The following post is going to be a bit of a watershed for me on this blog, as it’s the first that isn’t about politics/philosophy/economics. But given that the loose formative theme behind this site is to outline a personal philosophy for evolving into the future (hence the blog’s name, FoundryForward), technology is a natural fit. (This is a more specific tech topic than I first imagined, but it’s in support of the broader topics of the .Net framework and, in turn, managed code and OOP.)

So for the very, very few readers who will come across this, be warned that the waters will soon be muddied with filthy bits of programming and that kind of thing, from time to time, which I’ll prefix with “Code:”  in the subject.

ExxonMobil’s announcement of quarterly earnings totaling $10.7B — and annual earnings of $36.1B — has this week provoked a predictable resurgence of the anti-”Big Oil” rhetoric that last spiked in early November of last year.

On November 10, executives from the major oil companies in the United States were questioned by US senators regarding the nature of their unusually high profits for the third quarter. Discussion hasn’t much dwindled on the topic since then, and I’ve consequently seen, read, and heard a good many people of all walks of life echoing the complaints of Congress that the profits in question are unfair, unpatriotic, and greedy — in short, that the consumer is being gouged by the oil companies.

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