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How Norway has avoided the 'curse of oil'

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Re: How Norway has avoided the 'curse of oil'

#121

Post by digikata »

tormeh wrote: post #109
digikata wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highway maintenance is already a problem in the US, but not because of electric vehicles, it's from increasing efficiency of fossil fuel vehicles and the political refusal to raise fuel taxes to balance the maintenance costs with the tax revenue from fuel. If electric vehicles do become a significant proportion of vehicles on the road, the pragmatic thing to do would be to charge for mileage based on the odometer and…

How is the odometer data supposed to be collected? Weight is easy, though. I guess you could let the car phone home a couple of times per year, but the consumer still owns the car and can do a lot of shady stuff with the odometer, I imagine. Better to just use a flat annual fee with modifiers for weight. Trucks and other business vehicles can be assumed to travel a lot, so higher taxes for them.

I think the car-to-car variation in annual mileage traveled is too wide to fairly assess an annual fee. A secured odometer box checked during periodic vehicle inspections would be enough to reasonably raise the bar on mileage, but unfortunately more invasive solutions always seem to get suggested - e.g. GPS monitoring of mileage, or pervasive license plate tracking etc...

Re: How Norway has avoided the 'curse of oil'

#122

Post by throwaway283719 »

cylinder wrote: post #94
prawn wrote: post #9

Statoil and how Norway essentially protected its future is a lot like how Australia should have dealt with the so-called mining boom. Named and outlined better, our "mining tax" could have been this. It could have protected against capital flight and essentially built national strength for all at the expense of those (especially foreign interests) looking to dig up serious swathes of our ground. Instead, we had a pre…

Australia is basically like many African nations, where foreigners run the resources sector and the locals hope to get a piece of the pie through employment/wages. However, Norway's resources are completely different to Australia's. Norway knows where the oil is, they just have to dig it up. So, they can just have a state-owned company pump it out of the sea and keep the profits for themselves. OTOH Australia's miner…

> All speculatively, knowing that their type of oil production is not profitable at all if oil once again goes below $70 a barrel, which could happen overnight (see Sept-Nov 2008)?

Is there an obvious reason they couldn't sell their oil forward (or just sell futures)? You can sell oil forward three years for around $89 a barrel at the moment, as opposed to around $93 a barrel for delivery next month.

That's for WTI, and Brent is currently even more (in fact the Brent curve is in contango at the moment). I don't know what grade Australian oil would be, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer to Brent than to WTI.

Re: How Norway has avoided the 'curse of oil'

#123

Post by adventured »

cgh wrote: post #106
adventured wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of people talk up Norway, but I'm not aware of anything that Norway does economically that matters outside of energy production. What great technology, companies, etc. have they produced in the last 40 years? What big innovations come out of Norway? Do they have the top universities in the world? They've only won two nobel prizes since oil became the center of their economy, and they became rich. They wo…

The country only has 4.5 million people. It's like saying that greater Phoenix doesn't matter because it's only produced two Nobel winners.

Norway has five million people, but I would assume outsized results given the claims about the quality of the country courtesy of the immaculate welfare state and the money available for education. Being entirely serious.

My primary comparison is that, since the oil boom, their results have fallen off in nobel prizes, not significantly increased. And those two prizes they won in the last 40 years were for economics (they were winning them for chemistry and physics in the '60s / '70s).

Ireland has won five since 1974, they only have 4.5 million people, and no grand oil boom, and have only recently become well-off.

Denmark has 5.5 million people and have won four nobel prizes in those 40 years, for chemistry, physics, and physiology.

My point is: where are the results outside of energy production? We should be seeing amazing innovations, great technology, and big technology exports, incredible global contributions to science and break-throughs in medicine. I should be using phones designed by Norway, and software designed in Norway.

So where is it? There is absolutely no question Norway has created a high quality of life courtesy of the money from the oil boom, but what else have they done with it other than provide lots of money to live well (ie what do you have to show for it if the oil is gone in ten years)?

Re: How Norway has avoided the 'curse of oil'

#124

Post by adventured »

pi-rat wrote: post #115
adventured wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of people talk up Norway, but I'm not aware of anything that Norway does economically that matters outside of energy production. What great technology, companies, etc. have they produced in the last 40 years? What big innovations come out of Norway? Do they have the top universities in the world? They've only won two nobel prizes since oil became the center of their economy, and they became rich. They wo…

The Cheese Slicer and Black Metal ofc! :) On a more serious note, we're only like 5 mill people, and while we don't rock the nobel prices I think the oil has pushed us more towards engineering than theoretical research (for better or worse..). Agree our Universities should be better than they are - it's apparently hard to get funding for something that isn't directly applicable to oil, subsea or salmon. But you proba…

Definitely fair points.

It's interesting to read about the debate on who deserves credit for inventing GSM, with Switzerland, Finland, and France all claiming various credit.

And of course Norway re:

http://www.ntnu.no/gemini/2005-01e/gsm.htm

Re: How Norway has avoided the 'curse of oil'

#125

Post by pi-rat »

adventured wrote: post #124
pi-rat wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Cheese Slicer and Black Metal ofc! :) On a more serious note, we're only like 5 mill people, and while we don't rock the nobel prices I think the oil has pushed us more towards engineering than theoretical research (for better or worse..). Agree our Universities should be better than they are - it's apparently hard to get funding for something that isn't directly applicable to oil, subsea or salmon. But you proba…

Definitely fair points. It's interesting to read about the debate on who deserves credit for inventing GSM, with Switzerland, Finland, and France all claiming various credit. And of course Norway re: http://www.ntnu.no/gemini/2005-01e/gsm.htm

Didn't know GSM was controversial, that's very interesting, wonder what happened there.

But still, I bet you interact with gadgets powered by tech from Norway on a daily basis, even if we remove GSM from the equation: the Atmel AVR micros, radios and micros from Nordic Semiconductor, Energy Micro and Chipcon, etc. Maybe you also touch a UI built on QT (Trolltech), even though the QT phones never became a success. :)

Re: How Norway has avoided the 'curse of oil'

#126

Post by hkarthik »

67726e wrote: post #96
hkarthik wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whaling is a tradition in Norway and has been going on since medieval times. Jumping in a longboat and pillaging neighboring villages was also a Norwegian tradition in medieval times, but we find such practices barbaric today.

Eh, depends on how you frame it. Is a troop transport taking US forces over to Iraq barbaric? Depends on who you ask.

Absolutely, I'm not claiming the US doesn't participate in forms of barbarism.

We had a completely different set of unjustified justifications for the Iraq invasion, but we didn't use tradition as the excuse.

Re: How Norway has avoided the 'curse of oil'

#127

Post by parsnips »

praptak wrote: post #16

I am jealous of Norway. Social relations in most other countries, even the "first world" ones, seem uncivilized by comparison. I always wonder how they arrived at this point - this looks like they have some magic ingredient that made their Prisoner's Dilemma converge on 'cooperate'. It must be the fjords.

Look at Norway's demographics and immigration policy for a clue or two.

Re: How Norway has avoided the 'curse of oil'

#128

Post by jokoon »

CalRobert wrote: post #112
jokoon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"However, you should take into consideration that living expenses in Norway are higher than in many other countries." I don't have a job right now, no savings, 29 years old, and paperwork bore me. There are dozens of those "programs", and I don't want to spend one entire week sorting it out to discover I can't afford to just live over there. I want to go there no question asked, to work, not to study.

Wait, you're French? As in, you're an EU citizen??? Go there. Find a hackerspace. Meet people. Show off your skills. You should be OK. If not, you can go back to France. I would have killed to have your ability to just go anywhere in the EU a few years ago; even now I'm ecstatic just being able to work in Ireland. Sometimes life involves tasks that are very slightly unpleasant, like paperwork. You might find that lea…

> go there

I don't have money to throw away at a round trip to Norway, not to mention a place to stay for 1 week or two. What do you mean "show off your skills" ? I'm not an entertainer... I have no skills in PR and selling myself.

> hackerspace

Is a hackerspace going to get me a job ?

> Sometimes life involves tasks that are very slightly unpleasant, like paperwork.

The task of getting a job in norway is going to be paved with a lot of obstacles. I'm ready to move out, go there and do interviews, but if nobody can promise me to hire me before I actually have a place to stay, I won't move there to not find a job and come back with debt.

How do I really promote my project of seeking work in norway all by myself, while I live in france ? I already speak english, so that's a plus...

note: I have no job experience.

Re: How Norway has avoided the 'curse of oil'

#129

Post by saraid216 »

noir_lord wrote: post #62
varjag wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's of any consolation, your healthcare is still better.

For now. The current government seems determined to paint the NHS as failing in a pretty blatant attempt to privatise large chunks of it, the bastards. I used to be pretty neutral towards the major parties, tending to look at what they did rather than what they said but quite frankly the conservatives can go and fuck themselves.

The first step to understanding politics is understanding that speech is a type of action.

Re: How Norway has avoided the 'curse of oil'

#130

Post by jokoon »

sanoli wrote: post #69
jokoon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"However, you should take into consideration that living expenses in Norway are higher than in many other countries." I don't have a job right now, no savings, 29 years old, and paperwork bore me. There are dozens of those "programs", and I don't want to spend one entire week sorting it out to discover I can't afford to just live over there. I want to go there no question asked, to work, not to study.

Really, you want to go live and work legally on a different nation, but you don't want to spend some days on paperwork, you just want someone to call you and say 'you're brilliant! Come over we got everything sorted out!' I hope you really are brilliant. Hmmm... since this is HN and I've seen this before, let me ask: did you win the Putnam?

> you just want someone to call you and say 'you're brilliant! Come over we got everything sorted out!'

Where did you read I said that ? getting hired doesn't mean I'm a genius. I means they need me and are ready to hire me and maybe help me move there. stop with the misconceptions, I'm not narcissistic. I'm just saying I don't have savings, so I can't put myself in debt and risk going there and not getting a job.

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