Posts from — March 2008

Free Tibet

Originally uploaded by Kenny Maths

Atlas Copco’s head of Construction and Mining Techniques unit, Bjorn Rosengren says “I have not run into one mining company that sees any problems over the coming three to five years.”

This optimistic statement is nice to read. But it does not counteract the concern brought on by the other news reports of further suppression in Tibet and the fire-sale of US Bear Sterns for $2 a share, down from $169 only a year ago.

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“Geology” Cake

Originally uploaded by Gurpreet Ghuggi

A short posting to link you to the Globe and Mail article that puts the salary of some starting geologists in the mining industry in Canada at above $100,000 a year. Apparently the average salary for geology undergrads is up from $62,500 in 2004 to $90,700 today.

Nominee for the strangest mining-related event of the week goes to the release in Tanzania of a report entitled A Golden Opportunity? How Tanzania is failing to benefit from Gold Mining” I cannot find a copy of the report on the web, so I have to rely on a series of badly written articles to try to find out what the report says.  

Background to the report appears to be this:  “The research is published by the Christian Council of Tanzania (CCT) the National Council of Muslims in Tanzania (BAKWATA) and the Tanzania Episcopal Conference (TEC). It was funded by the Norwegian Church Aid and Christian Aid.”

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Presumably these bishops have the support of the Pope?  In so tightly controlled an organization, it is hard to believe they speak without official sanction.  This is part of a longer report:

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Here is a terrifying thought:  agents of an NGO infiltrate your mining company, gain your confidence, learn your plans, penetrate your secrets, and then a year later put you in the same situation as ex-governor Eliot Spitzer. 

Hard to imagine this happening in the real world: NGOs generally look and act differently from hard-core miners.  (I refrain from specifics!)  But it can happen in the world of virtual reality.  Here is how. 

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David Blades at my take on photography post this photo called Mining Operations on Planet X.  Colorful, but strange.  Maybe that is the  point. 

From what I can tell, this is not a mine, but that is not the point.  Scare tactics is what appears to be at play here.  Much like those reports all over Google on more mines coming closer to your home: 

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Here are some statistics about wages, salaries, and other compensation for United States coal mines in 2007.  The source of my information is CostMine.  They provide so much information that I never could summarize it all or do it justice.  So here and in a more detailed posting at this link, I give you my impressions and my selection of highlights.  You will simply have to get the main volume from them to drill down to your state, region, maybe even mine, and job classification. 

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All due respect to the Juneau Daily Photo for this one called The Hard Rock Miner. 

Seems it is a tribute to “Juneau’s rich history of hard rock mining.” 

Nine lives gambled and lost on the dice of three numbers:  900; 1,640; or 4,512.  These are the three dice-numbers that are at the center of Crandall Canyon’s Murray Energy versus Agapito versus MSHA debacle that turned to tragedy. 

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Haul truck, ASARCO mine, Sahuarita, AZ

Originally uploaded by free2camp19

Here is a link to a part of YouTube I will visit only once: umpteen short videos of mining trucks. Kind of dull I thought. But you may enjoy these MTV-type productions if you get a thrill watching big equipment to the strains of old county-western songs.