Because being prepared for something that might happen isn't profitable in the short term
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2026
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Yep.
If capitalism is calling the shots, then no one plans more than a fiscal quarter ahead of time.
You can't compete against someone that just ignores all risks, because if nothing goes wrong they put you out of business.
And by the time something goes wrong, they have enough wealth and connections to get bailed out by governments.
Because of that, every society that places capitalism above all else, will eventually implode. One day there just won't be anything to bail them out with.
It make sense for the oligarchs to keep making bets they can't lose, but it means everyone else is forced to take bets we cant win.
Because of that, every society that places capitalism above all else, will eventually implode.
This is just religious nut end-times doomerism.
Also, your explaination literally doesn't apply in this situation, since the people most impacted by the blockade are the petro-states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Iraq. With the exception of Iraq, all of these countries are monarchies, with the royal families having significant control over oil production and benefitting from its profits. These are not publicly traded corporations with CEOs only concerned about next quarter's bonus. They aren't even socialist technocrats given a mandate to do what is best for the good of the people now and in the future. They are individuals who will be directly impacted by this blockade, who are looking not only to the benefit of oil weath in their own lives, but in the lives of their families far into the future. If anyone would have an incentive to take the long view, it would be petro-state monarchs who are, I must point out, not capitalists.
So, no, this is not an example of the failures of capitalism. The far more obvious rationale is that (1) the future is hard to predict and (2) people are bad at planning.
Well this is rich people being unaccountable to anything but foreign military realities. This is the union of corporate capitalism and a two tiered justice system which are both things that go hand in hand.
When rich people feel invincible they do stupid shit. This is just human psychology.
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these corps are run by humans who have sold out. they only care about the next quarter.. the next bonus check.
the world is far more fragile than those in nice comfy cities could ever imagine
to mitigate real disaster on a global scale would take solving for human greed. good luck.
The petro-states most impacted by the blockade are all monarchies. The idea that the problem is that this blockade wasn't planned for by short sighted CEOs is fucking stupid.
The impact on most of the world is slightly increased oil prices. A sudden decrease in oil supply is exactly the sort of problem that markets are good at solving - the main result is that companies will search for cheaper ways to get their products to market and will shunt resources to less oil-dependent products, while individuals drive personal motor vehicles less and switch to walking, cycling, transit, carpooling, or staying close to home. Ie, we already have a backup plan in place. Every somewhat-competently-run nation will simply tighten its belt a little, maybe increase investment in renewables, and soldier on like they have through every other economic downturn. There will, of course, be impacts on people - but the country will not collapse, governments will not be overthrown, food and water and shelter will still be widely available and easily accessible to almost everyone.
Of course, in response to this you may say that the impacts will be severe, especially on working people in places like the United States where greedy corporate interests tore up the street car lines, forced everyone into auto-dependent suburbs, and lobbied the government for pro-oil-dependency legislation - which is all true. But which is also a project that took decades. Which is a weird thing if your thesis is that corporations only make actions with the next quarter's profits in mind. I'm not saying corporations aren't evil - I'm just saying, if they spent all that time and money influencing elections and building coalitions and passing laws, then they are clearly capable of long term planning - like telling the politicians they have in their pockets to ensure political stability in the Straight of Hormuz region.
Meanwhile, the blockade is having a direct, immediate impact on petro-state monarchs, who are not going to ditch their companies with a golden parachute the moment things get hard. If anyone would have an interest in looking ahead and planning for contingencies if the Straight would be blockaded, it would be these people - fabulously wealthy and powerful, with the export of oil directly flowing to them and their families. If the problem you have with capitalism is that it doesn't look ahead enough, then monarchs who pass laws and whose genetic lineages directly benefit from those laws should be your prime example of governments that take the long view. And yet, they don't seem to have a great plan either, other than "pay the toll and hope Israel genocides the Iranians next."
So is this because the evil capitalists don't think far enough ahead? No! Not everything is because capitalism is evil. Sometimes stupid bullshit just happens, because that's life.
pulease. long term plannig my asshole.
the modern world is littered with the failures to 'long term plan'. i remeber thinking the world would be run by sears, ibm and xerox
the world has shifted to 'just in time' supply chains... warehousing is considered liability. the wealthy people youre referring to have globally diversified.. it would take actual catastrophe to affect them because when youre that rich even a recession is opportunity.
the modern world is littered with the failures to ‘long term plan’.
SO IS THE ANCIENT WORLD. That's my point. People, in general, are bad at long term planning, and we should not have so much hubris as to believe we have improved on this state of affairs. The old yiddish proverb "Man plans, god laughs" is as poignant today as it was in the past.
The null hypothesis here should be "this happened because people are dumb and the world is chaotic". The world today is significantly less dumb and chaotic than it was in the past, and that's great! But it is rather entitled to think that we should expect the world to be orderly and prosperous as a rule. Shit happens. Assholes gain power and start wars. Sometimes things that were abundant become scarcer. This isn't a capitalism thing - this shit has been going on since the dawn of civilization.
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And why was this war started, again?
Because Netanyahu needs a perpetual escalating state of war in order to maintain power, and Trump is a petulant man-child who is easily manipulated.
manipulated or blackmailed (if this is true but makes sense) - https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/tucker-carlson-escalates-attack-trump-210815399.html
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The backup plan is switching to solar. Which JD Vance called a scam. But China's about to make absolute bank selling solar panels to the rest of the world.
You know Vance, he's just backing up his boss
Renewable energy would remedy much of this situation, but some CEOs somewhere might not be able to afford a fifth superyacht
They're not losing billions. They're just selling less for more.
The price increase is working for them, because it's pretty certain that oil consumption is already decreasing with more cars and industries turning to electricity in the future anyway and supply is going to decrease as well. So this way, they already have customers accustomed to higher prices. Isn't that neat...
I mean, we do. The world isn't experiencing blackouts as a whole. We have alternative energy, generators, contingency plans, other oil suppliers, reserves, etc. It's just that the largest trading route by far is currently not an option, so we're feeling the squeeze from that.
Renewable energy sources are purposefully unsubsidized to keep the world dependent on coal, oil, and fossil gas (they market it as natural gas) If they allowed for alternative energies, they'd lose footing as part of the interconnected system of ruling families known as the oligarchy. No progress will be made in the current system. Even climate change won't be reversible until we've been heat-blasted for decades. It's shameful and infuriating.
In the Netherlands people who use solar have to PAY to feed power to the network. It's bat shit crazy.
The crazy thing is, the government doesn't outlaw this.
The government introduced it.
Pay to share? The excess energy? Why punish those people? Ridiculous.
The government gets backhanders from the fossil fuel industry.
It's kind of stupid, on the one hand they'll pay you for the energy, on the other hand you have to pay for the grid load. Depending on your supplier and contract you could get a net price of 1 cent per kWh or more.
If you look at a map, that's the most convenient and direct way for the oil to get out of that area. That whole region is mountainous. There are plenty of other ways to get oil, but it would take more than a few months to increase their supply.
It's like, imagine your local grocery store burnt down, and everyone in your neighborhood had to go to the next grocery store over. That grocery store would sell out of goods almost immediately, and you would just have to wait until they adjusted to increase their supply.
There is no entity called "the world" that can flick through contingency plans. You can bet those who benefit from oil that would have sailed through the strait with no problem hadn't the orange toddler started a war have a plan B. Whether that's reactivating a few old pipelines or just sending ships the long way around, fuck knows. I'm not swimming in petrodollars. None of these plans will cost the same. All contingency plans cost more money. They might be raising fuel prices too much but they couldn't not raise them at all.
No one foresaw this development because it is - and that's the diplomatic term for it: fucking stupid. And that's why there isn't a plan B in place that can be used in the same way right away.
Don't you remember the pandemic? It was something more or less predictable for which no government had anything like a plan, everyone panicked and started improvising like crazy.
The explanation is very simple, we are idiots and we elected the most idiots among us to rule us
We elect charisma but eschew intelligence and wisdom
Oil crisis IS the plan.
shipping is way cheaper by ship. You can't create new shipping lanes. rail and such would increase costs as is and no one would be using it when the straight is open. It would be unused infratstucture until this happens and then due to disuse it would not work.
There are backup plans, they are just more costly. Big Gas companies will just pass that cost down the line. Trust me, those companies were never in danger of losing money.
The oil companies made a backup plan, patented the hell out of everything and then shelved it. Source: I used to work for one.
A patent means that a design is publicly published. If it was patented there would be designs that anyone could read and build for personal research. There would be YouTubers showing off their work. This happened 15 years ago when 3d printing was still under patent protection.
China in general doesn't care about US patents until they're big enough to be sued. It would be on Aliexpress next to the retro game consoles that include hundreds of stolen roms.
And Patents are only good for 20 years.
So yeah, quit the bullshit. I've heard stories about miraculous inventions being patented and sat on by oil companies for 50 years. There's no car that can run on water. They're all scams that became urban legends.
Gee, I wonder who's right, the person who literally worked for one of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world or the random Internet stranger 🤔
If your claim is true then you could show the patents. They're public. You'd know that if you actually worked for an oil company in the capacity to know anything about patents.
I taught a TCPIP class a few times to Chevron in Houston so technically I worked for one of the largest oil companies in the world too.
US20120005949A1 - Solvent-enhanced biomass liquefaction - Google Patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120005949A1/en
Status: ABANDONED
You didn't even read the summary.
Patents Assigned to Chevron U.S.A. Inc. - Justia Patents Search https://patents.justia.com/assignee/chevron-u-s-a-inc
Yes Chevron has patents. That's not the claim.
The claim is that oil companies are sitting on patents that would make oil obsolete.
There's no plan. Most states have strategic reserves of oil and gas, but that's about it.
Thankfully world shifts to renewables organically year by year.
What most people aren't aware of, is that those reserves are enough to keep the military running for like 3 days.
Because it is a collective problem for society to solve until it is profitable to invest and privatise and lock down.
I don't think Israeli government cares about this as long as they can bomb more children.
Canada should have pipelines and port facilities for shipping oil and gas all around the world
But for some strange reason we don't
says who? the first nations don't agree to have their lands and people raped by pipeline workers
The US declared every country where a pipeline could pass from there to any large consumer as an enemy and has been trying for half a century to destroy them.
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