Picture this: a McDonald's forced to excavate deeper underground just to keep supplying hamburgers. Sounds absurd, right? That's essentially what the oil industry operates as—a perpetual extraction game. The moment you sell the product, you're depleting the underlying asset. Extract and sell today, drill harder tomorrow to maintain tomorrow's revenue. It's extraction masquerading as business. The model cannabilizes itself. From an investment perspective, this represents one of the weaker business structures—you're constantly hemorrhaging your core resource to generate cash flow. Compare that to software platforms or renewable systems where the asset appreciates or regenerates. One burns fuel to move. The other builds momentum. That's the gulf between extractive and generative business models.