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How Bad Is the Gulf Coast Oil Spill?
Dasher42 writes "Claims are circulating on the Internet that the Coast Guard fears the Deepwater Horizon well has sprung two extra leaks, raising fears that all control over the release of oil at the site will be lost. The oil field, one of the largest ever discovered, could release 50,000 barrels a day into the ocean, with implications for marine life around the globe that are difficult to comprehend. So, considering that losing our oceanic life, with subsequent unraveling of our land-based ecosystems, is a far more possible apocalyptic scenario than a killer asteroid — what do we do about it?" Other readers have sent some interesting pictures of the spill. One set shows the Deepwater Horizon rig as it collapsed into the ocean. Others, from NASA, indicate that the spill's surface area now rivals that of Florida. The US government has indicated that it intends to require BP to foot the bill for the cleanup. And the Governator has just withdrawn support for drilling off the California coast.
The spill's smell now rivals that of New Jersey.
We will be footing the bill, not you. With higher gas prices that is.
Last i heard they were going to drop a giant concrete dome down on top of the hole and pump that out directly.
As for all the oil already floating around... well... sucks to be an animal in the ocean this month.
..lifeforms in the ocean.
Then why are you posting anonymously? When Nixon signed all the current environmental laws in the 1970s, it was because pollution was so bad that it could not be denied as a figment of liberal media. And here comes another such event. Welcome to your worst nightmare. And mine.
The spill has been described as a volcano at the ocean floor. I haven't read anywhere that anybody knows how to cap it. Has our thirst for oil unleashed an apocalypse?
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
We worry about nuclear plants going Chernobyl, but how much do we worry about that chemical refinery 20 miles away? If it had an uncontrolled fire, it could spew toxic chemicals into the air that would be about as disastrous as fallout. It's like worrying about a plane crash when you drive like a maniac.
Yet we still need oil, so we'll keep pumping. Greeks protest and riot when they realize they are going to have to start paying for their entitlement programs, and we complain when we need to pay more for gas. Well, we can't have it both ways. If we want to live 25 miles from where we work, we're going to have to pay for it. If we don't pay for it at the pump, then we'll have to pay for it when a shared resource, like the ocean, is destroyed.
I'm still a supporter of offshore drilling. Ask me again in a year, when this whole episode has concluded (or not), and I may change my mind.
It really seems like an understatement to call this a 'spill', as though it were a limited quantity from an oil freighter or something. It's an underwater gusher. I knew it was a huge disaster when it was reported as such with the addendum of at least 30 days to fix. At least. How would they even fix something like that? Has anything like this been attempted before?
Loose lips lose spit.
Did these people on the rig have on Dharma jumpsuits?
How about Bobby Jindal?
Or is crying for the feds "You're not doing enough!" all he can do?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Oh, we're far from facing the death of the oceans. Even acidification and warming and ocean current changes won't do that.
What the added oil is is another stressor to the system.
Instead we'll see a slow collapse of traditional fisheries, meaning lots of people going poor and hungry, and Red Lobster offering all-you-can-eat Giant Squid and tilapia dinners.
That said, it's good this happened in the Gulf, which is relatively contained. Good for the oceans as a whole, bad for the Gulf sea and shoreline ecosystems.
* * *
One of cool things folks forget about the movie Soylent Green: The green stuff is supposed to be made from krill. Edward G. Robinson's character goes to the euthenasia parlor after reading a Soylent Corporation research study taken from a murdered executive's home. The reason that the Soylent corporation is making the crackers from corpses is an ocean ecosystem collapse. I don't remember if they made the connection, but the movie also invokes the greenhouse effect. In 1973.
I mean, really. Stop listening to the liberal media and learn to THINK FOR YOURSELVES.
yeah baby!
drill baby drill! drill baby drill! wait what did you say?
Say what now?
oh, oh, ok uhm
Drill Baby Drill, Somewhere else, Drill Baby Drill, Somewhere else!
Bad!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Anyone know of any research into the long term environmental effects of World War 2 tanker sinkings? They should represent a range of climates and a range of developed to pristine locations. Some with surface oil burning, some not. Surely there is something to be learned from that era of history.
--
Perpenso Calc for iPhone and iPod touch, scientific and bill/tip calculator, fractions, complex numbers, RPN
BP is going to pay? I don't think they are going to take it out of BP employee salaries. Let's face it, if BP pays then the costs get passed on to the customers. Whatever BP doesn't pay will get passed tot he US taxpayers.
If BP doesn't pay, then should their business licenses be revoked in all affected states? in the US?
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
NASA's contribute has been taken by a slash and a dot!
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
Drill Baby Drill!
Why do we have to go through the slashdotted blog.alexanderhiggins.com to see images hosted at NASA? This is the dumbest thing so far this month.
CG Pin-Ups?
There are two ways of looking at what to do -- proximate and ultimate.
In the proximate sense, one thing to do is volunteer time or supplies if you're in an affected area. I'm in Florida -- in my area, I know right now of Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary ( http://www.seabirdsanctuary.com/uploads/oil.pdf ) and Audubon Florida ( http://audubonoffloridanews.org/ ), which are each asking for volunteers, money, and/or supplies. Other organizations may be looking for help -- help if you can, spread the word even if you can't.
In the ultimate sense, it's hard not to become reactionary to things like this. Clearly there's a need for some serious prevention, and however that comes about, it must. There are boycotts, letter writing campaigns, and the like, and while they may seem awfully pedestrian, the first step in each is something that's been needed for an exquisitely long time -- awareness. People don't tend to realize that the oceans are just downstream from everyone -- for example, just how many people do you think recognize the oil spill that dribbles into the Gulf every year from runoff into the Mississippi watershed? It's once people start to realize what's happening, what's important, and where changes need to happen that movement toward change occurs. Oil being the trigger word that it is these days, it's hard to say whether or not ocean health is foremost in people's minds. Building awareness -- even inland! -- is about getting it there.
I don't know what the key is. Maybe it's kids asking whether the animals they love seeing at the aquarium are going to be lost because of the oil spill. Maybe it's fishermen who lose their livelihoods because their fisheries are either contaminated or outright destroyed. Maybe it's people who worked in tourism and sports industries that previously thrived on healthy beaches and coastal waters. Whatever that key is, some catalysis needs to happen soon, and it needs to start with people simply caring enough to understand and do something, wherever they are, however they can. Too much is at stake.
"What's the use in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes?" --Fourth Doctor, "Robot"
When we first saw the images of the rig burning and collapsing is when we should have started our response (if not sooner). Instead we sat around saying "oh, that's too bad". Why didn't we get ships out there immediately with containment booms to hold back the slick? Was it really that outlandish to expect an oil leak to come from this?
Sure, containment booms (like we used for the Exxon Valdez) wouldn't have solved the problem on their own - and likely wouldn't have been able to contain all the oil coming up from 5,000+ feet down - but it would have at least been able to keep a good portion of it from spreading out.
This response has been pathetic, to be kind. Why we thought that the oil companies could honestly handle this on their own is beyond me.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You are doing it wrong.
You aren't suppose to use logic or reason. It is the end of the world (Again...), so start acting like it!
If there is anyway BP is going to actually pay for this disaster then we all are going to lose. BP will not survive this and will just be absorbed by some other multinational. Perhaps even some corporate entity associated with the Bush and Chaney crowd. It was all well and good to bail out the auto industry but we are just delaying the inevitable social collapse caused by our collective stupidity and greed!
Do people really think offshore drilling should be stopped because of this?
Transitions should be made to other forms of power, but my Lord, what else is there to substitute for oil for transportation in the short-mid term? Nothing. We need to get more oil. The WSJ reported that the Department of the Interior knew about failings of shear rams in deepwater conditions (the mechanism that should have shut this well down) since 2004 but didn't do anything about it.
Thanks, Uncle Sam. BP holds blame, the US government holds blame, and Transocean holds blame. But we should increase safety mechanism reliability and oversight without going Greenpeace on this.
Note of credibility: I love LA and am from the Gulf Coast. I grasp what this can do to the local economy and my oyster appetite. I can see rigs from 1/4 mile from my old back yard. Without proper safeguards, this shit happens. But it's unavoidable that we drill. Let's manage risk better.
Yeah because shit loads of oil has always been known to be good for the water and life within it.
In fact my gold fish take 30 weight oil quite happily but anything over that doesn't really agree with their stomachs.
Everyone knows Nixon was a sissy liberal. He met Elvis and his evil gyrating hips.
An NPR interview this morning with a BP executive asked two simple questions:
1. Are you responsible for the leak?
2. Will you pay for the results of the leak?
The response was along the lines of "We will cooperate with cleanup and containment efforts, and will pay any legitimate claims."
I think this will be a long (decades?), dirty fight to hold BP accountable.
Actually, it's been modified to Drill, after assuring that the requisite safety systems that were already supposed to be installed, are installed, baby Drill. This wasn't so much of a problem because of the rig itself blowing up as the safety systems which were supposed to have been installed at the drill site itself not being there.
Also, everybody notes the schtick about BP being forced to pay for this, but I'm pretty sure that won't suss out legally.
Uh...the governator's republican...you just critfailed your clue check.
We all die, of course. It's the end of the world. This is utterly catastrophic and utterly unprecedented. No such thing could ever happen naturally, At no time in the entire history of the planet has erosion or tectonic activity ever ruptured a large oil reservoir. There are no bacteria that metabolize oil and it does not oxidize or decay naturally in any way, and it kills everything it touches. It will float on the surface of the ocean forever, bringing an end to all life.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If BP raises their prices, it opens the door for their competitors to under cut them.
The price of oil will be set by the supply and demand of the other producers if BP raises it's price. The the other producers can't meet demand, the price will rise to BP's costs. If the can, then BP will be losing sales and income to them.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I think the supporters of offshore drilling, at least the intelligent ones, and I am not saying the "Drill Baby Drill" crowd was knew there would be serious accident eventually. Its just a common sense no matter what precautions you take if you engage in a fundamentally dangerous activity often enough eventually the odds will catch up with. Skiers break bones, drivers have accidents, nuclear reactors melt down or leak, coal mines collapse, drillers have spills, these things happen.
We should do our best to learn what went wrong and our best to avoid it in the future but we must accept that this is a consequence of the life style we enjoy the rest of the time. Experience with other major spills shows us the environment will recover eventually. This is a tragedy and its going to impact some of us more than others. I bet though for every Gulf Coast fisherman or tour operator that gets put out of business there was AT LEAST one who was/is making a comfortable living in oil and gas. I think you also have to consider all the good in terms of quality of life cheap petroleum and energy in general has done our nation as whole and will no doubt continue to do. When you look at this in broad objective terms its hard for me to conclude it was not worth it. Maybe when all the consequences are known I will change my mind but for now lets be sensible and keep in mind the old saying "no pain no gain."
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
to finally convince people to support alternative energy.
The Gulf of Mexico is huge compared to a sailboat, but tiny compared to the whole ocean. The volume of the ocean is 1.5 x 10^18 tons. Even if a ton of oil contaminates a million tons of water, 50,000 barrels a day would take over half a million years to do the job by my calculations.
It may be a decent sized oil reservoir (it is far from "one of the largest ever" per the article) but it isn't THAT big. Sometime in the next half million years it will stop gushing on its own. Probably before that.
This is a very serious event on the scale of the Gulf, but it is nowhere near as serious as ocean acidification from atmospheric CO2, which affects the entire ocean.
mt
It is sad that the US has swung so far to the right, with such extreme abuses of power that Nixon now comes across as a relatively honest moderate.
I just got me a row boat and a bucket. Free oil! Woo Hoo!!! The arabs can kiss my oily ass!
It wouldn't be the end of the world. It could only ever be the end of human life or life as a whole but it would take a whole lot worse for the planet to suffer.
Not that it has to be the end of human life either. Just the mere fact this will fuck up a lot of people's jobs in the local fishing industry, their surrounding environment, etc should be enough for people to realise it is bad. But who cares if people end up broke and living in a shit hole when we need oil?
Everyone knows Nixon was a sissy liberal. He met Elvis and his evil gyrating hips.
And "Elvis" is an anagram of "evils". How much more proof do you need?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
1 And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit; 2 he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.
Personally I was reminded of the dwarves digging too deep and unleashing a Balrog upon Middle Earth. Have we learned nothing from Tolkien?
The thing that's been on my mind a lot over the last couple of days is that I've heard numerous accusations over the years that the whole Gulf offshore industry is a health and safety nightmare compared to European (notably North Sea) operations... While we don't know the cause of the explosion yet (and, obviously, North Sea rigs have had explosive accidents) does anyone have any real commentary about Euro vs NA safety, and/or the likelihood of an equivalent type of accident in Europe?
Some of the links have been /. and are unavailable at the moment, any one have mirrored sites?
Of all the things I've lost; I miss my mind the most. - Mark Twain
So a week after the event, it was just garnering enough attention that law-makers decide to do something. And now, 2 weeks after the event, we're talking about possible unimaginable catastrophic future for oceanic life.
Why did everyone sit on their hands the first week? You're telling me NO ONE had a contingency plan in place for such an event to occur?
I wonder if decreasing the entire US coastal fishing industry by half or more for a few years, or a decade, will make people wake up to the consequences of our actions?
An individual tanker isn't all that large, at least in WW2. There is a reason we call modern tankers: super-tankers.
It is like people who think CO2 emissions don't matter because volcanoes do it as well. Indeed they do, but have these people never heard of adding up. This spil comes on top of all the others. On top of the coral reefs already dying, on top of fish stocks already being over fished, on top of the plastic we have been dumping whole sale in to the ocean.
Will this be the straw that killed the camels back? Hard to say, but if fishing is hurt then that means some areas need to pay more for their food then they do now and not everyone can afford that. Plus the replacement food will have to be grown somewhere else.
And down the line, some fish migrate and others are dependent on long food chains. I don't know what grows in place X that is eaten in place Y that has an effect on populations in Z.
This isn't about one tanker sinking with the oil inside. It is about tanker after tanker being emptied in one single spot with no way to end it so far except waiting for one of the biggest oil fields to run out. And that could be REALLY bad because according to the people who want to drill everywhere, oil doesn't run out.
The apocalypse won't come in a flash of thunder, it will the eco-system slowly dying from being over-stressed. Less 2012, more YKK or Testament.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
were you just some AC i'd have thought you were just trolling, but seriously? politics aside, California's economy is huge, the 8th largest in the world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California . regardless of what you think about the policies, when California does something, the world does take notice.
So.....we're about to convert one of the biggest oil fields in the world directly into CO2 without even getting the energy from it?
Burn: Apocalypse
No burn: Apocalypse
Hard to see a way out of this one if the oil is coming out under pressure.
No sig today...
Nuke it. 1 Kiloton nuke inside a bunker buster warhead dropped from a bomber. Problem solved.
The deepwater horizon well is around 5,000 feet below water. If it was closer to land (which offends some people), it wouldn't be as deep and it would be much easier to deal with an incident like this.
But the left is going to use the "crisis" to fuck up as much as possible. The amount of oil coming out daily is roughly the amount that leaks through natural cracks in the ocean floor in the gulf daily. True it's in one spot, and will be bad for a fairly small area. It won't be of global significance, and shouldn't effect production, drilling, exploration, or gas prices, but the liberals will make sure it will. There were 6 safety systems that all had to fail for this to happen, I'm pretty sure that when all the facts come into play, it will be obvious that the accident was deliberate. A similar disaster 40 years ago was used to screw the world, and move oil production from the US to the mid east, we can all see how well that has worked out. Thousands times this amount of oil were dumped out in a much smaller body of water during the first gulf war, and now you would never know it happened.
It is sad that the US has swung so far to the right, with such extreme abuses of power that Nixon now comes across as a relatively honest moderate.
It's swung so far in the direction of statism that "left" and "right" have become devoid of any real meaning. Both used to mean a set of political principles. Now they're just two different approaches to the same goal of expanding government. What is now called "right" wants to expand government for the purposes of defense and national security. What is now called "left" wants to expand government for the purposes of social engineering and entitlements. The result is the same and the two ideologies are little more than excuses or justifications.
The two-party system has done to politics what a reasonable person would expect a duopoly to do to a market. The former fails to serve the interests of the voter just like the latter fails to serve the interests of the customer. In both scenarios the voter and the customer are viewed as a means of maintaining power.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
[Citation Needed]
I've read estimates of 50 million barrels or so on NPR.
They will be forced to pay the legal max of $75 million then there is a special $1-2billion fund for oil spill clean up that is part of the gas tax we all pay. As for safety they had a blow out protector/shut off but it's was either damaged or defective as it failed to activate. Right now there not much they can do to contain the spill on the surface because of bad weather. They are doing all they can to get the shut off activated with ROVs but they can only do so much given how complicated it is to do anything 5,000' below of the surface in bad weather. Sadly the vast majority of people are naive idiots who want BP and the Feds to snap there fingers and make it all better instantly. This is a very complicated and complex operation in deep water then again this is /. which is full of "elites" who know they can do it better and fully grasp all the problems and would have no problem getting it done instantly.
An individual tanker isn't all that large, at least in WW2.
I don't think that matters much for assessing environmental impact. Long term data from a small spill that affects two miles of coastline can still yield info relevant to a large scale spill that affects twenty miles.
--
Perpenso Calc for iPhone and iPod touch, scientific and bill/tip calculator, fractions, complex numbers, RPN
Then why are you posting anonymously? When Nixon signed all the current environmental laws in the 1970s, it was because pollution was so bad that it could not be denied as a figment of liberal media. And here comes another such event. Welcome to your worst nightmare. And mine.
Am I alone in viewing comments like this as an attempt to steer the discussion away from the statements that were made and towards the irrelevant personal decisions of the speaker? Had he not posted AC, would you bring up the way his username is spelled and consider it relevant? It's just a weak (as in lesser) form of ad-hominem. It's only really appropriate when the AC makes a post talking about their belief in the uselessness of anonynimity and privacy, which is not what happened here.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
>> It is sad that the US has swung so far to the right Are you sure you are speaking of America? Obama (a left wing party member) is president and "the right" are a minority in the Senate and House. Get your facts straight... The left is in charge in America now.
You seem to be thinking that the ocean needs to be saturated with oil for it to have an effect. Most of the ocean is already dead, always has been. The whole eco-system depends on a few rich spots to feed it. Why do you think so many sea live hold such epic migrations? Because they like it?
How can a tiny bit of metal possibly kill a human being? Fine, let me stick a needle in your brain, see how long you last. Maybe a long time, maybe not long at all.
Killing the eco-system doesn't have to be whole-sale slaughter. All you have to do is knock over one part of the food-chain. It doens't even have to mean the end of life in the ocean. The wrong algea start to grow out of control, and you have plenty of life, and also death at the same time.
Will this be it? Well we better just bloody hope it isn't because else we are screwed. But the right wingers seem determined to keep trying to screw up until they finally really manage to screw us all.
Gosh, off-shore drilling isn't safe. Irak doesn't have weapons of mass destruction. Banks do need goverment control. Are republicans even capable of saying "we were wrong"?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Hate to break this to everyone but each human you produce will inevitably increases your carbon footprint by 10x. So even if you stop using petroleum, chances are your spawn won't.
Have a good night!
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
Just to clarify, the surface oil area is not anywhere near the size of Florida, according to those NASA images and overflight observations.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Not to the right, simply polarized. Hubert Humphrey looks pretty moderate these days too.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
He's a corporatist. If you think he is left wing, you really have guzzled the Flavor-Aid.
And married to a Democrat (Maria Shriver), among other things. Chalk it up as parody failure.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
unfortunate how most anti-nuclear arguments use Chernobyl as an example - we can build them so much safer today. Looks like the oil drilling technology hasn't come as far, while still capable of producing devastating effects for years to come.
Unfortunate how most pro-drilling advocates used the slogan "we can build them much safer today".1 2 3 4, etc etc.
These are the same old arguments businesses constantly give to get around regulation. Call the laws "outdated", "old", and talk about how progress has made them unnecessary.
We saw the same "mining is much safer today" from coal companies skirting regulations. And it's the same line of argument that was used to remove regulations from the financial industry. And it's used pretty much everywhere that "stifling" government regulation stands in the way of "economic progress and freedom".
At 5:00 in this video you can learn how the oil companies lobbied successfully to NOT have to use modern safety backup systems:
"BP didn't want to spend the money for a system- a fail-safe system... used all over the world... except the United States because we give them a free pass. ...it's called the "acoustic switch" system.. it's a relay system that... stops the oil exactly from the source... If BP has to do business in Norway, they have to use the switch. When they do it in the US, they don't have to use it... During the Bush deregulation years, you had the mineral management service that told companies like BP that "gee whiz we have a new policy- it's the closed-door Dick Cheney policy..." that allowed the industry to bypass safe systems like the acoustic switch, and there was no need to spend $500,000 with a company that was making $40 billion dollars. It was a complete bypass of safety."
Obama is no where near the left. The American political spectrum is shifted so far right that our "left" candidates are too far on the right for most first world nations' center-right parties.
The U.S.S. Arizona is losing about a quart per day. It's tanks had about 1.5 million gallons when it was bombed at Pearl Harbor. Some of that burned but it's not clear how much.
One thing to remember though, the 1,000 or 5,000 gallons per day estimate that this well is losing is probably as low as is remotely justifiable. BP gains nothing by overestimating the amount of the leakage, they do however gain something by underestimating it.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
This is what's going to happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Dark_Water
Why in the hell is the max $75 million?
The fund for oil spill cleanup aught to be every dime they ever made not a tax I pay. You make the mess you clean it up.
Dumb question, why was Halliburton cementing this rig shut in preparation for abandonment by Horizon? Math is not my strong suit, but here goes. Conservative estimates say the untended well is spewing 5,000 barrels of crude oil a day into the gulf. BP estimates it might take 90 days to seal off the leak. That's 450,000 barrels of oil that is just coming up from the ocean floor on its own, no pumping. (This makes sense, as oil is lighter than water and would naturally rise out of the hole.) Crude oil is currently selling for $86.19 a barrel (even higher in the futures market.) That's almost $39 million worth of oil that is, again, just bubbling up on its own. The good lord only knows how much is actually in the oil field, but I'd guess it's probably much, much higher. I don't know much about the intricacies of oil harvesting, but why would they be abandoning this much easily obtainable oil after they've already done the enormously difficult and expensive task of poking a hole in the earth almost a mile below sea level? This just doesn't make sense.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I think the supporters of offshore drilling, at least the intelligent ones, and I am not saying the "Drill Baby Drill" crowd was knew there would be serious accident eventually. Its just a common sense no matter what precautions you take if you engage in a fundamentally dangerous activity often enough eventually the odds will catch up with. Skiers break bones, drivers have accidents, nuclear reactors melt down or leak, coal mines collapse, drillers have spills, these things happen.
We should do our best to learn what went wrong and our best to avoid it in the future but we must accept that this is a consequence of the life style we enjoy the rest of the time. Experience with other major spills shows us the environment will recover eventually. This is a tragedy and its going to impact some of us more than others. I bet though for every Gulf Coast fisherman or tour operator that gets put out of business there was AT LEAST one who was/is making a comfortable living in oil and gas. I think you also have to consider all the good in terms of quality of life cheap petroleum and energy in general has done our nation as whole and will no doubt continue to do. When you look at this in broad objective terms its hard for me to conclude it was not worth it. Maybe when all the consequences are known I will change my mind but for now lets be sensible and keep in mind the old saying "no pain no gain."
There is something wrong with a lot of people that prevents them from accepting that we are mortal beings and the world, in many ways, is a dangerous place. It's like they want to live a modern lifestyle directly or indirectly involving such things as cars, other heavy machinery, electricity, oil, prepared foods, medicine, aviation and lots of other things but do not want to acknowledge the non-zero risk associated with them. Unfortunate events like this oil spill are considered newsworthy because they are so rare despite the vast multitude of things that can potentially go wrong, which is nothing other than an engineering triumph.
On a mundane level, we need and want oil so it's a question of where it will come from, not whether we will have it. Apparently it's more acceptable to some to pay foreigners to do the drilling for us than it is to also use our own resources. It's as though birds and fish in oceans in other parts of the world wouldn't suffer from an oil spill as much as the animals affected by this one, as though foreign oil workers killed by an explosion wouldn't be just as dead as our domestic oil workers who were killed by this one.
On a more philosophical level, we are mortal. One can deal with that by fearing every little thing that might bring harm. In that case, you should not drive and you probably shouldn't stay home either since many accidents happen there. Good luck having any real quality of life if you spend such a great deal of time worrying about the end of life. Or one can deal with this by taking reasonable precautions and then viewing mortality in a different light, as an incentive to taste life to the dregs and enjoy every moment you have and every person you know as much as possible during the time you have. The problem with media sensationalism and politics is that fear sells and there is little profit and political power to be had by seeing it this way. The one strong advantage this gives is that anyone who holds this viewpoint does it genuinely as an individual choice since it's exactly the opposite of what we are daily encouraged to believe.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
"what do we do about it?"
Quit whining.
There's nothing "we" can do about it.
The company(s) losing 50,000 barrels a day at $100/barrel are working on it.
When did it become ok to whine?
E
Really? By that logic,
- if you use any electronics, or wear shoes for that matter, you're partially responsible for the sweatshops in China. (I notice you didn't ask if he bought specifically from BP, so I'm not gonna cut you any such slack here either.)
- if you ever used anything cocoa-based, you're partially responsible for child slave labour in Africa. (Turns out even buying "Fair Trade" doesn't mean it can't be from those.)
- if you or any relative ever used opiates (e.g., as painkillers for a cancer), then you're at least partially responsible for funding the taliban in Afghanistan. (There is no opium poppy grown in the USA to the best of my knowledge, you know.)
- if you ever bought bread, whiskey, beer or anything made from grain, really, then you're at least partially responsible for the destruction of agriculture in third world countries and the extinction of several species because of pesticides.
Etc.
I could call you a monster for that, but in reality, it just shows how stupid that kind of argument is.
I know it's hard for you right-wing, corporate- and oil-baron-apologist crowd to comprehend, but really it isn't everyone else who's a hypocrite. It's just your limited brain power, sorry. The rest of us can distinguish between personal guilt and just not having other choices but trying to change society for the better in those aspects. But, don't worry if you can't understand it right away. Some day your children might evolve into something that does. And maybe can walk without getting bruised knuckles. Won't that be nice?
Or in other words, that's gotta be the lamest attempt at a guilt trip attempt ever.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It seems that, if anything, it's swung away from statism. In the post-WW2 but pre-Reagan era, both parties were in favor of a whole range of statist approaches that now often struggle to get support among even the nominally "left" party. For example, Nixon imposed price controls, created the EPA, and was in favor of a national healthcare program, and was seen as right-wing at the time.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
With more than 150 replies so far, only one poster mentions the Transocean drilling contractor.
Drilling contractors drill wells for oil companies like a house building contractor will build your house.
Mass media almost exclusively talk about BP but the drilling contractor is the real specialist is oil well drilling. So, it is just like the media were mentioning exclusively yourself because the house you had a contractor building blew up and killed people.
Of course the client (BP) might very well have some part of responsibility, especially if they pressured the contractor to cut costs in a way impacting security. I wander how this thing will settle in courts, how the responsibilities will be split.
Anyway, I though that it was good to mention the above in contrast to the over simplistic view usually depicted in mass media.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Obama, and the mainstream Democratic party platform are moderate to slightly right leaning. They have very few positions that could be called "socialist", they are more corporatist.
The Republican party has veered so far right, that it is in serious danger of wrapping the spectrum and becoming far left.
...this one will do that in three days if that crimped riser pipe gives way. And how long are they saying it'll take to fix it? Months?
I like the way you think, h4rr4r. I can't sign this as your newest buddy because I've already modded.
If corporations want to have all the civil rights of persons, including the right to participate in our elections, then they need to be eligible for the death penalty when they screw up so massively and an entire ecosystem is fouled for decades, and thousands of people lose their jobs and (at least) 11 people lost their lives. BP's off-shore wells need to be nationalized, like right now. That'll at least pay off a fraction of what this is going to cost our society.
I understand BP has already been circulating waivers on the Gulf Coast, offering people $5k if they'll sign away any rights to damages. The money paying all the oil company lawyers crawling around the Gulf should have gone into cleaning this mess up.
Oh, and guess who else is involved in this clusterfuck? Our old friends Haliburton were involved in the management of this site, including safety. I guess there are going to be a lot of dicks being pulled in Washington by oil company lobbyists over the next few months.
It's sad that such meaningless statements are considered insightful by some. There is far more regulation of the economy now than there was in Nixon's time, so in what way exactly has US "swung to the right" since then? What "abuses of power" do you speak of and what do they have to do with anything? Economically, if you take the extreme "right" to be completely unregulated market and extreme "left" to be communist style central planning, the US has actually swung to the left and sadly continues moving in that direction.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
If all that oil leaks out, eventually it will spread to all the oceans. We get most of our oxygen from the oceans. And that is a large field, but I haven't read any exact figures yet, just some hand waving numbers.
It could really suck, depending on how much is down there.
Drill dumbasses drill!! (oil fail)
That should be reserved for Transocean.
http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Home-1.html
Stock's up today.
A five-digit ID is no guarantee against trolling. Or parody. Or parody failure.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
“Behold, when ye are entered into the city, there shall a man meet you, bearing a pitcher of water; follow him into the house where he entereth in.” Luke 22:10.
We are living in apocalyptic times.
The top 10 rated "News" shows are on conservative networks in the US. Please elaborate on your premise of a liberal-biased media.
and consume no oil, you will be paying for this spill decades from now as that will be at least how long it will be before the US has seafood from the Gulf of Mexico, about 40% of total US catch.
One of the problems is that the US and Britain do not have as strong requirements as other countries for deep water drilling. For example, several other countries require an acoustically activated remote shut-off valve.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/01/nation/la-na-oil-spill-investigation-20100501
Halliburton is under investigation for problems cementing near Australia and they had just done this to this rig. About half of the blowouts that have occurred in the gulf were due to cementing problems. There's also concern that curing cement raised the temperature of methane hydrates causing it to become unstable.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
It seems that, if anything, it's swung away from statism. In the post-WW2 but pre-Reagan era, both parties were in favor of a whole range of statist approaches that now often struggle to get support among even the nominally "left" party. For example, Nixon imposed price controls, created the EPA, and was in favor of a national healthcare program, and was seen as right-wing at the time.
I define "statist" in terms of the size and power of the federal government. Currently its size as measured by dollars is around 35% of GDP. Compare that to just ten years ago and you'll quickly see my point. Note that the relative size of government measured as a percentage of GDP should be inherently self-adjusting for inflation.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
...the current flow is reduced by a crimped riser pipe that some reports suggest is deteriorating. After that, estimates are 4.2 million gallons a day out of the hole.
We CAN build both nuclear and drilling and mining systems safer today. Technology and laws, among other things, helps that to happen. It's unfortunate when businesses save a buck today and cost them and everyone else tomorrow. It's also unfortunate when certain industries come to a halt because of preventable disasters and fear, like the nuclear industry, instead of making them better and safer. My original point was more in comparing the two industries - both require safety precautions and both have major impacts in a disaster. But for whatever the reasons there is more public fear with radiation than with oil.
I have to say, we are willing to spend billions in bailing out stupid banks that had a almost fraudulent system, but when it comes not only to saving the world from an apocalyptic disaster and even coming up with a way to not only contain but actually siphon the oil coming out from the ocean which no one has claimed yet, i tend to think enough already, just get er done!
Yeah, it's gone up, but most of that has been due to autopilots put in place decades ago (mostly social security and medicare expanding faster than inflation). I don't see much actual support for new policies among politicians.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You're absolutely right. I'm Irish and to me, the Democrats are, at best, moderate and at worst, on the hard right compared to my left wing politics. In fact, the former American Ambassador to Ireland, Tom Foley, once called me "an out and out Marxist". Now I'm no Marxist, hell, I'm not even communist, but considering his politics and the huge swing to the right that Americans have had since Reagan, I took it as being that I was simply one of the few true left wingers that he had encountered in those early days of his tenure in Ireland!
There is no -1 disagree
Calm down guys. We will live. It has happened before:
http://www.incidentnews.gov/incident/6250
However, if you own a beachhouse in Florida you might want to sell within the next 24 hours:
http://www.news-press.com/article/20100503/GREEN/100502030/1075/Oil-may-reach-Loop-Current-within-24-hours
Yep, I do not remember him mentioning Transocean, which did not help with the over simplistic view that mass media offers us as I explained here:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1639434&cid=32079132
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
You can't get more liberal than chris matthews, keith olderman, rachel maddow and the rest of cnn. In fact, I can only think of two commentators who aren't socialistic liberals, and neither of them are on cnn.
with the exception of a couple of centrist commentators on fox, liberalism dominates the mainstream media.
Sorry, but not all of the effects are linear. There are long and complex feedback cycles involved, and the only real answer is "You want me to guess? OK. But it's a guess."
If you wan't me to guess I could guess that the oxygen production of the oceans is cut by 2/3 over the next decade, and slowly recovers over the following century. If you want me to defend it I couldn't. (But the oxygen production is already declining, so the only two questionable parts are:
1) cut by 2/3. That number was clearly picked out of a hat.
2) recovery? There's no reason to presume that. This suggestion is merely an acceleration of existing trends.
(That said, "cut by 2/3" is probably fear-mongering. 1/20 might be more reasonable. Or possibly not.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html
It's not certain that this remote valve would have been able to contain the spill, but it is another line of defense that the US does not require. Brazil and Norway require these acoustic switches. They only cost about 500,000 dollars. I'm assuming that is a tiny amount compared to the cost of the platform.
Someone mod parent up, a score of 4 does not do it justice.
amen. Legal "persons" need real person-esque responsibility, not all of the benefits and none of the cons.
But how do you expect to nationalize a multinational outfit that is headquartered on a different continent? I suppose you could seize their American properties as "payment", but other than that...
Sent from my PDP-11
He also comes across as being competent in foreign affairs.
He tried escalation, realized he couldn't go further without war with China (whose demonstrated willingness was demonstrated in the Korean War), cut a deal, bolted, and pulled off detente (which matters far more than the whole of the Vietnam War).
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
and chain emails don't count..
"Claims are circulating on the Internet..."
There are claims circulating on the Internet for just about everything... so let's see some credible sources, m'kay?
I agree. Conservative mediaites like Rush Limbaugh say it was the liberals who blew up the rig intentionally:
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/limbaugh_obama_blew_up_oil_rigs/
After reading that I was able to think for myself and shake free from the "factual" bonds of the liberal media.
Sigh.
Our cities and infrastructure are designed around the automobile and have no sense of real community or ecological plan. The future must be designed around a society that plans for the ecology of more than the just the needs of cars! Perhaps a crisis like this is necessary to wake up the most industrialized consumptive stupid nation on Earth to the facts of the future.
I grow old and tired of being just a "stupefied-consumer" in the eyes of a corporate crazed system of consumption and waste. Our corporate culture of greed and consumption must change now or we will be considered as a lost generation of essentially greed driven parasitic humans.
Are you sure you are speaking of America? Obama (a left wing party member) is president and "the right" are a minority in the Senate and House. Get your facts straight... The left is in charge in America now.
Take a look at the Political Compass. How many dots do you see to the left of the vertical axis? For that matter, there aren't many dots below the horizontal axis, either. As has been said many times, both major parties are pretty much the same, the Republicans are just more extreme than the Democrats.
I am personally not a fan of nationalizing the oil well, heck they may be able to pay for this. Now if they fail too, then of course sell everything they own to pay said debt.
I would much prefer that those responsible be held criminally liable. Only when people actually stand to lose something will they be responsible with their actions.
Sorry, but not all of the effects are linear.
True, but exponential is not the only other direction things could go. Constant is also an option. I am not claiming this is the case, but if a layer of surface oil seeks a natural thickness then a small reef may get slimed in a similar manner regardless of whether the slick is one mile wide or twenty miles wide - given an expectation that onshore winds and currents will cause the slick to have an easier time expanding laterally. So the effect on a given reef could be constant to linear? Again, I'm not claiming this is so, just questioning that the effect is exponential or some other extreme.
--
Perpenso Calc for iPhone and iPod touch, scientific and bill/tip calculator, fractions, complex numbers, RPN
I just want to point out that the "hydrogen economy" touted by W. is a sham. The cheapest way to get hydrogen is by steam forming from fossil fuels. E.g. live steam over coal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production
I am angry with Reagan. He destroyed the US, and harmed the world, by killing alternative fuels research in the early 80's.
W. and Cheney are also objects of my anger. As is GM who killed by what accounts was a great electric car in 2000.
And the US Congress for gutting mileage standards.
How stupid are people?
Why are we using 19th century technology in the 21st century?
The upside is ANWAR maybe untouchable now.
This will probably be modded as "redundant".
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'm absolutely not a deep sea aquatic etc. engineer, but what exactly is the problem with the diverting?
i.e. my house has gutters and pipes to lead the water that naturally flows down along paths and through those pipes to a destination I want it to - the sewage system below.
So why doesn't the reverse work?
i.e. create a (flexible) tube - probably out of segments, that can be installed one segment at a time by divers or robots, with the first one placed around the well source. It would take a fair bit of materials but with each segment the potential dispersion area gets smaller as you get closer to the surface.. and eventually, it seems to me, you reach the actual surface and you can pipe it away from there to floating storage containers that can then be hauled off to have the crude pumped over to ships/whatever and be of some use.
The idea is too simple to not have been considered by other laymen before, but googling around gives so many generic articles right now that I can't find the obvious reason as to why this is not an option. So your (and others') thoughts are appreciated.
An oil pipeline spill in Alaska a few years ago. A refinery explosion and fire in Texas last year. Now this. Somewhere along the line BP procedures need to be questioned because it appears that something is wrong with they way the conduct their operations.
I realize BP says they will pay for this. But watch the actions of their lawyers closely, and the bank accounts of your congressmen even closer.
We should do our best to learn what went wrong and our best to avoid it in the future but we must accept that this is a consequence of the life style we enjoy the rest of the time.
We could also take it as a sign that our way of living needs to change. We need to use less energy and switch to less damaging, more sustainable energy sources. People hate to acknowledge it, but it's the simple truth.
Just writing this sort of accident off as "the cost of doing business" only works in the short term. Eventually, the cheap, accessible oil will be gone, the ecological damage will be irreversible, and then we'll still have to switch over to other energy sources. It's clear that we're heading down a blind alley, so why not turn around ASAP, rather than waiting until all possible damage has been done?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
OTOH, it shows how somebody is unwilling to stand behind his words (and in cases where the consequences would be mostly harmless...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Seriously, why don't they bomb (torpedo if they have to) the bedrock where the leak(s), or pipe feeding the leak, is situated. The actual oil reserve itself is no doubt many kilometres below the seabed. If they blow up the seabed will it not self seal (or at least drastically slow) the leak ??
Oh, this oughta be good. Please. Name some "centrists" who have shows on Fox.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
What happens when you cover a Florida-size portion of the Gulf of Mexico with a thin oil layer just as the summer solstices approaches? A method to reduce water evaporation that rivals Bill Gates patented hurricane stopper (http://www.usatoday.com/weather/research/2009-07-15-gates-hurricanes_N.htm)? Maybe. Of course, it will heat up the Gulf, too, acting like a solar collector. That may offset the reduced evaporation and amp-up a mega hurricane, which could wash away the Gulf Coast.
what? you're insane. the US is so far to the left right now, few people alive know what the right is anymore. influential companies will always hold sway over government if not kept in check, right or left.
The current oil spill spew out 40 thousand tons of crude.
Ixotic spew 400 thousand tons
The gulf war in 91 did between 750 thousand and 1.5million tons spill (but mostly over inland / burning).
Amoco Cadiz was about 250 thousand tons.
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
It is not the worst oil spill by any standard and the ocean got off with 10 time as worst. Sure it will polute , sure it sucks, sure we4 want it stopped ASAP, but it ain't the end of the world oce3an by any standard.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Great, just what we need is more dicks in the hot tub.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I've heard Rush a few times in the truck when I go to lunch with my bud. He's a die hard Rush fan and an idiot.
I haven't had the heart to explain in depth all the reasons that Rush is a shit spewing douchebag to him. Rush drives me fucking nuts. If I ever met him, there's a strong possibility I'll just throw him off the nearest cliff.
Idiots don't generally bother me, but this one has fans and he is creating many more idiots.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Sigs? We don't need no steekin Sigs!
Thing I don't get is why every car today is still running on oil based fuels.
30 years ago, the LA times truck that pulled up each week to offload the "Calendar" sections we put in the Sunday papers. On the back, it had a sign which said "this truck is running on clean natural gas". I thought, "cool, no more smog!" If they are already using on LA times trucks, it can't too long before some cars have it too. No more Arab oil embargoes, etc.
In about 2004 or 2005, the Washington area metro converted its entire fleet of buses to natural gas in about a year. I work near a major Metro station and could see the first few buses and was excited. Within a year, it was rare to see an old diesel bus. No more smelly diesel fumes!. If an agency as incompetent as Washington Metro can convert its entire bus fleet in a year, how hard can it be?
We have been able to do this easily for at least 30 years. Apparently to convert a regular gas engine to natural gas requires only a few modifications, to the gas tank (obviousely), fuel lines and injectors. As anyone who has been to a Home Depot or most grocery stores knows, the distribution system is also already in place.
Imagine the marketplace if we had 3 different fuel systems for transporation: Oil, Natural Gas, and Electricity. Then as a bad computer analogy, imagine if Windows, Linux, and OS/X each had about a 33% market share.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Oh I agree, and furthermore, if this accident turns out to be as bad as the worst case, then I'd predict that this is probably the end of BP the company. They're probably looking at bankruptcy, and then being broken up into assets that are purchased by their competitors. In the worst case.
Ultimately, BP is responsible for this as they leased the rig and hired the subcontractors. I'm not going to demonize BP. Right now, the cause is all a matter of speculation until they can get the well capped and do a proper investigation. Accidents happen (and yes, I live in a gulf state not too far from the coast), and the truth is, no one is giving up fossil fuels anytime soon, because there simply isn't a really practical replacement right now. Supplements, yes. Replacements... not so much. I recently read that there are over 1400 wells in the gulf, and none of them have ever had an accident like this. We should probably wait to see what actually happened and why before we decide who to line up against the wall.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
RTFA:
Or is NOAA not credible enough?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
How are are the results "the same"? The US government already spends some 41.5% of the world's military expenditures, and probably has the best traditional (meaning, for nation-versus-nation wars) forces. It also spends a lot of money on social security, medicare, and soon health care, and the results of those programs are people who might survive job loss, illness, or old age. Now, which one you care about more depends on your political views, but it does matter where the government is big.
That may be a bit overly dramatic. The spill hasn't even added up to the Exxon Valdez yet, and this particular well will have to flow for a few more months past that to add up to what seeps into the gulf naturally. Now obviously one big leak isn't the same thing as 600 smaller ones, but oil isn't exactly new to the ecosystem either.
Link here
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I was in the US Navy for nine years, five of those at sea. And while you are on a ship, you train for fire-fighting several times a week, with dozens of different scenarios. And in ALL of them, de-watering is one of the most crucial aspects of fire-fighting.
If you don't take out the water you're pumping into the space that's on fire, your ship will sink. So we train, train and train some more on how to use electric pumps, diesel pumps, installed pumps, peri-jet eductors, s-type eductors and just plain mops and buckets.
I've been maintaining that this rig should NOT have gone down. They should have got fire-fighters onboard to establish fire boundaries, and more importantly, flooding boundaries. Bulkheads should have been sealed off, pumps should have been installed and fire-fighting water should have been pumped out.
But Mother of God...looking at those pictures, I don't think anything would have saved it.
The fire appears to involve the entire center of the rig. I was thinking, get someone inside the pontoons to keep them pumped out, but there doesn't look like there was any way to get someone inside them.
Based on what I could see in the pictures, my guess is that the overall superstructure simply melted. The tops of the pontoons probably burned through, losing watertight integrity. Fire would have poured inside, killing any pumps that might have been running, and then the fire-fighting water simply filled them up.
This thing went *BOOM* in a way it's not supposed to go boom.
[End Of Line]
A leaked document by definition has no credibility. Unless and until NOAA releases an official communication, and the spokesperson gets on TV and backs it up (rather than dancing around it as this guy did), the report may as well be written in crayon on the back of a UGA diploma.
Yeah, it's gone up, but most of that has been due to autopilots put in place decades ago (mostly social security and medicare expanding faster than inflation). I don't see much actual support for new policies among politicians.
What do you call the government-sponsored bailouts of various financial companies, or government expanding into the health-care insurance market? Or a few years prior to that, the federalization of airport security into the TSA, or the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, or the Patriot Act? If these are not (relatively) new policies I don't know what would qualify.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
No, as I have to point out to idiot after blooming idiot, the US has two positions: right, and further right. I think you got your left and right confused there.
How are are the results "the same"? The US government already spends some 41.5% of the world's military expenditures, and probably has the best traditional (meaning, for nation-versus-nation wars) forces. It also spends a lot of money on social security, medicare, and soon health care, and the results of those programs are people who might survive job loss, illness, or old age. Now, which one you care about more depends on your political views, but it does matter where the government is big.
They're the same because the federal government is looking for growth areas and will exploit them wherever they are found. Any benefit to me as a taxpayer is indicental.
You mention Social Security and health care. If I could, I would opt out of Social Security entirely. I'm in my mid-20s. If I cannot figure out on my own, without assistance, that I will one day grow old and wish to retire, and that the time to start saving up and preparing for that is right now, why should somebody else be forced to pay for my lack of foresight? Morally speaking, I don't know how to justify that one. That is, I cannot tell you why my failure to plan ahead should become someone else's emergency. I certainly cannot tell you a good reason why the Baby Boomers could not have felt the same way as I do, why they prefer to burden their children and grandchildren instead of working to make sure they have a better life then they had. As far as I am concerned, they are the most selfish group to ever exercise suffrage.
It's likewise with health insurance. I pay a monthly premium for my health insurance. I see it this way: I pay an insurance premium so that I am prepared in the event of a medical disaster, or I risk bankruptcy. I chose to pay the insurance premium. Other people will have to weigh the cost-benefit analysis as they see fit. So long as they don't dip into my wallet to make up for their shortcomings, I have no problem with this.
Where the government is so big is precisely where people don't want to use some foresight and plan ahead and take personal responsibility for their situation. There's nothing politicians love more than a crisis to solve. The problem is, a "crisis" that involves adults who could not properly plan for inevitabiltiies is not actually a crisis at all. Those adults deserve to be left to their own devices. If they succeed, uphold them as examples of good planning. If they fail, use them as examples of why one should think of these things ahead of time. Yet that's not good enough for big government, and it's apparently big business to protect people from their own poor decision-making.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The problem is that there are "Progressives" in BOTH parties. It's not about left/right or liberal/conservative or even Republican/Democrat. Nixon, both Bushes, Carter and Obama were/are Progressives.
Personally I believe that the government that governs best governs least.
As someone who lives in Louisiana, all I can say now is that the whole thing is very scary. We will have to see what happens.
However, what may be of interest to some is something I heard today from a friend who has worked on Transoceana/BP rigs. Apparently, what happened was that they were in the very final stages of finishing the well and the down pipe is filled with sea water for that phase, rather than the more traditional mud. What then happened was that there was a release of gas. This would have been held, or at least slowed by the mud, but just rose up through the seawater at a high rate of speed. When it reached the head, it just vented from the top. Now, as the gas is heavier than air, it sank down. While the drilling floor is a spark free zone, not all of the rig is. One spark from an AC unit, or the like is probably what set it all off, too quickly for anybody to do anything. My buddy also told me that the practices out there can be mighty sloppy and not done by the book. He no longer works in the industry and hope all the companies involved get what they deserve.
Any oil engineers out there want to explain what this story means -- I'm no expert, so I do not fully understand it.
We dug too deep.
What happens if the US totally pisses off British Petroleum and BP says "fuck it, we're outta here. good luck with your gulf of chocolate pudding"?
"So, considering that losing our oceanic life, with subsequent unraveling of our land-based ecosystems, is a far more possible apocalyptic scenario than a killer asteroid — what do we do about it?""
A) you aren't going to be "losing our oceanic life". Locally, temporarily, yes. But this event will pass and things will be back to normal eventually.
B) it is far, far, FAR from the effect of an asteroid impact or any other kind of global apocalyptic scenario. This isn't a global-extinction-level event. Oil wells at sea have spilled this much oil per day before. Much more. Heck, oil wells ON LAND in the USA have spilled several times this much per day. There was an oil well drilled back in the early 20th century that spilled 18000 barrels/day for months in the Great Valley of California. It made lakes of oil. Oil wells and ships at sea have spilled as much as this one is anticipated to spill even if it keeps going at this pace for many weeks. It's sooooo bad mainly because of one solitary reason: it's along the continental U.S.A. where people can see first-hand the effects and scream about it, rather than it happening in some far-flung corner of the world that "nobody" (in the USA) cares about. This is distinctly not the end of the world. Maybe the end of much tourism and fisheries along Gulf Coast for a while, but that -- supremely bad as it is -- isn't the end of the world either. For gods sake try to get some perspective. It's bad. Very bad. Not apocalyptic.
C) oil seeps already occur naturally all around the Gulf, and are found all around the world. The ocean system and its biota are equipped to clean up from this event eventually even if the humans do nothing, and the humans that made the mess are trying their best. Many creatures will die -- many creatures that humans care about and that the ecosystem needs. Others (bacteria mostly) will feast. It will take decades for the ecosystem to fully recover -- but it will recover.
D) it's light, sweet crude in a warm climate. This is much more biodegradable and easier to clean up than heavy oil. It could have been a lot worse.
E) any time you complain about oil spills ask yourself this question: "How much oil have I used this year, how much have I complained about the price, and how much have I done to use less or encourage alternatives?" If the answers are: "plenty", "plenty" and "not much" then you don't understand that accidents like this are part of the cost your, my, and every other user's choices. We asked these companies to push to the ends of the Earth and to technical limits to find more of this stuff. We want them to do it safely, and they try. Everyone is prepared to quickly blame the evil, irresponsible oil companies when a problem like this happens, but they ARE responsible when it comes to safety as they explore, they DO spend enormous amounts of money on safety systems, and they have a HUGE economic incentive not to let an accident like this ever happen. Do you think they want to lose a $300 million rig, millions of dollars a day, billions in cleanup, and human lives? Even if they were heartless they still don't want to lose money like that. Regardless, they do it all because we pay them to and we set the terms. We have voted with our dollars: "Find more." We can and should push for tougher safety standards but accidents WILL happen. Human systems are not infallible.
I figure there are only two possible reasons for a failure this grand, despite all the precautions that companies take. Either this was an unlikely series of technical/engineering failures of multiple safety systems that we will eventually come to scientifically understand and learn from so it doesn't happen again, or somebody somewhere committed a crime by signing off on something that wasn't actually up to engineering specifications. I laugh at the suggestion th
We are. Shame on us.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Most of the oil in the gulf will never be extracted.
Investors are unlikely to invest in any more deepwater drilling, at least in this block. Lawsuit potential. Expense. All make the profitability marginal at best. By the time we get desperate enough to try again, we probably will no longer have the means to do so.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Nothing to worry about since they quit using Jerry Curl
Let not forget which party made this their slogan.
Perhaps, a creative used of google earth, but it doesn't look like this guy drew his lines right. It look like he circled the entire hypoxic zone at the mouth of the Mississippi. How is it that one guy with google earth suddenly is more believable than the experts and those flying over the accident. This is not to minimize the this terrible disaster, but misinformation like this can take on a life of its own.
What would happen if a hurricane went right through this? Good thing this it isn't the season yet, but if it continues and is churned up by a big hurricane, it could make a horrible situation even worse. Then again, maybe it would make it better, dispersing the oil? Any way you look at it this is scary.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I don't know about you but I am just beyond angry about this oil well pumping into the Atlantic Ocean, killing everything in it almost immediately, because I know this is the most catastrophe that has ever befallen the earth. This is armageddon. I'm not smiling when I say this. Oil will continue to flood into the Atlantic Ocean, poisoning the entire world's oceans in one year of having this oil pump into this mile deep oil well that is flowing unchecked, gushing oil at this very second into the Atlantic, and then Pacific Ocean, turning both into an oily puddle--forever! For the rest of our lives, we just killed the ocean. They will never re-cap that oil well, or do anything whatsoever to cap it or decrease its flow into the oceans. It will pump oil into the oceans for years and within one year all the oceans on this earth will be dead! Too late! It's done. Go immediately to the ocean and breath in that fresh air, because soon it will smell like gasoline all over the earth, in a one-micron tall layer of petroleum that will oil every single drop of the ocean. This is the dumbest thing that anyone in all humanity has done. This is the worst thing that will ever happen. Everything in the ocean will die. Think about it.
And if you continued listening to the lecture about collusion, you'd know that in the long run one or more members of a cartel will cheat on the agreement and sell their product at a slightly lower price, hoping to make up the "loss" through volume. Other members catch on ("Hey, we're not selling as much as we thought we would!") and start lowering their price. Eventually prices normalize.
The second part of your post is much more sensible and explains why we _do_ see fluctuations in the oil market.
...it shows how somebody is unwilling to stand behind his words...
That is a meaningless, foolish statement.. Words should stand on their own. If they need somebody(a charismatic, for example) to prop them up, they are worthless, and should be ignored. Try not to obsess on the messenger.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
America's definition of 'left wing' and 'right wing' is rather different to what is understood elsewhere in the world. Democrats and republicans are both right wing, it's just a question of how far right.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
You might not have flown to Germany, but you did just say it...
After all, I am strangely colored.
We CAN build both nuclear and drilling and mining systems safer today. Technology and laws, among other things, helps that to happen. It's unfortunate when businesses save a buck today and cost them and everyone else tomorrow. It's also unfortunate when certain industries come to a halt because of preventable disasters and fear, like the nuclear industry, instead of making them better and safer.
My original point was more in comparing the two industries - both require safety precautions and both have major impacts in a disaster. But for whatever the reasons there is more public fear with radiation than with oil.
I don't know about the oil industry, but given that we have a couple of operating (or at least recently operating) nuclear plants in adjacent New England states, I've followed that industry a bit. So when you say that we, as in Americans, can build better nuclear plants, you're basing this on what? We haven't build a new nuclear plant in well over a decade (and that last one was just one), and haven't designed a new one in about 20 years. Three Mile Island was 30 years ago, Chernobyl 25. There are essentially no living, practicing nuclear power plant engineers in the US with any experience whatsoever. Some of the most recently designed plants (Connecticut Yankee, New Hampshire Seabrook) are maintenance nightmares in present day (hear about the tower collapse in Vermont?). If only half of the stories about Seabrook are true, you wouldn't want to live or work in a building built by the ... ahm ... workers who constructed that plant.
We might as well be starting from square one. So, again, please provide evidence for your assertion that we are better at building nuclear plants. I see nothing to support that assertion, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.
There are two deeper issues with building new nuclear power plants (and I am pro-nuclear, and have been for decades), at least the standard non-breeding designs that require moderators to slow fast neutrons. The first issue is that because of the inherent public safety risk, they require higher standards of construction skill ... but lowest-bidding practices nearly guarantee that the crews aren't going to be the best and brightest. The second is that we are still unable to handle nuclear waste from a technological and social standpoint. Moreover, any plan that includes shipping nuclear waste to some central facility (like the thankfully ill-fated Yucca Mountain plan) presents a serious national security liability as the waste is transported from the source to the storage facility.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A leaked document by definition has no credibility. Unless and until NOAA releases an official communication, and the spokesperson gets on TV and backs it up (rather than dancing around it as this guy did), the report may as well be written in crayon on the back of a UGA diploma.
What color is the sky in your world?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Poor words being, potentially, propped up by charismatic speaker and somebody willing to say such words only on the condition that people won't be able to know what kind of fool he might be are two completelly different things; why do you want to confuse them?
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's not clear that an acoustic data link to the blowout protector would have helped. The model installed was supposed to close if the connection to the surface was lost. If it didn't close on that, a secondary data link probably wouldn't help.
As for things that go wrong, here's a marlin with its spear caught in a blowout preventer. An underwater ROV with robot arms is brought into position, grabs onto the tail of the marlin, pulls it out, and releases the tail. The marlin then charges forward, and jams itself into the same place. The ROV moves back into position, grabs the dumb fish, pulls it out again, and drags it a short distance away before releasing it. The fish again tries to attack the blowout preventer, but finally gives up.
Has our thirst for oil unleashed an apocalypse?
One of the cute things about the Book of Revelations is that you can ALWAYS read current events into it as the signs and portents of the end times. This has been going on for well over a thousand years.
If you believe in it, shouldn't you also believe in the part that says nobody will know the time in advance?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's not linear (including flat) AND it's not exponential. It's complicated.
There aren't ANY good models for this problem, but the simple one are known not to work.
(OTOH, I'm not expert in this particular field. This is just something blatantly obvious to anyone who reads the popularizations of science, like New Scientist and Scientific American. [Well, it's not blatantly obvious that there aren't any good models, but there aren't. That took a little bit more reading.])
E.g., small spills have large "edge effects" which spread some problems even while mitigating others. These are less significant factors, probably, in larger spills. But, OTOH, since the center of a larger spill has a nearly 100% kill effect, you won't find as large, proportionately, a population of injured animals which *might* be saved. (The area of a circle expands faster than the circumference...not to mention that the center has an actual bit of volume, so you only get a thin film near the edges. P.S.: This is logiced out. I didn't research it, but I'd be real surprised if it weren't true.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Progressives are those who work to make things better for most of us, not for the select few.
... a capture device could be places over the "leak", the buoyant oil channeled to a surface collector and pumped out.
I hear they're working on it. Big concrete dome or box to be sunk over the blown well. Don't recall how many tons and how big, but it's HEAVY and BIG. Once it's in place it collects the oil before it gets a chance to get around the opening and the oil's buoyancy keeps it in the pipe - entraining a small amount of seawater (and perhaps insufficiently cautious sea life) to be separated later. As long as they remove the oil as fast as it comes out of the bore hole they should get essentially all of it.
The trap is already built but it takes time to get it to the site, position it, and sink it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Turns out it was an Act of God!
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Agreed. The oil was either going to enter the water or the atmosphere. Either way, it's a mess. Just more visible this way.
A classic photo of the oil rig burning or a view from outer space may become known as the "End-of-oil Fire". People in Pensacola are taking their cameras to the beach and photographing what it looked like "before the oil got there" for youtube and posterity. This is the trigger for the renewable energy future. 'bout time.
The huge mistake you make is in assuming that all forms of calamity can be warded off with proper planning. It's true that there's a heck of a lot that can be avoided with foresight and preparation. But a well-placed hurricane, bullet, love affair, or metastatic tumor can annihilate every one of those plans.
I suspect you're the kind of personality that thrives on feeling like you're in control and have the moral high ground. And that's all very well and good up to a point, but:
"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!"
(Robert Burns)
No matter how carefully you plan, it can all go to shit in an instant. And there's nothing you can do about it. EVER.
So if your worldview depends on cognitive errors like the just-world fallacy, or blaming the victim...well, then you're almost guaranteed to spend your last days in a state of abject terror and despair. Good luck with that.
Looks like Muzzi-land didn't like that particular oil-well. Muzzi see Muzzi do. Sure they can't blow-up gas in NYC, even in a Toyoda gastank. But dammwell they can blow-up oil in the Gulf. Who wants betting on the "undocumented" workers on that exploding well ? Eh ?? Boom ... Muzzi see Muzzi do.
Everyone knows that fire can't cause steel structures to collapse! It was clearly a government inside job.
Many of those that will suffer pain from this spill haven't gained at all, and cannot be reimbursed for their loss. I'm speaking of non-human inhabitants of the ocean and shore.
Many of the rest that suffer pain from this spill have gained rather little, and will not be reimbursed for their loss. I'm speaking of people in the gulf region that haven't seen proportional benefits from cheap petroleum.
And the rest? Those of us that have seen great economic benefit from cheap petroleum? Our gains are only material, and only temporary.
The problem is that there are "Progressives" in BOTH parties. It's not about left/right or liberal/conservative or even Republican/Democrat.
That seems incorrect. 'Progressive' as a political label means 'having left of center tendencies'. It's basically the modern label for 'Fabian socialist' or 'social democrat' - incremental movement toward resource sharing through democratic means, as opposed to revolutionary or radical socialist, who would advocate completely disestablishing the democratic system.
Unless you take the word 'progressive' to merely mean 'anyone in favour of a vaguely defined idea of progress, such as increase of the science budget and fewer restrictions on corporate capitalism'?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Nixon was a Republican. Bush was a Monarchist that wanted to be an American version of George III.
Why was that oil rig even capable of collapsing into the ocean? Are these things constructed that cheaply? I'd expect these things to be filled with containment measures for when something does go wrong and if something goes wrong mechanisms should kick in to prevent a disaster like this.
But ah, yes. BP wanted to cut some corners for even more profit and so decided to bribe the U.S. government into relaxing the rules about security, safety and environmental protection.
I can't sign this as your newest buddy because I've already modded.
Protip: Posting AC in a story you've modded wipes your mods without warning.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
So, sinking one loaded oil tanker dumped about as much oil into the ocean as this is expected to dump per month.
148 oil tankers were sunk during WW2. There was no ecological collapse as a result.
I have to ask you, how many millimeters of oil in your drinking water is acceptable for you to drink?
How many millimeters of crude oil would you like in your fried salt-water fish?
How many millimeters are required to affect cancer rates?
"Other readers have sent some interesting pictures of the spill. One set shows the Deepwater Horizon rig as it collapsed into the ocean. Others, from NASA, indicate that the spill's surface area now rivals that of Florida." Or didn't you read the article before commenting?
TPJ - Founder, The Amazon Basin
The benefit of this system is, of course, that oil companies aren't exposed to devastating liability; instead, the liability is spread across he entire oil industry. This is also the problem: no individual oil company has an adequate economic incentive to avoid risky behavior
Sounds just like the banks...
Is there a -1:moron moderation?
It's only really appropriate when the AC makes a post talking about their belief in the uselessness of anonynimity and privacy, which is not what happened here.
Not even in that case. My post is associated with an IP that is assigned to exactly one dial-up user at the moment from a phone line of a person who lives alone. Anyone with enough interest in my ID has access to all that data. What - exactly - makes me anonymous? Not logging in means I do not agree to the T&C's at the bottom of this page or presented via the registration process (words to the effect of provide and keep accurate your email address... wtf?). I have read them. Chances are good that you have not.
The huge mistake you make is in assuming that all forms of calamity can be warded off with proper planning. It's true that there's a heck of a lot that can be avoided with foresight and preparation. But a well-placed hurricane, bullet, love affair, or metastatic tumor can annihilate every one of those plans. I suspect you're the kind of personality that thrives on feeling like you're in control and have the moral high ground. And that's all very well and good up to a point, but: "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!" (Robert Burns) No matter how carefully you plan, it can all go to shit in an instant. And there's nothing you can do about it. EVER. So if your worldview depends on cognitive errors like the just-world fallacy, or blaming the victim...well, then you're almost guaranteed to spend your last days in a state of abject terror and despair. Good luck with that.
Actually I don't see your post and my previous one as incompabitle. Not in the slightest. You plan for everything you can control and then you accept the rest. Things work out surprisingly well this way. It's amazing how few "emergencies" you have when you do this correctly. Sometimes shit does happen and there's nothing anyone could have possibly done to prevent it. You'll find, however, that this is relatively rare.
It's not a matter of whether I feel in control or whether I think I have some sort of high ground. It's a matter of whether I take good care of the things within my control and then accept the things that aren't, knowing that I have at least some influence over the vast majority of things that could ever occur in my life.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
According to Political Compass, on the right side of the line are people FOR the severest punishment in child rape cases... This is a country of with deep convictions about justice, dignity and personal responsibility. I hope it is what always separates us from the weakness (aka leftness) found in many other "first world" nations.
Its funny how the very people who are pollutting the world with oil, cars and useless waste, will now have to live, see and smell in their own filth. Maybe all those lazy fat lardass americans who drive everywhere because they are too fucking lazy might think about changing their greedy selfish ways.
I'm in my mid-20s. If I cannot figure out on my own, without assistance, that I will one day grow old and wish to retire, and that the time to start saving up and preparing for that is right now, why should somebody else be forced to pay for my lack of foresight? Morally speaking, I don't know how to justify that one. That is, I cannot tell you why my failure to plan ahead should become someone else's emergency.
Social security benefits (or is supposed to benefit - this can be argued) the old by providing a guarantied minimum pension which isn't subject to your employer or your investment manager fucking up or outright defrauding you. It benefits the middle-aged in that they don't have to worry about (or prepare for) being stuck with feeding their now dead-weight parents (sapping them of otherwise productive energies). It benefits the young in that it fosters a culture that encourages old folks to retire younger than they otherwise might, opening positions and opportunities which would otherwise be closed for many years.
It's supposed to be a cost with a greater benefit. Whether it turns out that way in the end is anybody's guess. It seems that an apathetic electorate may have enabled in SS what corporate opacity enables a whole lot of in Wall Street.
It's likewise with health insurance. I pay a monthly premium for my health insurance. I see it this way: I pay an insurance premium so that I am prepared in the event of a medical disaster, or I risk bankruptcy. I chose to pay the insurance premium. Other people will have to weigh the cost-benefit analysis as they see fit. So long as they don't dip into my wallet to make up for their shortcomings, I have no problem with this.
Socialized healthcare is exactly about personal responsibility in the face of disaster. It amazes me that this isn't more obvious:
There are four ways to stop making you pay for other people's healthcare:
This turns into a disaster as hospitals get bankrupted. This hits the whole population quite badly in two ways. First, the loss of such a large portion of the medical infrastructure does terrible things to a population's ability to deal with epidemics or even more mundane accidents that threaten key productive members. Second, all the problem people who were relying on the ER are left to suffer or die on their own. Misery of that sort engenders criminality as desperate family members might decide to steal gramma's drugs for her.
While this is about as responsible as you can make people be for their choices, it completely fucks over those who planned for common illnesses and then get run over by a drunk driver (or even those with the misfortune of having their insurance paperwork misfiled). It also transforms Sicko from exaggeration and sensationalism into undisputed truth. Not too surprising that nobody really advocates this.
If this could be done, I think it would already be done. The major issues are that hospital-grade medicine is inherently expensive, since hospitals rely on pricey high tech and specialists to carry out their work. Charities are also easily overwhelmed in economic downturns as people both have less to give and as many of the poorer members of society will be increasing their risk of illness through the stress of finding additional work or by switching to cheaper foods (among oth
You missed the point completely. Obama is more to the right than he should be as are most of his party members. The right still dislikes him because they're even further to the right some which are bordering on crazy land.
True conservatism has been dead in the water for decades.
Protip: Posting AC in a story you've modded wipes your mods without warning.
Only if you're logged in.
don't bother arguing, just sit back and enjoy the show as the verbal gymnists come out to show us all how this was all the democrats' fault
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
People do get to judge their neighbours and do it all the time. Americans lately seem to want to express their opinion on how shitty everyone else's healthcare is even if they have zero experience with it.
Like it or not you are part of a community that you need. It has always been that way no matter tea party mongos say. It will always be that way too. It's just how humans operate so live with the fact people have an opinion on the US.
It's clear that we're heading down a blind alley, so why not turn around ASAP, rather than waiting until all possible damage has been done?
The answer to this in unfortunately all to easy. You know how sometimes you're driving your car and you notice that the lane you are in is about to end? You've got two choices - merge now while there is still some space between the cars, or race up to the end of the lane and try to cut in. The first choice will result in a faster average speed for everyone. The second choice will result in a slower average speed, and will likely even slow you down on average. But there is a small chance that you will get ahead.
Politicians, decision makers and business leaders all have a common trait. They are all skillful at politics. They have all been successful in cut throat environments where dog eats dog and have managed to claw their way to the top.
Which option do you think these kind of people will chose?
The right are just as responsible for government control. The patriot act itself is probably the worst thing to ever happen to american freedom.
Not sure where you got those facts, but it looks to me like they own a 65% interest in the well. While it could be argued that a "working interest" doesn't imply ownership, it pretty much says 'owns' to me. Mitsui owns 10% and Anadarko the remaining 25%.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/30850121/Deepwater-Horizon
RIG Deepwater Horizon rig owner
BP 65% working interest (operator)
APC 25% working interest (operator)
Mitsui 10% working interest (operator)
CAM Manufacturer of blowout preventer (BOP)
HAL Provided cementing services to the rig
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN3011545120100430
"Transocean Ltd (RIGN.S) (RIG.N) - The Zug, Switzerland-based company owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon Rig. The rig went into service in 2001 and was drilling the Macondo prospect about 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana.
BP Plc (BP.L) (BP.N) - BP hired Transocean's rig at a rate of about $500,000 per day to drill the well. BP is the project's operator and has a 65 percent working interest in the well.
Anadarko Petroleum Corp (APC.N) - The Houston company owns a 25 percent nonoperating interest in the well."
http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Deepwater-Horizon-56C17.html?LayoutID=17
It was built by Hyundai Heavy Industries Shipyard, Ulsan, South Korea in 2001.
Let me guess you like the idea of Sarah Palin as president?
We need to use less energy and switch to less damaging, more sustainable energy sources.
How much using less energy would actually help is debatable. There's some argument that using less energy would actually cause more energy as a whole to be used.
But the thing to remember is that alternative energy is not a spectator sport. We can't trust the government and the scientific community to provide us a result any time soon (although you science guys do good work). We have to experiment, do DIY projects and figure it out on our own. For you ME types, please consider ideas like solar thermal energy (using the sun to run steam engines), and home-made wind turbines. For you chemist types, please look at making new types of batteries and fuel cells, as well as biorefining. The steam engine and the gasoline engine weren't invented in a government lab, folks. Why should the solar engine? We can do it on our own, and we have a huge advantage: when we get something working, it will be cheap, affordable, and ready to commercialize.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
In a few million years when the cockroach archaeologists are poking around, they are going to have a hell of a time figuring out what actually killed us off.
I agree with that it is a sign that our way of living needs to change. And an important part of that is using less energy or viable less damaging, more sustainable energy sources is necessary too, But this is a worldwide problem, so I don't think this is will solve the problem.
China estimate doubling it's energy consumption by 2020 (http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jan/china2019s-syndrome). As other countries push for higher standards of living energy usage is only going to rise. Even increasing energy efficiency per capita doesn't really solve the problem if the population is rising at a faster rate.
I'm not saying nothing should be done, but just don't expect that technology is going to solve this one. I still believe population growth is still the fundamental problem. There are just too many damn people. But I expect that nature will eventually have a way of sorting that out.
The health-care thing has been bipartisan consensus for decades, just various fuck-ups kept keeping it from being enacted (mostly the Democrats holding out for something even better, a bluff they lost several times). Richard Nixon proposed a universal health-care plan in the 1970s, and in the 1990s, the Heritage Foundation, of all people, proposed an insurance-mandate scheme.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
using an Amkus or Hurst Jaws type of tool from whats left of the riser. I'm not an engineer obviously but I wonder if this has been tried. I heard something attempted like this on the news however it turned out to be false. I realize the tools mentioned are not designed to work in such an environment but the principle is the same.
The "incompatibility" between our posts comes, in part, from this:
This statement implicitly assumes that when someone else is in a situation of dire need, it's because, unlike Stuart Smalley, they weren't smart enough, good enough, or disciplined enough. If they'd only planned ahead and worked harder, everything would be a-OK. So any kind of "safety net", like Social Security, serves only to reward the lazy and penalize the industrious, right?
Yet I've known people who were incredibly hard workers and careful planners, who saved every penny they could and who were meticulous with their money...and who were completely wiped out by some unexpected illness, accident, act of betrayal by a trusted partner, or another one of the many things in a person's life that can go disastrously wrong. Perhaps some of these things could theoretically have been foreseen or prevented, but some cannot: how can someone plan to be paralyzed in a car accident?
Life is full of calamities that no amount of preparation can prevent. We can deny this, and insist that only "poor decision-making" will reduce a person to desperate straits. Or we can acknowledge that since we're all imperfect, we're all guilty of poor decision-making in some aspect of our lives. And since no one is above that risk, it's in our best interest to help people get back up again when they've been knocked down -- or at the very least, to do what we can to alleviate existential threats like hunger and sickness. It's the societal equivalent of insurance: we all pay a little to keep from potentially having to pay a lot.
And it's not only the victims of random misfortune who pay, either. The thing is, desperate people take desperate measures. When you leave your house without armed bodyguards, you do so under the assumption that no one will gamble their life and liberty in order to get what you have. But need can make a criminal out of even the noblest person...and the choice between mugging you, and buying medicine for themselves or food for their kid, wouldn't be a tough dilemma for most people.
So, moralize about it all you want, but you're a hell of a lot safer with fewer desperate people in the world. You'd be wise to consider whether the policy changes you advocate might someday cost you a LOT more than a few bucks in taxes.
Your argument ("Both sides are the same") in this case really begs the question. It doesn't hold up to close scrutiny, especially in regards to this issue where you have one side literally yelling 'drill baby drill' and 'we don't need any more studies or regulation'. And you have the other saying (literally): 'we want to drill, but drill responsibly.'
Of course your argument doesn't really hold up out of the context (and off the topic) either. You have one party saying "we need to be decent human beings and show some compassion to the least fortunate by helping them acquire basic human needs (arguably falling within the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness) of healthcare, food, and shelter"; while on the other side you have the others literally saying "we are above the law in international folly and war crimes" and "screw humanity and our country, as long as the rich get theirs...it will surely 'trickle down' when we piss on you." I don't see them the same at all, in fact you'd have to be a moron not to see the difference. (for what it's worth, I truly mean no offense)
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
You're absolutely right. I'm Irish and to me, the Democrats are, at best, moderate and at worst, on the hard right compared to my left wing politics. In fact, the former American Ambassador to Ireland, Tom Foley, once called me "an out and out Marxist". Now I'm no Marxist, hell, I'm not even communist, but considering his politics and the huge swing to the right that Americans have had since Reagan, I took it as being that I was simply one of the few true left wingers that he had encountered in those early days of his tenure in Ireland!
That would be Thomas C. Foley, not to be confused with Tom Foley [Thomas S. Foley], retired Democrat and former Speaker of the House from Spokane, WA.
Everyone knows Nixon was a sissy liberal. He met Elvis and his evil gyrating hips.
And "Elvis" is an anagram of "evils". How much more proof do you need?
Or, ``Lives.''
The sad fact is that many people don't have that foresight and as a result without SS we would have millions more people homeless on the streets and starving to death. Don't you think that eventually that would become your problem one way or another?
So, sinking one loaded oil tanker dumped about as much oil into the ocean as this is expected to dump per month.
148 oil tankers were sunk during WW2.
Your logic assumes that all of the oil tankers sunk in WWII were fully loaded. This is not true. The oil tankers that were sunk were in various states between being fully loaded and completely empty.
sinking one loaded oil tanker dumped about as much oil into the ocean
Another bad logic assumption. Most oil tankers had their cargo burnt when torpedoed. A number sank but remained intact - not releasing oil. As the steel has corroded over the last 60 years they have begun to leak the oil, which is a problem. Case in point: the USS Mississinewa lay on the ocean floor for 57 years before being discovered, and was found to have 2 million gallons of recoverable oil still onboard. Only a smaller number of tankers would have released oil when under attack, not had this oil ignite and burn, and go on to be released into the ocean.
The claim that every WWII oil tanker was fully loaded at the time of being sunk, and upon being sunk immediately released all of that oil into the ocean, is clearly invalid.
You went forward with an epic rhetoric on self-reliance and independence, trying to prove that social security or national healthcare service are useless and only good to tie him down and support the ignorant and irresponsible masses, but then you went on claiming that you "pay a premium on your health insurance". That alone contradicts everything you said because you either:
The thing is, no one in their right mind believes that social security in any form, such as unemployment compensation, along with national healthcare service are services that are in place to take away any semblance of personal responsibility. That is perfectly false and entirely baseless. In fact, if you look at countries who have implemented social programs such as the ones pointed out, you will always find people saving up for a rainy day and caring for their future. Social security and national healthcare doesn't take that away from anyone. After all, the purpose of those social programs is to act as a complement to each and every measure you yourself put in place in order to be safe in case of a disaster hitting, so that you avoid having your life go into shambles. And how easy it is for your life to get accidentally flipped over. Take, for example, the vast number of US citizens that, when the economic crisis started to be felt, were forced to live in tent cities. Do you believe that those folks were all irresponsible or indigents?
To put it in perspective, social security and national health care are nothing more than insurance services that are implemented to grant each and every citizen a set of resources (a financial buffer, if you will) which can be mobilized in times of need. As the system encompasses millions of people and can only be mobilized under specific circumstances (unemployment, health problems, etc..) then, in practice, that financial buffer ends up being practically limitless for each individual's needs. That is exactly opposite what you get from a private service, as it imposes restrictions on your compensation and forces each and every medical act to be under the scrutiny of an accountant and lawyer instead of a medical doctor, where it should be. Moreover, as it's a public service then you benefit from a service which doesn't have to support needless waste such as generating profits to shareholders (i.e., syphoning your contributions to investor's pockets) and supporting a large number of high maintenance executives and their bonuses. In short, social programs are nothing more than insurance programs but without any profit-driven restrictions, arbitrary limits and needless waste.
So, where's the need for so much FUD?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
* BP is as capable as any of its peer companies, and its operations standards, personnel and other related factors are as good an anyone else. When it comes to industry activities such as drilling operations offshore and in deep water there is a huge amount of industry collaboration. Everyone knows that they are all facing the same challenges and risks and that sharing knowledge, information and learnings is vital for the whole industry. BP's response to this terrible accident has been textbook perfect so far and shows how capable the company really is.
* They have already suspended existing operations on another well and relocated one of their semi-submersible rigs [the Transocean Development Driller III] to start operations on the first relief well and they are going to be moving a dynamic drillship [the Transocean Discoverer Enterprise] currently at Thunderhorse to start the second relief well very shortly.
The rig that capsized was in the final operation of the drilling phase of the well. The well was cased and they were not tripping out as I speculated in my last post, but had finished the last trip and were circulating the riser [that is the pipe system from the BOP stack on the ocean floor to the rig on the ocean surface] to seawater in preparation to disconnect the rig and move it off the well.
It is typical in a drilled and cased well to leave the wellbore filled with drilling mud and slightly overbalanced [the density of the drilling mud gives a bottom hole pressure that is slightly higher than the pressure of the formations], and I would guess that was the case here. However, seawater is typically slightly less dense than drilling mud so as roughly 5000 feet of riser was displaced from drill mud to seawater in preparation to disconnect the rig, the hydrostatic head of that portion of the column may have decreased enough to cause an underbalance
Regardless, something else had to have gone wrong, as the well was cased but would not have been perforated, so all the formations should have been isolated from the wellbore. That suggests something failed downhole [perhaps a liner lap?] to allow the formation fluid into the wellbore.
Finally, I went back and had a look at some of the video of the rig burning before it sank. There is one flame shooting straight up, at times higher than the derrick, which is probably the fluids flowing through the inside of the drill string section that would have been in the hole for the circulating operation. If you look carefully it's clear there is a second flame shooting out sideways underneath the helideck [in fact the later video shows it burned through the helideck before the rig capsized]. This flame is probably coming from the diverter, which means that the annulus [the space between the well casing and the drill pipe] was also flowing...and that implies that neither the pipe rams nor the shear rams were closed on the BOPs.
The failure of the BOPs is a real mystery. There's normally at least 3 locations on a rig from where the BOPs can be activated: the rig floor, the BOP control room [which is deliberately located well away from the rig floor], and usually somewhere in the living quarters...so it looking more likely that somehow gas entered the wellbore that was supposed to be isolated from all formations, and as it rose toward surface, expanded and rapidly displaced the drilling mud, taking the crew by surprise.
In most accidents it's a series of events or failures that leads to the final result, rarely is it just one thing. And this instance is starting to look that way also. First perhaps an underbalanced wellbore from the riser displacement, then some sort of failure of the casing/liner system downhole, and finally the failure of the BOPs to actuate. The rig that capsized is reported to be on its side more than 1000 feet away from the wellhead so there is no chance it damaged it. It's possible there's something in the BOPs that is preventing them from closing...either a drill collar or perhaps eve
The first question that came to mind in all of this is why, the valve (tap) didn't work to cut of suppply.
Why is it stuck? Why can't 8 robots close it? Because it was only put in to 'relieve fears' about what happens when the rig goes down, and it was not maintained. Any engineer knows that a valve would need greasing and checking on a yearly basis (or less). I mean cars need a yearly service, so why not oil rigs?
I guess it shows the urgent need to test cut-off valves BEFORE a disaster happens. It seems to me that BP and possibly other companies care more about saving a bit of money and maintaining operations, than testing critical safety measures.
WHEN ARE WE GOING TO LOOK AFTER THE ENVIROMENT MORE THAN PROFITS? HOW OFTEN SHOULD A VALVE GET TESTED?
Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. Then again, orbital bombardment probably won't penetrate a mile of water. Better to strap the nuke to a robotic submarine.
I keep wondering when it became cool for someone to call someone else an idiot while at the same time saying they would kill them... In my mind that makes you an idiot...
For example, I hate spammers and if I believed I could off them without being caught, I don't think I would have any problem at all doing that... But I'm not going to go publicly espousing my thoughts on the matter... Because, that would make me an idiot.
Most information received to our tiny little brains is biased - smart people learn to filter the bias and seek the core factual information... It's not fun to watch cnn if you are from the right, or fox if you are from the left, but the idea you can just toss out anything one network or commentator says because it's not from your preferred news source is, well idiotic...
So, I guess that makes you an idiot, for disregarding all of Rush's spiel and for posting publicly that you'd throw him off a cliff if you met him....
Grow up kid!
In answer to all of these, you probably meant mg per litre, not millimeter...
Assuming we drank out of the Gulf here (we don't, we have the Mississippi River for that), and that the next three years worth of this little problem were crowded into 1000 km^3 (it won't be) of the water supply we use, then the total contamination levels would be rather less then 0.001 mg/L oil in the water.
Now, one must remember that the EPA doesn't actually control for crude oil in the water supply. But of the chemicals they do control for, about four non-radioactive ones have safe limits lower than 0.001 mg/L. And, since the EPA controls for those four chemicals, if any of them (one of the four might be present in crude oil. Maybe. It's a byproduct of refining oil and I don't know whether it's waste from the process or something created in the process) are present at that level, the local water treatment plant will reduce the level below the legal limit before it's put into the drinking water system.
In other words, this is a non-issue in the USA. It could conceivably be an issue elsewhere, if you can find a place where people drink salt water without purifying it first, I concede. Good luck with that.
All that aside, as I said, I'm from the gulf coast. It is going to royally suck down here unless this is dealt with promptly. But it's not going to be the end of life as we know it in the oceans, or much of anywhere else.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
... probably has the best traditional (meaning, for nation-versus-nation wars) forces.
I'd argue that the US Military is the best force/equipment combination against any actor, anywhere in the world, ever. Limited successes by non-traditional opposing forces should not be mistaken for a lack of capability or skill. I firmly believe that no other military would be able to limit losses to the levels they've experienced if placed in an identical situation and given an identical mission. The only solution that would probably yield fewer US Military casualties would be all-out genocide which would be socially unacceptable, but is well within the US military's capabilities.
Just something to think about - they've actually demonstrated remarkable restraint in spite of all the bad press.
Mod parent insightful. Where are my mod points when I *need* them?
I'm still wondering who or what Muzzi is. Is it a misspelling of the Jewish nickname "Mutti"? Is it an eccentric Italian ice-cream maker? Is it short for Motoguzzi?
What brings the whole thing full circle is you're spouting the same 'government is the problem' nonsense that the Republicans used to justify deregulating the financial markets in the first place. Do you REALLY think it was coincidence that we had no banking problems since Glass-Steagall until Republicans started deregulating and then we had the S+L crisis (and also coincidentally Kneel, Jeb, and Poppy Bush were knee deep in associated scandal (Kneel effectively robbed us all of millions of dollars with nothing but a wrist slap)) and then in the 90's, they deregulated again, basically repealing the last of Glass-Steagall and the other huge crisis that prompted Bush Jr's administration to author the biggest bailout since his dad bailed out the S+L's?! America needs to wake the fuck up. Some of us obviously have not learned from history and thus we are repeating it. We are a bunch of Rubes. One family has enabled the theft of literally TRILLIONS of dollars...twice! By comparison, any malfeasance by Democrats is like comparing the guy who accidentally brings a pen home from work with the accountant who clears the accounts and flies to South America. THERE IS NO COMPARISON!
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
Seriously; no more new business allowed for British Petroleum in the US. They had a an oil spill in Alaska because they ignored maintenance that lead to pipe corrosion; had a massive refinery explosion in Texas with fatalities, and in this case, they glibly assumed this very failure would never occcur (which was rubber-stamped by ineffective Bush-era 'regulators' in the Minerals office). In every case: profits before common sense. You have to be an incredibly craven entity to make ExxonMobil look moral in comparison.
That's why you always have a plan-B and protect your investment with numerous safeguards for contingencies!
If you don't have a fallout shelter in your backyard, I strongly suggest you start digging.
It wasn't just cost. Chernobyl was used to produce nuclear weapons. This requires specific reactor designs to do efficiently, and those designs are inherently unstable. Three Mile Island is another example. In short, government regulation doesn't help you when it is government requiring the stupidity in the first place.
Of course, bad emergency shutoffs didn't help either. Chernobyl had hilariously badly designed control rods and TMI had a misprint in their shutdown procedure.
We have been drilling in bodies of water for over 100 years, such gross negligence for the environmental safety and the well being of the oil rig workers is criminal. Someone at BP and Transocean made a calculated risk believing that the cost of such safety system was less important than the cost of their employees and the environment. This is a disgraceful accident as it could have been easily prevented with technology we had thirty years ago, as a once supporter of offshore drilling I have realized companies and governments will always put the bottom line first and the cost of life second.
Math
The BOP wouldn't operate when they sent a submarine down to close it manually. A remote control switch wouldn't have done jack squat.
Only if you're logged in.
Or if you're posting from the IP that you modded from. It tracks both your account and your IP.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Mod parent insightful. Where are my mod points when I *need* them?
Maybe you should have paid for mod-point insurance before you got yourself into this mess?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Or if you're posting from the IP that you modded from. It tracks both your account and your IP.
Okay, fair enough. I usually post from the campus computer lab, so it's a different IP (almost) every time.
A spill is when the liquid or material comes out of a container: milk spills out of a glass or bottle where the quantity is known.
Here the container is the earth and in human scale the quantity can only be guessed at. This is not a spill it is an oil gush or flow. The term is more accurate in describing the magnitude of the disaster.
Well said.
Let me add two thing. First, Social Security, like all altruistic acts pays dividends. We're social creatures for a reason - it's good for the group.
If you're my neighbor and you make a poor decision (like getting injured on the job or having the poor taste to develop multiple sclerosis) and it wipes you out financially, it's better for me if society can get you back on your feet. Otherwise, the bank forecloses on your house and you die in the gutter with your shopping cart in front of my house - and that can have negative effects on the neighborhood's property values.
Second, 90% of people thing they're better than average drivers. Somehow I bet the same is true for contingency planning.
What we all need is a mod point reform, so that millions of slashdoters will be able to afford moderation!!
That's the cap on liability not clean up. Meaning if they decimate a 10 billion dollar fishing industry, they only have to pay $75 million to that industry.
They're still on the hook for the full clean-up costs (more or less...).
Satellite Monitoring.
Yours In Astrakhan,
Kilgore T.
Why didn't that happen before social security?
as long as it stays out of the Atlantic. Then it's ONLY going to kill everything living in the Gulf. If this thing gets big enough and ends up in the Atlantic, Europe & the Arctic will be in for a nasty surprise.
What most amazes me is that there did not seem to be any plan or equipment for dealing with a leak like this. Surely it must have been part of the possible scenarios considered when drilling is considered. Surely governments EVERYWHERE must require oil companies to submit a detailed plan and list of equipment available to seal a leak promptly if it develops under any circumstances. I know I have thought many times what would happen if the line breaks due to an accident. If I have as a casual observer having nothing to do with the field, surely the people involved in these explorations have thought about it too. I hope BP goes under for the cost of fixing this. All oil companies need to realize that having a plan before a disaster hits is more important to their survival than the cost of developing such a plan and maintaining the equipment that you hope you will never have to use. The only way for them to learn is for BP to go under, just like its drilling rig. I fervently hope they will, though I won't count on it really happening or its competitors learning from the experience.
It's funny. We've reached peak oil in july 2008 already, so now there is going to be an ever bigger frenzy of getting the more difficult oil. And as the well dry up ever more quickly, in the frenzy of drilling more wells safety will be the greatest victim for the sake of cutting costs of ever more expensive to extract oil. We are buying only a few years extension to our oil addiction, but in making sure we get the last bit of it we also destroy not only the environment, but the future livelihood of millions of people. We are willingly sacrificing the long term for the sake of a very short term benefit. For the sake of not chaning our way of life one little bit, we ensure that the total change in our way of life will be all the more drastic as we destroy our other means to sustain it. Well, as McCain would say: "Drill baby Drill", or "Drill drill drill". What could go wrong with that plan?
We would actually buy a lot more years of our current way of life by adopting a less energy voracious lifestyle. Technology can only ever increase energy efficiency incrementally, and any gains made by technology would be offset by people's habits IMMEDIATELY. If you're spending 20$ a week on fuel and suddenly your car only requires 15$ a week, you're going to use it more and get right back to the 20$ a week. The same thing goes for making more energy available by increasing production... the end effect is maintaining or reducing the price of energy which leads to making it scarcer faster. Any technological improvement is wiped out as soon as it is implemented. Any production gain is wiped out as soon as it is generated. However, if you limit your outings, walk more, reduce your speed on the road, choose to live close to where you work instead of using all kind of flawed logic to justify buying a home in the suburbs 2 hours drive from work, an countless other changes then you could reduce in a very short time your fuel consumption by a very large fraction of what it is. Behaviour change is the only way out. And somehow some fraction of society believes that ANY change in our current way of life is a betrayal to what we are. Well, news flash, our current way of life is not the one we always had, and people didn't want to let go of the old ways either (and sometimes their ways were better than the new ones we adopted). The way of life is ALWAYS changing. The thing is, refusing to make any concession now, only means we will have to make much bigger ones later, and ones that will hurt much more.
Reducing carbon footprint is not just a way to do good to our environment (and avoid potentially catastrophic consequences of that), it is also ensuring that we will have enough energy to avoid economic catastrophies as well. Ecology and Economy (real economy, not the perpetual growth delusion that current conventional economists are high on) are not opposed ideas. They are actually very much in agreement. Long term economic
The problem is that "relatively rare" isn't. Just thinking back at the last ten years a good number of relatively rare things have happened to my family. Off the top of my head...
My father got downsized because the board replaced his bosses with idiots - and being older than 50 years he was utterly unhirable and had to retire early (don't think that a brilliant track record, specialized skills and glowing recommendations will get you a job at that age).
My brother got shot in the leg, which resulted in a multi-month stay in hospital and screwed up his leg just enough to reduce his job chances - but not enough to qualify as a disability so he doesn't get preferential hiring.
Both of these are unlikely to happen to you but each one of them (and a whole lot of other things) can completely ruin your careful planning through no fault of your own. They don't even need to happen to you; what if a close relative ends up spending half a year in hospital and no one but you is there to foot the bill? Do you tell them to die or you you burn through your retirement savings to help them out?
Of course you can just go with what you recommended and accept that your life just crashed and burned but then again most people don't like living in poverty because they got hit by a car twenty years ago. Or because the bank managing their savings accounts got fried during a stock crash.
Proper planning for the future also ought to include the worst case. Financially, the worst case is "I am in debt and can't make any money". "I guess I'm screwed, then" is not a good plan for that contingency.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
...at this very moment, Michael Bay sits planning how he'll outdo that explosion.
Yeah, I'm serious. BP's efforts to stop the blowout all seem to focus on preserving the integrity of the well for future production.
Why no send down some some sort of shaped charges to collapse the bore hole into the deposit.
How about a mini-nuke?
Seriously, that's gotta work...
So if a manufacturer of food products starts inadvertently poisoning its customers, we are only allowed to complain about it if we don't eat? How can anyone refute logic like that?
An accident is not assured. I don't want to seem like a troll, however this seems to convenient. There is happenstance. However I find it way to coincidental that just as Obama announces that he wants to allow new off shore drilling we have a major accident. There hasn't been a problem for decades. I know militant environmentalists aren't above doing something like that. After all, they drill in some of the most sensitive environmental areas in the world and there hasn't been a problem. I learned this from testimony from the last administration, from representatives in Louisiana about their sensitive areas. I know people who worked down there after the Hurricane and they said even spilling Diesel for a generator is a big deal.
This is not directed to you... I just want to state it for others reading - Oil is natural by definition. Man didn't make it. Some people seem to forget that.
Enjoy (if you've got the patience to read through 22 pages of comments!)
A couple of highlights -
First radio interview from someone on the rig:
http://www.marklevinshow.com/Article...422&spid=32364
Second - OSHA's website has some of the best diagrams:
http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/oilandgas/well_completion/well_completion.html
Third - the specs from this platform/ship:
http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Deepwater-Horizon-56C17.html?LayoutID=17 -- check out "Thrusters: 8 x Kamewa rated 7375 hp each, fixed propeller, full 360 deg azimuth"
JGG
Crap. I came here to read about the oil spill. How far do I need to scroll? Where are the mods to mark this whole thread offtopic??
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
You are in your mid-twenties and you have it all figured out.
You think that 200,000,000 workers all making individual investment decisions would result in a return on investment and retirement system better than social security. You think the logic of return above real growth + inflation can last forever (it cannot - eventually only some people would have all of the money - do the arithmetic).
You like the crap shoot that the market provides and are OK with a large chunk of those 200,000,000 investors getting screwed every 20 or 30 years?
Social Security is one of the best most stable investment programs ever invented and young Libertarians such as yourself have been complaining about it since I was your age.
My 92 year old mom worked her entire life and saved and the marked F***ked her. Her social security is the one safety net she has. Her social security makes it less on hard on me to provide for her, which I do, btw.
I'll be curious to see what your opinions are when you are 55. I heard your exact same arguments from the Silicon Valley crowed 30 years ago. I was at Berkeley, they were at Stanford. That's funny, public vs private. Social Security was supposed to be broke by now. It isn't. And the only reason it will be is if the illogic of the Libertarian Fundamentalists such as yourself remain in control and the Goldman Sachs and other (overpaid) investment bankers of the world and the U.S. Oligarchy continues to transfer wealth to itself at so ably has done these past 30 years.
Read Les Leopold's book The Looting of America, How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity and What We Can Do About It.
Cheers,
Dennis Allard
Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/
On a slightly more practical level, the planet is mortal and we really can't afford to kill it off.
It is very, very sensible to fear every little thing that is capable of wiping out an entire species or ecosystem, or that is capable of making irreversible changes to our habitat. A single individual can risk a threat to themselves, but we cannot risk existential threats to our species. This oil spill might raise to that level if it kills too much of the gulf.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Why not drop a napalm barrage acrosss the slick and light it on fire and call it a day.
A permanent "Sea of Fire" sounds like a great place to hide the "Staff of Truth" guarded by the "Dragons of Eternity".
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Why not deploy oil-soaking sponge weilding roombas with GPS to constantly mop it up, bring it back to a tanker, wring it out, repeat.
Hell they could use the crappy crude as fuel while they are at it...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
"There is far more regulation of the economy now than there was in Nixon's time..."
Citation (references) please?
Resistance is futile. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. You will become one with the morgue
Bullshit. Progressives work to make things better for their friends. If you happen to be in a high enough place and know the right people, you are "their friend". Obama said it himself when talking about some millionaire traders "I know those guys and they worked hard for that money". Because of course, everyone else just has their money given to them.
Progressives are those work toward making you do what they want. It's a stepping stone toward a dictatorship.
Bullshit again. McCain and Obama want a lot of the same things. The only difference is that when Progressive Republicans do it, they do it slower. When Progressive Democrats do it, they do it full speed ahead. Just look at Lyndsey Graham. He supports cap and trade just like his Democrat friends do. Cap and Trade, according to Obama will "necessarily cause electricity rates to skyrocket". No ones putting words in his mouth.
So when the choice is Progressive or Progressive light, who are you going to vote for? Most people will take the progressive since he/she is going to give them more faster.
This country (the US) hasn't been making progress. We're heading back toward a king where the State grants your rights and doesn't limit them. If you want to define progressive as those in favor of making progress, then the Founders were the most progressive individuals that ever lived. Most of the laws passed since our founding have done more to limit the common man than anyone else.
What do you call the government-sponsored bailouts of various financial companies, or government expanding into the health-care insurance market? Or a few years prior to that, the federalization of airport security into the TSA, or the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, or the Patriot Act?
Corporatism. The fact that it's big is just a side effect.
"Hey, corporate interests, would you like a large government under your control or a small one?"
-- "Oh. This guy again."
The huge mistake you make is in assuming that all forms of calamity can be warded off with proper planning. It's true that there's a heck of a lot that can be avoided with foresight and preparation. But a well-placed hurricane, bullet, love affair, or metastatic tumor can annihilate every one of those plans.
That is the price we pay to live in a free society.
My God the lack of knowledge of history around Slashdot these days is astounding. If the people that settled the west had been like most slashdotters, this country would've never grown past the original 13 States. "Oh no, we can't go out into the wilderness! Something might happen that we can't predict and might kill one of us!" Stop being so afraid of your own damn shadow. Do the best you can with what you're given in life. Yeah, something might happen to make it all go to shit. Do you expect the government to bail you out if it does?
here's another perspective.
i have not verified any of the details (which is why i'm posting a link to the article here). and while i'm skeptical given the free-energy theme of the web site on which it resides, i'm capable of imagining some of the details of the article might be true.
Mother of all gushers could kill Earth's oceans
http://pesn.com/2010/05/02/9501643_Mother_of_all_gushers_could_kill_Earths_oceans/
I suspect you're the kind of personality that that likes to feel smug about your vastly superior understanding of the world and talk down to others.
That's all I really wanted to say, but as long as I'm typin' I want you to know that the government won't save you. You love to make fun of other people's plans, but the government is also a complicated system of plans carried out by individuals. It would be nice if we would look after one another out of love and mutual respect for each other, rather than trying force compassion with unfeeling systems and laws. I know I'm dreaming.
Correct, but calling him Tom annoys him, so I call him Tom!
There is no -1 disagree
Thanks, that is a very good point. The earth will survive, will we?
The earth survived whatever killed the dinosaurs, but it really sucked for the dinosaurs. If we die, the planet will go on, but that is little consolation to anyone who doesn't REALLY like cockroaches.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
China actually uses much more coal than us, and they consume much more than us as well.
Wow, that caused quite a sub-thread to form, when my original point was exceedingly simple. If you spend money on the military, you'll have some guns and missiles by the end of it. If you spend money on social security and such, you'll have those services. Just because government got "bigger" either way doesn't mean that you should discount the differences between the two results, especially if you come to really need one or the other.
To be fair, he identifies himself as a Republican (right wing), so that's not a particularly good example.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Great post. I struggle to imagine how the other guy, causality (!), manages to ignore this. It's the reason for why the concept of insurance exists.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Agreed, but that's exactly my point. Everyone has their own opinion and to act like there's a consensus / reference point on political "truth" is retarded imo.
The point of the democratic process is that each nation's citizens can choose what kind of government they want. Like I said, I don't come to Europe and complain about European policies. I don't have to live with them on a daily basis and I respect the right of their citizens to make whatever policy decisions seem right to them.
"Why in the hell is the max $75 million?"
Because only people should exercise responsibility. Not corporations.
What is the argument always advanced on "Tort reform"? Business needs a stable environment. Translation: you cant make us responsible for our mistakes, that would cut into the profits!
What I don't get is why the "conservatives" ( minimum govt, personal responsibility, etc, etc ) think we don't see straight to the real motivation when they get going on these things.
emt 377 emt 4
I hate to say it, but I think you just meta-called yourself an idiot.
Turn around to... what, exactly? I don't know about you but I can't afford $110,000 for a Tesla Roadster, if I could even get on the waiting list before they're all sold out.
I have a south-facing roof on my house that's plenty large enough to power the entire house underneath it, especially with some load-balancing battery packs in the basement. I don't know about you but I can't afford $75,000 for the low-efficiency silicon solar panels required to power it.
In either case, I can't even buy any of the 700 different technologies featured in Slashdot stories about energy and transportation, because nobody sells them at all, anywhere, at any price.
Last but not least, I can't construct any of those technologies either, because I can't afford the millions of dollars in equipment and materials and energy and trained personnel necessary to fabricate even the low end of those wonderful ideas.
So, turn around to what?
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This leads directly into a rant. For those satisfied with the previous post, you can stop reading.
This is why I don't have a problem with confiscatory taxes for the ultra-rich. When too much capital is tied up in too few hands, it becomes completely divorced from the rest of the world. When one man controls hundreds of billions of dollars, he's no longer capable of USING that money. All he can do is pile it up. The financial sector in most of the First World has devolved into some kind of primitive counting coup kind of game among people who have absolutely no risk of going hungry if they happen to get scored on. The money they manipulate barely exists; it's just numbers in accounts, moving around uselessly from one account to the next. The only thing the ultra-rich care about is maintaining their dynasties and clinging to every digit in those accounts.
Meanwhile they're utterly failing to utilize that money to actually DO anything. Ten percent unemployment represents a vast unutilized resource (much as I despise using the word 'resource' to apply to humans.) Some of them don't know anything useful, but they can all learn, and many of them already know something. It takes money to mobilize those idle hands and forge them into a coherent system, but the money sits idle, doing nothing but own things.
That's not an economy. That's a failure.
Would the government likely do a better job, positing a return to last century's 90% progressive tax? Yes, because the government isn't allowed to just KEEP the money. It has to be spent, and economies fail when money is stagnant. Taking money away from people wrapped up so tight in their little fantasy world of numbers they can't move and forcing it to circulate benefits a whole lot of people, and ultimately benefits everyone. Would there be lots of waste and failures along the way? Definitely. Is that better than some strange attempt at stasis? Yes.
This is why I think the Republican party has congealed around a solid core of ultra-rich. Those same ultra-rich are extraordinarily risk-averse, for no discernable reason, and they're terrified that a large voting block will materialize and strip them of their wealth, because they're well aware that a large block of people with nothing left to lose don't really care what other people lose.
So far, 10% isn't enough to cause anything radical, especially when the pervasive myth that anyone can make it is still around, propped up despite all evidence to the contrary. When is it enough? What's the tipping point? 25%? 35%? 38% + a sympathy vote from the tattered remnants of the middle class? Those ultra-rich had better figure out how to start moving money again, before they find that number by experiment.
Would a small targeted nuke exploding 5000 feet down stop the leak
seriously wouldnt it destroy the well and stop the flow and possibly burn some of the oil off.
Will Obama be the first president to use a Nuke to save the environment
I'd predict that this is probably the end of BP the company.
Really. How sweet. You're aware they make 60 billion usd profit/year.
I predict a slap on the wrist and to be told not to be so naughty in the future.
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Ya can't make an omelet without breakin' a few eggs!
YeHaw! Bang Bang! YeHaw!
Seriously though, I find all the letters to the editor mentality here a bit repugnant when I don't think I would be out of line to say that 99%+ of the people here use oil. Likely a LARGE portion of that use on average per capita more oil than the rest of the world. I would even go so far to say that MANY of the people posting right now, indignant about the spill, have actually burned some of the oil, BP took out of that well personally.
That would include myself. I try to have as little impact as possible, however even I have driven about 60,000km in the last 8 years or so, and that doesn't include jet travel, public transportation, or even electrical power put into the system from sources using oil as fuel.
Anyway it is a terrible tragedy, however it is like a fat man being indignant about the fate of minimum wage employees of McDonald's, while chomping down as many BigMacs as will fit in his face. Perhaps the fat man as little choice? Perhaps he is addicted to it, or is poor and that is all he can afford, or perhaps the regulation on food, or perhaps labor is at cause. However bottom line he is still consuming it in great quantities while screaming about the problem. It is somewhat crazy if you think about it. (BTW a car analogy is too easy here)
Yeah we can liquify coal, we have a 250 year supply at current consumption rates
Yeah but consumption rates won't stay at the current levels. As oil supplies deplete, coal usage will increase, and at 3% growth, the coal supply is only 70 years using your figures.
Also. The 250 year supply is almost certainly the total reserve figure. Unfortunately, like oil, coal will rapidly become uneconomic after the peak production rate is reached. Somewhere around half way through the reserves. Which means that there's only about 35 years worth of cheap/easy coal at 3% growth.
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Probably because that other source of engergy is going to have problems as well.
*What will all those offshore windmills do to migrant birds?
*What imact will vast arrays of dark solar panels of large areas of desert to the plants total reflected heat?
*What will do with all the radio active material we decided not to reprocess?
*What will all those hydro-electric installations do to fish, what about errorsion and silt?
We are going to have to do something which poses risks. Unless we want to drastically recude our population and go back to a life of hunting and gatehering and even that turned out to be not so good if you happend to be a Mamoth or whale.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Hint to mod : flamebait is what you give as a mod when the post is calling for a anger response , trying to bait people. I was just pointing out, rightfully, that this is not the end of the world as the summary was hinting. So overated, redundant, maybe. But flamebait ? You gotta stop smoking unknown substance...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Do you think that budgets being set decades ago changes the effects of the money being spent now?
More government money will generally mean more government power. Obviously not a perfect correlation.
Don't ignore the compounded growth of Johnson's work, granted it's small compared to FDR's and most of his programs have been renamed and rearranged (in the deck chair sense).
Johnson was a much sneakier bastard. I'd suggest that his programs got more (bad things) for their money.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Haha, Bushes, Nixon(!) and Obama are progressives?!
Please turn off your Glenn Beck program and step away from the TV set.
So I guess we're all pretty much fucked, now, yes? Maybe drilling for something that FLOATS under the ocean which contains all the life which is churning out about 70% (estimates vary) of the OXYGEN we breathe was maybe, a pretty stupid fucking idea? Oh, and when you see what is going to happen as a result of this, I think you'll agree I haven't used the word FUCK too many times in this post, actually, I haven't used it nearly enough. This is not a disaster. A disaster sucks, you hold some concerts, and everyone eventually is pretty much okay. This could be, well... anyone know any other good planets we can all move to? Ones where we haven't completely fucked up the environment yet? Consider this, fellow Terrans... If you're living in a spaceship, and some god-damned fucking moron blows a hole in the side, what do you do?
I can't imagine why prices would go up. There's now plenty of oil, and it's free. Just go down to the Gulf Coast with a bucket...
But we all know nigger's can't swim!
Is that why you live in Somalia?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I see it more that of course we are responsible for those things because our choices and money pay for them. So we are responsible for trying to fix the problems in those systems.
We would be anyway because I tend to believe we all have a duty to, for example, try to stop or at least diminish slavery.
Either way, it's not about feeling guilty or about blame, it's about either (a) taking responsibility for the negative externalities that we incentivize by our actions, or (b) believing we can be a better world than we are right now and working to make that happen.
Either way, we don't get out of it by saying we have no choice since we can't eliminate all the externalities. Because we do have choice, and that choice lets us cut back on those externalities. (As by using renewable fuels, using products from companies that actively work to prevent slave labor use in their product chains, socially conscious investing, personal philanthropy, and community service).
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Does punching him on the nose annoy him - because that's what you should have done!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So, prior to social security, people hit "retirement age," promptly quit their jobs, lived on the street and starved to death?
Obviously absurd.
I don't know for sure, but I would assume they worked as long as they were able to physically and mentally. After that, if they had no savings, they may have lived on the street, may have gone to a "poor house", or may have lived with relatives or depended on the kindness and charity of others.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Err - Glass Steagal was repealed under Clinton. LTCM was a banking crisis that was narrowly averted - that was under Clinton. Don't confuse me with someone that gives a damn about that though, the partisanship between Reps and Dems is a fucking disgrace.
Cue all the lefty slashtards who somehow feel vindicated by this ...
Instead, why don't we learn from this mistake, use the knowledge to improve safety and reliability of offshore drilling, and continue drilling, but just more safely and reliably? 'Cause that would be logical and wouldn't fit a lefty agenda, that's why.
FTFY
If BP does raise its prices, it will take some oil out of the market and allow the others to raise their prices as well. So, in a market with so few suppliers, and a limited but tight production stream, we will all pay a little more. BP will be more punished than the other petroleum companies, though.
I don't know about you but I can't afford $110,000 for a Tesla Roadster, if I could even get on the waiting list before they're all sold out.
True, but you could probably afford a bike. Then perhaps you could bike more and drive less. Or you can wait for less expensive electric cars to come out. Or you could buy a motorcycle or a scooter (or even an electric scooter). Or you could organize your life in such a way that you don't have to travel so much. There are lots of things you can do, once you've shrugged off the "I must drive my car every day" mindset.
In any case, I wasn't posting about you personally, but about the society as a whole. We need to do whatever can be done to make it easier and more convenient for people (like yourself) to get off of oil.
I don't know about you but I can't afford $75,000 for the low-efficiency silicon solar panels required to power it.
FWIW, our HOA is about to put 43 kilowatts worth of solar panels on our condo building's roof, and it isn't going to cost us a cent. In fact, it will save us about $3,500 per year, starting at day one, with no up-front investment required. We're signing a Power Purchase Agreement with SolarCity, in which they will install the system and operate it, and sell us the resulting power at 9.5 cents per kWh. (We currently pay the power company 15.5 cents per kWh). I don't know if a similar deal is available where you are, but it is possible in many areas to get solar power without a big up-front investment.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'm a so-called "knowledge-worker." Commuting is totally unnecessary for me. My employer refuses to entertain the idea of telecommuting. As I understand it (from past Slashdot stories, even), this is extremely common. Even if a worker does nothing at all, all day long, companies feel better if they can see them.
Lucky you. SolarCity doesn't do business in my state. Our populations are low enough that we pay less than 9 cents per kWh direct from the power company, so it appears the price point they can reach is not competitive here. Which explains why they don't do business here. I could afford a large up-front cost myself, but I would be foolish to do it because that up-front cost amortized over 20 years is higher than utility power.
Until the overall cost comes down, panels aren't cost effective here. And panel costs do have to come down. Local power costs are not going to rise much. It's all coal. Coal is nothing if not predictable.
I would be absolutely delighted to be independent of both the gas and the electric companies, and manufacturing and physics says I could be. Unfortunately, finances say I shouldn't be. Fix that, and I'll be first in line.
I'm a so-called "knowledge-worker." Commuting is totally unnecessary for me. My employer refuses to entertain the idea of telecommuting. As I understand it (from past Slashdot stories, even), this is extremely common. Even if a worker does nothing at all, all day long, companies feel better if they can see them.
No problem; there are still a number of possible ways to reduce your energy consumption. In no particular order: drive something more efficient; carpool; take public transportation; move closer to your job; bike to work; commute during off hours rather than during rush hour; convince your employer to allow you to telecommute; or find another job that is closer or more flexible. Or you can just come with excuses for why nothing can be done. It's really up to you.
Until the overall cost comes down, panels aren't cost effective here. And panel costs do have to come down. Local power costs are not going to rise much. It's all coal. Coal is nothing if not predictable.
I agree than solar prices need to come down; and I think they will do that. As far as coal prices not going up; that depends to a great degree on whether the external costs of coal are ever factored into the price. Currently, those costs (global warming, pollution, mining damage, health problems) are being effectively subsidized by people other than those who benefit from the coal.
There is also the possibility of wind power and geothermal, depending on where you live.
Fix that, and I'll be first in line.
Sorry, I can't solve your problems for you. You know your situation better than I do; maybe you'll think of some clever solutions.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
There is no doubt that Clinton signed both. And he has admitted it was a mistake, and he regrets it. Both were put through by a Republican controlled legislative branch, and Republicans had been trying to pass the repeal for 10 years. And I have heard NO Republicans suggesting that it was a mistake, in fact they are actively opposing any regulation of the financial industry even in the wake of the recent meltdown. There is no doubt that I would smack Clinton upside the head for his part, but to suggest he shares equally in the blame is ludicrous.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF