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?).

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.