SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Saudi Arabia has sentenced a group of foreign workers who protested against unpaid wages early last year to 300 lashes and four months imprisonment, exacerbating the already dismal plight of temporary foreign workers in the kingdom.
The men, employed by the construction conglomerates Binladin Group and Saudi Oger, had been waiting for months to be paid. Video footage from their protest in April shows them angrily setting ablaze several buses that belonged to their employers.
[...] Binladen Group, founded by the father of deceased al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, and Saudi Oger, led by Lebanon's Prime Minister Saad Hariri, both claimed they were unable to pay employees after a plunge in oil revenues.
The companies say they completed payment to 70,000 sacked employees at the end of 2016 and that workers who are still with the company would be receiving payments soon.
Source: teleSUR
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 08 2017, @08:51PM
And, that is why alternative energy is so important. We need energy, we don't necessarily need a lot of oil. I'm certainly not a rabid Green, but I do want to see our reliance on petroleum cut drastically.
(Score: 1) by Lester on Sunday January 08 2017, @10:51PM
Forget it. There is no replacement for fossil energy. We will have to live with less energy, so a lower standard of living, and that's something no one wants to hear. So no polician wants to tell it.
We are in a plane and we are running out of fuel, we will have to continue our trip on our feet. Do you want soft landing or hard landing? We should use the last wonderful oil to build the best energy facilities without fossil fuel. When we run out of oil it will be more difficult and expensive. And we should start lowering our demand of energy, so our standard of living.
Did I say "we should use"?. I meant "we have had started to use years ago". We cannot reshape our society un five or ten years before the peak of oil.
There is no sustainable growth only sustainable stagnation. That's the cruel truth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @04:29AM
Do you mean hard landing or crash? We can have soft landing, hard landing or crash. Some of the greenies talk about it... some even seem to want that crash, without realizing it could mean The End directly, or Humankind staying away from Space Era forever, back to Middle Ages at best, until something really nasty makes Earth, their beloved Gaia, totally unfit for human life, maybe life in general as we know it. One wanting The End, fast or slow version, is one too many. Even more so if they think it will be flowers and happy dances.
Quote as posting this: Aliquid melius quam pessimum optimum non est. Something better than the worst is not the best.
(Score: 1) by Lester on Monday January 09 2017, @10:21AM
LOL :-DDD. Yes you are right, they seem to be looking forward for the apocalypse.
Well, they don't really want it to happen, it's only that human beings always want to be right. As human beings, they want their predictions fulfilled. Their desire of being right expands in their minds, putting away in a small corner of their brains how horrible would be if those predictions became real. There is a positive view in this attitude: They warn us about what could happen.
Nevertheless, I think they are right and I also think that their fight for warning us is futile.
There is no technology in sight to replace completely fossil fuel, only partially. Nuclear fusion is still a fantasy, solar, biodiesel, wind, geothermal etc can only replace a small part. Current nuclear fission power is not scalable, beside big mess with nuclear waste and risks like Fukushima or Chernobil, we cannot build ten fold nuclear power plants in 20 years, no country have the resources to do that, even if we could, we would run out of uranium in a few years. And I don't think there is a magic technology kept secret by Oil Companies, they are just doing their business with oil.
The sensible think would be to save as much fuel as we can now to get time to find a better solution (maybe a magic technology), and in the worst case a soft landing. But that is not going to happen, we, people, don't do that. We don't even save money for retirement, ar we going to save fuel? I don't think so. Biologist have studied that when a population has a sudden abundance of resources, the population expands until shortage and then there is a die-off followed by less population than in the beginning. No matter how intelligent we are, as specie we are going to do that, we are doing that.
I don't expect in any way a voluntarily change of behavior of people and rulers, only forced by circumstances.
What could we expect? What you said, a return to middle age. A chain of economic crisis, wars in third world. And the third world each day bigger until it will reach first world countries except an elite. People who expect a new golden age of peace and living in harmony with mother nature don't know history. Ask Russian and Italian Mafia, warlords in Africa and Middle east, current tycoons of USA, EU, and Russia, and current politicians backed by those tycoons, wether they are going to take part in that peaceful age of Aquarius or wether they are going assure or expand their power by any way, even violence if they have to.
What's my hope? There are still maybe 40 years for that. I will start in a few years, In fact I think it has already started, but until the mess reaches me I hope it will take some years, maybe 40 or more