201–210 of 339 posts
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How does capitalism decide who gets extraction rights for natural resources?
The discoverer? And then whoever wants to buy the extraction rights from her at the market price? What’s even the problem?
I did some quick math and with their current annual return rate of 5.8%, the returns from the the Oil Fund could finance the government's budget entirely once it gets to be about $2T in size. That's about 2x its current size. That's still about 20 years away at their current growth rate, and the government budget would probably increase by then, but it's still probably achievable. What happens then? Norway could theo…
The Norwegian success is the single biggest piece of evidence as to why the Venezuelan catastrophe was largely avoidable, and the fault of irresponsible leadership.
I can't stand this ideological sports-team type of commentary, so just to add some real information and context (after my downvote): Venezuela produces ~70k barrels per person per day. Norway produces a little more than half as much total oil, but with one-sixth the population it works out to ~330k barrels per person per day. An order of magnitude per-capita difference.
Venezuala's problem was just overleveraging
They basically got margin called on their long oil position, and then their political ideology became apparent
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Is anybody claiming otherwise? It seems pretty obvious that someone there messed up majorly for a long time.
The people who barricaded the Venezuelan embassy when there was an attempted coup against Maduro for one. There is a big ideological drive to show that communism works, and as such all the problems Venezuela faces are just imperialism at work (In their argument).
In other words, to me the situation in Venezuela does not prove anything, in terms of political ideology.
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Norway was lucky to be a very developed society before oil was discovered. In most countries oil is a curse
I wonder if it's about being developed, vs being about having a high-trust society? In a lot of places people will immediately get suspicious if you say you're setting up a government fund to hold everyone's money. For the benefit of society, of course.
"On average, the fund holds 1.4 percent of all of the world’s listed companies." This blew my mind.
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One piece of history that I think marks the start of Venezuela's free fall, it's the pardon that the then-president Caldera granted to the leader of a military coup, Chávez. That allowed populism and corruption to reign in the country (he won the next elections).
The corruption was there before the military coup. I think the only coup that did not involve prior corruption was the one against Mosaddegh (and still, the country was still corrupted from his predecessor). Also this was probably the coup that finished any hope of peace and democracy in the middle east.
Wow! These people must be extraordinary to use oil money this way! Not kidding! Never been in Norway, but in countries I have ever been this would be barely possible due to corruption and the needs of the politician’s buddies. Like yachts, private jets, Bentleys and Vertu phones. This $186k/person isn’t far from what average German poses: https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/617492/cd59713c156ad...
Farouk al-Kasim is the Iraqi who is said to have played a big role in this outcome. I believe his story has been on HN before: https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...
This is particularly visual. Not taking away from Farouk al-Kasims contribution but find Norway to see how unique their particular situation is.
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Farouk al-Kasim is the Iraqi who is said to have played a big role in this outcome. I believe his story has been on HN before: https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...
This might be a good resource to get some more context on different countries’ energy systems and where petroleum plays in. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-03... This is particularly visual. Not taking away from Farouk al-Kasims contribution but find Norway to see how unique their particular situation is.
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I don't the point of UBI is for everyone to leave their careers. If anything, it's the opposite.
Which is exactly why UBI is generally suggested to give below the poverty line. Enough to survive but not enough to be comfortable. Enough to get you through downturns but not enough where you'll abandon a well paying job.