Not without stretching the narrative though - he shows the images of Mexican mafia with armoured vechicles and guns and then arches towards calling Russian oligarchs and friends mafia: those don't rely on armoured vechicles and guns but on connections inside the Russian Federation state, making the whole piece somewhat dubious.
Oh, I think the articles theme is mostly bunkum armchair theory. Reads great, but is nonsense. The author’s premise is that:
* oil+gas are not complicated
* metallurgy is somewhat complicated
* a drilling machine has a very complicated dependency
Like, duhhhh, oil+gas is fiendishly complicated (drilling, transport, refining, organisational), with extremely complicated (and often single-source) dependencies; certainly more complicated than the CNC-machine-needed-to-make-a-mining-machine small business example. “Metallurgy” is complicated with complicated dependencies too (although plenty of Russian expertise available). Both of those are massive industries with very deep complexity.
The story also has a strong “geek inherit the earth” narrative - which always scores well with engineers here on HN.
The “mafia” metaphor didn’t work for me either.
It does make me wonder who the author(s) want to influence and why?
But still, I liked the links, I liked the story, and they wrote well (I am guessing English wasn’t their first language?).
The product of tech companies is the tech itself. For oil, the tech is a means and can be imported. Drilling oil is technically complicated but you can hire foreign companies to do the hard work, just like most African nations. Russia relies heavily on foreign companies to drill oil.
From my own writer's experience, finding good images with reasonable licensing is hard. Unless you want to pay significant royalties (which may sink your writing activity to unsustainably deep red numbers) or risk being target of a copyright troll company, you are stuck with free and libre images, which often do not cover exactly what you want to.
Not disagreeing, but that's not what's happening in the article: those pictures of Mexican cartel army are precisely about Mexican cartel army and not random stand-ins. And I think the author is making a very interesting point. That point is not at all about armoured vehicles and guns, it's about extractive business as opposed to something more complex. The claim is not that Putin generation oligarchs use the same cars and guns Mexican cartel power uses, it's that oil and gas have a lot in common with avocados. And that's a really valuable observation.
