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Comment by bsedlm | Hacker News Reader

> it has been built upon slavery, colonialism and/or cheap imported labour.

I think it was actually true in the USA around the time of the oil age. I think this because back then, it seems, you'd poke a hole in the ground and oil would spill out. Oil so good that it has all been extracted already; and such an oil is as close as we've gotten to free energy.

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Pretty sure there was/is a TON of exploitation in the crude oil industry

Don't the technicians that maintain remote oil-rigs make $200k+/yr though?

I mean sure, there are some people who (sacrifice their whole lives for their oil bosses and) make high salaries, but these corporations will pay the absolute minimum they can and unless you are unionized you have no chance of a fair negotiation. And every time the pipes break plants/animals/ecological systems die. And it poisons our water, the single most important shared resource we have. And when we burn that oil en masse our planet’s climate balance shifts and plants/animals/ecological systems die. And going back this oil comes from the European conquest and mass genocide of indigenous Americans. A highly strategic, centuries long conquest that openly called for the eradication of an entire race of people. We literally live on and extract resources from stolen land won via carefully planned out genocide. There were ~100 million indigenous people in the Americas before European contact. 1/5 of the worlds population at the time. “Exploitation” is a euphemism, all things considered. It’s more like “extremely violent” and “deeply sick” IMO.

Do you realize that most native Americans were killed by European disease decades or centuries before a European ever showed up to their area? And since no one even understood the concept of disease or how it was spread, it was really hard to imagine the Spanish purposefully showing up in Mexico with the explicit purpose of killing people in S. America via smallpox.

And paying someone a high salary to do a job they can leave at any time, isn't causing them to sacrifice their life, it's called free trade is generally considered 'winning'.

> And since no one even understood the concept of disease or how it was spread, it was really hard to imagine the Spanish purposefully showing up in Mexico with the explicit purpose of killing people in S. America via smallpox.

True, but smallpox blankets did happen. Not often. Perhaps only once, but it was documented at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_Pitt

Not just oil but generally vast natural resources ready to be tapped.

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