Big Oil's Salvation in the Video Arcade?
The accounting firm Deloitte & Touche has devised a fascinating way to predict how events will transpire in the Alberta oil industry. It's a video game called Producers Dilemma. Gordon Jaremko, a reporter at CamWest News Service, wrote a piece about it last week.The game, which seems so far to correctly anticipate moves both by the industry and the government, was built by a Deloitte team along with a Canadian game theory firm called Priiva Consulting. On its web site, Priiva says that it uses game theory "to help clients assess and solve their strategic business decisions."
The story piqued my interest a couple of ways. I've thought for some time that there will be a paradoxical resolution of global warming and plateauing oil supply. I've thought that Big Oil will play a big, early role in solving them because these lumbering giants have much to lose by there being a runaway train.
Big Oil has lost its global primacy to state-owned oil and natural gas companies in Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Chuck Marvin at Thestreet.com wrote an excellent year-ender on this last week. So, unlike in previous decades, it's actually important to Big Oil's survival to develop alternatives to carbon-based fuels.
One has to think that these or other theorists have bigger challenges in mind. Have they already produced a video game that simulates Big Oil's current dilemma, and shows the way out? If they haven't started, here is an existing platform.
Photo: Duluoz Cats
Rights: Creative Commons
Labels: big oil, Caspian, game theory, peak oil, Russia, video game
2 Comments:
Steve
Deloitte & Touche was hired by my school district, Los Angeles Unified, to create a new payroll system. It began in January, 2007 for non-teacher employees, and February 5, 2007 for teachers. The system has yet to produce correct paychecks for all of LAUSD’s employees.
[LAUSD teachers are paid two ways, their annual salary and additional worked hours, such as pay for workshops and supplementary teaching, as in summer school or adult school. It was said our previous system—the “legacy system” (isn’t everything old now a legacy?)—was on its death bed. So did D and T come to us.]
D and T promised the bigwigs the system worked. It was never given a test run. 80,000 or so employees were led to believe this system would be the greatest thing since sliced bread. The district still claims great things to come for our payroll (known to us as the BTS system), such as greater access to our pay process.
Checks have varied from a few cents for a month’s pay to employees receiving thousands more than they were owed. Our first checks did not list how much we were being paid so we did not know if we were paid correctly. Soon reports came out we were paid incorrectly, the vast majority overpaid. Employees had to spend days away from their schools and posts to go to the district’s headquarters to get paid. Many have had their credit ruined or had to borrow money to make end’s meet.
We keep receiving warm and fuzzy reports from our current superintendent, a former Naval admiral with no formal experience in education. He was not on board when the program was designed. He began a few months before its implementation. Our previous superintendent, the illustrious technocrat ex-Colorado Governor Roy Romer, gets the blame for that. It’s mission accomplished every month.
Now we await our W-2s. We have been promised—no really—that our W-2s will be correct.
Teachers and others have been told they owe back thousand of dollars. Others, like me, were overpaid just a bit—a few hundred dollars—that we will not have to pay back because of bureaucrat costs. We have yet to receive any accurate information what we have been paid.
We did go to court to end this disaster, and were told by the judge that our not being paid correctly is a “collective bargaining issue” rather an matter for the courts. We are appealing her decision.
The system originally cost the district $95m. I have heard the bill may reach $300 m before it works—if ever. Ireland tried to use a D and T payroll system and had to abandon it $180m later (http://lausdpayrollnightmare.blogspot.com/2007/10/deloitte-touche-10-years-of-trouble-in.html). There have been other payroll system disasters as well (Los Angeles Community College payroll system for one.)
I guess the mistake we made was asking D and T to directly create a payroll system. If only we had been wise enough to get them to make a video game simulating paying employees of a large company the correct amount of money for various kinds of work done.
So more dinners at mom’s.
A recent story on our salary woes: http://www.examiner.com/a1108317~Officials__LAUSD_payroll_system_more_than__35_million_over_budget.html.
Ed
Steve
The complete link for the most current story:
/www.examiner.com/a1108317~Officials__LAUSD_payroll_system_more_than__35_million_over_budget.html.
Ed
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