There are plenty of people who run small, unincorporated, business that show little empathy and even actively defraud people and shirk their responsibilities. Many of these individuals are far less responsible than "big corporations" -- mostly because they lack oversight by a BOD, by investors, by a multitude of people in the company, and by regulators.
I've known individuals who ran their own small, unincorporated, business that were the most amoral people I know.
If you've ever tried to collect money that you are legally owed, even with a judgment, you will probably know what I mean.
The notion that "corporations are bad" and that individuals are better (showing more empathy, morality, ethics etc.) is largely a fantasy IMHO.
Because we know what fabulously reliable products Detroit produced so efficiently in the 70's and into the 90's.
I recall reading an article some years ago in a trade magazine for the Plastic Injection Molding industry by an engineer who was explaining why most mold production has moved to China. It didn't have to do with cost, it had to do with speed. The Chinese would diagnose mold problems quicker than their American counterparts AND fixed them much more quickly. This engineer was describing once when there was some sort of a problem with a mold (perhaps unreliable release of the part) and he diagnosed it with the mold maker and they agreed on some fairly major changes to the mold. The American engineer went back to his hotel and assumed he would just fly back to the US in a day or so because it seemed (based on his extensive experience with American mold makers) the mold change would take, I think, at least two weeks and there wasn't much to do until the mold was changed. He was shocked when he showed up at the mold maker's the next morning and they were ready to test with the updated mold.
Americans, overall, just aren't hungry and competitive enough and have developed a sense of undeserved entitlement. The problem of off-shoring is not going to change as long as we raise our generations of kids such that too many of them expect the world served to them on a golden platter (and don't think it's the "teacher's fault" they got a B- on a test which they didn't prepare for).
Probably multi-generation Americans won't save us. Perhaps if we let educated, professional workers enter and work freely and give them an easy path to citizenship, we can leverage off of brain drain for awhile.
Actually, I used one quite a bit and never had that problem. Perhaps my mouse was a later revision that had resolved that problem.
I have more trouble with modern mice than with the Alto mouse. In my experience, the Alto mouse used in an office environment didn't need cleaning (which was fortunate, because as I recall it wasn't meant for the user to disassemble w/o tools). Modern mice, on the other hand, I find need cleaning every couple months (but, fortunately, it's easy to do). I think most of this is because the Alto mouse had a steel ball which stuff didn't stick to as much while modern mice have a "grippy" mouse ball which stuff sticks to and then is carried into the belly of the beast.
I never used the original Apple mouse on a regular basis so I don't recall how it fared in these regards.
Wow, I hadn't thought of 'Kilo-Core Ticks" (or similar measures) for decades (back when I cared what they cost).
Maybe only people who have been in the field over 40 years should be able to file patents -- at least they might recognize crap like this and be too embarrassed to actually apply for a patent like this.
Perhaps we need to enable 'reverse patent trolls'. If someone patents something and the patent is later invalidated, the person (company) who made the application must pay the challenger's legal expenses. In addition, the entity filing for the application must pay the challenger, with interest, all revenue derived from the patent (both licensing fees paid to them and the added value derived from the patent in their own products - such as 'one-click' during the life of the patent). In addition, the entity applying for the patent would have to pay back (with interest) all licensing fees they were paid back to the people who paid them (yes, this is double!).
People might think a little more about filing bogus patents with a system like this.
Prior to the Apple mouse, mice had two circular rollers instead of a a spherical ball.
Hmm... Actually, Apple was about ten years late to the game. They must have noticed the Xerox Alto I mouse while they were stealing everything else. (I'm pretty sure the two small steel balls at the bottom were just for "sliding" purposes - although I must admit I've not used the depicted mouse for almost 30 years).
Indeed this is the minimum I would expect from someone.
I'm sure that I'm not the only person who, after googling "Tavis Ormand" as part of evaluating him for a job, would decide to take a pass -- he obviously has poor judgment, is vindictive, and doesn't think outside his little box. Imagine what he would do if he disagreed with an internal change. Actually, I might be more likely to hire Terry Childs for a job than this guy -- at least Childs has had time to reflect quietly on the wisdom of his decision.
I would hope that Google would consider if they trust this guy. By being identified as a Google employee, he's sullying the name of Google. As a consumer of Google, I would prefer that this guy doesn't have access to code running on my computer or seeing my demographic data that Google may collect on me or my family.
This is an unfortunate consequence of 95% of the people lacking the qualifications to have 95% of their opinions. Unfortunately in the US we let these people vote. In Wikiland, we let them pollute.
Articles that simply list every possible point of view -- like "Some people believe this; other people believe that..." -- are rather useless.
Agreed that listing every possible point of view (including nut case ones) in detail is not very useful. However, listing main points of view and giving the primary arguments for each is quite useful.
Picking the first hot topic that came to mind led me to the Wikipedia article on gun politics in the USA. While this article has a lot of warnings (including neutrality) at the head of it, it seems like a fairly balanced coverage. Nuts on either side won't like it, but I think knowledgeable and open minded people, even those who lean strongly one way or the other, will find it tolerably neutral.
People who can do this exist for most topics or, at a minimum, a couple people who are open minded and knowledgeable but are on opposite 'sides' of the issue exist and could work together to make the judgment.
The problem is, most of these people have real jobs (often in academia or in think tanks) and probably unlikely to spend their time on Wikipedia when they could be publishing their insight and research either for creds or for money. They are also likely to be unwilling to spend the necessary time to defend their contributions from editing by people who know little about the topic or are unable to accept that any position but their own could be useful.
I'm not sure we are in that much disagreement. However, I think we should only use tariffs to retaliate against countries that impose tariffs or other trade barriers on us or that blatantly subsidize their manufacturers to try to establish a monopoly. To force our policies and standard of living (or to protect ours) through tariffs is inappropriate - if a countries internal practices are so bad as to raise us to moral outrage, we should refuse to trade (import or export) with them.
BTW, the reason I have never bought an American car is not due to cost (they were cheaper), it was due to Japanese cars being of higher quality starting about 1980. It is true that in the past ten years that gap has closed considerably (American cars got better, Toyota began to have quality problems).
If your concern is keeping manufacturing in the US, it's simple. Either do it better or cheaper. Since it's already done so well elsewhere for consumer products at a low price, that just leaves doing it cheaper. Labor and associated costs are a big part of manufacturing. We can either make our labor cheaper (i.e., reduce the standard of living of those who work in manufacturing) or eliminate much labor through automation (i.e., eliminate many manufacturing jobs in the U.S.).
Obviously some manufactured items can support a higher local labor cost because local manufacturing reduces transportation costs over importing the items. Of course, these are the very products that are not well suited for export.
I think it's a fool's errand to compete with China at their game. The US needs to find, as we once did even in quality manufacturing, a way to do something better than others. Likely it will be something that has intellectual content -- but to pursue that we need to do that better and, as far as I can tell, the average and the median American school kid is way less motivated to learn than they were fifty years ago - unfortunately just as intellectual content of good jobs increases. So, we would need a major cultural shift very quickly to accomplish this in the next 75 years with a native born intellectual base (two to three generations to shift the mentality) or encourage legal immigration by anyone who has the necessary skills and educational drive. These immigrants will help motivate and set the bar and example for the coddled American kids.
The US will not be a leader and continue to enjoy the standard of living that we have become accustomed to by thinking that a high school degree insures life time stable employment in manufacturing and a pretty good life style.
Remember though, standards are very different for "rights" in Somalia, the US, China, and western Europe. Do expect tariffs on US goods because we don't meet the labor standards of some European countries (too little vacation for example).
And, watch out for things like tourism becoming a human right:
Now Brussels has declared that tourism is a human right and pensioners, youths and those too poor to afford it should have their travel subsidized by the taxpayer.
and US goods getting tarrifs imposed on them because our government doesn't pay for tourism for poor folks. (It's amazing -- one doesn't even have to make this stuff up!)
Really, is the iPhone so poorly made? Looking at consumer products made in China, signs of "poor quality" that I see have nothing to do with the manufacturing process, they have to do with the design and materials selection process. And, often, I really don't want to pay twice as much for a product that will last three times as long since it will be obsolete long before even the cheaper version would have worn out.
Sure, we could manufacture iPhones in the US, but they would cost so much more that less people would chose to buy them. The innovation (to the extent that there is any) in the iPhone is intellectual content of design (which probably has substantial US labor force contribution), not manufacturing prowess.
As to the US being able to win a trade war because historically we helped out other nations -- nonsense. The world economy is like sales organizations - they don't care much about what you did last quarter, they want to know what you're going to this quarter and next quarter. German consumers are not going to look at two iPhones - one made in the China and one made in the US and buy the US version for $200 more "just because the US saved our butts 65 years ago." Seriously, faced with two identical products, one made in China for $200 and one made in France for $400, would you buy the French made product because "they saved our butt almost 350 years ago"?
I think the self-checkout case is a quite different case. In that case, if the store catches it, they simply inform you that the item is $100 instead of $1 and you can then decide to hand the store $99 and take the item or you can hand them the item and request your $1 back. Also, grocery store checkouts are not intended to be a "gamble" - they are intended to be an exchange of goods for money at some market value.
So, while I'm okay with a grocery store correcting their error as long as you can respond "Rollback Transaction", I think the casinos who evaluate, buy, maintain, and operate the machines should have to payout when those machines report an erroneous win. This is especially true if the payout is not outside an advertised or reasonable expectation range -- for example, if the machine has a big sign saying "Max Payout $1000" and the machine pays out $1M in error, it's probably reasonable to limit the win to $1000 (even if the machine should have paid nothing on that particular play) as that was the maximum reasonable expectation of the consumer.
Some gambling table errors are a bit different. If a dealer inadvertently pays out too much and the video clearly shows that the cards or dice didn't support that payout, then that error should be correctable in most cases if done quickly before the patron has relied and acted on the win - for example, before the next play. The difference is that in these cases if the dealer underpaid or overpaid the player can easily detect it.
It also seems to make good business sense to payout even if it was an error. How much less likely are gamblers to use the machines if they know that wins are sometimes blamed on errors and rolled back (while, of course, patron losses are not routinely examined to make sure they were not in error)?
Of course, I didn't RTFA and, as an informed consumer, I know the/. summary is untrustworthy and almost certainly wrong in several respects. Therefore I have no idea if the casino "should" have paid out in this case.
Things work: Board of Directors get reelected without controversy and reap director fees and other perks.
Something fails: Board of Directors scapegoats CEO and appoints a new one.
Things work: Investors reelect BOD and reap stock appreciation from continued success.
Something fails: Investors elect new BOD members and reap stock appreciation from depressed levels of when things were failing.
It works all the way up and down. The directors collectively are as responsible as the CEO is. Since investors are responsible for electing the BOD, arguably even they are as responsible (although, the investors have no operational control so the buck probably should stop below them even though they are at the top of the hierarchy).
If the CEO didn't know about the individual decisions that led to the problem (which, in the GoM situation, is likely) surely they are no more criminally culpable than the persons who reviewed them or those who made them. So, folks lower down in the chain should, at a minimum, get punished at least as severely.
For example, if a software programmer's bug or bad design contributed to the disaster (in the GoM situation, that's probably not the case), they should do hard time as well. More to the point, if a rig worker did something wrong (esp. if they failed to report it) which contributed to the disaster, shouldn't she be doing jail time as well?
Of course, in the United States, one has to find a pre-existing law and prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant(s) violated it -- we're kinda funny about that in the United States. So far I've not even heard a single claim of what law, for example, Tony Hayward has violated (being a slimy weasel is not, specifically, a crime -- at least in the U.S.).
Have you asked Comcast if you can get (and pay for) a second connection? If you can, it's just that you're not willing to pay for the service you want (which is WAY over what the vast majority of Comcast customers use). Or, switch to Comcast Business Class -- last I heard that didn't have the 250GB/month cap.
If you're the fat belching farting slob in the "all you can eat" buffet line for the 15th time since dinner service started, don't be surprised to discover that the business exercises the "we reserve the right to refuse service" clause in the future (which is all Comcast does -- first time is a warning, second time is disconnect according to their policy as I recall it).
Now they are open about it and I have access to the "GB transferred so far this month" meter, I'm okay with it. When the level of the cap was a secret and there was no meter available, I was pissed.
If I need more, I'll pay for it (upgrade to business class, get a T3, get a couple DSL lines, or get a second Comcast connection or...)
To me it is inconceivable that at this point BP is worried about the additional cost required to stop the flow more quickly. The political and PR cost of leaving it leaking for just one more day is enormous to both BP and to the industry (remember what happened to the nuclear power industry after TMI -- and the actual technical "non political" impact of TMI was nearly zero).
For example, they are paying to drill TWO relief wells. The second well is just a contingency in case the first well has a delay or problem. That doesn't sound like "cutting corners" to me.
It sure sounds like they cut corners to get into this mess, but I'm pretty sure that's not what they are doing now. However, they almost certainly want to be very careful with unproven techniques because making the spill worse until the relief wells can cap the spill will be even more costly. If they make the problem worse, all the politicians and/.ers who apparently have never had to make cost/benefit/risk tradeoffs will attack with 20/20 hindsight.
(If anyone can explain the technology that makes intersecting a seven inch bore with a relief well bore 18,000 feet down possible, that would be an interesting read.)
And, a bit offtopic, but the best description I've seen of the "sucker tube" (a.k.a. the Riser Insertion Tube), albeit what appears to be an early description so the actual implementation may have ended up different, is here.
9) wait a few days/weeks/months/years until high pressure oil & gas seeps through fractures and silt near surface of seabed and begins to leak out around cap already created.
10) expand area to be capped.
11) repeat starting at step 2 until seabed of entire Gulf of Mexico has been cemented over.
12) maintain crews and equipment forever (well, at least for a couple billion years) plugging the inevitable cracks that in the concrete parking lot at the bottom of the GOM.
Of course, BP would have to sink a new one for another couple million dollars, but at least the leak would be cut.
First, it costs way more than a "couple million" to sink a new well out there - that will pay for about five day's rent on a drilling rig like the Deepwater Horizon (now sitting at the bottom of the ocean after baking for a while) or the Development Driller II or III (I think the links point to the stats on the rigs being used, but I'm not absolutely sure) which are/will be drilling the relief wells.
Second, BP has publicly stated that they are not going to attempt to ever use the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon.
Somewhat unrelated, but here's a nice graphic on the relief well plans (and, now somewhat outdated, progress).
Using light would also make it easier for a driver to disable if terrorist (or prankster) transmitters became a problem.
As usual, duct tape is the answer -- just cover the receiver on the roof with it. And, of course, everyone has duct tape next to the plastic sheeting stored their "Terrorist Attack Kit" in their closet so there is a nice symmetry and this is a great re-purposing opportunity.
At 5,000 barrels a day, the leaks are dumping almost $400,000 a day worth of crude into the Gulf. BP spokesman Jon Pack said it’s still possible there will be oil produced in the area. The reservoir may have held about 50 million barrels of crude, he said.
But who knows where they got that from, how accurate it is, or how much of it is economically recoverable with current technology at current oil prices.
Of course, to compute a percentage, we know [update: we knew that until today, now BP seems to magically decided maybe it's a bit more] that it's leaking 5,000 BPD so it's leaking 0.01% a day - so it's been about 30 days, meaning it's leaked only 0.3% of the reserves. Nothing to see here, move on.
I think there were more than two safeguards in place - except a sequence of stupid moves, possibly coupled with some legitimate mechanical problems (which would not have been enough alone to cause the disaster), culminated in this mess.
For ever hour that they try to "recover" from a disaster instead of just capping the well and closing it off
So, when should they have "capped" the well after the "event". You might recall there was the whoosh followed quickly by the boom and 11 folks died (possibly nearly instantly). I suppose some guy with really good lungs (and a hell of a resistance to pressure) should have dived off the rig with some duct tape and started swimming down the moment he heard the whoosh? As I understand it, they did everything they could after the event to "cap" the well (as I understand it, the gamma ray imaging shows all/most of the valves in the BOP closed) -- but due to, at least, human screwups in the days/weeks proceeding the event, the BOP was compromised already.
Give them a grace period/deadline... maybe 3 days or so. But, if they can't manage the recovery effort, they should get fined $1,000,000 for every hour past the deadline.
If you make the penalties high enough ($24M a day is probably not enough to incur this behavior though), it would encourage reckless behavior. They would be motivated to try high risk solutions which might work but also might make the problem worse (such as the "blow it up" approach which might make things unimaginably worse). If the fines were so high as to bankrupt the company if the prudent/proven solution (relief wells) were used, reckless behavior would be expected (since non-reckless behavior would be suicide anyway).
Don't forget that a production rig and a semi-submersible drilling rig are not the same. There's a reason BP never planned to leave the Deepwater Horizon sitting there pumping oil - that's not what it's for. Similarly production rigs are not made for optimal(?) drilling.
The Development Driller III is the semi submersible that BP brought in to drill the first relief well. This was already under contract to BP - but it may have been in use (probably making the contract issues easier, but possibly requiring shutting down another drilling operation safely). Note this is not your "fathers" drilling rig. It was on site on April 27 - about five days after the rig collapsed on April 22. Unless it was close by and not in use (and, obviously, these things are not bought/leased to sit around idle), that's pretty good in my book. Note that, unsurprisingly, BP doesn't have a lot of suitable idle rigs in the Gulf (note that the Mad Dog, for example, isn't suitable -- if nothing else because its rated water depth is inadequate).
Also, getting a less capable rig in two days earlier, for example, would make no sense if that rig would require four days more to drill the relief well (because, for example, it used 93-foot-long stands of pipe rather than 135-foot-long stands of pipe or had longer setup time).
And, how exactly, would you get a semi-sub "anywhere in the world" in 24 hours? The Discoverer Enterprise (which I believe is being used to drill the second relief well) weighs more than 75 million pounds, is 835 feet long, and 418 feet tall. The only way I know to move ANYTHING halfway around the world in less than 24 hours is by air -- and I'm pretty sure this beast won't fit in a First Class seat, let alone a Coach seat. Come to think about it, even the Antonov An-225 comes up a bit short (by about 74.5 million pounds in weight capacity, about 414 feet in height, and at least 560 feet in length). Oh, and since there would be insufficient time to deliver it from land via traditional oceangoing tugs and the An-225 can't land in the ocean (well, at least not more than once), one would have to do an airdrop. Building the world's largest (to put it mildly) parachute to set this the Discoverer Enterprise down at the right place would be challenging to say the least. And, I don't know of any existing rockets that could be successfully used to slow its descent.
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There are plenty of people who run small, unincorporated, business that show little empathy and even actively defraud people and shirk their responsibilities. Many of these individuals are far less responsible than "big corporations" -- mostly because they lack oversight by a BOD, by investors, by a multitude of people in the company, and by regulators.
I've known individuals who ran their own small, unincorporated, business that were the most amoral people I know.
If you've ever tried to collect money that you are legally owed, even with a judgment, you will probably know what I mean.
The notion that "corporations are bad" and that individuals are better (showing more empathy, morality, ethics etc.) is largely a fantasy IMHO.
Because we know what fabulously reliable products Detroit produced so efficiently in the 70's and into the 90's.
I recall reading an article some years ago in a trade magazine for the Plastic Injection Molding industry by an engineer who was explaining why most mold production has moved to China. It didn't have to do with cost, it had to do with speed. The Chinese would diagnose mold problems quicker than their American counterparts AND fixed them much more quickly. This engineer was describing once when there was some sort of a problem with a mold (perhaps unreliable release of the part) and he diagnosed it with the mold maker and they agreed on some fairly major changes to the mold. The American engineer went back to his hotel and assumed he would just fly back to the US in a day or so because it seemed (based on his extensive experience with American mold makers) the mold change would take, I think, at least two weeks and there wasn't much to do until the mold was changed. He was shocked when he showed up at the mold maker's the next morning and they were ready to test with the updated mold.
Americans, overall, just aren't hungry and competitive enough and have developed a sense of undeserved entitlement. The problem of off-shoring is not going to change as long as we raise our generations of kids such that too many of them expect the world served to them on a golden platter (and don't think it's the "teacher's fault" they got a B- on a test which they didn't prepare for).
Probably multi-generation Americans won't save us. Perhaps if we let educated, professional workers enter and work freely and give them an easy path to citizenship, we can leverage off of brain drain for awhile.
I never thought of slugs as "dear" - I usually reserve such terms for GFs and wives. But, I guess, each to their own.
Actually, I used one quite a bit and never had that problem. Perhaps my mouse was a later revision that had resolved that problem.
I have more trouble with modern mice than with the Alto mouse. In my experience, the Alto mouse used in an office environment didn't need cleaning (which was fortunate, because as I recall it wasn't meant for the user to disassemble w/o tools). Modern mice, on the other hand, I find need cleaning every couple months (but, fortunately, it's easy to do). I think most of this is because the Alto mouse had a steel ball which stuff didn't stick to as much while modern mice have a "grippy" mouse ball which stuff sticks to and then is carried into the belly of the beast.
I never used the original Apple mouse on a regular basis so I don't recall how it fared in these regards.
Wow, I hadn't thought of 'Kilo-Core Ticks" (or similar measures) for decades (back when I cared what they cost).
Maybe only people who have been in the field over 40 years should be able to file patents -- at least they might recognize crap like this and be too embarrassed to actually apply for a patent like this.
Perhaps we need to enable 'reverse patent trolls'. If someone patents something and the patent is later invalidated, the person (company) who made the application must pay the challenger's legal expenses. In addition, the entity filing for the application must pay the challenger, with interest, all revenue derived from the patent (both licensing fees paid to them and the added value derived from the patent in their own products - such as 'one-click' during the life of the patent). In addition, the entity applying for the patent would have to pay back (with interest) all licensing fees they were paid back to the people who paid them (yes, this is double!).
People might think a little more about filing bogus patents with a system like this.
Hmm... Actually, Apple was about ten years late to the game. They must have noticed the Xerox Alto I mouse while they were stealing everything else. (I'm pretty sure the two small steel balls at the bottom were just for "sliding" purposes - although I must admit I've not used the depicted mouse for almost 30 years).
Indeed this is the minimum I would expect from someone.
I'm sure that I'm not the only person who, after googling "Tavis Ormand" as part of evaluating him for a job, would decide to take a pass -- he obviously has poor judgment, is vindictive, and doesn't think outside his little box. Imagine what he would do if he disagreed with an internal change. Actually, I might be more likely to hire Terry Childs for a job than this guy -- at least Childs has had time to reflect quietly on the wisdom of his decision.
I would hope that Google would consider if they trust this guy. By being identified as a Google employee, he's sullying the name of Google. As a consumer of Google, I would prefer that this guy doesn't have access to code running on my computer or seeing my demographic data that Google may collect on me or my family.
This is an unfortunate consequence of 95% of the people lacking the qualifications to have 95% of their opinions. Unfortunately in the US we let these people vote. In Wikiland, we let them pollute.
Agreed that listing every possible point of view (including nut case ones) in detail is not very useful. However, listing main points of view and giving the primary arguments for each is quite useful.
Picking the first hot topic that came to mind led me to the Wikipedia article on gun politics in the USA. While this article has a lot of warnings (including neutrality) at the head of it, it seems like a fairly balanced coverage. Nuts on either side won't like it, but I think knowledgeable and open minded people, even those who lean strongly one way or the other, will find it tolerably neutral.
People who can do this exist for most topics or, at a minimum, a couple people who are open minded and knowledgeable but are on opposite 'sides' of the issue exist and could work together to make the judgment.
The problem is, most of these people have real jobs (often in academia or in think tanks) and probably unlikely to spend their time on Wikipedia when they could be publishing their insight and research either for creds or for money. They are also likely to be unwilling to spend the necessary time to defend their contributions from editing by people who know little about the topic or are unable to accept that any position but their own could be useful.
I'm not sure we are in that much disagreement. However, I think we should only use tariffs to retaliate against countries that impose tariffs or other trade barriers on us or that blatantly subsidize their manufacturers to try to establish a monopoly. To force our policies and standard of living (or to protect ours) through tariffs is inappropriate - if a countries internal practices are so bad as to raise us to moral outrage, we should refuse to trade (import or export) with them.
BTW, the reason I have never bought an American car is not due to cost (they were cheaper), it was due to Japanese cars being of higher quality starting about 1980. It is true that in the past ten years that gap has closed considerably (American cars got better, Toyota began to have quality problems).
If your concern is keeping manufacturing in the US, it's simple. Either do it better or cheaper. Since it's already done so well elsewhere for consumer products at a low price, that just leaves doing it cheaper. Labor and associated costs are a big part of manufacturing. We can either make our labor cheaper (i.e., reduce the standard of living of those who work in manufacturing) or eliminate much labor through automation (i.e., eliminate many manufacturing jobs in the U.S.).
Obviously some manufactured items can support a higher local labor cost because local manufacturing reduces transportation costs over importing the items. Of course, these are the very products that are not well suited for export.
I think it's a fool's errand to compete with China at their game. The US needs to find, as we once did even in quality manufacturing, a way to do something better than others. Likely it will be something that has intellectual content -- but to pursue that we need to do that better and, as far as I can tell, the average and the median American school kid is way less motivated to learn than they were fifty years ago - unfortunately just as intellectual content of good jobs increases. So, we would need a major cultural shift very quickly to accomplish this in the next 75 years with a native born intellectual base (two to three generations to shift the mentality) or encourage legal immigration by anyone who has the necessary skills and educational drive. These immigrants will help motivate and set the bar and example for the coddled American kids.
The US will not be a leader and continue to enjoy the standard of living that we have become accustomed to by thinking that a high school degree insures life time stable employment in manufacturing and a pretty good life style.
And, watch out for things like tourism becoming a human right:
and US goods getting tarrifs imposed on them because our government doesn't pay for tourism for poor folks. (It's amazing -- one doesn't even have to make this stuff up!)
The "poorly-made" meme seems out of date.
Really, is the iPhone so poorly made? Looking at consumer products made in China, signs of "poor quality" that I see have nothing to do with the manufacturing process, they have to do with the design and materials selection process. And, often, I really don't want to pay twice as much for a product that will last three times as long since it will be obsolete long before even the cheaper version would have worn out.
Sure, we could manufacture iPhones in the US, but they would cost so much more that less people would chose to buy them. The innovation (to the extent that there is any) in the iPhone is intellectual content of design (which probably has substantial US labor force contribution), not manufacturing prowess.
As to the US being able to win a trade war because historically we helped out other nations -- nonsense. The world economy is like sales organizations - they don't care much about what you did last quarter, they want to know what you're going to this quarter and next quarter. German consumers are not going to look at two iPhones - one made in the China and one made in the US and buy the US version for $200 more "just because the US saved our butts 65 years ago." Seriously, faced with two identical products, one made in China for $200 and one made in France for $400, would you buy the French made product because "they saved our butt almost 350 years ago"?
I think the self-checkout case is a quite different case. In that case, if the store catches it, they simply inform you that the item is $100 instead of $1 and you can then decide to hand the store $99 and take the item or you can hand them the item and request your $1 back. Also, grocery store checkouts are not intended to be a "gamble" - they are intended to be an exchange of goods for money at some market value.
/. summary is untrustworthy and almost certainly wrong in several respects. Therefore I have no idea if the casino "should" have paid out in this case.
So, while I'm okay with a grocery store correcting their error as long as you can respond "Rollback Transaction", I think the casinos who evaluate, buy, maintain, and operate the machines should have to payout when those machines report an erroneous win. This is especially true if the payout is not outside an advertised or reasonable expectation range -- for example, if the machine has a big sign saying "Max Payout $1000" and the machine pays out $1M in error, it's probably reasonable to limit the win to $1000 (even if the machine should have paid nothing on that particular play) as that was the maximum reasonable expectation of the consumer.
Some gambling table errors are a bit different. If a dealer inadvertently pays out too much and the video clearly shows that the cards or dice didn't support that payout, then that error should be correctable in most cases if done quickly before the patron has relied and acted on the win - for example, before the next play. The difference is that in these cases if the dealer underpaid or overpaid the player can easily detect it.
It also seems to make good business sense to payout even if it was an error. How much less likely are gamblers to use the machines if they know that wins are sometimes blamed on errors and rolled back (while, of course, patron losses are not routinely examined to make sure they were not in error)?
Of course, I didn't RTFA and, as an informed consumer, I know the
In other words, a bit like kids trying to get into professional sports in the US!
Things work: Board of Directors get reelected without controversy and reap director fees and other perks.
Something fails: Board of Directors scapegoats CEO and appoints a new one.
Things work: Investors reelect BOD and reap stock appreciation from continued success.
Something fails: Investors elect new BOD members and reap stock appreciation from depressed levels of when things were failing.
It works all the way up and down. The directors collectively are as responsible as the CEO is. Since investors are responsible for electing the BOD, arguably even they are as responsible (although, the investors have no operational control so the buck probably should stop below them even though they are at the top of the hierarchy).
Why just the CEOs?
If the CEO didn't know about the individual decisions that led to the problem (which, in the GoM situation, is likely) surely they are no more criminally culpable than the persons who reviewed them or those who made them. So, folks lower down in the chain should, at a minimum, get punished at least as severely.
For example, if a software programmer's bug or bad design contributed to the disaster (in the GoM situation, that's probably not the case), they should do hard time as well. More to the point, if a rig worker did something wrong (esp. if they failed to report it) which contributed to the disaster, shouldn't she be doing jail time as well?
Of course, in the United States, one has to find a pre-existing law and prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant(s) violated it -- we're kinda funny about that in the United States. So far I've not even heard a single claim of what law, for example, Tony Hayward has violated (being a slimy weasel is not, specifically, a crime -- at least in the U.S.).
Be very careful in negotiations. Your version of hot girls may be different than Hells' negotiators' version of hot girls.
Have you asked Comcast if you can get (and pay for) a second connection? If you can, it's just that you're not willing to pay for the service you want (which is WAY over what the vast majority of Comcast customers use). Or, switch to Comcast Business Class -- last I heard that didn't have the 250GB/month cap.
If you're the fat belching farting slob in the "all you can eat" buffet line for the 15th time since dinner service started, don't be surprised to discover that the business exercises the "we reserve the right to refuse service" clause in the future (which is all Comcast does -- first time is a warning, second time is disconnect according to their policy as I recall it).
Now they are open about it and I have access to the "GB transferred so far this month" meter, I'm okay with it. When the level of the cap was a secret and there was no meter available, I was pissed.
If I need more, I'll pay for it (upgrade to business class, get a T3, get a couple DSL lines, or get a second Comcast connection or...)
Agreed...
/.ers who apparently have never had to make cost/benefit/risk tradeoffs will attack with 20/20 hindsight.
To me it is inconceivable that at this point BP is worried about the additional cost required to stop the flow more quickly. The political and PR cost of leaving it leaking for just one more day is enormous to both BP and to the industry (remember what happened to the nuclear power industry after TMI -- and the actual technical "non political" impact of TMI was nearly zero).
For example, they are paying to drill TWO relief wells. The second well is just a contingency in case the first well has a delay or problem. That doesn't sound like "cutting corners" to me.
It sure sounds like they cut corners to get into this mess, but I'm pretty sure that's not what they are doing now. However, they almost certainly want to be very careful with unproven techniques because making the spill worse until the relief wells can cap the spill will be even more costly. If they make the problem worse, all the politicians and
(If anyone can explain the technology that makes intersecting a seven inch bore with a relief well bore 18,000 feet down possible, that would be an interesting read.)
And, a bit offtopic, but the best description I've seen of the "sucker tube" (a.k.a. the Riser Insertion Tube), albeit what appears to be an early description so the actual implementation may have ended up different, is here.
9) wait a few days/weeks/months/years until high pressure oil & gas seeps through fractures and silt near surface of seabed and begins to leak out around cap already created.
10) expand area to be capped.
11) repeat starting at step 2 until seabed of entire Gulf of Mexico has been cemented over.
12) maintain crews and equipment forever (well, at least for a couple billion years) plugging the inevitable cracks that in the concrete parking lot at the bottom of the GOM.
First, it costs way more than a "couple million" to sink a new well out there - that will pay for about five day's rent on a drilling rig like the Deepwater Horizon (now sitting at the bottom of the ocean after baking for a while) or the Development Driller II or III (I think the links point to the stats on the rigs being used, but I'm not absolutely sure) which are/will be drilling the relief wells.
Second, BP has publicly stated that they are not going to attempt to ever use the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon.
Somewhat unrelated, but here's a nice graphic on the relief well plans (and, now somewhat outdated, progress).
Using light would also make it easier for a driver to disable if terrorist (or prankster) transmitters became a problem.
As usual, duct tape is the answer -- just cover the receiver on the roof with it. And, of course, everyone has duct tape next to the plastic sheeting stored their "Terrorist Attack Kit" in their closet so there is a nice symmetry and this is a great re-purposing opportunity.
This Bloomberg article claims:
But who knows where they got that from, how accurate it is, or how much of it is economically recoverable with current technology at current oil prices.
Of course, to compute a percentage, we know [update: we knew that until today, now BP seems to magically decided maybe it's a bit more] that it's leaking 5,000 BPD so it's leaking 0.01% a day - so it's been about 30 days, meaning it's leaked only 0.3% of the reserves. Nothing to see here, move on.
I think there were more than two safeguards in place - except a sequence of stupid moves, possibly coupled with some legitimate mechanical problems (which would not have been enough alone to cause the disaster), culminated in this mess.
So, when should they have "capped" the well after the "event". You might recall there was the whoosh followed quickly by the boom and 11 folks died (possibly nearly instantly). I suppose some guy with really good lungs (and a hell of a resistance to pressure) should have dived off the rig with some duct tape and started swimming down the moment he heard the whoosh? As I understand it, they did everything they could after the event to "cap" the well (as I understand it, the gamma ray imaging shows all/most of the valves in the BOP closed) -- but due to, at least, human screwups in the days/weeks proceeding the event, the BOP was compromised already.
If you make the penalties high enough ($24M a day is probably not enough to incur this behavior though), it would encourage reckless behavior. They would be motivated to try high risk solutions which might work but also might make the problem worse (such as the "blow it up" approach which might make things unimaginably worse). If the fines were so high as to bankrupt the company if the prudent/proven solution (relief wells) were used, reckless behavior would be expected (since non-reckless behavior would be suicide anyway).
Don't forget that a production rig and a semi-submersible drilling rig are not the same. There's a reason BP never planned to leave the Deepwater Horizon sitting there pumping oil - that's not what it's for. Similarly production rigs are not made for optimal(?) drilling.
The Development Driller III is the semi submersible that BP brought in to drill the first relief well. This was already under contract to BP - but it may have been in use (probably making the contract issues easier, but possibly requiring shutting down another drilling operation safely). Note this is not your "fathers" drilling rig. It was on site on April 27 - about five days after the rig collapsed on April 22. Unless it was close by and not in use (and, obviously, these things are not bought/leased to sit around idle), that's pretty good in my book. Note that, unsurprisingly, BP doesn't have a lot of suitable idle rigs in the Gulf (note that the Mad Dog, for example, isn't suitable -- if nothing else because its rated water depth is inadequate).
Also, getting a less capable rig in two days earlier, for example, would make no sense if that rig would require four days more to drill the relief well (because, for example, it used 93-foot-long stands of pipe rather than 135-foot-long stands of pipe or had longer setup time).
And, how exactly, would you get a semi-sub "anywhere in the world" in 24 hours? The Discoverer Enterprise (which I believe is being used to drill the second relief well) weighs more than 75 million pounds, is 835 feet long, and 418 feet tall. The only way I know to move ANYTHING halfway around the world in less than 24 hours is by air -- and I'm pretty sure this beast won't fit in a First Class seat, let alone a Coach seat. Come to think about it, even the Antonov An-225 comes up a bit short (by about 74.5 million pounds in weight capacity, about 414 feet in height, and at least 560 feet in length). Oh, and since there would be insufficient time to deliver it from land via traditional oceangoing tugs and the An-225 can't land in the ocean (well, at least not more than once), one would have to do an airdrop. Building the world's largest (to put it mildly) parachute to set this the Discoverer Enterprise down at the right place would be challenging to say the least. And, I don't know of any existing rockets that could be successfully used to slow its descent.