Quote:
Originally Posted by Undertoad
Halliburton sold off its war services division in 2007 and is now just an oil services company. They are a generator of wealth now.
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We certainly have had our differences, but I have to admit that you have the best sense of humor evah! Yeah, old Halli is generating dollars faster than the Treasury can print them out. You never saw a happier group of CEO's and major shareholders in your life - especially when you scan down the list of Halliburton's affiliate corporations.
Much of the gang these days is going into the fracking game full speed ahead. The fav techniques out West here is to construct endless roads back and forth across public lands for thousands of miles (that means the lands that belong to ME, Sam; and YOU, Undertoad, BTW). Once Halliburton and the rest of 'em has pumped ever last molecule of natural gas out from between the layers of shale, and caused the Colorado and Green Rivers (among others) to go dry since fracking requires mucho aqua, the energy guys will pack into their crew cab, hit the liquor store drive thru for some Coors and Glenlivit and are never seen in those parts again.
Whatever rural region in the West that has just been raped in this manner faces an expensive massive clean-up which will never really end. The dry soil around here has a tendency to turn into dust and blow away if you scrape it off the land's surface to put in an unpaved road. And there's that nagging little water problem. Have the aquifers now become depleted or contaminated with fracking chemicals? Can the rancher across the way get his water rights back?
Who knows? But the taxpayers are either going to have to fork out a bunch of cash in an attempt to mitigate the huge environmental damage that we all now get to deal with. Or, we could do what the now defunct US Uranium Mining Corporation did to the poor little Colorado mining town of Uravan, since the Corporation CEO's couldn't have cared less about either safety or the environment. It was much easier to just send the bull dozers in to flatten every building in sight and then pave the entire thing over with asphalt. They even made a deal with the CO Department of Highways to re-route Colorado 145, so that it no longer goes by what has become a huge and distasteful grave by the side of the old road.
The Uranium Company then declared bankruptcy which meant it never had to pay a penny for clean-up, and its various affiliates were gobbled up by affiliates from other energy and hard rock mining outfits and - POOF!
Yep, creates so much money that those offshore banks may have to start digging under the ocean to store it all.
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Me? I'd stick with gold if I could. Since gold is out of the question, given my slender resources, my portfolio consists of items that would fill a whacko survivalist type with joy - Coleman lanterns, tents, non perishable food items, maps, The Army Manual for Escape and Evasion, etc. Hey! At least collecting all this stuff keeps me off the streets.