BOMB BOMB BOMB, BOMB BOMB ABQAIQ

On Saturday, Saudi Arabia reported that their oil plants in Abqaid and Khurais had been knocked out by drone attacks. So how is this potentially going to lead to a massive war?

First thing you need to understand: the Abqaiq plant in particular is quite huge. It processes sour crude - crude oil which has a lot of sulfur in it - into sweet crude, the type of crude oil that is typically then processed into your major fuels, like gasoline and kerosene. (Fun fact: it’s called “sweet” crude because in olden timey days, prospectors would taste the oil to see if it was low sulfur or high sulfur, and “sweet” crude was the oil that didn’t taste like rotten eggs. Olden times: they sucked.) Saudi Aramco, the Saudi state’s oil company, says that the two plants together produce about 5.7 million barrels of sweet crude per day. Or, depending on which source you read, 7 million barrels of sweet crude per day. This is kind of the problem when your main source for information about a plant’s processing capability is a nation-state with a proud history of lying whenever it is convenient, but regardless of how many millions of barrels it produces, it definitely produces a hell of a lot of oil and accounts for somewhere in between 5 and 7% of world total oil production each day, so when the Saudis reported it going down, oil prices immediately spiked.

Who attacked it? Well, there are two possible options here. One are the Yemeni Houthis, who are currently at war with the Saudi-backed faction in Yemen and who hate Saudi Arabia and are effectively already at war with them and also took responsibility for doing it almost immediately. So, you know, they tick a lot of boxes.

The second option is Iran, as the Saudis and the USA’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have accused Iran of being “behind” the attacks (without producing any evidence as of yet). Now, if Iran did this it would be an open act of war against the Saudis, and Iran certainly loathes the Saudis (and vice versa), but an open shooting war with a country that is still technically an American ally would be an invitation to an open shooting war with America, except that Iran can’t really shoot anything at America and America can sure as hell shoot at Iran a whole lot and everybody involved knows this.

To be fair, I’m not saying it’s impossible that Iran would attack the Saudis like this. But it’s definitely counterproductive and illogical for them to do so, particularly when Iran by all accounts is close to negotiating a re-introduction of the nuclear deal Donald Trump unilaterally cancelled last year which would be in their best interests.

My guess here is that there are two realistic scenarios for what happened and one improbable one. The improbable scenario is that Iran just went and attacked the Saudis, either by central direction or a rogue military unit. The first, but still less likely scenario is that yes, Iran attacked Saudi Arabia, but in retaliation for an actual or perceived attack on their own interests from the Saudis. And the last scenario, and the one I think most likely - because I’m cynical - is that the Houthis were in fact the ones who attacked the facilities, but because Iran backs the Houthis in the Yemeni conflict, the Saudis and the USA have just decided to blame Iran for the attack because it’s a convenient excuse for them to up aggression - either for the war that many in both countries have not-so-secretly been agitating for over the years, or in order to force concessions in other negotiations, such as the nuclear negotiations, by threatening them with force.

[CHEAP PASTA JOKE]

Update on Italy: it has a new government! Okay, technically the new government was formed two weeks ago, but it didn’t pass the confidence votes necessary for it to begin being the government until this past week, so I waited on writing about it because… well, because Italian politics are really wild and things pivot a lot.

The short version, following what I wrote back on August 25th, is that the Five Star Movement (who probably refer to themselves as “The Wacky Rogues Of Italian Politics” when nobody is listening) formed a political alliance with the Partito Democratico and the Free And Equal socialists, and these three parties together formed a new government with very slight majorities in both houses of Italy’s parliament. The new government is still being run by Giuseppe Conte (the same one who ran the previous government), with the Five Stars and the Democrats more or less splitting the government ministries equally, with the Democrats taking the majority of the boring jobs that make the economy work and the Five Stars getting an eclectic mix of reasonably important gigs and minor side ministries like Sport. Most notably, the Five Stars have gotten current party leader Luigi Di Maio to head up the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a position at which he has basically no relevant experience. The Five Stars like this because they have their leader in an important job, and the Democrats like it because either he turns out to be good at it and the government works better, or he turns out to be crap and the Five Stars look stupid in the next election and the Democrats can say “we know what we’re doing and they don’t.”

The immediate upshot of a more left-leaning government was that it immediately started striking deals with other European nations to stop harassing refugee boats and instead agreed to take some of them and transfer the rest to the rest of Europe, which is good for the refugees and humanity in general. Granted, the right-wing Lega party (who are now out of power) are not pleased with this, but fuck those people.

BUT WHAT ABOUT MY RIGHT TO WORK MORE HOURS FOR LESS MONEY

The California gig economy law got passed this week. Sort of. Gig economy companies (like Uber, Lyft, Hello Alfred and Taskrabbit, among many others) are all already negotiating with the California government trying to bribe it into letting them be exempted from the law before the governor signs it into law and/or it becomes effective at the start of next year. But as goes California, so go many other American states eventually, and the gig economy businesses do not want that because, well. That would really suck for them.

The bill is, in its essence, really simple: if you are a gig-economy company (in essence, any of the several dozen companies which exist to match people providing services with people who want services), and part of your relationship with gig workers involves requirements for how they provide that work, or if their work is part of your regular business - then they aren’t contractors any more. They’re just workers, which means you’re on the hook for vacation pay, unemployment benefit pay-ins, and the like.

This is, to be clear, an unalloyed good. Gig economy companies are among the shittiest companies operating in the first world these days, and the fact that they are all stunningly bad at being businesses is little consolation. And they are terrible at it. I’ve written previously about Uber being not profitable, but all of the gig economy companies aren’t profitable, and that’s kind of stunning when you realize they’re just a bunch of matching-contact apps with ratings systems. Uber alone lost $5 billion in just the second fiscal quarter of this year. Lyft lost over half a billion. Grubhub loses about ten million per quarter. What’s more, these are just the ones that are public. We don’t know how much money the private ones are losing, but remember that most of the time when a company announces “a new round of investment” that is code for “it doesn’t make money by itself yet.”

The reason these companies lose money (with one important exception: Airbnb) is because they are all essentially the same trick: they exist only because of legal loopholes that haven’t been closed yet. For example, Uber and Lyft both work under the same principle: “what if taxis, but without having to get the insurance that taxi drivers do?” When those loopholes are closed, the company loses money rapidly - but worse, the company was generally already losing money because in order to get people to use the service in the first place you need to make it cheap enough for them to adopt it, which means cheaper than the competition. Uber and Lyft have this problem the worst, followed by the “get a worker” apps like Handy or Taskrabbit. The food delivery apps geberally don’t lose quite as much money, mostly because food delivery charges are pretty standard. But they’re still losing money overall.

(Airbnb is, as noted, the exception to this rule, mostly because Airbnb has one advantage most of the others don’t, which is that its sellers - the people renting out rooms and homes - can set their own prices rather than setting an Airbnb-determined price, which means Airbnb doesn’t have to subsidize its market. Airbnb is bad for many other reasons - it’s essentially creating unregulated hotels which poach existing residential housing into a consumer market - but it doesn’t appear to be losing money at this point. At least until it gets regulated.)

Anyway, I kind of got lost in the woods talking about gig economy companies, but this law is potentially really good if California doesn’t let it get diluted into meaninglessness and also if they can figure out how to apply and enforce it (which won’t be easy). Granted, Uber’s already said the law doesn’t apply to it, but then again Uber also has dumped billions of dollars into self-driving cars and they only drive into lakes about five percent of the time now.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

Blow Dry (2001, Paddy Breathnach, Hoopla) - 2.5/5

Yesterday (2019, Danny Boyle, theatre) - 3/5

Also finished the current season of Ducktales, about which I cannot say enough superlative things. It’s honestly remarkable on so many levels: cleverly written in and of itself (juggling a regular cast of about ten plus another dozen or so semi-regulars), but also an impressive distillation of seventy years of Disney Duck stories into a tight, cohesive whole which furthermore is slowly involving all of the Disney cartoon TV series of the 1990s within its narrative. And it’s almost always extremely funny and entertaining. It’s one of the best-written TV shows of the past decade, both for enthusiasts and noobs alike, and if you aren’t watching it you’re missing out.

See you in seven.