The goatse guy has prior art, and he used a 5 1/4 inch hard drive as opposed to a wimpy USB flash. I'm sure theres someone out there whom can fit a whole NAS rack in.
No, you get worms from fecal matter not spam. Although a remarkable amount of factoryfarmed "meat" contains fecal matter, its mostly from the bowels of the slaughtered animals as opposed to human, as far as I know.
Re:"targeted advertising" is NOT a benefit to ME
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Privacy Machiavellis
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· Score: 1
it's hard to get people to subscribe to product review information. A publication like Consumer Reports
Third, Amazon, as a vendor, isn't exactly an unbiased party
Which brings up the other problem, that Consumer Reports is by no means unbiased either. They used to be absolutely famous for being total fanboys for certain car manufacturers and hating certain car manufacturers, apparently completely disregarding the cars themselves. Some of it may have been target market, in that a coastie liberal journalist fighting the good fight against corporate interests is probably going to end up with wildly different opinions about the facts of a truck when compared to a midwestern ranch hand.
Also with intense astroturfing its hard to find unbiased information. For a good time, look at some reviews on amazon for certain children's leapfrog products, and notice how the same cut and paste is seen on multiple products from a person self described in the review as the ideal target market of their product. Did a genuine end user do the cut and paste, or a marketing firm, or the companies CEO? Who knows, but I have my suspicions.
You can cut all that out by just giving me cash directly to watch their ads. Some cable channels cost money per hour (per month anyway). I don't see why some couldn't pay you. Same concept with micropayments, all this focus on me sending big corporation a few pennies, but I don't see why it couldn't work in reverse.
But at no time did you say that it would be less reliable.
Well, you gotta read between the lines a little bit, dude.
So, you've got a weight budget of 1 Kg for a tank for the helium for the gas analyzer, for three months. Not a serious engineering problem.
You bolt on the RTG and the mission now lasts 10 years. No problem man, all you need is 40 times the helium. Which you don't have the budget to lift. But helium is pretty light, and metal is pretty heavy. We'll make the total WAG that if you lightened the helium tank by 50% that tank mass could be replaced by a 9.75 year supply of helium. I find that highly unlikely, but we'll be really optimistic here.
One tiny little problem. Now instead of a perfectly reliable and reasonable 1 Kg helium tank, you need a tank with 40 times the volume and half the mass. Good luck, you are so going to need it. Most likely that giant weak tank is going to crack from vibration during launch/landing, or corrode in storage while waiting for NASA, or split wide open when they try to fill it before launch, etc. After all, if you could engineer in an extra factor 80 safety margin, your mission budget would almost certainly have originally been to install a 1/80th of a Kg helium tank instead of a 1 Kg tank.
That's just the problems with the consumables. Now consider instruments. Ball bearings will run a wind speed meter for 3 months without lubrication in a sandy environment, if you don't care if they still work in 3 months. If you want it to run forever, then you have to do something more complicated, probably less reliable, but certainly more mass. Then take the mass of that out of... what... the parachute mass budget? Not good for reliability at all.
Re:"targeted advertising" is NOT a benefit to ME
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Privacy Machiavellis
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't care if the advertisers think it's a benefit. It doesn't benefit me
If it'd FUD scare tactics, or lifestyle promotion trash, sure. If its informational, thats a whole nother matter.
I'm in the market for a vacuum cleaner. I'm pretty hot to get a Dyson at this time. The commercials suck. Mostly I want high suction and I am so thru with buying bags and filters.
I wouldn't mind some "targeted ads" on this topic.
Given the enormous amount of advertising money spent to reach people whom don't give a $#*!, you'd think amazon or something would set up a service where companies pay me money to examine their marketing crud, paid to me at time of sale on amazon. I'd sit there and watch an "electrolux" or whatever commercial for $1. And they'd probably pay me $1 since I'm hot to buy a vacuum cleaner, and amazon would only clear the money to me if I actually bought someones vacuum cleaner (not necessarily theirs). Essentially a reverse ebay auction, where the companies bid on me to get me to watch their ads, and I prove I'm serious by purchasing "someones" product.
We also "only have so much hydrogen left" since, with the exception of rounding errors, its all industrially produced by steam reforming natural gas, coal, oil, etc. You do the old fashioned "town gas" process, remove the yummy CO and unreacted N2 (and I suppose the one percent or so trace of Ar and friends) and whats left is.... H2. Oh there are some fine details besides that to steam reforming, but thats the basic idea.
So you can fractionally distill He from natgas, probably powered by burning lots of natgas, or you can steam reform natgas to make H2, probably powered by natgas. I'm totally at a loss as to which will "run out" first or which is supposed to be more "environmentally sound-er". I'm guessing on a cubic foot of natgas vs pound of payload lifted basis, He production might use slightly fewer resources, but its a pretty tight race. An excellent homework assignment for the ChemEng slashdot set.
... and you designed it to give a 150 degree delta V to survive the winter, in the summer she cooks along at perhaps 175 degrees C. A bit toasty. Yes I know there are heavy and complicated compressed gas / spring control arm systems and other such foolishness available, but they're heavy. Perhaps if we removed all the scientific instruments we'd have the weight budget to land a survivable multi-year infrastructure platform, but it would have nothing to do since all the instruments had to be removed.
more complex? How? the RTG is a very simple device.
Your analysis is 100% correct assuming the REST OF THE MACHINE could function for years without any increase in complexity and weight. My guess is no. Yes a radio that operates "forever" costs about as much as a radio that operates for a couple weeks. I'm not completely familiar with the science instruments onboard, some things like magnetometers operate "forever" but some things like gas analysis systems complete with reagents and vacuum pumps and purge gases have a very finite life. Optics get covered with dust, unless you add a heavy system to clean them. Stainless steel ball bearings in a windspeed meter will eventually wear out, unless you do something heavy and complicated.
Wasting all that money on an expensive RTG isn't so useful if all you end up with a year later is a working radio and... not much else. Maybe a working seismometer and a working magnetometer and everything else used up and worn out? Interesting, but maybe not worth the bucks.
I haven't really been following this whole event, but wasn't there a dead battery in one of the control systems?
Which is why they have two of them. And carefully maintaining a single battery, when you have two, neither requires maintenance, because they can back each other up. Or something like that.
my check card (debit card that allows you to run it as a credit card anyplace that accepts mastercard, but takes the money from your account with 0% interest owed instead of racking up money you owe to faceless megacorp with 18% interest) has the exact same protections as a credit card.
So, your check card is stolen, your account is zero'd. Now all your legit paid bills bounce. Each individual merchant wants $25 and up, directly from you, for bouncing a check. How does your check card protect you from that? My theory is, it does no such thing.
Also I owe 0% interest on my CC. Simply pay your bill each month, no big deal.
No surprise this year. Jobs himself: check. New iPhone model: check. New firmware version: check. All is "déjà vu" ! The only possible surprise would be "OS4 for iPhone2G" (they said "no !"; now they should say "yes !").
Oh, I'd be pleasantly surprised by a 64GB nano, I'd rush out and buy it as my 16 is too small. I'd be pleasantly surprised by a lowered ipad price. I hope its not just all "phone" news.
Iphone total price with contract has dropped from around $3000 to around $2500 or so. Still way too steep for me. I'm not asking too much for a modest $50 to $100 off the price of an ipad, I hope.
Buy small work your way up. You'll be hopelessly confused with oil immersion lenses unless you get plenty of experience with something simpler first. Also you feel a lot better when you break a $100 kids scope than a semi-pro $1000 scope.
Just like astronomical telescopes, marketing says the most important thing is the magnification factor, when it's actually amongst the least. Proper illumination is not the most exciting topic, but its certainly amongst the most important.
The only thing worse than crushing a $25 lens into the surface of a slide because you haven't learned how to focus, is crushing a $250 lens into the surface of a slide...
Just like metalworking, half the group says your best bet is 50 year old classic american made glass, and half the group says buy brand new Chinese glass knowing that its at best a preassembled kit.
Just like dating (?) be sure to try everything before focusing exclusively on one topic. Low power stereo microscopes are fun. Preparing your own slides is fun. Geological is fun. Phase contrast is ph-un. Adventures in photo-mosaicing/stitching is fun. Buying weird prepared slides is fun "mitosis set" "every part of a frog" "the joy of bacteria" or whatever etc etc. Little protists are fun. Leaf sections from giant trees are fun.
That assumes 100% of the people are there to pay a bill.
Correct. On the other hand, charging at least five times per transaction more than a fast food joint, makes up for a lot.
Even if only 1 in 5 people paid a cash bill, that's still about the same cash flow as a McDonalds. And even McD has people paying by CC and by that electronic "food stamp" card thingy instead of cash.
And in some bad neighborhoods around here, they do in fact rob McDonalds and shoot employees.
I bet a cable payment office has more paper cash flow that some small bank branches (like the ones inside food stores)
Hence, the armed guard.
Now, if the average bill were back to the 1980's and was merely $17 like in 1983, things might be a bit different.
If you are doing such bad job servicing your customers needs that you feel you have to protect your employees from customers so angry they might start shooting up the place, maybe, just maybe, you might want to try and improve your customer service a bit...
I'll stay away from the whole customer service thing, but, think about the crime angle.
If you had good enough credit to have a credit card, or even a checking account, you'd pay by mail or online or pretty much do anything other than stand in line. Who enjoys standing in line? Now if the monthly bill is only $100 (you wish), and you're paying in cash pretty much by definition of going there and standing in line, and there's always a line, and there are only two reps (probably more), and the rep takes a pessimistic 5 minutes per bill payment (including a 4 minute nap time?), even pessimistically, that's an absolute minimum cash intake of $2400 per hour. Even if you have an armored car swing by every four hours, that means an armed robber can pull an average of $5K but if he cases the joint out to harvest his cash right before a pickup, thats darn near $10K. At an absolute minimum.
I defy you to find a legal small office that pulls in more paper money per day. There are plenty of retail establishments with way more dollars in checks or credit card receipts, but not in cash... Maybe a large gentleman's club pulls in more cash, but then again, they have more bouncers...
Robbers can in fact multiply, even if they have to use a calculator. And that's why they have an armed guard.
Your snarky sarcasm doesn't change the truth; permitting the same cast of characters to do the same nefarious shit again and again is the alternative. We must invoke the corporate death penalty on those corporations which deserve it.
So you've killed a paper document. Burned it in effigy, perhaps. Great job. Now, total demand for product remains the same. Other companies are going to need to hire folks to handle the increased volume. Conveniently, there's a handy pool of experienced folks ready to start screwing up their new employer.
You plan has no real world effect whatsoever other than temporarily feeling good, rather like a drug. And some rich lawyers will get richer by shuffling some papers, but thats just business as usual.
Now if you personally ordered the death penalty for those whom were the cause (assuming they're not already dead from other causes, etc), then you'd at least have a measurable positive effect. But environmentalists never quite have the guts to pull the trigger, they always want someone else to do the shooting, and someone else to catch the bullets. Nothing but a call to arms for the nameless and faceless "other" (usually the government) to kill the nameless and faceless "other" (anybody other than me and mine). I'm unimpressed.
Prices are not simply set by the financial needs of the seller, they are set by market forces
I agree with you completely. Previously their competitors could not raise their prices because BP would simply undercut them and gain market share, assuming that makes them a higher profit. If you send BP an immense bill, I don't think they're going to undercut their competitors new higher price.
You've got a graph of units sold on the y and price on the x. Its a downward ski slope. It just took a sudden kick to the right because BP can no longer undercut their competitors. What happens to the market clearing price? Goes up.
...prices... won't go up because BP tries to recoup the cleanup expenditure.
Why? Their competitors are not charities. They're leaving profit on the table and failing their financial responsibilities to their shareholders by not increasing their price...
How do you figure? BP is going to sell their oil at a higher price than other oil companies (who's going to buy it from them)?
How do you figure they're getting their money? Pull their cashflow accounting one page summary, look to income sources, what do you find? They don't exactly have a private mint...
They COULD reduce expenses, raising some money, but cutting some safety corners. After all, lightning never strikes twice, so if they just had the "worst oil spill evar(tm)" or whatever, they could save some dough that way.
Can't reduce salaries, then in your free market, no one would work there...
Less payoffs to congressmen? Thats not going to fly.
So, if the money doesn't come from us at the pumps, then where, exactly?
BP is going to sell their oil at a higher price than other oil companies (who's going to buy it from them)?
The other oil companies are going to raise their prices to get a higher profit, because they can. What's BP going to do about it, undercut them? ha ha ha they have a multi billion dollar bill to pay, of course they'll play along. Thats why all of us will pay, not just BP customers.
They are not astronomical if you continue operations despite knowing that some of your safeties have already failed.
I'm curious if you could list those known failed safety systems? I don't think you can, because there were none that I have found in my research.
Until the BOP didn't work, they thought it was working normally. Until the cement failed, it seemed to be working normally.
This wasn't a "failure", it appears to have been blatant disregard for safety procedures.
Yeah in retrospect pumping out the oil based drill mud to "save the environment" sounds like a good idea, but this time it didn't turn out so well for the environment. Maybe in the future we'll have a rule to keep a kill pill of mud in closed off wells just in case. Which will probably make the cement people pretty lazy, since they'll have a backup, which will work pretty well until a cement job fails and the heavy mud leaks out. So thats how the next disaster will occur, by trusting the safety procedures too much, not by disregarding them.
Also once the well started coming in, it was heroic of them to stay and try to save it, but in retrospect the 11 folks whom died should probably have just started running. They must have been good hands because they stayed to fight, and unfortunately those are the exact folks whom die in disasters like this. Those rules might change too. So the next disaster will turn out to be everyone followed the rules and ran for it, when just one dude with a pipe wrench could have saved the worlds oceans or whatever. Again, not disregarding safety, just trusting the written procedures too much.
Since that's such a common failure mode of complicated systems, its likely that happened here, just based on odds. Don't want to ruin the environment with oil based drilling mud, and don't want to let the mud interfere with the top plug of cement, so lets pump it out. Ooops, no happy ending like safety folks claimed, this time.
How does the tensile strength of cement matter here?
Cement is like an order of magnitude, at least, stronger in compression than tension. (formation pressure minus seawater pressure) crushed it in compression. Now we're going to squirt downhole hard enough to push mud down rather than let oil flow up, in other words harder than formation pressure. Except it already crumbled in compression at less, and has been out of control eroded for like a month. And its tensile strength is going to be like 1/10 its compression strength. Therefore, they're probably going to lose circulation like mad. Which is probably why I read they're stockpiling some insane quantity of drilling mud for this attempt.
I forget the exact numbers but I remember the delta was 0.3 ppg between losing circulation and the well kicking. Something like 14.4 ppg mud and they lose circulation, pumping mud into fractures in the rocks. Something like 14.1 ppg mud and the well started to kick. Its not flawless granite down there.
This is all based on the extremely widely held belief that the blowout was due to a bad cement job between the two smallest diameter casings.
The funny part is watching people desperate to fine BP... Apparently, because they have the most money. Ambulance chaser culture at its finest.
No one mentions fining Haliburton the cement company, no one mentions fining the owners of the drilling platform, no one mentions fining the govt inspectors whom may have not done their job. No one mentions fining the families of the 11 dead men, whom might have been the cause. Just, suspiciously, fining the company that happens to be the richest. While carefully avoiding the two issues of whom exactly screwed up (its possible BP did nothing wrong), and the issue of whom will pay (that being us, the gas station consumers, of course). Ethics and morality at its finest, I guess.
Hilarious subject line for your post, since the process of "frac-ing" aka "fraking" the well is a production technique used to greatly increase flow rate, using explosives to crack the oil-bearing rock.
So, that's the question. Are we better off with a sharp huge release of the entire formation in one big gulp, or better off letting it slowly trickle out as we've been doing?
The other hilarious part, is nuke obsessed Americans never notice the only thing untouched in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was buried concrete and steel building foundations... You know, just like... oil wells...
Other than being a big orgasmic kaboom, setting of a nuke would do either jack nothing, or make it much worse.
Also the kill well we're digging probably would need to be bigger to fit a nuke instead of pumping mud. So it'll go slower.
Unfortunately, BP is doing something very intelligent . . . they are wiping their hands from the affair and trying to disassociate themselves from the whole disaster. "What?!?! Liability?!?! Not us!"
Seriously? All I've heard from them, over and over, was they're not going to hide behind the legal liability limit. If you can provide any actual quotes that their position is now to do the exact opposite, that would be very insightful.
Slashdot Mirror
The goatse guy has prior art, and he used a 5 1/4 inch hard drive as opposed to a wimpy USB flash. I'm sure theres someone out there whom can fit a whole NAS rack in.
No, you get worms from fecal matter not spam. Although a remarkable amount of factoryfarmed "meat" contains fecal matter, its mostly from the bowels of the slaughtered animals as opposed to human, as far as I know.
it's hard to get people to subscribe to product review information. A publication like Consumer Reports
Third, Amazon, as a vendor, isn't exactly an unbiased party
Which brings up the other problem, that Consumer Reports is by no means unbiased either. They used to be absolutely famous for being total fanboys for certain car manufacturers and hating certain car manufacturers, apparently completely disregarding the cars themselves. Some of it may have been target market, in that a coastie liberal journalist fighting the good fight against corporate interests is probably going to end up with wildly different opinions about the facts of a truck when compared to a midwestern ranch hand.
Also with intense astroturfing its hard to find unbiased information. For a good time, look at some reviews on amazon for certain children's leapfrog products, and notice how the same cut and paste is seen on multiple products from a person self described in the review as the ideal target market of their product. Did a genuine end user do the cut and paste, or a marketing firm, or the companies CEO? Who knows, but I have my suspicions.
You can cut all that out by just giving me cash directly to watch their ads. Some cable channels cost money per hour (per month anyway). I don't see why some couldn't pay you. Same concept with micropayments, all this focus on me sending big corporation a few pennies, but I don't see why it couldn't work in reverse.
But at no time did you say that it would be less reliable.
Well, you gotta read between the lines a little bit, dude.
So, you've got a weight budget of 1 Kg for a tank for the helium for the gas analyzer, for three months. Not a serious engineering problem.
You bolt on the RTG and the mission now lasts 10 years. No problem man, all you need is 40 times the helium. Which you don't have the budget to lift. But helium is pretty light, and metal is pretty heavy. We'll make the total WAG that if you lightened the helium tank by 50% that tank mass could be replaced by a 9.75 year supply of helium. I find that highly unlikely, but we'll be really optimistic here.
One tiny little problem. Now instead of a perfectly reliable and reasonable 1 Kg helium tank, you need a tank with 40 times the volume and half the mass. Good luck, you are so going to need it. Most likely that giant weak tank is going to crack from vibration during launch/landing, or corrode in storage while waiting for NASA, or split wide open when they try to fill it before launch, etc. After all, if you could engineer in an extra factor 80 safety margin, your mission budget would almost certainly have originally been to install a 1/80th of a Kg helium tank instead of a 1 Kg tank.
That's just the problems with the consumables. Now consider instruments. Ball bearings will run a wind speed meter for 3 months without lubrication in a sandy environment, if you don't care if they still work in 3 months. If you want it to run forever, then you have to do something more complicated, probably less reliable, but certainly more mass. Then take the mass of that out of ... what ... the parachute mass budget? Not good for reliability at all.
I don't care if the advertisers think it's a benefit. It doesn't benefit me
If it'd FUD scare tactics, or lifestyle promotion trash, sure. If its informational, thats a whole nother matter.
I'm in the market for a vacuum cleaner. I'm pretty hot to get a Dyson at this time. The commercials suck. Mostly I want high suction and I am so thru with buying bags and filters.
I wouldn't mind some "targeted ads" on this topic.
Given the enormous amount of advertising money spent to reach people whom don't give a $#*!, you'd think amazon or something would set up a service where companies pay me money to examine their marketing crud, paid to me at time of sale on amazon. I'd sit there and watch an "electrolux" or whatever commercial for $1. And they'd probably pay me $1 since I'm hot to buy a vacuum cleaner, and amazon would only clear the money to me if I actually bought someones vacuum cleaner (not necessarily theirs). Essentially a reverse ebay auction, where the companies bid on me to get me to watch their ads, and I prove I'm serious by purchasing "someones" product.
Did they even google "tea bagging" before they started that?
Oh not googling is not the bad part.
The bad part, is they did google it.
and we only have so much helium left.
We also "only have so much hydrogen left" since, with the exception of rounding errors, its all industrially produced by steam reforming natural gas, coal, oil, etc. You do the old fashioned "town gas" process, remove the yummy CO and unreacted N2 (and I suppose the one percent or so trace of Ar and friends) and whats left is .... H2. Oh there are some fine details besides that to steam reforming, but thats the basic idea.
So you can fractionally distill He from natgas, probably powered by burning lots of natgas, or you can steam reform natgas to make H2, probably powered by natgas. I'm totally at a loss as to which will "run out" first or which is supposed to be more "environmentally sound-er". I'm guessing on a cubic foot of natgas vs pound of payload lifted basis, He production might use slightly fewer resources, but its a pretty tight race. An excellent homework assignment for the ChemEng slashdot set.
Since you can't shutdown the decay....
... and you designed it to give a 150 degree delta V to survive the winter, in the summer she cooks along at perhaps 175 degrees C. A bit toasty. Yes I know there are heavy and complicated compressed gas / spring control arm systems and other such foolishness available, but they're heavy. Perhaps if we removed all the scientific instruments we'd have the weight budget to land a survivable multi-year infrastructure platform, but it would have nothing to do since all the instruments had to be removed.
more complex? How? the RTG is a very simple device.
Your analysis is 100% correct assuming the REST OF THE MACHINE could function for years without any increase in complexity and weight. My guess is no. Yes a radio that operates "forever" costs about as much as a radio that operates for a couple weeks. I'm not completely familiar with the science instruments onboard, some things like magnetometers operate "forever" but some things like gas analysis systems complete with reagents and vacuum pumps and purge gases have a very finite life. Optics get covered with dust, unless you add a heavy system to clean them. Stainless steel ball bearings in a windspeed meter will eventually wear out, unless you do something heavy and complicated.
Wasting all that money on an expensive RTG isn't so useful if all you end up with a year later is a working radio and ... not much else. Maybe a working seismometer and a working magnetometer and everything else used up and worn out? Interesting, but maybe not worth the bucks.
I haven't really been following this whole event, but wasn't there a dead battery in one of the control systems?
Which is why they have two of them. And carefully maintaining a single battery, when you have two, neither requires maintenance, because they can back each other up. Or something like that.
Somewhere, just beneath the surface, lurks a "your mom" joke...
If you don't want anyone knowing about something then you should not be doing it. Give me one example to the contrary.
Leaving your house empty at a specific time with a specific valuable object in it ready to be stolen.
my check card (debit card that allows you to run it as a credit card anyplace that accepts mastercard, but takes the money from your account with 0% interest owed instead of racking up money you owe to faceless megacorp with 18% interest) has the exact same protections as a credit card.
So, your check card is stolen, your account is zero'd. Now all your legit paid bills bounce. Each individual merchant wants $25 and up, directly from you, for bouncing a check. How does your check card protect you from that? My theory is, it does no such thing.
Also I owe 0% interest on my CC. Simply pay your bill each month, no big deal.
No surprise this year. Jobs himself: check. New iPhone model: check. New firmware version: check. All is "déjà vu" ! The only possible surprise would be "OS4 for iPhone2G" (they said "no !"; now they should say "yes !").
Oh, I'd be pleasantly surprised by a 64GB nano, I'd rush out and buy it as my 16 is too small. I'd be pleasantly surprised by a lowered ipad price. I hope its not just all "phone" news.
Iphone total price with contract has dropped from around $3000 to around $2500 or so. Still way too steep for me. I'm not asking too much for a modest $50 to $100 off the price of an ipad, I hope.
Nah, you have google.
Buy small work your way up. You'll be hopelessly confused with oil immersion lenses unless you get plenty of experience with something simpler first. Also you feel a lot better when you break a $100 kids scope than a semi-pro $1000 scope.
Just like astronomical telescopes, marketing says the most important thing is the magnification factor, when it's actually amongst the least. Proper illumination is not the most exciting topic, but its certainly amongst the most important.
The only thing worse than crushing a $25 lens into the surface of a slide because you haven't learned how to focus, is crushing a $250 lens into the surface of a slide...
Just like metalworking, half the group says your best bet is 50 year old classic american made glass, and half the group says buy brand new Chinese glass knowing that its at best a preassembled kit.
Just like dating (?) be sure to try everything before focusing exclusively on one topic. Low power stereo microscopes are fun. Preparing your own slides is fun. Geological is fun. Phase contrast is ph-un. Adventures in photo-mosaicing/stitching is fun. Buying weird prepared slides is fun "mitosis set" "every part of a frog" "the joy of bacteria" or whatever etc etc. Little protists are fun. Leaf sections from giant trees are fun.
That assumes 100% of the people are there to pay a bill.
Correct. On the other hand, charging at least five times per transaction more than a fast food joint, makes up for a lot.
Even if only 1 in 5 people paid a cash bill, that's still about the same cash flow as a McDonalds. And even McD has people paying by CC and by that electronic "food stamp" card thingy instead of cash.
And in some bad neighborhoods around here, they do in fact rob McDonalds and shoot employees.
I bet a cable payment office has more paper cash flow that some small bank branches (like the ones inside food stores)
Hence, the armed guard.
Now, if the average bill were back to the 1980's and was merely $17 like in 1983, things might be a bit different.
If you are doing such bad job servicing your customers needs that you feel you have to protect your employees from customers so angry they might start shooting up the place, maybe, just maybe, you might want to try and improve your customer service a bit...
I'll stay away from the whole customer service thing, but, think about the crime angle.
If you had good enough credit to have a credit card, or even a checking account, you'd pay by mail or online or pretty much do anything other than stand in line. Who enjoys standing in line? Now if the monthly bill is only $100 (you wish), and you're paying in cash pretty much by definition of going there and standing in line, and there's always a line, and there are only two reps (probably more), and the rep takes a pessimistic 5 minutes per bill payment (including a 4 minute nap time?), even pessimistically, that's an absolute minimum cash intake of $2400 per hour. Even if you have an armored car swing by every four hours, that means an armed robber can pull an average of $5K but if he cases the joint out to harvest his cash right before a pickup, thats darn near $10K. At an absolute minimum.
I defy you to find a legal small office that pulls in more paper money per day. There are plenty of retail establishments with way more dollars in checks or credit card receipts, but not in cash... Maybe a large gentleman's club pulls in more cash, but then again, they have more bouncers...
Robbers can in fact multiply, even if they have to use a calculator. And that's why they have an armed guard.
Your snarky sarcasm doesn't change the truth; permitting the same cast of characters to do the same nefarious shit again and again is the alternative. We must invoke the corporate death penalty on those corporations which deserve it.
So you've killed a paper document. Burned it in effigy, perhaps. Great job. Now, total demand for product remains the same. Other companies are going to need to hire folks to handle the increased volume. Conveniently, there's a handy pool of experienced folks ready to start screwing up their new employer.
You plan has no real world effect whatsoever other than temporarily feeling good, rather like a drug. And some rich lawyers will get richer by shuffling some papers, but thats just business as usual.
Now if you personally ordered the death penalty for those whom were the cause (assuming they're not already dead from other causes, etc), then you'd at least have a measurable positive effect. But environmentalists never quite have the guts to pull the trigger, they always want someone else to do the shooting, and someone else to catch the bullets. Nothing but a call to arms for the nameless and faceless "other" (usually the government) to kill the nameless and faceless "other" (anybody other than me and mine). I'm unimpressed.
Prices are not simply set by the financial needs of the seller, they are set by market forces
I agree with you completely. Previously their competitors could not raise their prices because BP would simply undercut them and gain market share, assuming that makes them a higher profit. If you send BP an immense bill, I don't think they're going to undercut their competitors new higher price.
You've got a graph of units sold on the y and price on the x. Its a downward ski slope. It just took a sudden kick to the right because BP can no longer undercut their competitors. What happens to the market clearing price? Goes up.
...prices ... won't go up because BP tries to recoup the cleanup expenditure.
Why? Their competitors are not charities. They're leaving profit on the table and failing their financial responsibilities to their shareholders by not increasing their price...
How do you figure? BP is going to sell their oil at a higher price than other oil companies (who's going to buy it from them)?
How do you figure they're getting their money? Pull their cashflow accounting one page summary, look to income sources, what do you find? They don't exactly have a private mint...
They COULD reduce expenses, raising some money, but cutting some safety corners. After all, lightning never strikes twice, so if they just had the "worst oil spill evar(tm)" or whatever, they could save some dough that way.
Can't reduce salaries, then in your free market, no one would work there...
Less payoffs to congressmen? Thats not going to fly.
So, if the money doesn't come from us at the pumps, then where, exactly?
BP is going to sell their oil at a higher price than other oil companies (who's going to buy it from them)?
The other oil companies are going to raise their prices to get a higher profit, because they can. What's BP going to do about it, undercut them? ha ha ha they have a multi billion dollar bill to pay, of course they'll play along. Thats why all of us will pay, not just BP customers.
They are not astronomical if you continue operations despite knowing that some of your safeties have already failed.
I'm curious if you could list those known failed safety systems? I don't think you can, because there were none that I have found in my research.
Until the BOP didn't work, they thought it was working normally. Until the cement failed, it seemed to be working normally.
This wasn't a "failure", it appears to have been blatant disregard for safety procedures.
Yeah in retrospect pumping out the oil based drill mud to "save the environment" sounds like a good idea, but this time it didn't turn out so well for the environment. Maybe in the future we'll have a rule to keep a kill pill of mud in closed off wells just in case. Which will probably make the cement people pretty lazy, since they'll have a backup, which will work pretty well until a cement job fails and the heavy mud leaks out. So thats how the next disaster will occur, by trusting the safety procedures too much, not by disregarding them.
Also once the well started coming in, it was heroic of them to stay and try to save it, but in retrospect the 11 folks whom died should probably have just started running. They must have been good hands because they stayed to fight, and unfortunately those are the exact folks whom die in disasters like this. Those rules might change too. So the next disaster will turn out to be everyone followed the rules and ran for it, when just one dude with a pipe wrench could have saved the worlds oceans or whatever. Again, not disregarding safety, just trusting the written procedures too much.
Since that's such a common failure mode of complicated systems, its likely that happened here, just based on odds. Don't want to ruin the environment with oil based drilling mud, and don't want to let the mud interfere with the top plug of cement, so lets pump it out. Ooops, no happy ending like safety folks claimed, this time.
How does the tensile strength of cement matter here?
Cement is like an order of magnitude, at least, stronger in compression than tension. (formation pressure minus seawater pressure) crushed it in compression. Now we're going to squirt downhole hard enough to push mud down rather than let oil flow up, in other words harder than formation pressure. Except it already crumbled in compression at less, and has been out of control eroded for like a month. And its tensile strength is going to be like 1/10 its compression strength. Therefore, they're probably going to lose circulation like mad. Which is probably why I read they're stockpiling some insane quantity of drilling mud for this attempt.
I forget the exact numbers but I remember the delta was 0.3 ppg between losing circulation and the well kicking. Something like 14.4 ppg mud and they lose circulation, pumping mud into fractures in the rocks. Something like 14.1 ppg mud and the well started to kick. Its not flawless granite down there.
This is all based on the extremely widely held belief that the blowout was due to a bad cement job between the two smallest diameter casings.
The funny part is watching people desperate to fine BP... Apparently, because they have the most money. Ambulance chaser culture at its finest.
No one mentions fining Haliburton the cement company, no one mentions fining the owners of the drilling platform, no one mentions fining the govt inspectors whom may have not done their job. No one mentions fining the families of the 11 dead men, whom might have been the cause. Just, suspiciously, fining the company that happens to be the richest. While carefully avoiding the two issues of whom exactly screwed up (its possible BP did nothing wrong), and the issue of whom will pay (that being us, the gas station consumers, of course). Ethics and morality at its finest, I guess.
Hilarious subject line for your post, since the process of "frac-ing" aka "fraking" the well is a production technique used to greatly increase flow rate, using explosives to crack the oil-bearing rock.
So, that's the question. Are we better off with a sharp huge release of the entire formation in one big gulp, or better off letting it slowly trickle out as we've been doing?
The other hilarious part, is nuke obsessed Americans never notice the only thing untouched in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was buried concrete and steel building foundations... You know, just like ... oil wells...
Other than being a big orgasmic kaboom, setting of a nuke would do either jack nothing, or make it much worse.
Also the kill well we're digging probably would need to be bigger to fit a nuke instead of pumping mud. So it'll go slower.
Oh, and we have no deep sea underwater nukes.
Other than that, great idea.
Unfortunately, BP is doing something very intelligent . . . they are wiping their hands from the affair and trying to disassociate themselves from the whole disaster. "What?!?! Liability?!?! Not us!"
Seriously? All I've heard from them, over and over, was they're not going to hide behind the legal liability limit. If you can provide any actual quotes that their position is now to do the exact opposite, that would be very insightful.