Congrat!!
Ref No: BEH/XGM/012/0023.
Your email address was chosen at random during an internet search to receive USD 805,000.00 from me, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. If you are interested respond promptly via this e-mail:{grantsprogram@ cpn.it} to learn more about the donation and how to claim it.
Regards,
Warren Edward Buffett
(I’ve disabled the email address so you don’t get there before I do. Probably not necessary; I’m sure Mr. Buffett wouldn’t give the funds to someone else by mistake, he’s not an idiot, and the reference number is clear as can be.)
You may be stunned to hear that I didn’t pursue this opportunity, but an even better one came up.
Dear Friend,
I am Mrs. Chieko Haruki Ahmet, a 53-year-old Japanese woman, married to a Turkish man who tragically lost his life in a devastating earthquake. I currently work as a bank analyst at Ziraat Bank in Istanbul, Turkey. While searching for someone with your unique qualities and attributes, I received your contact information through the assistance of Facebook’s Chief Information Security Officer, Mr. Guy Rosen. He provided me with numerous contacts from their database, but ultimately, choosing you felt divinely inspired.
Holy moly, this poor lady needs to find a home for $108 million, unlike that picayune Buffet with his mangy 6-figure offer. Besides, she is working with a senior Facebook officer as well. True, I’m not on Facebook, which raises a question or two, but read what she says: “divinely inspired”. Who would make up something like that?
What has me really excited is how this opportunity looks able to open other opportunities, also possibly divinely inspired, that I will now have the capital to pursue. Like this, also in the inbox recently:
Dear sir:
Our company mainly focuses on the production and sales of manhole covers, which can make your company’s profit increase by 30% on the original basis, are you willing to listen?
Mr. Yang
You bet Mr. Yang, I’m willing to listen. Up 30% on the original basis! I’ll take a hundred!
In less than one month, the panoply of opportunity that’s been laid out is simply breathtaking. I can buy oil from Russia on favourable terms, according to one Odinets Maxim Pavlovich, CEO, or be #1 ranked on Google search according to 45 people per day.
With respect to every one of these correspondents, I say: Imagine all these people’s take your kid to work day.
Yeah, I know, obviously it’s all just a pile of spam. Some of these dear correspondents are clearly just criminals; some are just hustling to make a buck.
But it is what you make of it, spam, like a lot of things we encounter and dismiss. True, there is no value in any of these things, unless I was in the market for a whole lot of manhole covers or some Russian oil.
But flip it around the other way. What does the world look like to the people sending all this stuff? What do we look like here in the west?
Do we care what we look like here in the west? Do we care what the average African thinks of a Canadian, or an American or a Brit?
Do we know that they know that, as the now common statistic goes, the average African in a dozen countries consumes less energy per year than an average American fridge? What does the world look like through their lens?
My brother worked in Africa for a decade and would bring back all sorts of weird stuff available in local markets. Some of it remains in my garage, like a little wall-hanging vignette covered in very non-safety glass and consisting of artistically arranged dead bugs and crustaceans. I don’t know why I keep it but I do.
But other things are quite the opposite. He brought me back the best pair of tweezers I’ve ever had, tweezers that had been made from an old rounded file. The craftsman had used a grinder to shave one side down and somehow weld another piece to it, then had ground the tweezing (?) ends down to a razor sharp edge. What you could grasp with those things was remarkable.
My brother told me that where he was working, he would now and then come across an auto carcass, some old clunker that could go no further. These orphaned carcasses would be stripped absolutely bare, with every little piece that could be pried off going into some other use or marketplace somewhere around.
Necessity breeds invention. Scarcity brings inventiveness.
What do they see when they look at us howling and whining on the news about trifling things? They don’t have electricity and they watch us tear our very own civilizations apart from within over the dumbest and I do mean the DUMBEST things.
Out of the three-ring circus that is my inbox, I have had the very great pleasure of corresponding with people from those parts of the world, because they too have a fascination with energy. Maybe in particular they have a fascination with just exactly what life would be like with all that freaking energy available.
It’s odd that, speaking of things that we smash each other in the mouth for, it is now wrong to try to understand and vocalize what those people might be thinking because it is ‘cultural appropriation’, but at the same time we can shove our energy fantasies down their throats, and cut them off from benefitting from the fuels that we rely on for existence.
Bloomberg news had a typical mind-splitting bit of deflection in a story the other day. It was called “How Energy Traders Left a Country in the Cold”. It was about poor Pakistan’s attempts to secure LNG cargoes a year ago, but to no avail because all the gas went to Europe. Bloomberg blamed traders for this situation, while pointing out that “they’d done nothing illegal”. Traders do what traders do, but it is a fairly monumental stretch of sensibility and a pretty bad display of humanity to blame traders when it was quite clearly Europe’s energy policies and bank accounts that bid up the value of natural gas so that Pakistan could not compete.
We can’t even be honest about such things, because the narrative Must Not Be Violated. It’s an old habit that dies hard, the thought that the world bends around the voice and will of the west.
The west should wake up. The whole world can see what’s going on, and the “rest of the world” has many more billions of people than the west. They are realizing they have resources, they have capital, they have energy, they have minerals, and if they cozy up to BRICS they have access to China’s metal/mineral processing capacity that the west covets but cannot have, because it won’t do the dirty work that China will.
We’re used to the likes of The Economist painting the narrative of how the world works, and how it ought to work. In my inbox is their weekly blast, nestled amongst, and forming part of, the spam, because I also like to see how that slice of the world views itself and the world.
It’s not freaking pretty. A few weeks ago, From The Desk of Editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes came this synopsis of content of the then-current Economist issue: “An in-depth Briefing explains why the Middle East still matters to the world.”
They see you, Zanny. They hear you. The arrogance, the judging, the blistering and smarmy confidence that the British view is still from the very top, and that will never change.
If I had to sit down and have a beer with one of the above cast of characters, or to put it a better way if I had a chance to buy a beer for one of them, I guarantee you I’d take Mr. Yang over Ms. Beddoes.
Here’s an interesting fact. On my website where I rarely write anymore, in order to keep the site ad-free and cover costs, I would put one of those “if you enjoyed, feel free to throw a few bucks please and thank you” boxes at the bottom. It’s not a way to get rich I can assure you, but I can tell you that the largest single contribution anyone ever made was from an African gentleman that was resoundingly grateful because I had spoken up for Africans, had humanized them, and had pointed out that maybe the world should listen to them more. I thank you again, Sir.
Didn’t mean for this to turn into an anti-anything diatribe, and I’m sure The Economist has good people that can find the word humility in the dictionary.
What it is meant as is an end-of-year greeting and hope that the new year finds more and more people that are curious about things other than who they talk to in their echo chamber and what they see in the tunnels they choose to look through. In the energy world, this has to happen soon.
Happy Holidays!
Energy conversations should be positive and, most of all, grounded in reality. Life depends on it. Find out more in “The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com. Thanks!
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.