Interesting. I have no idea how accurate it is; the little I know about oil production all comes from areas that are far inland where this isn't an issue. Definitely interesting, though.
It does bug me how she pans the drilling workers, I have to say.
3: In a weird way that actually plays to her credibility, it sounds like she's infantilizing them. "These fucking children!"
It's annoying for management to speak about underlings in that manner, and it sounds like she wants better training for them, so it's a pretty minor annoyance.
4: To clarify: it sounds like she wouldn't have let that behavior fly under her command, and this was not her command, as far as we know. And she does point to the managers as the problem owners. But the repeated shots of the purported rig dudes in a bar is kind of annoying, is all. They needed better management, she seems to be saying.
Doesn't it sound more like inter-squad rivalry? Like, she's on the production side, and the production folks hate the drilling folks?
We don't know who she is, obviously, but from the impression I got I think it's not quite right to think of her as management, at least not in relation to the drilling workers. She's most likely some sort of consultant or part of a company that provides booming or booming education under contract to the companies that do the actual drilling and production. So I think her criticisms are more of the sort of macho risk-ignoring culture that prevails at the oil companies, from the executives down to the drilling workers, and that definitely rings true to me.
That is, I don't know, but it's plausible that other people in the industry would disparagingly consider the drilling people to be cowboys.
From the outside, I would say that everyone in the oil and gas industry looks like cowboys. But I doubt that's a surprise to anyone.
On re-listening, I'd bet she's an instructor at one of the schools.
But yeah, there does seem to be a particular disdain for the drilling side in the way she presents it. I don't think it's so much that she's on the production side as that she's outside of both and judging them from that position, but as I said above we don't actually know who she is so there's no way to really tell.
10: Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking.
11: Wild speculation is the way of the internet cowboy, teo.
13: Well, yeah, which is why I'm trying to avoid it.
I'm right in the "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" zone on this sort of stuff, so I want to be careful not to go too far out on any limbs.
It must be incredibly frustrating to be hired to do training for something that, if done the right way, could have benefits for everyone involved, but, if done the wrong way, appeals to stupid people who might be assessing you from the outside. Oh wait, that's been my job for the last year. But seriously, I feel for this woman. If she is a booming trainer, she's watching people do things badly that it's been her job to train them to do well, and watching them pat each other on the back for what a terrible, environment-destroying job they're doing, despite the fact that they all know their greater interest in visibility is the thing that's killing the Gulf. I'd be cursing too.
16: Whatever. We should clearly throw limes at the problem. THROUGH COPPER TUBING!
17: Yeah, she seems really pissed, and for good reason. I found it interesting when she mentioned that she's an Obama supporter. I bet that's a hard position to have in that world.
I think I am in love. Thanks Stanley
BP Won't Change Dispersant CNN 5/22;I don't know if link will stay. Supertanker of Corexit on its way. There is plenty of discussion of how dispersed oil will impossible to measure and so assess liability. Or taxes, for that matter, every barrel spilled counts as a barrel extracted.
BP plans to continue using a controversial subsea dispersant to break up a plume of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, saying that the leading alternative could pose a risk over the long term, the EPA indicated Saturday.The EPA issued a directive on Thursday, ordering BP to find, within 24 hours, a less toxic but equally effective chemical than its current product, Corexit 9500 -- and one that is available in sufficient quantities. The directive also gave the company 72 hours to stop applying it to the undersea gusher.
Corexit has been rated more toxic and less effective than many others on the list of 18 EPA-approved dispersants, according to testimony at a congressional hearing Wednesday.
Cleaning Wetlands May Be Impossible
AP. Because nobody in the Gov't made BP do proper fucking booming.
Looks like the stuff at 1:55 is a shorter version of this Daily Kos post (which has a follow-up).
Now it's timne for tweety to show up and say that the linked woman is an idiot; that I am a fucking moronic troll; and that Obama and the Coast Guard should be applauded for the great job they are doing on the oil gusher.
This administration has lost your trust or it hasn't, I guess.
Jesus, what an understatement, "lost my trust" Anybody watching Afghanistan lately?
Anybody watching Afghanistan lately?
Yes. First as tragedy, the second time as farce.
21: Huh. So is that her narrating the video, or someone else reading the post?
Where's neb with a kitten pic when I need one?
Look on the bright side: it's only one of our major coastlines. We still have others. It's a small price to pay for the sense of security you get in a giant fucking SUV.
Oh, never mind kittens. Let's talk about dog psychology.
When is my puppy (now 10.5 months old) going to start lifting his leg to pee? He's a mutt: a mix of black lab, pit bull, and perhaps German shepherd; and to some strangers, he apparently looks a bit formidable (he's big, and he growls at strange men), but he's still just such a baby. But am I babying him too much, and this why he still pees like an infant? Do I need to cut loose the apron strings?
(And am I turning into one of those cat ladies...but with, well, a dog instead of a cat? which is back to kittens, I guess).
Where's neb with a kitten pic when I need one?
As if he's the only one that can assuage your pain.
When is my puppy (now 10.5 months old) going to start lifting his leg to pee?
Maybe never? I was under the impression that neutering a dog was related to this, but I'm not sure. Anyway, my parents' dog almost never lifts his leg.
20 BP Won't Change Dispersant
I wish the article had done more digging into whether there are other plausible dispersants. I mean, I can't tell if it's "no, really, there are no options", or if BP said "well, we checked this one other option, and it sucks, so we're going to ignore you" and the EPA said "lol never mind then we didn't mean it".
Hey look, it's the Internal Server Error kitten!
Some dogs lift their legs, MC, some don't. Our border collie/Aussie mix only began doing so around eighteen months, for what that's worth.
Both my dogs, male & female lift their legs to pee...the female when appropriate to reach a spot, the male always. The point is to cover a previous dog's scent (or other scent?) or mark territory. It may indeed have to do with alphaness and sexual maturity. I wouldn't worry about it too much, if the dog doesn't grow into it it will be much better for his hips and groins if he squats.
The male is absurd, trying sometimes to reach up two feet on a bush or wall, doing splits. A few weeks ago I tried to put a backpack on him, to carry extra water and tire him as much as the still gimpy female. Trying to do those splits with a unbalanced pack strained his groin for several days.
I am crazy about my dogs, but oe of the breed drawbacks is that they are only about thirty years from wild animals, and need massive amounts of daily exercise to be healthy and happy. Probably at least ten miles every day, of which five should be running and jumping. Preferably more.
But they are five years older, and I am five years older, and our joints and connective tissues have become fragile. I used to cut them loose in the woods, but anymore trying to climb the tree after the squirrel will just kill them.
The female is back to 80%, but needs a different kind of exercise than walking to get the knee and hips back. Hill climbing or swimming maybe The male just isn't getting the long sprints with turns he needs. He'll lap the dogpark over and over but not adequately motivating.
Both are to smart to overeat.
The Silence of Lorna is a subtitled nasty about immigration scams in Belgium, but the lead is the splitting image of Ellen Page, if Page were 6 inches taller, ten years older, and could play a serious adult rather than a cute smart-mouthed gamin. The kind of movie makes wonder about America.
On the video, doesn't the narrator sound a little like Julia Sweeney? I wonder if it's meant to be a dramatic, anonymized reading of the Kos post.
Not to say I necessarily think it's Sweeney.
||
The public editor's take on the Blumenthal story is up. He takes one for the team.
|>
From the comments on D^2's blog:
On the other hand, it's nice to see the US government not screwing our pension funds (which are, what, 5% invested in BP if they're FTSE trackers?). Anyone British opposed to the current response to the disaster-in-question is fundamentally unpatriotic.
(In assessing the tone of the above, bear in mind where it was posted.)
Some dogs lift their legs, MC, some don't.
See, I didn't know that. Thanks.
Bob, what breed are your dogs? That sounds quite demanding.
@39...and the person posting, who has a finely honed ability to crack the kind of jokes derauqsd gets away with but with a certain clanging thockness that reliably pisses people of.
38: He takes one for the team.
He did, didn't he? He admitted the NYT had screwed up, had had an agenda and so on, but it was OK. The NYT had the right to publish the info. {rolls eyes} Well.
37: I wonder if it's meant to be a dramatic, anonymized reading of the Kos post.
I think you are correct; the guy with the voder doing the lead-in may have set it up.
m, so who is fishgrease and is she an expert, or is she making stuff up?
She's not really saying very much about booming (because, being a not-very-complicated-procedure, there isn't very much to say about it), and what she is saying, experts say, is true. What seems to be somewhat misleading -- or so the experts say -- is the idea that even the very best booming evah would have prevented the ecological catastrophe that's currently unfolding
40:Exactly This Times Two Except the tail is usually erect and curled forward spitz style
Another showing why I needed to raise the fences over 6 feet
Dogs at Play showing the tail
I'm trying to imagine how I'd feel watching a largely avert-able disaster unfold for the want of basics, and further, knowing that I'd been thinking this was likely to happen because some side of the industry thought it was too cool to know how to do the boring basics, because they were cowboys and loved complicated equipment besides.
There's no small chance I'll get my own shot at watching that, so maybe I shouldn't imagine so much. But it would be infuriating, and very sad.
43:She does say that there weren't enough booms to protect the entire Gulf Coast. There were enough to protect most of Louisiana from surface oil..
And of course, according to current "speculation" 80% of the oil has not yet risen to the surface, because of the "plumes", currents, pressure/cold. dispersants etc.
You can go to the oildrum if you want technical discussions. Microbes will eat the oil and multiply until the water runs out of oxygen and there is much discussion about whether the depth/pressure is "fractionating" the crude into maltenes and ???. In most cases leaks and spills degrade? off the lighter components and becomes asphalt, although I am not sure what happens to the light stuff. Benzenes released into Gulf water/air?
Still finding no discussion of the natural gas/methane.
44: Those are beautiful dogs. I like the wolfiness.
43: is the idea that even the very best booming evah would have prevented the ecological catastrophe that's currently unfolding.
Makes sense; from what I remember from Ixtoc I, it took a long time to clean that mess up, so I guess fishgrease is exaggerating. BP has clearly been fucking things off one way or another.
m, sigh
She does say that there weren't enough booms to protect the entire Gulf Coast.
Then she goes on to add that there should be enough booms, that it is fucking unacceptable that there aren't. They're cheap and an adequate disaster plan would have required them. That makes me mad.
Incidentally, the oildrum threads surprised me, because there is a lot of defense of BP and the gov't over there.
Not really environmentalists over there not even that interested in Global Warming. I gather they don't think we will get that far. Peak Oil/Energy was five years ago or something, and the oildrum appears to be about mitigation and triage as civilization disappears, said mitigation only possible if civilization disappears gradually.
2. Doing things that might help our immediate families survive for some period of time--a few weeks up to 40 years.Things in this category would include hoarding food, water and medicine; buying water filters; setting up gardens; raising chickens; buying solar PV panels; buying bicycles; saving tradable items, from gold or silver coins to small bottles of alcohol; and buying guns and ammunition.
More kittens and puppies, please
A bit of a sidebar, but the discussion on the Sunday talking head shows this morning about BP and the government's action or inaction was pretty infuriating: quite a bit of "This is unacceptable, I don't care whose fault it is, it should have been taken care of by now, and the Obama administration has dropped the ball and bears the blame, I tell you what!" Countered by sober-headed attempts to note that the MMS is being reorganized, that BP is ignoring the EPA's directive to use a less toxic chemical dispersant (cf. 20 above) but EPA can't exactly go in with machine guns to stop them, that the government has been involved from very early on, and that you can't just issue an executive order that the leak be stopped and have it be so, for crying out loud.
I may well be concluding my month-long experiment in watching the Sunday talking head shows, given that Cokie Roberts also averred that if she were a democratic strategist, she would firmly advise that Richard Blumenthal just withdraw now from the race in CT, end of story, because the American people are all about hating fakers, and that's that. I am not such a big fan of Cokie Roberts.
"President Barack Obama yesterday declared that offshore oil drilling would only be allowed to continue if firms gave assurances that disasters such as the present Gulf of Mexico spillage would be avoided."
Wow. Now that's leadership.
Big Oil:"Ok. We promise. Cross our hearts."
Obama:"That's what I needed to hear. Carry on. Oh, and here is where you can send campaign contributions and here is my agent for post-Presidential speeches."
I am curious as to why the administration's response hasn't been more antagonistic to BP. It seems like bad politics to play the middle, especially in an election year. I wonder how many Republicans will be elected because the admin are looking like corporate rather than public servants? What a cruel joke at the expense of the left.
Right, the issue, as I understand it from the people who tell me things, is that the surface oil is ugly and yucky and will create serious problems, including for (relatively) charismatic (relatively mega) fauna. But the real problem is what's happening at the subsurface level, where all kinds of complicated molecular somthings-or-others are happening, many of which reactions are proceeding in environments -- because of pressurization and whatnot -- about which we have very little working knowledge. In other words, we don't know how the chemical reactions will play out.
When I say "we" above, I mean petroleum engineers and their friends the chemists, who, for the most part, won't go on the record.
Honestly, this is the most terrifying and upsetting story of my adult lifetime. Katrina was awful and angry-making, of course. And I knew enough to know how very preventable most of those tragedies were. Still, it was a local or regional disaster, a VERY BAD THING for people and places I love, but it was contained. This time, well...I just don't know how this one ends. Which is why I keep asking for kittens.
So, I went ballistic a few months back when the administration came out for more* offshore drilling. But if we're talking about politics, I do wonder about the alternatives. How will voters react if gas hits $4/gallon this summer? $5/gallon? $6/gallon? With no end in sight? Again, I'm mostly in favor of higher gas prices, assuming the increased cost doesn't translate into nothing but higher corporate profits. Still, it's not clear to me that anti-drilling policies right now are the way to go politically. On the other hand, I don't really care. I think the members of BP's board of directors and its corporate officers should be in leg irons right now.
* It was more complicated than this, I know, but "more offshore drilling" is precise enough for government work.
I'm probably missing something, but this would seem to suggest that we don't yet have the technical chops to be drilling in water that deep.
As I understand it, you're not missing anything. The technology was supposed to do one thing -- stop the oil from coming out -- but it didn't work. And then it turned out that we (used here in the same way as above) have no idea how to deal with this kind of problem at these kinds of depths. We may have opened Pandora's box. On the other hand, kittens are as cute today as they were yesterday.
You're missing the faith in Better Living Through Chemistry.
I thought deepwater drilling was engineering.
As long as we still have breweries it will probably be all right.
||
Overheard on a train, guy talking on a phone: "We're keeping silent on this. I can handle these things.... No! Do nothing until I tell you, this information cannot get out.... No, do not tell them, this can't go public. I will handle it."
Wish I could hear some clue about what this is about.
|>
Some information on the ecological effects of drilling in general and the spill in particular.
I find it somewhat counterintuitive that gas prices here in NoCal have dropped about 10 cents since the spill. Just in time for Memorial Day!
No such luck with beer prices, though.
There's also a bunch of links here that I'm still going through. This graphic is pretty impressive.
62: Gah. I overheard a lengthy cell phone conversation on a train from a woman in front of me along those lines a year or two ago -- she sounded to be a political operative of some sort, alluding to a private meeting with "Jim" and a conference call with "Bob" and "Jack", which she discussed later with "David", so everything was in order, and they were good to go, but if "Jessica" or "Alan" calls, put them off for a while, okay, because we're putting together copy for their people, and there will be an internal memo the day after tomorrow ...
It was fairly clear that she was well-versed in avoiding saying anything overhearable about the actual matters at hand.
EIA reports no effects on energy prices so far.
67: I hope someone responds to this, b/c i have no idea what he's on about. What's next...more internet-death threats in spanish?
68: Energy prices are one thing, gas prices are possibly another (depending on your mereological supositions), and one that people experience frequently and directly.
"Energy prices" as used there includes gas prices.
69 cont'd: And thanks Teo for the link. Don't mean to sound rude.
Nobody responds to the so-called Troll of Sorrow. Eventually, when someone with keys to the blog sees the comment, it will likely be deleted.
69: I understand - I'm thinking parts and wholes are not necessarily the same thing.
70 s/b "68 continued"
Yes, the ToS is our borderline-retarded, undermedicated troll who is desperate for attention from his intellectual superiors and so spends hours a day telling us how much we bore him. Please to ignore.
71: This is good, except of course now it will look like I am trolling Teo in a particularly awful fashion, when actually props for hard-data link are impled and now explicit. Is it me or has this ToS been more active since I started posting? I'd only noticed it a time or two previously.
Best perhaps to quote the referenced comment in the future. Or just don't feed the troll.
Also, I can spell, and have a pretty good handle on definite articles, hyphenations, etc. Trust me.
72: I'm not sure what you're getting at, but here's the most recent EIA situation report (from May 12, so not actually all that recent). It seems to only discuss gas prices in the context of the region, where prices have risen slightly but are still below the national average.
74.1: The ToS comes and goes; it has nothing to do with you or with any of us in particular. Everyone here is variously jewish or a whore or otherwise compromised in his eyes, so just, you know, ignore. You might not notice his comments unless you're actively participating in a thread, since they tend to disappear fairly quickly.
One thing EIA notes is that the oil spill itself is unlikely to have any direct effects on prices, since the well wasn't scheduled to start producing any time soon. Any effects would be from disruptions to other production or refining facilities in the region, and there are a lot of them so it's a major risk.
And, of course, if this leads to less offshore drilling in the long run that would also lead to higher prices.
I'm going to address the ToS directly: would you cut that out? I don't know why on earth you think that anyone would listen to or respond to you when you burst out with that kind of thing.
(/direct response to ToS)
I'd like to see more info about the 1970s Ixtoc I oil spill, which apparently was the largest spill ever, went on for months and sent a huge amount of oil into the gulf, yet somehow doesn't seem to have been that bad (or, at least, we're not all still talking about it). I guess there wasn't the high pressure deep sea chemical mystery aspect to the disaster.
76: Sorry if I wasn't clear here. Metaphysics aside, some quick googling shows that gas prices have indeed fallen about 10-15 cents nationwide in the past two weeks, back to late-March levels. This is seemingly counter to cyclical trends. I would post a link, but I'm too cool to make an effort.*
77: Understood. Buddha was right when he said something to the effect that our antagonists can be our greatest assets. In my case, I'm saved from being the dumbest member of the commentariat.
*By this I mean I don't know how.
Clean-up needed on aisle nine, whenever anyone gets around to it.
57: And then it turned out that we (used here in the same way as above) have no idea how to deal with this kind of problem at these kinds of depths.
Yeah, but when Ixtoc I (Wiki) blew, no one knew how to deal with that either. It took them 10 months to shut down Ixtoc I, and that was with Red Adair in only 160 feet of water. Instead of an engineering problem per se, I am leaning towards human stupidity and malfeasance. Since it seems to me that dealing with 5000 ft of water is not that big a thing in terms of dealing with drilling that runs 3-4 miles deep. What they don't have is the chops to deal with is a blown out blowout preventer, since that isn't supposed to happen. And that brings us back to Halliburton and human stupidity and BP and corner-cutting malfeasance. In short, I think BP & Halliburton fucked things off and heavier regulations paid for with new and higher taxes (on oil company profits perhaps?) would go a long way to preventing this from happening again for 30 years.
Which brings up the real problem: we (and the rest of the world) need oil at the moment and the way to get it is to drill in some ocean somewhere. How do we stop this sort thing without bringing ourselves to a grinding halt? I know we should have lots of alternative energy but no one seems to want to pay for it. See climate bill.
m, feck
82.last: to post a link, use HTML, as in: <a href="http://whatever">Link text here</a>
74, 77, et al:
I'm curious how one would go about a filter. Comments are strings and IPs, yes? One could collect the set of IPs associated with those strings that include " yr " or something and see if there's a pattern. Alternatively, one could come up with a series of ToS-tests and randomly use a subset of them to screen posted comments.
{reading teo's infographic} So...BP has averaged 20 billion/year in profits since 2001, and they're spending six million a day (180 million total) to fix the spill. I say, old chaps, that's not right, he said, understatedly.
m, windfallllll profit tax time
I half remember some sort of scheme for extraction-based resources wherein the first extractor only gets to keep profits based on the value of the technology to extract.
I'm not saying it very well, but I think the concept was that natural stocks (which no one made) should belong to all. So one company shouldn't be selling our oil back to us. But, they are adding value by building extraction technology, so they should profit on that. Somehow the value of the oil itself was refunded to all overlying citizens, and the value of the extraction went to company profits.
I don't remember where I saw that model or if it is applied anywhere.
Which brings up the real problem: we (and the rest of the world) need oil at the moment and the way to get it is to drill in some ocean somewhere. How do we stop this sort thing without bringing ourselves to a grinding halt? I know we should have lots of alternative energy but no one seems to want to pay for it. See climate bill.
Exactly. This is what makes these issues so frustratingly difficult in practice. It's certainly possible to imagine a world in which we aren't dependent on fossil fuels the way we are now, and it's even possible to come up with ways to transition to that world, but the changes involved would be so big and so expensive in the short term that no one actually wants to do them. So what we end up with is either meaningless symbolic gestures or useful but totally inadequate incremental steps.
I half remember some sort of scheme for extraction-based resources wherein the first extractor only gets to keep profits based on the value of the technology to extract.
Sort of like a Georgian tax?
You're wonderful, TJ. What are the technical names for all the other things I heard once and half remember?
92: Give him a barbering and a ranger hat and it might be teofilo.
He also sounds like a fascinating guy.
When I type "Henry George" into the search engine, the first suggestion is "Henry George's best selling book". ?
I suppose I do look a bit like him, but it's hard to tell with that goatee.
Wow, there's this whole network of Georgist institutes and schools and stuff. Kind of like the parallel network of institutions devoted to Austrian economics, but much less prominent.
Probably they don't have infinite millions of dollars of funding from the ultra-rich like Austrian economics institutes tend to have.
Not mentioned in the article, George is important to the development of John Bates Clark and marginalism, the homogeneity and substitution of productive factors. I do believe they had a series of public debates.
Yeah, from Wiki on Clark
The probable source from which immediate stimulation came to Clark was the contemporary single tax discussion. ... Events were just at that time crowding each other fast in the single tax propaganda. [ Henry George's ] Progress and Poverty... had a larger sale than any other book ever written by an American. ... No other economic subject at the time was comparable in importance in the public eye with the doctrine of Progress and Poverty. Capital and its Earnings "... wears the mien of pure theory .... But ... one can hardly fail to see on almost every page the reflections of the contemporary single-tax discussion. In the brief preface is expressed the hope that 'it may be found that these principles settle questions of agrarian socialism.' Repeatedly the discussion turns to 'the capital that vests itself in land,'
Read about this in a defense of the Physiocrats, I think. Clark is one of the bad guys, who wanted to diminish the importance of rents and rentiers in economics.
Yes, I quite agree that Georgian economics is analogous to Austrian - weird network of people devoted to pushing utter insanity. I speak, of course, as a weird kind of Marxist.
A great book about Henry George (and others).
In contrast to the above, the oil spill impacts will be regional or basin-wide. Toxins from the oil spill will likely integrate into the food chain and eventually arrive to the deep in the form of food. Flux of material from the ocean surface is also likely to transport oil and toxins to the deep ocean. Shading by the oil slick might also inhibit phytoplankton production and reduce carbon flux to the deep sea meaning less food for seafloor organisms. An overall reduction of biodiversity both in terms of species and genetic diversity is expected. Of course with the oil spill, it needs to be recognized that 48 million gallons of oil are leaked naturally in the Gulf of Mexico annually (the current spill is near 34 million gallons). On one hand this may have produced a more resilient fauna. On the other hand this might provide a tipping point that pushes many species and communities past which they can survive. It also should be considered that many organisms will be exposed to oil concentrations much higher than they would naturally.And a twitter from there:
RT @Revkin: @DotEarth reader proposes an open salvage rush 2 stp the #OilSpill, winner takng the oil. BP cn take a hike. [link to NYT blog here]m, huh. works for me
OT: I just added some pictures to the flickr pool of one of my favorite Unfoggeders.
could someone give me directions to the flicker pool?
max, if you're there, please check your email.
Sorry, folks, for this.
108: Email Armsmasher at: specialcapps AT the google mail service, and/or add him as a contact on Flickr: cappseus.
Further to 110: Adding him as a contact on Flickr is a necessary but not sufficient condition for gaining access to the Unfogged pool, and one must still also convey in some way one's desire for access to Mr. 'Smasher.
||
I just got cockblocked by a 20-lb. dog.
|>
McManus is getting pretty Emersonian with those dogs.
106: 105, meet 63.
Whoops! Sorry, teo. I missed that one and only saw the other link.
m, great link though!
i just realized my little-used flickr account i have has my name mispelt. par for my course
62: When I was in high school, I thought it would be great to do something like that as a prank, but I never had the guts to go through with it. Also, a phone--that is, I never had a phone either.
My impression is that Clark is indeed one of the bad guys.
119:Well, John Bates Clark was a little more interesting in his variant of marginalism than my description might imply. IIRC, as always unlikely, his emphasis on competition was picked up by Joan Robinson in the 30s for her work on monopoly capitalism. But I still view him as the best economist of the Gilded Age and Robber Barons.
My impression is that Clark is responsible for the idea of "marginal productivity", that the wages of workers are equal to their marginal contribution to profits. Thus, the unproductive peons like ourselves deserve our low salaries, and the super-productive superstar CEOs deserve their high ones.
Big Bad News?
Umm, for those who know, the BOP has always been in danger from erosion. The flowing oil carried sand, concrete etc up with it. This is why the intial estimates of 5000 barrels could have been right, but the flow increasing to 25k+ as erosion widened the holes.
Anyway. it is still tentative, from people watching the cams. Who knows what the maximum outflow is?
Nothing at oildrum yet, unless in comments
Oh, never mind...maybe. Could have been any number of things that looked radical on camera. Ot iy could have been the catastrophe.
Dead thread, but I must say that I found this bit of Dilbertism rather unpersuasive. In the vernacular, just about every fucking engineer thinks that every fucking problem is so very fucking simple and watch me be fucking transgressively emphatic about it so that you know that I am fucking right. ( And please do not think I am hereby apologizing for the company or the response or even the actual fucking booming that has been done.)
I do agree that "drillers" tend to be cowboys (the whole drilling enterprise that is). The drilling side of the oil business has been the one that has really pushed the envelope through the whole history of the industry. Drill and hope you both hit oil and can control it when you do has been the modus operandi from the start. Those "gushers" in old movies where everyone hugged and cheered because they were rich were basically exactly what you have here (except they didn't even have blowout preventers until the '20s), and in truth they killed people and blew up and leaked millions of gallons (Lakeview Gusher 1910 in Kern County, California lasted 180 days at rates up to 100,000 barrels a day). Ixtoc I was similar but much easier to work with being in only 160 feet of water and it still took 10 months. Once again, no excuse, given the history, a prudent society would demand many more layers of contingency plans.
126: Basically, just the whole "give me the job and it would all be fixed right up" tone. Unfair of me, but "it is so simple" is a repeated trope of engineering types in the face of complex situations. In this instance it tends to excuse the riskiness of the whole endeavor by scapegoating those involved in the current situation (even though God knows they deserve it) and making it seem like it really is all so simple, just put competent people in charge next time and it will all work out.
Ah, I thought you were referring to a specific comment or that "this bit" was supposed to link to something. Yeah, I'm with you, bro (here's a beverage).
129: Yes, I was unclear. There are a few Zimas lurking somewhere in my basement, but I am planning on leaving them for the archeologists. "We believe we have discovered the root cause of why America collapsed in the early 21st century."
