My Crime

You’re from Venezuela? How long have you been following the whole bit about how they lost that judgement to Exxon?

Here’s my thing: maybe if they did know what was out there, they would have run for their rifles even faster.

On the other thing, where military is a way to some level of dignity and financial stability, I met at least one Venezuelan serviceman like that once. Real straight up dude, wanted to do right by his family and such.

But I prefer criminals.

I’ve always found criminals to be generally more honest and predictable and to be more of a principled bunch.

Lol, it’s one of those lunatic things like China does where they want to claim a territory that was theirs 200 years ago and was lost to the then English empire, now English Guyana, and think they can just bully Guyana cause they poor. I’m glad the powers that be intervened and allowed Guyana to get its bread.

Though, no lie, some part of me does pull at me that that’s Venezuelan land. But even if it were, bullying some neighbour who’s really actually cool for fucked up wag the dog reasons…

If that’s the judgement you mean.

Could also be a thing about PDVSA, Venezuelan state oil agency currently under military control, trying to fuck over a business partner, which they generally do, or maybe at this point also a lot of the times are so damn inefficient and incompetent they actually cost people vast sums of money.

PDVSA gets sued a LOT.

Maybe the oil majors figured you’d think that, and since they couldn’t get an exploitative enough deal from Chavez or Maduro, then found someone more desperate nearby and took advantage of the situation that way. A few things we know for sure, oil fields don’t follow along property lines, the oil will eventually be in the hands of those oil majors, Venezuela is going through a complex economic shift that can’t be attributed solely to “socialism”, and all that started to happen when they pissed off the US who wanted to profit…probably more than they should have off another people’s resources.

All corporations get sued a lot.

Me too. By a long shot.

Just one more reason I trus Trump, who made his bones dealing with the Mafia and shit. Not these goody two-shoes two-faced basterds.

Dude, you know so very drastically little about this issue. Catastrophically little. I say that as a friend.

I dunno man. A lot of people think that a lot of conflict in the world is a result of people feeling like they’re being slighted out of the wealth that’s under their feet. Exxon had rigs in Northern Iraq on deals they’d struck with the Kurds when Isis “came out of nowhere” back in the day. They had to abandon the rigs and evacuate. Kurds were selling Iraqi oil and exxon was buying.

It’s far, far too long of a story for me to get into right now.

I’ll just point one thing out.

Early Chavez, we had gotten to a point where, by law, any oil venture in Venezuela had to be owned by minimum 51% by PDVSA.

Then, whenever he needed cash, he would demand an even higher percentage, the project had already been started, and offered no compensation.

these dudes ain’t even criminals. They’re thugs.

I still kinda love em though. But they can’t be trusted to run one of the largest oil operations on the planet.

Fuck, even Russians will periodically sue PDVSA.

In their case though they tend to find a way to work it out. Maybe no rig ever really gets built, maybe a friend of a friend has something for you and you forget about this whole business.

Ironically, EXXON has to stick with the suit till the end because they don’t have that option, US law is too stringent and effective.

You are giving me one size fits all narratives, I on the other hand have been closely studying the development of the oil industry in Venezuela as well as its entire history.

You know far too little on this one guy. You don’t even know.

Dude you can spend 3 years in prison here for weed. Like 3 actual years. Mandatory minimums and all that.

Fun fact; it was a Venezuelan dude that came up with the idea for OPEC and got all the Arabs on board. Shit is deep, partner.

We have a saying in Venezuela. “Los rusos tambien juegan.” The Russians also play. It doesn’t necessarily actually refer to Russians, just to the fact that while the US has been jockeying for a position of power and influence, so has everybody else.

We’re not some fucking land of simple naive idiots who just always get duped. The world is a complicated, ferocious place.

OK.

In some other parts of the world, which the US gets shit for interfering with, they just shoot you and maybe your family too.

For weed.

Which parts? I want to avoid those places.

I’m lucky enough to come from a part of the world where if you get caught for weed, nobody really actually knows what the law is but you just pay the cop a little something and go on your way.

If you don’t have money, it depends. They might extort you if they think your family may have money, or beat you up, or send you a couple of nights to jail to taste some real hell, or if you’re up front about it they may just be in a good mood and let you go, or if they think you are selling and aren’t affiliated with the right people or don’t have the money to pay them off, then maybe yo go to prison. But you probably don’t get a trial for enough years that you have become involved in one of the darkest worlds on the earf, Venezuelan prisons.

In reality it’s kind of beautiful. But it got out of hands. Not because of corruption, which I kinda like. It’s reasonable. But because of socialism, which demolishes Economies, even super rich ones like Venezuela, in matters of decades. Authoritarianism in general, it’s not an easy thing to pull off. Look at Turkey’s economy.

All of the Middle East, the Philippines, well most of Asia, and that’s about it.

Just sayin. US may not be perfect, but you got a pretty sweet fucking deal down there. All things considered.

Re: all the Hondurans and stuff pouring into the US, like ladies who know for a fact they will get raped doing so.

Pretty fucking cool place, all things considered.