cevans
TDIClub Enthusiast, TDI Parts Ninja Vendor , w/Bus
Good point on the situation a few years ago AD.
This place is sure full of idiots. As a warranted contracting officer, I can assure you that Dick Cheney has not influenced a single no bid contract that I've ever awarded to Haliburton and other firms (mostly other firms). Please take your frustration out at the polls. Next time vote instead of smoking all of that dope that has clouded your judgement.MrMopar said:And for the past five years running, Dick Cheney's income taxes show that he makes bazillions more dollars in "deferred compensation" from Halliburton than he makes being Vice President. Not like being Vice President is the huge payroll to begin with, but $250,000 (I think) would be really nice for about 99.99% of Americans.
What does this mean? It means that Halliburton agreed to pay Dick Cheney future deferred compensation depending on how well the company does with all the deals set in motion from when Dick Cheney was CEO. Not unheard of, as plenty of businesses have long term plans that can take years to work out a profit - and these plans might be set in motion by a CEO who might no longer be with the company when the deals pay off. So the CEO sets up to be paid in the future should the company make some serious bank from what he or she set up while running the place.
BUT (and that's a huge but) Dick Cheney is in the enviable position of being able to take his Vice President job, and use it to influence how his former employer does financially via the no-bid contracts and what-not.
I read a couple articles about the Exxon-Mobil earnings statement, but I must have missed the paragraphs where it said Exxon "didn't develop new oil.. didn't reduce cost or increase capacity," and all it did was "well, nothing."RAST said:My point is that companies like Exxon are making windfall profits. They didn't develop new oil. They didn't make some new process. They didn't reduce cost or increase capacity to make more money. All they did was, well, nothing. Since they are making this huge profit ($10 billion is a huge number no matter how you slice it) they should have an obligation to help pay some extra for this war. After all without it they would not have made that much profit.
i wonder where all the people like you were when people like my dad were getting laid off left and right because oil was too cheap. he's a chemical engineer and was laid off three times before i even got out of high school.RAST said:Wow this thread has really grown a bunch!!
My point is that companies like Exxon are making windfall profits. They didn't develop new oil. They didn't make some new process. They didn't reduce cost or increase capacity to make more money. All they did was, well, nothing. Since they are making this huge profit ($10 billion is a huge number no matter how you slice it) they should have an obligation to help pay some extra for this war. After all without it they would not have made that much profit.
It's interesting to see people line up to defend a huge company like Exxon. They don't give a hoot about you and I. They'll happily take their profit and run while the average taxpayer is getting hit with a $700 Billion bill for this war.
I'm counting the days until I can crank up my TDI on Bio and flip Exxon and their buddies OPEC the bird!!
If he does influence Halliburton's fortunes, then that would be a very blatant ethical violation, and probably rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors".MrMopar said:BUT (and that's a huge but) Dick Cheney is in the enviable position of being able to take his Vice President job, and use it to influence how his former employer does financially via the no-bid contracts and what-not.
RAST how do you support your claim that http://www.exxonmobil.com/corporate/RAST said:Wow this thread has really grown a bunch!!
My point is that companies like Exxon are making windfall profits. They didn't develop new oil. They didn't make some new process. They didn't reduce cost or increase capacity to make more money. All they did was, well, nothing. Since they are making this huge profit ($10 billion is a huge number no matter how you slice it) they should have an obligation to help pay some extra for this war. After all without it they would not have made that much profit.
It's interesting to see people line up to defend a huge company like Exxon. They don't give a hoot about you and I. They'll happily take their profit and run while the average taxpayer is getting hit with a $700 Billion bill for this war.
I'm counting the days until I can crank up my TDI on Bio and flip Exxon and their buddies OPEC the bird!!
As a matter of fact I DID look on Halliburton and KBR's websites for jobs when I graduated from college and before I got this (practically a dream job) job.Variant TDI said:Send them an application.
It ironic how they're always looking for people with the skills and the balls to do the jobs that their detractors would never set up to.
RAST said:I think our energy policy in this country has been very broken for a very long time. I blame Democrats (Clinton) and Republicans (Reagan, Bush, Bush). We've been foolish in our consumption. We use 25% of all the oil pumped worldwide every year! That can't continue for ever.
Americans die every day in the middle east to keep the cheap oil coming . A it is still cheap or no one would ever buy a low mpg pick up truck or SUV . In truth if we had to add the actual military cost on top of the show cost to imported oil price would be well over $100 a barrel . As it should be .Sortova said:The oil industry is heavily subsidized and thus could hardly be called "free enterprise". Your tax dollars went into allowing Exxon to make those profits. As much as I might hate Microsoft and their profits, no American soldiers died for Windows.
Iraq is only one theatre in a global war... a war that started in 1967 or 1973 or 1979 (not 1991 or 1993 or 1997 or 2000), but the US didn't recognize that we were at war til 2001.RAST said:Lone --> I never, ever said we were in Iraq for oil. Read my original post and you'll get the idea. My point has been all along that Exxon is profiting because of high oil prices - caused by the war. Therefore Exxon should pay some of it's higher profits since they didn't really do anything - a windfall profit. Especially considering that the war is costing us $700 Billion we don't have.
This argument sounds good on the surface but would merely backfire. If we start doing things like this, all we have done is raise the RISK of operating in the oil business, since you never know when the government will take your profits from you. So what happens to the price of a product when the business RISK increases? You got it! They GO UP to compensate the risk taker (the business) for taking the risk. That is one of the reasons oil is so high now - with terrorism going the way it is, it is more risky than it was in years past to operate, so there has to be more profit potential to make it worthwhile to take the risk. I also have a problem morally with deciding that someone is making too much money operating in a particular business so we should just take it from them after the fact(Robin Hood anyone?) I'm fine with a higher gas tax (stay away from diesel though ) if that's what would help out with the financial situation - of course that would decrease consumption as well wouldn't it?RAST said:Lone --> My point has been all along that Exxon is profiting because of high oil prices - caused by the war. Therefore Exxon should pay some of it's higher profits since they didn't really do anything - a windfall profit. Especially considering that the war is costing us $700 Billion we don't have.
I definitely agree with this point Rast. We have been wasting money for many many years trying to gain the appearance that we're taking care of the problem instead of putting the money where it has the best chance of actually changing something. IMO most of the money spent on alternative energy has been spent to buy votes, not in any genuine attempt to help solve our long-term problem. Why are we subsidizing electric cars and gas/electric hybrids that pollute so MUCH MORE overall than our beloved TDI's? Because it looks good to Joe Q. unthinking Public, not because it's actually doing something positive to help the problem. If hybrids are so cool, why not a diesel/electric hybrid? That would be 20-30% more economical right off the bat. But the reality is that we're way more concerned about NoX/particulate emissions at the tailpipe (image) than we are about TOTAL pollution produced and TOTAL oil consumed (substance).RAST said:Madrea --> I think our energy policy in this country has been very broken for a very long time. I blame Democrats (Clinton) and Republicans (Reagan, Bush, Bush). We've been foolish in our consumption. We use 25% of all the oil pumped worldwide every year! That can't continue for ever.
Then you must be blind. Don't roll eyes at me, pal. Do you think I'm dumb enough to take any of your rhetoric at face value? Talk about not holding water? Have you ever listened to yourself?nicklockard said:As a matter of fact I DID look on Halliburton and KBR's websites for jobs when I graduated from college and before I got this (practically a dream job) job.
Guess what? There ain't no "employment opportunities" links anywhere on any of their websites. Clearly, you have to KNOW PEOPLE. So your argument holds nary a drop of water
looks like you should have went to a better college. My dad went to school in a one room building on a dirt road in middle MO. Didn't even make it past the 9th grade. He was able to find and apply for work with KBR.. My brother is also a high school drop out. He just shipped out Sunday for KBR.nicklockard said:As a matter of fact I DID look on Halliburton and KBR's websites for jobs when I graduated from college and before I got this (practically a dream job) job.
Guess what? There ain't no "employment opportunities" links anywhere on any of their websites. Clearly, you have to KNOW PEOPLE. So your argument holds nary a drop of water
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When I graduated in June of '04, the economy plain sucked. I took a FT job for $11 stinking bucks/hr and took on 3 part time jobs (math/science tutoring for learning-disabled adults, private calculus tutoring, and volunteer English writing tutoring), raising my pay to $15.50. Out of pure frustration, I checked Halliburton and KBR's websites. Of course I also had my resume on Monster, Hotjobs, etcetera. Now I had finished 3 summers of research internships at UNM and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories. NO ONE was hiring chemists/scientists/chem-tech's west of the Mississippi river. Period. I can't relocate to the east w/o losing out time with my son...but even so, out of frustration at busting my nuts and getting nowhere, I tried KBR and Halliburton. As I said: zero, nada, zip...not even an employment link ANYWHERE on any of their websites. Not even a "contact us" link. Hey, maybe they show up at job fairs where you are, but I went to all the science/engineering fairs at OSU and made good contacts, but KBR and Halliburton were never there, not once in 3 years. I scoured the employment boards online and at Oregon employment department (which has been a source in the past before I got my degree.)03_01_TDI said:looks like you should have went to a better college. My dad went to school in a one room building on a dirt road in middle MO. Didn't even make it past the 9th grade. He was able to find and apply for work with KBR.. My brother is also a high school drop out. He just shipped out Sunday for KBR.
Your calculations are completely off-base. Let's say (for sake of argument) that they buy oil for $.50/gal and sell gas for $1/gal. That's a profit of $.50/gal right? Now prices double, so they buy oil for $1/gal and sell gas for $2/gal. What the profit? $1/gallon! The entire energy industry is built on margins, and as prices increase, typically so do margins. When the price is low, everyone goes out of business. I work in the NGL industry and we endured 7 years of little/no profit due to the extremely depressed prices, just like the oil industry did. What they're making now has not even come close (yet) to making up for what they didn't make for all those years.Thunderstruck said:The question to ask is "did their earnings per share increase, or not?" And if they did, why? If, as they claim, they are just passing on the higher cost of crude then their earnings would have stayed flat. If the cost of a barrel of oil goes up 50%, and they raise the price of a gallon of gas 50%, even though dollar volume goes up profits stay flat. OTOH, if they use increased crude as an excuse to raise prices, this will show since instead of making a dollar a share, suddenly they would be making a buck fifty a share.
.Updated: 13:11, Thursday February 02, 2006
Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has unveiled the highest profits in UK corporate history - equivalent to £1.5m an hour.
Shell recorded a surplus of £12.96bn - up nearly a third on last year when it set a UK record with profits of £9.8bn.
The results follow a year in which the cost of crude jumped from below $45 a barrel to a record high of more than $70.
Shell's haul is enough to build more than 17 Wembley Stadiums or to snap up two of the UK's biggest retailers, Marks & Spencer and Boots, outright at current prices.
The bulk of Shell's profits come from getting oil and gas out of the ground. This division has been boosted by the spiralling cost of crude oil due to a particularly bad hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico.
Shell filling station
Output in 2005 was about 3.5 million barrels of oil a day - at the bottom end of the target laid out by Shell earlier this year due to damage caused by hurricanes.
Investors will want to be reassured that the cost of repairs is not higher than Shell's estimates at the end of October, and that efforts to get the Mars platform in the Gulf of Mexico back into operation are progressing to plan.
Motoring groups will check on the profitability of its network of filling stations to see whether Shell has been using high oil prices to boost margins at the expense of drivers.
Shell's results follow news earlier this week that Texas-based oil giant Exxon Mobil made £19.2bn in its last financial year - the biggest surplus yet in corporate history.
UK rival BP is also due to report full-year figures next week, with analysts pencilling profits before exceptionals of around £12.2bn.
Here're the key parts:Thunderstruck said:Here's something that will really p*ss most of you off.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/3627131.html
It seems to me that this is how the market is supposed to work. If there's a lot of gasoline in the Indiana-Ohio region, and prices are too low to make it profitable when West Texas crude is $67/barrel, then it makes sense NOT to buy so much of that crude and NOT to keep making gasoline and selling it at a loss.San Antonio-based Valero Energy Corp., the nation's largest fuel producer, said Tuesday it slowed output from its refinery in Ohio by more than 10 percent for economic reasons.... Earlier in the week, British energy giant BP slashed fuel production from its refinery in Whiting, Ind., by 10 to 15 percent because of lower profit margins in the region, market sources said....
Oil refiners traditionally slow fuel production when profit margins fall into the red — something that happens when the cost of crude rises too high relative to the selling price of gasoline and heating oil....
"Inventories in that part of the country are high and pipelines are full," the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association said in a prepared statement.
Well... We're agreed. That's what we'll do. We can start tomorrow.TornadoRed said:If refiners stop buying $67 crude, then it will have to come down in price.