I don’t understand why there’s no secondary option if Strait of Hormuz goes down. Obviously there are alternative routes out there but why big gas companies even governments did not see this coming. Are they okay losing billions? Or do they actually have a plan that ordinary people don’t know about?
Because being prepared for something that might happen isn’t profitable in the short term
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.
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.
don’t blame capitalism. People are that shortsighted about everything. In your own niche you are not but I don’t have to know anything about you to state with 100% confidence that you have already been shortsited about something in your life.
On the other hand you can’t do everything correctly - you don’t have enough time. You have to make hard choices about where you place the redundancey. Aften people focus an the last crisis and so they over invest in fire protection in the next house after a house burns - but the odds of a house fire are still low and they are likely putting less into the real next problem - whatever it will be.
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Preparing for worst case scenario is literally the only reason humans managed to make it thru 17 different ice ages chief…
In times of plenty people who will take any risk do well, but winter always comes and those dumb fucks get killed off.
It’s human variation.
The problem is we’re letting people incapable of evaluating risk drive a globally connected society.
Next time shit gets bad, there’s a real chance instead of a kingdom dissolving, virtually every living human dies, despite how personally risk averse they are.
The problem is ultra capitalists being in charge of everything, not just that they exist on a fringe
But this isn’t worst case. Its something like 20% supply so things are more expensive for a while and for as long as people see this as a risk people will work to improve other transport options
Also, here is a simple alternative view:
You have a water tank that you share with a neighbour and a pipe you share to your house.
A storm hits and the pipe is damaged.
You both could have buried the pipe deeper, or made a backup pipe but you chose not to. Not a great capitalist failure: it’s thinking the risk wasn’t high so not spending your time on something you think you don’t need. You’re also not dying of thirst, you can still walk out and bucket water, it’s just slower and more problematic.
Not a perfect analogy bit wow on parts of this thread
And in this case, I’m not convinced that the government setting prices and supplies, like in communism, would have helped since most people seemed to not think this was not a huge risk and really didn’t expect the US to ignore simulations and blaze ahead quite this unconcerned for negative outcomes.