You're assuming it gets 50% of the oil out with each pass. It probably does not.
Also, each pass you make at least doubles your processing time. As it is now it would take 6,000 of Costner's centrifuges to clean up the Gulf spill in a year. If you add a second pass to that, it will either take 12,000 centrifuges or you get it done in two years. Add a third pass and you're at 18,000 centrifuges or three years.
It's also illegal to dump a 75% water - 25% oil mix, that isn't clean enough. Costner's centrifuge apparently does get the water clean enough to dump, but it can only handle oil/water mixes where the oil and water are both nice and smooth. The stuff in the Gulf is like a mouse - it is clumpy and sticky, and so does not work well at all in the centrifuge.
His celebrity no doubt helped a lot - someone says "Jack Puderschmidt has a machine that could clean up the spill" and your response is "Yeah, him and everybody else. Who the hell is Jack Puderschmidt?" That doesn't mean his machine won't ever come up and be evaluated, and if it works eventually used, but it does mean he's just another guy in line, waiting for everyone ahead of him to have their chance at it first.
Now, you hear "Kevin Costner has a machine that could clean up the spill" and your response is "Kevin Costner? Really? I'll bet it doesn't work. Lets get him up here and find out." He gets to jump ahead of the line because people know who he is.
For what it's worth, Costner's machine doesn't work at all on the kind of oil that comprises most of the spill (it's heavy and sticky, which clogs the machine). That's why they only got whatever it was, 30 or 50 of them - they'll be able to use it on the very light stuff or perhaps as a second phase of another process in some cases. If it were good enough to clean the whole spill they would have gotten more like a couple thousand, because that is what it would take for the centrifuge to clean up the spill in a reasonable amount of time.
I work as an engineer in the oil field, and I'm amazed that the US hasn't already adopted many of the regulations already in place elsewhere.
They have. The BOP in the BP spill had all the features you and others describe, as well as being highly redundant internally. It was a fail-safe device.
The devices that are mandatory in most of europe (funnily the home of BP being one of the exceptions, presumably because of the much more shallow waters they're drilling in there), are a little bit more than just the blowout preventer, it's a device which can be triggered in case of emergencies where the wireguided signals from the rig is unable to reach the BOP. They were, as best I can tell, developed after a problem with a platform sinking, same as what happened in the gulf.
Everything you say there is true of the BOP that was used on the BP well. They are the same devices. Accoustic triggers, remote triggers, pressure triggers, you name it, it had it.
It's required by law, and the MMS signs off on every device before and after it is installed. If it doesn't have MMS approval it isn't legal.
The BOP has a half dozen different redundancies built in, and some how all of them failed in the DeepWater spill. It's possible it was some kind of mechanical failure or pipe failure or something of the like (that actually explains very well why all of the redundancy features - even the hail marry trigger via ROV - failed).
Trust me, I work in the oil industry, and the environmental regulations in the US are anything but lax (at least for oil companies). One of the quickest ways to get fired is to spill a quart of oil on the shop floor and not report it to the EPA.
BP is on the hook because they own the lease on the reservoir. The way the law is written, it doesn't matter who is producing (the lease owners often contract that out), the lessee is the one responsible if anything goes wrong.
I'm sorry, but TransOcean and Haliburton are well known in the oil industry for what they do - they are not fronts for BP.
The government didn't "not buy" anything - there was no reason to even attempt to fool the government because it is very clear who is responsible and it isn't the company operating the rig. The reason BP (and most oil companies) contract these things out is because it is usually cheaper to hire a specialist company than to maintain your own rig department, pure and simple.
In this case, it certainly wasn't. Poor practices from TransOcean and Haliburton, combined with poor QA at BP and corruption to the MMS means BP is going to have to pay about $25 billion plus whatever the $1000 per barrel fine works out to (should be around $4 billion, using current total estimates). I don't care who you are, that's going to have a huge negative impact on your company.
Right now, oil companies that operate in the US are saying "Oh shit..."
* the oil is not spread out over the entire Gulf, and most of the oil WILL be in that first three inches of water. They won't have to process the entire volume of the Gulf.
He didn't say they did, those figures were for the 8,000 square miles covering the spill - i.e. the square mile area covered in oil. The total volume of the Gulf is many orders of magnitude higher.
* they are talking about 50 machines, not 3
Extrapolating from the GP's calculations (which others have verified), 50 centrifuges would take about 110 years to clean the Gulf spill. That's why the GP said it would take 6,000 of them to clean it up in one year - because that's what it would take.
* if left to its own course, most of the oil will flow to the surface in a small area. If these sort of measures were put into service right after the blowout, 90% of the oil would have been picked up and reprocessed.
You obviously know nothing about the physical properties of oil.
Just for fun, go out to your driveway and spray the pavement with water. Get it nice and wet, if you can get it into a puddle even better. Next, pour about a tablespoon of oil on the pavement (you can use cooking oil if you want, but if you have diesel fuel it will more closely resemble the oil that is in the Gulf).
Watch what happens. One thing that definitely does not happen is it does not sit in nice, tight little pools - it spreads way the hell out. That's because the oil is less dense than the water, but water is also slippery. This means there is nothing for the oil to push against to hold its shape. On a table top or something, oil will sort of pool up because the surface of the oil meets with a lot more friction when it's up against the table top.
There are pictures of the gulf from space a few months before the spill that show oil sheens from natural seeps that are hundreds of miles long and a few miles wide. Without the dispersants, the sheens from the spill would be many, many, many times larger than that. You would more than likely have a much bigger cleanup problem on your hands without them. That's why they are required to use dispersants in the first place.
Actually in the US you can lose your status as a business (at least as far as taxes are concerned) if you never turn a profit. You have 2-3 years if I remember right, after which you have to pay taxes on gross income if your net income has been negative the whole time.
It's there to keep people from incorporating as a pure tax dodge. If you're smart you'll just show a couple bucks profit, but then you may open yourself up to IRS audits, I don't know.
Actually it's likely related to global warming, since CO2 emits light at a different wavelength than it absorbs it, it sometimes causes the thermosphere (and other layers) to cool and contract by the time the light gets to the outer layers. There are climate models that predict this.
The problem with that is the CO2 levels have been gradually rising over the years - the 2008-2009 cycle did not have significantly more CO2 in the atmosphere than did previous cycles, yet there is a massive difference thermosphere compression.
If CO2 were the cause you would still expect to see a gradual increase in thermosphere compression year to year - the current 16 year cycle would simply have a higher rate of compression on average than the previous solar cycles.
That's not what was observed. What was observed was a massive compression in a single year - far greater than the previously useful solar models predicted. CO2 can definitely be part of the cause, but it cannot explain the huge difference between 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. They should only differ by the difference in solar activity, as CO2 levels are essentially the same.
It's the largest compression on record, which makes it "significantly more severe" than they were expecting, "its magnitude shocked scientists" enough to call it a "collapse". It cannot be explained by the Solar Minimum (which occurred at the same time), and since solar activity is the only thing that has a direct influence on the compression or inflation, it has left "researchers at a loss".
Christ, you can get that from the fucking summary, you don't even have to read the fucking article.
It's like you saw those phrases and immediately had to post, without even bothering to read enough to put any of them in context. If you were a reporter, you would be the poster-boy for reactionary alarmist journalism.
This is a major First Amendment issue. Where's the court order? I don't care what they were doing, there's no excuse for doing this without legal process. Judges are available 24/7 for emergencies.
You might try reading. It's a great thing to do - in fact you find out all sorts of things when you read!
Like the fact that a court order and gag order was issued to BurstNet to remove the single server this guy was hosting everything on.
That's how the law works. You have to get a warrant to take evidence from the people who actually own it not the schmuck renting the equipment. And hey guess what? They did!
Prior to the ascension of The One, the leftysphere and MSM (but I repeat myself) would have been all over this, proclaiming the birth of the Bush Police State.
Hey man, he got a Nobel Prize for Peace! You don't get a Nobel Prize for nothin!
When it's possible for a government to couch new laws in terms of right and wrong and when the People are blinded enough to accept such terms, freedom suffers.
Ok, if "right and wrong" are not the basis for law, what is the basis for law?
The whole purpose of law is to regulate right and wrong. That's why they exist. If you're using them for something else, you're a fucking tyrant.
For a blatant example, the only reason we have a law against murder is because we, as a society, believe murder is wrong. If it is not wrong, then there is no reason to have a law against it, and you're making illegal a perfectly OK activity.
All laws are opinions of right and wrong. Period. The idea that they should be otherwise is ludicrous.
It would be more like a storage unit is found to have dead body in it so they open up everyone's storage lockers and take everything as evidence.
You're close, but still not quite there.
It's like the guy was running a storage service out of a warehouse, and a dead body is found in it. So the police take everything in the warehouse as evidence - which includes everyone else's stuff because they are simply in separate bins in the warehouse.
You might want to take a better look at history, my friend.
The United States of America is the only country in the history of the world that defeats another country's military in war, and then leaves. Every other country in history - including all European countries - have been conquering nations.
The US generally attempts to make sure the local government is at least friendly to the US before it leaves, but this is not always so.
In other words, if you judge the US by its behavior, it does the exact opposite of what you describe, and it is the only country in the history of the world who behaves that way.
The USA government is likely going to make a profit on most of the bailouts.
Yes, the government will, but they stole the money to make the loans from the taxpayers, and they won't be giving it back.
This is a mobster robbing from the local shops (hey, it's not stealing! It's for "protection"!) in his territory so he can make loans to compulsive gamblers. Yeah, the mobster is going to get the loan back. If he doesn't, he'll break the gambler's legs and then double the interest. But the people he stole the cash from won't be seeing a dime of that profit.
From the government's perspective, TARP was free money that they'll get even more back for. It's a 150% "return" on their "investment". Even now, when they have money they could be giving back (most of it is actually just money they have planned to steal but haven't gotten around to yet, but hey, details!), they want to find another use for it instead. It's so much bullshit I can't stand it.
Your average bureaucrat is not over paid.
Most of the bureaucrats are unnecessary. By definition that makes them overpaid by whatever it is that they are making.
I became skeptical when I saw the U.S. ratings for executive and legislative accountability. On the surface, I think the numbers are fair. However, our adversarial two-party system, driven by sound-byte-reactionism, leaves the effective accountability far below the on-paper accountability. With congressional approval ratings running below 25%, we have an incumbency rate above 90%. That cannot jibe with a high accountability level.
It's a bell curve, not a set score based on set criteria.
Relative to the rest of the world, the US has an extremely high rating for executive and legislative accountability. That doesn't mean the accountability is particularly good, it just means it is better than most everyone else's.
That quote is an urban legend, and there has never been any evidence that it was actually uttered by Gates.
You'd think confirmation would be easy, since it was supposedly said at a 1981 computer trade show.
It's like the famous quote "Let them eat cake" which is attributed to Marie Antoinette, but which scholars have never been able to find any evidence to suggest she actually uttered it.
The idea that 640k would be enough forever is idiotic, especially since the industry was so constricted by the 64k limit of 8-bit processors. Microsoft was actually influential in getting the limit to 640k from the 512k originally proposed for the 8088, because they wanted to get as much memory as possible.
The counter notice is sent to the company who took down the post, and under the safe harbor provisions as long as the poster sends them a counter notice the service provider can re-post the material.
It is then up to the two individuals to solve the issue in court.
This means illegal distribution of copyrighted material is easily removed with force of law, with only a slight and temporary inconvenience to fair use materials or otherwise legal distributions of copyrighted materials.
The only change I would make is to add a consequence for an illegitimate takedown notice. A legitimate poster should have the ability to recoup any losses caused by a frivolous takedown notice. I wouldn't go as far as a fine for frivolous notices, but some sort of consequence to make sure copyright holders only go after those that are obviously infringing copyright.
Not really, most of the sentiment and it's popularity hasn't changed in the last decade. It's just that Fox News has its own agenda, and they also happen to be the only mouthpiece available for anybody right of center in this country. So if Fox isn't pushing the right wing anti-government message because a republican is in office (they'd rather a big government repub be in office than any form of democrat) then the anti-government message simply does not get out. The left wing media certainly isn't going to push that message just because a repub happens to be in office - the idea is cancer for them.
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You're assuming it gets 50% of the oil out with each pass. It probably does not.
Also, each pass you make at least doubles your processing time. As it is now it would take 6,000 of Costner's centrifuges to clean up the Gulf spill in a year. If you add a second pass to that, it will either take 12,000 centrifuges or you get it done in two years. Add a third pass and you're at 18,000 centrifuges or three years.
It's also illegal to dump a 75% water - 25% oil mix, that isn't clean enough. Costner's centrifuge apparently does get the water clean enough to dump, but it can only handle oil/water mixes where the oil and water are both nice and smooth. The stuff in the Gulf is like a mouse - it is clumpy and sticky, and so does not work well at all in the centrifuge.
His celebrity no doubt helped a lot - someone says "Jack Puderschmidt has a machine that could clean up the spill" and your response is "Yeah, him and everybody else. Who the hell is Jack Puderschmidt?" That doesn't mean his machine won't ever come up and be evaluated, and if it works eventually used, but it does mean he's just another guy in line, waiting for everyone ahead of him to have their chance at it first.
Now, you hear "Kevin Costner has a machine that could clean up the spill" and your response is "Kevin Costner? Really? I'll bet it doesn't work. Lets get him up here and find out." He gets to jump ahead of the line because people know who he is.
For what it's worth, Costner's machine doesn't work at all on the kind of oil that comprises most of the spill (it's heavy and sticky, which clogs the machine). That's why they only got whatever it was, 30 or 50 of them - they'll be able to use it on the very light stuff or perhaps as a second phase of another process in some cases. If it were good enough to clean the whole spill they would have gotten more like a couple thousand, because that is what it would take for the centrifuge to clean up the spill in a reasonable amount of time.
I work as an engineer in the oil field, and I'm amazed that the US hasn't already adopted many of the regulations already in place elsewhere.
They have. The BOP in the BP spill had all the features you and others describe, as well as being highly redundant internally. It was a fail-safe device.
What do you do when the fail-safe fails?
The devices that are mandatory in most of europe (funnily the home of BP being one of the exceptions, presumably because of the much more shallow waters they're drilling in there), are a little bit more than just the blowout preventer, it's a device which can be triggered in case of emergencies where the wireguided signals from the rig is unable to reach the BOP. They were, as best I can tell, developed after a problem with a platform sinking, same as what happened in the gulf.
Everything you say there is true of the BOP that was used on the BP well. They are the same devices. Accoustic triggers, remote triggers, pressure triggers, you name it, it had it.
It's required by law, and the MMS signs off on every device before and after it is installed. If it doesn't have MMS approval it isn't legal.
The BOP has a half dozen different redundancies built in, and some how all of them failed in the DeepWater spill. It's possible it was some kind of mechanical failure or pipe failure or something of the like (that actually explains very well why all of the redundancy features - even the hail marry trigger via ROV - failed).
Trust me, I work in the oil industry, and the environmental regulations in the US are anything but lax (at least for oil companies). One of the quickest ways to get fired is to spill a quart of oil on the shop floor and not report it to the EPA.
Huh?
BP is on the hook because they own the lease on the reservoir. The way the law is written, it doesn't matter who is producing (the lease owners often contract that out), the lessee is the one responsible if anything goes wrong.
I'm sorry, but TransOcean and Haliburton are well known in the oil industry for what they do - they are not fronts for BP.
The government didn't "not buy" anything - there was no reason to even attempt to fool the government because it is very clear who is responsible and it isn't the company operating the rig. The reason BP (and most oil companies) contract these things out is because it is usually cheaper to hire a specialist company than to maintain your own rig department, pure and simple.
In this case, it certainly wasn't. Poor practices from TransOcean and Haliburton, combined with poor QA at BP and corruption to the MMS means BP is going to have to pay about $25 billion plus whatever the $1000 per barrel fine works out to (should be around $4 billion, using current total estimates). I don't care who you are, that's going to have a huge negative impact on your company.
Right now, oil companies that operate in the US are saying "Oh shit..."
You need to read the GP again:
* the oil is not spread out over the entire Gulf, and most of the oil WILL be in that first three inches of water. They won't have to process the entire volume of the Gulf.
He didn't say they did, those figures were for the 8,000 square miles covering the spill - i.e. the square mile area covered in oil. The total volume of the Gulf is many orders of magnitude higher.
* they are talking about 50 machines, not 3
Extrapolating from the GP's calculations (which others have verified), 50 centrifuges would take about 110 years to clean the Gulf spill. That's why the GP said it would take 6,000 of them to clean it up in one year - because that's what it would take.
* if left to its own course, most of the oil will flow to the surface in a small area. If these sort of measures were put into service right after the blowout, 90% of the oil would have been picked up and reprocessed.
You obviously know nothing about the physical properties of oil.
Just for fun, go out to your driveway and spray the pavement with water. Get it nice and wet, if you can get it into a puddle even better. Next, pour about a tablespoon of oil on the pavement (you can use cooking oil if you want, but if you have diesel fuel it will more closely resemble the oil that is in the Gulf).
Watch what happens. One thing that definitely does not happen is it does not sit in nice, tight little pools - it spreads way the hell out. That's because the oil is less dense than the water, but water is also slippery. This means there is nothing for the oil to push against to hold its shape. On a table top or something, oil will sort of pool up because the surface of the oil meets with a lot more friction when it's up against the table top.
There are pictures of the gulf from space a few months before the spill that show oil sheens from natural seeps that are hundreds of miles long and a few miles wide. Without the dispersants, the sheens from the spill would be many, many, many times larger than that. You would more than likely have a much bigger cleanup problem on your hands without them. That's why they are required to use dispersants in the first place.
Actually in the US you can lose your status as a business (at least as far as taxes are concerned) if you never turn a profit. You have 2-3 years if I remember right, after which you have to pay taxes on gross income if your net income has been negative the whole time.
It's there to keep people from incorporating as a pure tax dodge. If you're smart you'll just show a couple bucks profit, but then you may open yourself up to IRS audits, I don't know.
Only if space-time is curved into a circle. If it's just an arc, we're* fucked.
By "we" I am referring to the universe itself. The human race is fucked no matter what (but not for a really long time, so it's cool).
Actually it's likely related to global warming, since CO2 emits light at a different wavelength than it absorbs it, it sometimes causes the thermosphere (and other layers) to cool and contract by the time the light gets to the outer layers. There are climate models that predict this.
The problem with that is the CO2 levels have been gradually rising over the years - the 2008-2009 cycle did not have significantly more CO2 in the atmosphere than did previous cycles, yet there is a massive difference thermosphere compression.
If CO2 were the cause you would still expect to see a gradual increase in thermosphere compression year to year - the current 16 year cycle would simply have a higher rate of compression on average than the previous solar cycles.
That's not what was observed. What was observed was a massive compression in a single year - far greater than the previously useful solar models predicted. CO2 can definitely be part of the cause, but it cannot explain the huge difference between 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. They should only differ by the difference in solar activity, as CO2 levels are essentially the same.
Perhaps you should read it again?
It's the largest compression on record, which makes it "significantly more severe" than they were expecting, "its magnitude shocked scientists" enough to call it a "collapse". It cannot be explained by the Solar Minimum (which occurred at the same time), and since solar activity is the only thing that has a direct influence on the compression or inflation, it has left "researchers at a loss".
Christ, you can get that from the fucking summary, you don't even have to read the fucking article.
It's like you saw those phrases and immediately had to post, without even bothering to read enough to put any of them in context. If you were a reporter, you would be the poster-boy for reactionary alarmist journalism.
This is a major First Amendment issue. Where's the court order? I don't care what they were doing, there's no excuse for doing this without legal process. Judges are available 24/7 for emergencies.
You might try reading. It's a great thing to do - in fact you find out all sorts of things when you read!
Like the fact that a court order and gag order was issued to BurstNet to remove the single server this guy was hosting everything on.
That's how the law works. You have to get a warrant to take evidence from the people who actually own it not the schmuck renting the equipment. And hey guess what? They did!
Dumbass.
Prior to the ascension of The One, the leftysphere and MSM (but I repeat myself) would have been all over this, proclaiming the birth of the Bush Police State.
Hey man, he got a Nobel Prize for Peace! You don't get a Nobel Prize for nothin!
Oh wait...
I told you it was them all along!
And Natalie Portman Naked, yeah...
When it's possible for a government to couch new laws in terms of right and wrong and when the People are blinded enough to accept such terms, freedom suffers.
Ok, if "right and wrong" are not the basis for law, what is the basis for law?
The whole purpose of law is to regulate right and wrong. That's why they exist. If you're using them for something else, you're a fucking tyrant.
For a blatant example, the only reason we have a law against murder is because we, as a society, believe murder is wrong. If it is not wrong, then there is no reason to have a law against it, and you're making illegal a perfectly OK activity.
All laws are opinions of right and wrong. Period. The idea that they should be otherwise is ludicrous.
It would be more like a storage unit is found to have dead body in it so they open up everyone's storage lockers and take everything as evidence.
You're close, but still not quite there.
It's like the guy was running a storage service out of a warehouse, and a dead body is found in it. So the police take everything in the warehouse as evidence - which includes everyone else's stuff because they are simply in separate bins in the warehouse.
You might want to take a better look at history, my friend.
The United States of America is the only country in the history of the world that defeats another country's military in war, and then leaves. Every other country in history - including all European countries - have been conquering nations.
The US generally attempts to make sure the local government is at least friendly to the US before it leaves, but this is not always so.
In other words, if you judge the US by its behavior, it does the exact opposite of what you describe, and it is the only country in the history of the world who behaves that way.
No other country can say that. Period.
The USA government is likely going to make a profit on most of the bailouts.
Yes, the government will, but they stole the money to make the loans from the taxpayers, and they won't be giving it back.
This is a mobster robbing from the local shops (hey, it's not stealing! It's for "protection"!) in his territory so he can make loans to compulsive gamblers. Yeah, the mobster is going to get the loan back. If he doesn't, he'll break the gambler's legs and then double the interest. But the people he stole the cash from won't be seeing a dime of that profit.
From the government's perspective, TARP was free money that they'll get even more back for. It's a 150% "return" on their "investment". Even now, when they have money they could be giving back (most of it is actually just money they have planned to steal but haven't gotten around to yet, but hey, details!), they want to find another use for it instead. It's so much bullshit I can't stand it.
Your average bureaucrat is not over paid.
Most of the bureaucrats are unnecessary. By definition that makes them overpaid by whatever it is that they are making.
I became skeptical when I saw the U.S. ratings for executive and legislative accountability. On the surface, I think the numbers are fair. However, our adversarial two-party system, driven by sound-byte-reactionism, leaves the effective accountability far below the on-paper accountability. With congressional approval ratings running below 25%, we have an incumbency rate above 90%. That cannot jibe with a high accountability level.
It's a bell curve, not a set score based on set criteria.
Relative to the rest of the world, the US has an extremely high rating for executive and legislative accountability. That doesn't mean the accountability is particularly good, it just means it is better than most everyone else's.
No.
Fun fact:
That quote is an urban legend, and there has never been any evidence that it was actually uttered by Gates.
You'd think confirmation would be easy, since it was supposedly said at a 1981 computer trade show.
It's like the famous quote "Let them eat cake" which is attributed to Marie Antoinette, but which scholars have never been able to find any evidence to suggest she actually uttered it.
The idea that 640k would be enough forever is idiotic, especially since the industry was so constricted by the 64k limit of 8-bit processors. Microsoft was actually influential in getting the limit to 640k from the 512k originally proposed for the 8088, because they wanted to get as much memory as possible.
Apparently you never got the results of that case.
Youtube (Google, actually) won, with the federal judge confirming the current interpretation of the safeharbor provisions in the DMCA.
Apparently, you need to read it as well.
The counter notice is sent to the company who took down the post, and under the safe harbor provisions as long as the poster sends them a counter notice the service provider can re-post the material.
It is then up to the two individuals to solve the issue in court.
This means illegal distribution of copyrighted material is easily removed with force of law, with only a slight and temporary inconvenience to fair use materials or otherwise legal distributions of copyrighted materials.
The only change I would make is to add a consequence for an illegitimate takedown notice. A legitimate poster should have the ability to recoup any losses caused by a frivolous takedown notice. I wouldn't go as far as a fine for frivolous notices, but some sort of consequence to make sure copyright holders only go after those that are obviously infringing copyright.
If you can get a camera down 5,000 feet, there's nothing stopping you.
Wow...
I'll bet whoever that guy is is making a fortune right now. I had a hard time laughing though.
Not really, most of the sentiment and it's popularity hasn't changed in the last decade. It's just that Fox News has its own agenda, and they also happen to be the only mouthpiece available for anybody right of center in this country. So if Fox isn't pushing the right wing anti-government message because a republican is in office (they'd rather a big government repub be in office than any form of democrat) then the anti-government message simply does not get out. The left wing media certainly isn't going to push that message just because a repub happens to be in office - the idea is cancer for them.