast majority of the human population, including the very same people with such views, are only alive because of substantial amounts of machinery. Such as those used in the Haber-Bosch process.

lol this is literally that "and yet you participate in society. curious!" joke comic?

No, I don't think you quite understand the implication. Something like 60% of the bioavailable nitrogen in the biosphere, including that in your human body, is created industrially via the haber-bosch process. Over half of all human beings and land biomass would be dead without it. Human beings and this industrial process produce more bioavailable nitrogen than all the nitrogen fixing microbes in the world combined. This process is a very important part of the earth's biosphere now with human presence taken into account, bioavailable nitrogen production is the bottleneck to biomass production. It is probably our only viable tool to actually reduce carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere.

Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs

#133

Post by baud147258 »

timdellinger wrote: post #22

As an aside, deep sea oil drilling and production platforms are incredible put-a-man-on-the-moon engineering feats. If oil weren't politically unpopular, the engineering behind these would be celebrated and admired.

I mean my brother is working in a company that's building oil drilling and refining equipment and had made a few periods on off-shore vessels and he always has a few interesting stories to tell

Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs

#134

Post by galkk »

When opening, I expected to see something about harsh conditions of life there etc etc, but those are only pictures of rigs. I don't see anything distopian there, only utilitarian.

One of things that I recently learned is that many of rigs are actually floating structures. Kind of didn't expect that.

Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs

#135

Post by MacroChip »

chasd00 wrote: post #50
Lio wrote: post #28

When I rode from John o' Groats to Land's End[1] I remember riding past a firth on the east coast of Scotland with a load of oil rigs ready for either refitting or decommissioning. It was crazy surreal. The landscape is an amazing backdrop anyway but these things are just so big, so weird looking and so out of place... it felt like being party to an alien invasion. It made me think of the John Christopher classic The…

if you've never seen the refineries on the US Gulf Coast it's worth a road trip. Super surreal, miles and miles of dense piping and machinery. I don't really have words to describe except it's something you'd expect to see in a sci-fi anime and not in real life. Just these massive complexes as big as small cities in a web of pipes of all sizes going in all directions. edit: they remind me of the scene in Aliens towar…

Got a specific location I can check out on Google maps?

Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs

#136

Post by robocat »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #61
mecsred wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could read this as "you can't say anything bad about the industrial complex because you participate in it", though I think that is pretty obviously bad faith. A more charitable interpretation I would take is "whatever misgivings you have about large scale industrial practices, it's important to remember that they also massively benefit society and are in some cases necessary." Pointing out the flaws is great, vil…

I think at this stage large scale for profit petroleum extraction is literally villainous, so I'm ok villainizing. Whether it's productive to is a question of tactics that I wouldn't expect to find consensus on even among like-minded people. There's potentially a nuanced and worthwhile conversation about what carefully ramping down fossil fuel use looks like, what responsibility we have to the people who haven't been…

Your argument equally applies to people, since we collectively cause all of the environmental problems you mention.

Are you consistent? Do you admire people? Do you find it distastful if others do?

Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs

#137

Post by kortilla »

rtkwe wrote: post #122
HPsquared wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water is very destructive and yet, where would be be without it. Same goes for oil and gas.

Water isn't oil though, the former is biologically necessary and the latter is socially necessary. It also wasn't really what I'm talking about but I'll bite none the less. I'm not really saying we get rid of it fully but we don't need anywhere near the oil and gas industry we have. About 67% [0] of extracted oil used in the US goes into the transportation sector in one form or another and an additional 6% goes into…

Oil is now biologically necessary for this population to survive: the Haber-Bosch process.

Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs

#138

Post by kortilla »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #49
MichaelZuo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is ironic as the vast majority of the human population, including the very same people with such views, are only alive because of substantial amounts of machinery. Such as those used in the Haber-Bosch process.

lol this is literally that "and yet you participate in society. curious!" joke comic?

I don’t think you understand the comic or you overlooked the thread above. It’s ironic because calling something as basic as “machinery” inherently evil has an inherently evil implication, which is that 95% of the population would need to die.

This is nothing like “you participate, how curious”. This is “I’m against literally every piece of technology required to feed any non-negligible portion of the humans on earth”.

Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs

#139

Post by maCDzP »

mLuby wrote: post #115
maCDzP wrote: post #111

I sailed a tall ship between Shetland and Norway. We zig zagged between oil rigs. I felt like I was starring in Water World, The Pirates of the Carabeean and The Goonies all at once. It was awesome.

Was that part of some program?

It was during a two week long sailing course.

Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs

#140

Post by maCDzP »

renewiltord wrote: post #119
maCDzP wrote: post #111

I sailed a tall ship between Shetland and Norway. We zig zagged between oil rigs. I felt like I was starring in Water World, The Pirates of the Carabeean and The Goonies all at once. It was awesome.

What a tremendous experience! Which ship?

It was T/S Atlantica.
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