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The profit seeking tactic you outline is contradictory to the facts. Profit maximization would be best achieve from avoiding spills of this nature and having plans and resources in place to minimize damages. You fail to see beyond your superficial ideology regarding some nefarious capitalist profit motive. Quote:
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here's a post from the oil drum that explains in more detail what can be pieced together about the leak in the choke line.
The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Starting the Testing Program - and Open Thread and a proposal to use the mississippi river itself to push oil away from the coastline. i am not in a position to comment on the pragmatic aspects of this, but i quite like the idea aesthetically: Restoration and Resilience Let The River Run Through It: Harnessing the Mississippi to Save Louisiana's Wetlands from the Oil Spill - Blogs & Podcasts - Environmental Defense Fund meanwhile, the regional economic situation around new orleans doesn't look good, but it's the case that the bp disaster is but one explanatory factor amongst several. Quote:
but bp is saying that the choke line is fixed: http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-sp...sting_new.html we'll see... http://www.bp.com/sectionbodycopy.do...tentId=7063636 |
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Stupid sidebar: "If we don't get caught, it's not against the law." |
ace, stating that AIG's problems were caused by "cutting corners" just shows that you're incredibly ignorant of the facts surround that particular corporation's problems. They cut no corners and violated none of their internal guidelines.
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this is good. finally something good, if temporary:
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you can find articles that say the same basic thing most anywhere. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...prss=rss_print the underlying problem with the cap move is that the test results remain ambiguous--so it's not obvious whether increasing the pressure at the leak is generating any problems further down the well. but folk remain "cautiously optimistic" whatever. what's more to the point is that for the past 12 hour for the first time in 85 days or so (i've lost count) the massive leak at macondo is not shooting oil into the gulf of mexico. more cost cutting consequences for the industry with bp in the midst of it shucking an jiving: BP troubles deepen with Buncefield verdict | Business | The Guardian no causal connections of course. mere coincidence. |
Q4000 shows nothing from the two sea floor spots they're monitoring, Enterprise 2 shows what might be oil going up or might just be compression artifacts in the dim light. Looks promising.
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I was preventing myself from commenting on thread until the problem was temporary fixed, but I have to thank RoachBoy and various other users for posting an incredible amount of links about the situation. I am now sort of well informed on this unfortunate situation.
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I think the percentage of psychopaths or stupid people in management mirrors that in the general population. I have never seen a true correlation to good old common sense and people being promoted into jobs with more and more responsibilities, have you? ---------- Post added at 07:15 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:57 PM ---------- Quote:
Headline day one: Mr. Pig saves company $1,000,000 by building the new building out of straw. Some say he is a genius, one of his competitors says he is just stupid. Regulators signed off on his new stronger designs, and gives Mr. Pig a Certificate, which Mr. Pig framed and hung on his wall. Headline Day two: Building made of straw destroyed by wolf, who huff and puffed and blew it down, costing Mr. Pig's company $1,000,000,000. The company faces bankruptcy. Congressional hearings are scheduled. Regulators release reports showing Mr. Pigs history of regulatory violations. Mr. Pig cut corners for money says everyone in the media and acedemia. One of Mr. Pig's competitors states he was plain stupid and that it has been common practice not to use straw for many years in the industry. Headline Day three: New regulations implemented to prevent taking short cuts to save money. Mr. Pig re-builds using sticks. The use of sticks saves Mr. Pig $500,000. Some say Mr. Pig is a genious, one of his competitors says he is plain stupid - that everyone knows in the industry that bricks have to be used. Regulators signed off on his new stronger designs, and gives Mr. Pig a Certificate, which Mr. Pig framed and hung on his wall. In other news Mr. Pigs competitors gain market share and announce record profits - citing the value of long-term planning and the value of doing things correctly from the start. New President to propose to taxes to "spread it around a bit" meaning profits. Protesters plan boycotts chanting " stop greedy capitalist pigs" Headline Day four: You know the rest of the story ---------- Post added at 07:19 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:15 PM ---------- Quote:
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my my what an edifying story. capitalist cheerleaders sound just like jesus. it's amazing.
anyway, the latest at the moment isn't that different from the latest before--which for once is a good thing. despite continued protestations that everyone should remain cautiously optimistic or avoid optimism altogether, the cap is holding and there's still no more oil blasting into the gulf. Cheers as Gulf oil spill is capped at last | Environment | The Guardian this is not the endgame--bp continues to gamble on the notion that the relief wells will work. this is not a given of course (of course because, well, we're 87 days into a research project and assume that there's been some kind of learning curve)... of course this isn't over in other ways as well. for example: what happens if bp gets bought out. or if it decides to declare bankruptcy? some of these questions at least are on the table in a serious way: BP May Saddle Asset Buyers With Suits as Claims Rise - Bloomberg but you see from reading this that there are a number of scenarios being tossed about and that they appear mutually exclusive. so long as the number is even of course. if you scroll through the comments at the trusty but odd oil drum site here: The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Results as the Testing Begins - and Open Thread you find lots of speculation about bp misleading people, which seems to me to follow from their remarkably botched (but nonetheless still operative) attempts to manage the information spill into the gulf of dominant media, which clearly alarmed them more than that pesky oil did for a while until things reached such a pass that this inversion of the world itself became a problem. you know. anyway, in almost all the press reports that talk to regular folk you get a percentage who thinks the cap is another bp spin attempt. credibility goes away much more easily than it comes back. o those captains of industry and their steely grip on the Higher Rationality of Profit-seeking..what have they done to themselves in this case? |
I don't recall Jesus talking about capitalism, or pigs for that matter, but I am interested as to how you came up with this new paradigm in your efforts to negate anything remotely kindred to capitalism, interesting analogy, to say the least, please start a new thread as to Jesus and capitalism, I am interested to be enlightened by your wisdom on the matter, or at the minimum your apparently evolved perspective of humanity that embraces, what exactly, and demoralizes, to quite a degree, that which has come before it and that which has at the most minute, helped to create the possibilities of human interactions beyond hunter-gathers?
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+++++++ I am very, very happy to hear they have been able to stop the flow for now! Finally, maybe now (at least while this "fix" is working) we can focus on cleaning this mess up and preventing it from happening again. We can do the things necessary to focus and work towards that goal now, cleaning up and rescuing not only the humans who are suffering but all the animals and the environment itself, what a mess. |
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idyllic..i was talking about the rhetoric of the parable. if you'd like i can certainly put up a thread about rhetoric and can spend perhaps a few passably fun minutes of my life ridiculing the form...or not as the mood strikes, this being far from anything i actually care about, the penchant for the novelists who created jesus as a character to have him speak in little edifying tales....but i am quite sure that you wouldn't play along. so i'd be just wasting my time. but reassure me that there's fun to be had and perhaps i'll reconsider. thanks.
---- meanwhile out in the gulf of mexico: Quote:
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Well, seepage found. :(
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patience is a virtue, one this disastrous incident/accident is truly testing, but faith insists (for me) that we must recover for not only ourselves but our children and our childrens', children, the environment alone deserves our best efforts. The world is still watching, at the very least I am watching and waiting until I can go home and pick up tar balls again from my beaches.... the panhandle is my home, the marsh is my home, the Gulf is my home. I live in hope... and the future, because that is the way I grew up and what I was taught, hope and substance and action. I hope the substance in the actions of those who can do something to fix, repair, clean, reduce, the oils damage to the environment and the people of the Gulf are doing the best they can. I thank all those who are working for this singular purpose in the restoration of the gulf and its shorelines and the end of this disaster. I send my prayers to those along the Gulf, may they find some sort of, I don't know, but something which will bond them together and help them to survive this and grow not only stronger but more resolved in the protection of their cultures and lives. Jimmy Buffett Concert Draws Crowd on Oil Coast - CBS News ^^was a nice moment of what was and what will be again... wish I had been there. It takes a lot to down the southern fisherman mentality, et al the "beachers", we are used to setbacks, but we still keep fishing and singing and enjoying to the best we can. I miss my home. |
idyllic: i've said this before, but there's a level of empathy for you and other folk who live on the coast that's affected by this fiasco that runs at a level deeper than the differences we may have in terms of how each interprets the fiasco itself, how one explains it and from that how one imagines what should be altered because of it. my place looks out over a salt marsh. i see it in the morning; i watch the sunset over it every night. i'm really fascinated by it. i cannot imagine how i would react to tarballs rolling into the grasses...worse than the beach to my mind anyway (btw--is it true where you are that localities are "dealing with" oil that washes up by bulldozing it under the sand? there are lots of reports from lousiana and alabama of that happening...)
so i kinda understand. of course i don't entirely because i'm not in it. but i do kinda understand where you're coming from, what you're saying, why you say it as you do. ==== here's the letter that thad allen wrote bp: Quote:
The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - (Breaking) Anonymous Official Expresses Concern about Seeps and Pressure (and Open Thread 2) the basic lines of debate amongst the oil people who post to TOD (death in german btw..i just noticed that) separates folk who are concerned about seep as over against people who think that the seep is being generated by the ROVs which are carrying out the pressure tests. fact is that there's no way to know which is the source and that explains the demand for more extensive monitoring. i'd also direct attention to the posts by someone called "rovman"---he positions himself as having operated these vehicles for many years and so is able to decipher the imagery better than most i think. a persistent issue from the spectator position: the feeds from the leak area we can watch but not see in a sense because the feeds are at best thin on context. btw this isn't a criticism. it's simply the nature of the beast. and because that's the case, there's a basic level of indeterminacy in the meanings of what's being seen, far more indeterminacy than is customary (if television footage, for example, is edited to support a particular interpretive or political line that is being read by a given talking head, there is manipulation of the viewership but no indeterminacy. television is geared around erasing indeterminacy---but i think that's largely unwitting. i mean, no-one sets out to do it. it's a side-effect) it appears that in a community like TOD you get a version of what seems always to happen: folk muster their technical understanding around positions which are a priori. so folk who think that the bubbles and elevated methane levels are caused by the rovs themselves are inclined one way, and those who think about the same phenomena as maybe problematic are inclined another. so it's a matter of predisposition. TOD is obviously a kind of mystery-science theater operation, in that they are watching the same infotainment that you and i have access to, but watch it a little better because of the technical backgrounds that are brought to bear on the data. but keep in mind that there's a very considerable gap separating the data we in the public have access to and the data that's "proprietary"...because, well, this is "private"...but i digress. a couple other articles from different sources that elaborate on what idyllic posted and/or on allen's letter: BP oil cap may not have stopped leak | Environment | guardian.co.uk http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/us...ef=global-home here is a piece that steps back a little and provides more context, more data that dovetails with the general explanation for this fiasco that's been developed not only here but in most places outside the confines of the dwindling drill baby drill set: The well is capped. But what else lurks below the surface for BP? | Business | The Observer |
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When I think of compassion, I think of it in terms of first having the ability and willingness to actually do something otherwise compassion is without meaning or real value - so me having compassion for someone I can not help is wasted. Second, I think of it in terms of being directed to a specific person or group. So in my view a CEO who acts in a manner to protect the wealth and well being of those who work or invest in his company is compassionate. The alternative would be for his to act in a manner that weakens and diminishes the value actually hurting those he/she was entrusted to protect. Comparable to a pride of lions - true compassion requires hard choices and occasional the good of the group may be more important than the good of an individual. Also, a lion can not show compassion for its prey. I see this the opposite of the way you do, and I find our perspectives very interesting. |
right. looking out for shareholder profits is compassion.
here's another little bit about compassion capitalist-style or what can happen when the captains of industry exercise their particular type of shareholder-oriented compassion in the context of imperial north-south relations and so without those pesky distorting regulations to direct that compassion impulse in other ways: Baird: We Don't Hear About Africa's Oil Spills - Newsweek or this: Apocalypse Now ... Niger Delta?s oil exploitation tragedy - Herald Scotland | News | World News or this, for the reference tree at the bottom: Environmental issues in the Niger Delta - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia meanwhile there's some reports that say the well is leaking both near the top and seeping a couple miles away. it's all still nebulous and it's not clear who's saying what quite yet...but if it turns out that these problems are serious, it'll mean that the oil will start heading back into the gulf again and it is meet, apparently, that it be a representative of the federal government and not bp who takes the news cycle hit for announcing it. or so the interpretations run. The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - White House Press Secretary Gibbs Confirms "Ruptured Oil Well Leaking from Top" and a Seep Two Miles Away (and Open Thread 2) things are still unfolding. i hope this turns out to be a false alarm. |
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Perhaps you would be better served by not espousing you anti-capitalist musing unless you have the balls to back them up. |
Ace:
The Lions & Wolves & other Critters you reference, are not small-medium-large business owners in the human capitalist arena. If you were one of these critters you so admire, you couldn't debate so disingenuously. .................................................................................................................... Thanks roach for the newest links. The idea of the Macondo well being sorely compromised & unstable, is something we all hold our collective breath about. Yikes. Post-script. Ace, I don't have testicles. What do you suggest I back up my claims with? |
this is a digression.
i have a friend who started and runs a biotech firm. among the drugs that firm produces are anti-malarial drugs which are designed in a way to get around acquired immunities to older anti-malarial drugs. the bulk of the market for them can't afford them. the firms doesn't stop producing them because, contrary to your one-dimensional view, there's more than one ethical decision involved and there's more than one way to approach them. and these questions aren't always easy. so you know, i have another friend who's head clinician for a different biotech firm. i have other who work trying to get anti retro-viral drugs into parts of east africa without them all disappearing between the port of entry and the clinics where they're destined. folk at several points in this sort of chain of production and distribution that is the result of **political choices** particular to the united states about the way in which medicines are produced and by extension funded. and one thing is sure--none of these people are as blind as you are about the particularities of the american system. none of them imagine this is the only way of doing things. there are multiple ways to balance economic and ethical questions. there are multiple conflicts that emerge as well. everyone who is involved with this production thinks about them from time to time. the folk in the production side tell me that most of their days are spent on purely technical matters. the ceo types consider them frame matters---so they wrestle with them but in ways that are shaped by having to work within a system that they see as both given and distorted. the folk who are really confronted with all the complexity of this overall system of drug production and distribution are my friends who are working on the ground in sub-saharan africa. but that confrontation involves complexity and nuance. i wonder if it is possible to be an ethical subject at all if you cannot deal with ugly realities. because ugly realities are often consequences of actions. there is a problem for anything like ethical action if you cannot deal with consequences of actions. so i wonder, ace, if your aversion to complexity makes you entirely incapable of ethical action. i mean in principle. i don't know how you roll in meat-space. i assume like everyone you're way more complicated there than you come across on this board. for example it is possible to defend oil production without having to vaporize the reality of the niger river delta. it is possible to make arguments about the relation of captialist forms of production to something approximating ethics that are not routed through milton friedman. it is possible to think about how to align capitalist forms of production with even stakeholder interests not to mention ethical questions that extend beyond the circulation of capital--because like it or not capitalist production operates in a wider social context. for example the deepwater horizon disaster happened in the gulf of mexico, remember? the gulf is other than than the circulation of capital. if all that matters is the circulation of capital, why should a firm like bp give a shit about what happens in the gulf of mexico? but what happens if all that matters is the circulation of capital? well, one thing that happens is the sort of thing that's happening in the niger river delta. so you might think that the niger river delta points to a the centrality of political arrangements in shaping what economic actors are and are not responsible for. so there is no ethical content to corporate actions. there is adaptation to particular frameworks and that's it. i have a husky to walk. |
as of this morning, the seeps that have been located around the well are not understood as cause(s) for alarm. so the cap remains in place. one day at a time is apparently the watchword:
Allen Takes Day-At-A-Time Approach To Well Seepage : NPR meanwhile congressional talking heads point the finger at each other as to which party's more to blame for the regulatory backdrop that enabled this fiasco: Quote:
neo-liberalism was a kind of equal opportunity ideological lobotomy. |
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http://www.chess-theory.com/image4/cat_and_mouse.jpg I have given consistent warning and have often suggested, that those not interested in my silliness - ignore my posts. It is possible, it can be done. Generally, I will just post my opinion and move on, if left alone. I won't change who I am based on posters taking pot shots at my character or my intellect, to the contrary - just like an un-brakable stallion - the technique of using spurs, just increases my resolve. Only the soft hands and approach of loving and caring person can break this stallion. http://nogoodforme.filmstills.org/im...on-rearing.jpg I really do believe humans can learn a great deal about systems and organizational behaviors from the study of animals. ---------- Post added at 09:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:31 PM ---------- Quote:
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problems before the deepwater explosion. nothing happened.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gree...-problems.html then a few days before things blew up, command of the rig was transferred. there's no conspiracy in this, btw. i just find it kinda interesting. were it not for the maintenance problems, the transfer woulda been unremarkable, and were it not for the explosion and subsequent disaster, all of this woulda been unremarkable. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gree...8Greenspace%29 but of course it's all very interesting because of what did happen. there's more to the story of the waning days and what happened with the explosion came: Deepwater Horizon engineer testifies about power failures before oil spill - latimes.com on the up side, there are 5 leaks identified around the geyser site now. but the cap is still operating. 5 small leaks have been identified in Gulf well, Thad Allen says | NOLA.com so the concern now is weather. |
Yes. The weather patterns are ripe for their seasonal romp.
Atlantic Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook The Oil Drum folk have been of great service. They've relied on donations to add servers as their traffic has increased. |
more information about the run-up to the deepwater horizon disaster, a run-up which is becoming increasingly bizarre:
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a speculative point---it seems to me that the petroleum industry and all those who benefit from it--erm support it in principle--have at this point every interest in painting up the deepwater horizon fiasco and bp/transocean/halliburton as having acted in a peculiar/particular way as a means of basically--and i hate this expression--throwing bp under the bus. this is not to say that i doubt these stories which are coming out of the govt appointed panel hearings in louisiana. i just find the emphasis on the particularities interesting. meanwhile, bp continues scrambling to raise capital, selling off assets: Quote:
and indicating that tony hayward, who i seem to remember was characterized as the greastest ceo of all time by some eccentric earlier in this fiasco, is likely to step down in october: BP's Tony Hayward 'set to step down' | Business | guardian.co.uk |
The spacer fluid composition:
Method and spacer fluid composition for displacing drilling fluid from a wellbore |
BP admits using Photoshop to exaggerate oil spill command centre activity | Environment | guardian.co.uk
This is but one of BP's desperate scrambling moves. This whole asset selling/trading business is more complicated yet just as calculated. Hayward will appear to step down, but in reality he will side-wind slither to another position in the same game, but different arena. |
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so here we are: a direct confrontation between notions of proprietary information and the public's right to be informed in the context of a disaster. the bbc article: BBC News - BP accused of 'buying academic silence' the contract bp is offering: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/h...p_contract.pdf i find this kinda startling---that more than surprising really. it does pose an underlying question for the neo-liberal set: on what planet is private information more symmetrical with an illusion of democracy than public information? it's obvious: privately controlled information is subject to far more controls, particularly on the part of corporate actors. it is a commodity. as such, it is controlled by the highest bidder. in conservative-world, that is apparently how it should be. if you want democratic responsiveness, you buy it. american conservatives seem to want a corporate oligarchy, but they want it by confusing it with some version of democracy. the only thing i can conclude is that the incoherence of american conservative political philosophy is total. meanwhile, in the domain of things that suck even more: Quote:
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Wow, in my eyes, this whole debacle is quickly becoming a symbol of advanced capitalism.
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day 96.
at least the hurricane is breaking up. Quote:
this information can be true and an element in a theater of positioning at the same time seems obvious, yes? the sniffly "ö bp is taking all the hit for this what about the american corporations also involved?" acquires a certain weight, something that goes beyond angst over the fate of the corporation the dividends from which account for 1 of every 6 dollars paid out in the uk... it's remarkable, when you think about it, the scale of intertwining that seems characteristic of petro-capitalism--intertwining at the level of stockholding and other forms of financial transactions, at the level of petroleum-based or derived commodities (looking at my laptop for example, thinking through the interactions and systems they presuppose that link what i'm typing here to what you're seeing there), at the level of direct consumer relations (the whole transportation model centered on automobiles)... it's taken quite a while to come this far: Quote:
oopsie daisy. meanwhile, our comrades on the oil drum continue their salutary efforts to make sense of what they---and we---are seeing: The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Tropical Depression Bonnie (1a) - and Open Thread |
so much for the greatest ceo in the history of everything:
Tony Hayward to quit BP | Business | The Guardian i don't see what this solves for anyone anywhere, with the possible exception of bp who get to unload a publicity liability maybe. well, it solves some shit for tiny hayward, who can retire to his yacht now. o the price the captains of industry pay when the corporate persons they control fuck up. retiring to a yacht. i shudder to think on it. |
so it's official:
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and so's a pretty large-scale selloff of assets: FT.com / Energy - BP plans $30bn sales to meet Gulf costs poor criminal corporate person bp: Quote:
an editorial from le monde on haywoods departure entitled "the fall of the head of bp: the end of impunity" La chute du patron de BP : la fin de l'impunité - LeMonde.fr meanwhile, back in the general vicinity of the actual spill, a plan from a coalition of environmentalist groups on this, day 99 of the disaster: Quote:
meanwhile in the general vicinity of the actual spill: The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Restarting Progress - and Open Thread |
Perhaps to prevent some people from injecting BP into other posts, I am back - primarily to be a nuisance to the flawed ideology littered throughout this thread.
BP has been focused on stoping the leak, and from the beginning everyone knew it would take about 90 days. BP has also been working equally hard on PR. The TV spots where obvious. It became clear early on that Hayword was not up for the job - his firing is not surprising. When Dudley assumed the lead role or became the "face" it was clear that he was going to be the next CEO. Again no surprises. The act of genius was when BP agreed to the $20 billion compensation fund to be administered by the government. In one stroke they transferred all the negative implications of compensating victims over to the government. They will not have the on-going negative PR of denying claims. This move was surprising, and surprising how eagerly Obama jumped on it. This will cost him and his administration. BP is planning on selling $30 billion in assets, the company will be leaner - but still produce over 3.5 million barrels of oil per day. And they have taken a $32 billion dollar loss in their latest quarterly earnings, clearing the slate for future clean financial reports. BP still has a long and difficult fight ahead of them, but so far they are making the right moves to save the company and enhance share-holder value. The share price has seen its low, of about $27 per share, now at about $37-$38, the 12 month peak was about $62. Sell Obama, buy BP. |
perhaps it is a flaw to think it is more important that the leak be stopped and the gulf cleaned up and that regulation be tightened in order to both make another such disaster less likely and to enable an actually coherent response to problems when they do occur than to cheer for how bp manoevers to save its corporate person ass.
and perhaps it is a flaw to see in the relation between aspects of the petro-capitalist system more a symbiotic matter (state and corporations co-operating all too much) than a private-vs-public thing as you do. perhaps it is a flaw in approach to be interested in actual social systems and how they work rather than being content with looking at mirror images of (conservative) ideological constructs. but they're flaws i'm fine with. |
^^Chewing your leg off to get out of a trap works if you don't bleed to death. You know the folly of howling at the moon. The noise has been against the cause, which you again defend. I don't get it.
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i find this type of conservative "thinking" to be basically dishonest. it bugs me, dishonesty does.
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back to oil in the gulf of mexico:
so thanks in part to the reactive regulatory system and in part to obstruction and in part to the amount of time it takes to assemble a coherent research team and locate funding and all that, the implications of the following are not at all obvious: Quote:
an alternate version, with more weight on noaa: washingtonpost.com now this is quite strange. and none of us are in a position to second-guess anything, so basically we're all kinda....um....what? the surface-level disappearance of oil originating a mile below the surface that's been heavily doused with a dispersant of controversial toxicity...it's just curious. and you know other things sometimes have one appearance on the surface and another below. so it is that the captains of industry apparently plan on transferring the cost of compensating victims of this fiasco back onto you and i by deducting the amount from their corporate tax return. Quote:
now isn't that special? meanwhile in the investigation of (other) criminal activity, the nature of the petro-capitalist regulatory system is moving by degrees to the center of investigations. which is good. about time. conservatives have contempt for regulation, the bush administration was very conservative, so it follows that if you haven't got the votes or ambition to erase regulation, you can make them unenforcable by way of good old fashioned corruption. Quote:
meanwhile, at the oil drum: The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Restarting Progress - and Open Thread things just get getting curiouser and curiouser. |
day 100.
continued consternation at the missing millions of barrels of oil: Quote:
you have to wonder who the various talking heads quoted above work for, who is free and who is not. these problems may have something to do with the situation outlined in this post from the oil drum (caveat lector as a function of anonymity): Quote:
the thread is interesting for the debates about assessments that have been constructed of the deepwater horizon disaster. there are a bunch of quite pro-corporate types who are arguing that the "real disaster" is a business one and that the environmental consequences are "overblown"---i've seen this sort of response before from folk i know who work in oil, who tend to poo-poo assessments of anything and everything petro-related not made by other petro-people...but in this case it is an interesting interpretive question which gets to the ways in which significance is built (first) then attributed (second) to imagery (third) which is presumed to replicate or otherwise communicate something about a world (fourth) beyond itself. obviously a central element in information management, so in the fabrication of consent, is defining then controlling the way imagery is framed. framing is the mechanism that enables people to generate meanings "autonomously" that coincide in a predictable manner with the meanings other similarly "autonomous" thinkin fellers arrive at. people like to do as they're told. but they like to feel they're being independent while they obey. it's a curiously american circle jerk. one thing seems clear, though: stay inside the framing and you are a slave to it. at the same time, it requires work to relativize these frames. and pre-chewed information makes a body feel so Certain about things, when the simplest of all simple facts is that there's very little certainty about anything at all. there's just interpretation and recursion (why this interpretation and not another). but recursion is hard. and certainty so tempting. |
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Just another example of amateur hour in the Obama administration. He's making Jimmy Carter look like a genius. |
yet another vital conservative insight.
see in the real world, the one that's not about royalism and shirking responsibility for policies implemented while conservo-"thinking" had power, there was a cap on liabilities for petro-capitalist outfits, a cap brought to us by the petro-capitalist oligarchy in the context of which political appointees and elected representatives jockey with each other to be nice nice nice to petro-capitalist concerns, all shaped by republican-style "thinking" about regulation. the liability cap was argued for as a "protection for small businesses"....right-o....well, one of the earlier indications that maybe, just maybe, this disaster will start setting fire to conservative "thinking" about regulation in general and petro-capitalist regulation in particular is starting gather some momentum: Quote:
of course this remains a petro-capitalist oligarchy, one in which the federal judiciary has been packed to the rafters with reactionary judges in order to "counter judicial activism" of course---so i expect that texas will be the site of much of the litigation. because texas conservatives love love love their oil corporate persons: Bring on the expense accounts into debate over location of oil spill lawsuits: Stephanie Grace | NOLA.com meanwhile the other captains of industry are trying to figure out ways to continue extracting profits through deepwater drilling: FT.com / Companies / Oil & Gas - Shell chief defends deep-water drilling |
The reason why we might want a person with executive business level experience in government - the nearly $10 billion tax credit being claimed by BP! What are the implications, among others here are two.
First, there is the $20 billion compensation fund, BP will put up $5 billion this year and the remainder over the next 3 years. The tax credit is half of this $20 billion fund. Second, there is taxable income and there is cash flow. BP reported a $17 billion dollar loss in the second quarter, but they generated a net positive cash flow of $6.8 billion, which includes $2.1 billion spent on the spill already. They have generate more than enough cash to make their 2010 payment to the fund plus the first quarter of 2011. The cost of the spill is punitive no matter how you look at it, but if you ever wondered why CEO's get paid what they get paid, just keep tabs on how the numbers unfold. So far BP has the upper hand in how they are managing this issue relative to the Obama administration. And, it is funny how again and again, the folks in Washington cry and complain when a company follows the rules - and then want to change those rules after the fact. Just as in this situation with the $10 billion dollar tax credit, they want BP to voluntarily not take the credit. How about having some folks in charge of government who don't get taken to the cleaners on simple deals? |
my expectation, ace, is that one result of this fiasco is that the rules of the game are going to change. you can already see it starting--that's why i posted the article about the changes in liability cap legislation that's being proposed. i expect the rules around drilling are going to be tightened quite considerably. i expect that some of the tax laws will be changed for corporate persons if bp is not careful about how it manages it's "playing by the rules"....
truth be told, i'm not terribly optimistic about how far it'll go. and that's not really my interest in the thread. i'm not particularly gathering this information around any explicitly political arguments. there are recurrent themes, questions that interest me, explanations that may arise from accumulation of information around them. i see this as tracking what is happening as much as an information flow as an oil flow. whatever. |
Politics aside, I still find the financial response interesting and given the common dislike of math some of these issue will not get the focus it deserves.
So, we have BP planning to sell $30 billion in assets when they don't really need to. So why are they doing it? One, they can off-set capital gains against the losses they report. They can end up with paper losses but "cash-flow profits". This reduces tax burden. Two, they make the sale in 2010 before Congress passes any capital gains tax increases or let the Bush tax cuts expire. So if they owe taxes they pay less. Three, given the losses they can off-set and/or the lower capital gains taxes - for simplification assuming about a 33% rate or a third of the profits - if they sell $30 billion in assets that cost them $20 billion, that $10 billion dollar gain on the sale, this year, could mean up to $3.3 in cash for BP, simply based on timing. Not bad for 2 minutes of thought by a CEO. |
i haven't been following this aspect of things, but is bp still having short-term paper trouble? when i saw the sell-off i assumed it was happening to bump their liquidity which i connected in my brain to the credit trouble they had gotten into a few weeks ago. i remember without really remembering (in the way one does when one's looking at other things) that these credit problems kinda disappeared from the press, but am not sure.
have you been tracking this? ================================================= aside: later in the afternoon [/COLOR]this report was released today by the national wildlife foundation: Assault on America: A Decade of Petroleum Company Disaster, Pollution, and Profit - National Wildlife Federation this link will take you straight to the pdf: http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazine...-Disaster.ashx |
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The use of debt does not appear to be a concern. And each day that uncertainty is removed from their financial future debt will become less of an issue. |
just in case the lot of actual people gets forgotten behind all this watching the struggles of the corporate person bp to maintain it's cash position:
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a bit later on day 105 (i think):
so if there are no rules that define conflict of interest then there is no conflict of interest. Quote:
for what it's worth, i had little knowledge of the regulatory and institutional frames that shape off-shore oil drilling prior to this disaster. i've been interested in the topic and also in the way that an image of that regulatory system has been surfacing across it. so here---this isn't exactly news at this point (the relation between mms & oil corporation has been a subject of recurrent interest, despite the name change). it's also clear that the deepwater mess is going to result in changes to these rules. where these changes happen and what they are is kinda interesting as well. once this is over with, i expect that for most of us (likely myself included) this whole arrangement will start slipping back into invisibility where it will operate for the folk directly involved and few besides. so a picture of petro-capitalism in 2010 that can be assembled through a crisis... that's the "agenda" |
the initial rate of leaking was under-stated (let's say) by a multiple of 12:
washingtonpost.com one result of the amounts dumped into the gulf of mexico and this despite the questions of the missing oil plumes... Quote:
but on the up side, hopefully anyway, preparations for the static kill attempt proceed apace. and just in case that you, like me, have a tenuous grip on what that refers to: The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Start of the Static Kill - and Open Thread |
meanwhile, more dissent within the obama administration about bp's hyper-enthusiastic use of corexit to disperse the oil. the reasons for the dissent are below:
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to the public employees group: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility: Homepage |
let's hope, yes?
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so far so good at the wellhead, so there's reason to be optimistic, more than before at least..but not so optimistic as to think that almost all the oil vaporized. well, a bunch of it did but that still leaves alot, they say. like 2x exxon valdez. not that anyone actually knows. no-one seems to actually know much at this point.
maybe it's the uncertainty. maybe it's that in this case cameras can't provide the requisite illusion of transparency and/or control, which is creating problems for the dominant technology of reality management. or maybe its something else: Quote:
but people seem to think that the happy-face all that oil seems to be gone report is a prelude to the obama administration abandoning the problem and by extension the region: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/us/05oil.html?hp aside: there are lots of ways to destroy marshland: Delacroix residents 'never imagined how bad it would get': Part four of four | NOLA.com but the wellhead seems to be holding. The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Cementing the Well - and Open Thread |
I heard a news report yesterday that the federal government is reporting that 75% of the oil is now gone - either cleaned up, evaporated, or eaten by the sea. It seemed hopeful that there might not be any more big oil masses hitting the shore. This is fantastic news.
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for what it's worth i'd like to believe that...and the impression one could press releases and/or yesterday's noaa report, but as time is passing more and more problems are being raised about that information:
NOAA report on Gulf oil spill draws criticism for many assumptions fact is that as of now, i don't think anyone really knows what's going on. i certainly don't. |
an update on activities at the well:
The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Waiting for the Cement to Set - and Open Thread 2 and isn't this special? Quote:
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the theater of engagement involving the captains of industry and the corporate person they pilot with the lives and well-being of actual human beings is entering a new phase.
i don't think this requires much commentary. plus i have to go to work. Quote:
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some say it's the end of the leak.
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others try to understand what is really going on despite new and improved information limitations and a drive for an appearance of Resolution: The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - How to Deal with a Dead Well - and Open Thread while others call bullshit Fintan Dunne Independent Journalist Blog: Return Of The BP Zombie Well and it's really hard to say anything definitive about what's going on. again. on the one hand, it's obvious from all the reports that the federal govt and bp have a common interest in the appearance of an Ending. this ending seems to be connected to some vague sense about the extent of the oil that's already in the gulf...whence the strange information of a couple weeks ago concerning how it's all magically disappeared. this is countered with reports like you see referenced in the guardian piece of oil still being found in the marshes... but corporate person bp seems to be using this appearance as a signal to start jockeying around to cut losses, as corporate persons are wont to do because of course when a corporate person can ditch responsibilities that follow from a disaster it is responsible for shareholders make more money and everyone benefits. except of course those who don't. but i digress. what's sure is that it is curiously difficult, even moreso than previously, to know what is happening here. but i do hope that the well is killed. it's just curious to me that even in these 3 short pieces above, there's plenty of reason to avoid being too sure about anything that's said. |
ok so here's a report from truthout about the mysteriously disappearing oil and how that trick is, allegedly, being managed. if this is accurate across the board, it's pretty stunning.
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this would be nice to have independent verification simply because it's so far at variance with the official lines on the matter of oil, where it is and how it's being cleaned up. there's not a whole lot of press about blasting it with dispersants from planes and sinking it instead of cleaning it up. oil drum monitorings: The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Continuing to Wait - and Open Thread |
the claim that the oil had simply vanished seemed absurd at the time it was made.
then there's the story above about the emphasis placed on making the oil invisible rather than cleaning it. and it turns out, seemingly, that the oil has in fact gone somewhere--and the corexit too. and that somewhere--it is not good. Quote:
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I've been waiting for these articles to appear.
All along I know I've been lied to, and the obfuscation machine regarding any real data reaching the general public, has been humming along, well well oiled. The amount & the type of dispersants used, has been a concern of many with half a mind. The government/corporate behemoth has a seemingly tight stranglehold. That article in post #557: Yes it would be good to have independent verification. BP must have had the government's blessing to do its bang-up job of keeping reporters away from the beaches? Yes? Is it just me, or did that woman doing the press report from NOAA, look nervous, and frightened? |
oopsie daisy.
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if you follow the link there's some interesting images and animations on the right. so the oil didn't just disappear. what a surprise. |
Nobody but die hard apologists expected the oil to really have disappeared. Corexit 9500 plus oil is no more toxic than oil alone (this is why BP switched from the more toxic Corexit 9527 at the urging of the EPA); and the evidence suggests that the unknown effects of dispersal of oil into the water column is likely less than the catastrophic damage to wetlands that would have occurred had oil been allowed to wash ashore. That's why as much dispersant as possible was used, now we have to figure out what to do from here.
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Fishing Industry in Gulf Still Worried About Levels of Toxins in the Water and the Impact on Marine Life
check out the transcript and/or webcast of this program. the basic accusation here follows on the kind of information that was provided a few posts above this one. the oil is present, mixed with dispersants. it's not difficult to find. there is no mystery about what's happening. fishermen know what's happening. anyone who's there, seemingly, knows. but for some reason the infotainment coming from the bp/federal government combine seems to be alot more---o i dunno---goofy optimistic about things. you'd almost think that the locals who see in this stream of infotainment a setting up of the ole cut-and-run are right. and if that's not what's being set up, it's quite difficult to imagine what possible function could be getting served by acting as though a quite catastrophic situation simply doesn't exist. except of course that no-one knows extent or magnitude or impact. but it feels like we're being fed a line of shit. kinda like shell and the nigerian government fed the un a line of shit in the report that's due out in december which essentially blames local people stealing oil for "90%" of the oil in the niger river delta Outrage at UN decision to exonerate Shell for oil pollution in Niger delta | Environment | The Guardian this flying in the face of information gathered over many years from non-governmental, non-royal dutch shell sources. go figure. |
Probably you saw it, but this had a ring of truth to me:
"bp is gonna be here until the oil is gone." -from one of its commercials. |
Looks like the majority of this plume is 50ppb of oil, the lc50 for almost all marine life in the area is on the order of 2-5ppm, so we're looking at hundreds of times less than what will be killing off wildlife en masse. This is surprisingly good news.
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Yeah...sorry I blew up. Quoting their ad was more unwarranted anti-capitalism. Acknowledging the relative insignificance of what happened too soon didn't even tickle this thread's thoughts.
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med---where's that information coming from? i've been searching around for a half hour already and can't find any reports or studies that say that. it'd be good if it were true, what you say. but i'd like to see the source if you have a link handy
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i seem to remember that new scientist has details of the research that claimes the plume has been mostly degraded by baceria.
the thing is: all that organic carbon doesnt just dissapear... even if it isnt present in the form of an actual plume / oil spill, its still likely to massively f*ck up the ecosystem and have a negative impact on the local biodiversity |
The key-word being "local",
re-entering our systems carbon's systematic beautiful. Freaking out about this oil spill seems to have at least distracted us from the air we breathe, reading, I hope, as a railing against why it happened, as I think roachboy has intended. Not that I know, OP, but you've reviewed the percentages. |
Here we go again....
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It appears that our government lied about the oil spill. Good thing people have short memories or there would certainly be more outrage.
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Anyone here gonna call for Obama to be "fired" or resign, like you did with the BP CEO?:orly::orly::orly: Didn't think so. |
Obama and the government messed up by suppressing the facts, but a BP CEO and president of the United States are two very different jobs.
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you just working out that in petrocapitalism the state and those captains of industry you love o so deeply are working hand in glove? please, ace, wake up and smell the coffee. it's only in the delusions of people like you that there's an adverarial relation between corporations and the state. "regulation" is not an adversarial relation. it's a symbiosis.
that noaa and the coast guard and bp were all basically on the same page in terms of information spill management was obvious to anyone who was looking from quite early on. even you'd likely to have figured it out if you'd allowed yourself a vacation from conservative metaphysics long enough to point your head in that direction. there's lots of information in this thread about it. so yeah, everyone knew about this. don't assume that because everyone knew about it that it means yay cover-up. what it means is that you are way behind, and your conservative metaphysics are in significant measure to blame for that. when your analytic viewpoint gets obviously in the way of reality, it's generally an indication that a rethink is in order. just mentioning this for your delectation. |
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There are so many more important reasons to be critical of Obama than this. |
We jus' need to get off oil.
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I have greatly reduced the amount of gas I buy now since I only use my car once or twice a week to drive under 20 miles. |
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http://smileys.on-my-web.com/reposit...popcorn-03.gif |
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I think the committee that comprises aceventura3 needs to meet to get its story straight. |
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"I know you are but what am I" is the best thing the committee could come up with?
I think I can guess your position: we should trust the president when he absolves BP of blame, but we shouldn't trust the president when we have an opportinity to make him look bad. |
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However, I pointed out early on that the suggestion that BP cut corners due to a profit motive did not add up. The logic of - let's save a few dollars and put our entire company at risk- is not what responsible business people do. And there was no evidence that BP was run by incompetent or irresponsible business people. It was clear to me that the accident was the result of a series human errors and no one was motivated to make errors because of profit. There is no doubt that management has to be held accountable and is at fault for not minimizing the risk of human error. Hindsight is always 20/20. Government regulators also dropped the ball. There should be accountability for errors and the lack of controls, but the knee-jerk reaction that the drive for profits is at the root of every negative corporate occurrence is overly simplistic. |
The obvious response to the oil rig explosion and subsequent spill is to reduce government regulation and simply allow consumers to choose whether or not to buy oil from companies that act irresponsibly. While I can't think of a single instance in the history of the planet where less regulation made an industry more responsible, a very convincing person called RnPl2012FreeMarketz on the Mises forums seems to think it will work.
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In reality, there is no shortage of examples of business folk who appeared responsible while they were simultaneously secretly breaking legal and/or ethical and/or safety rules. The fact that you, some guy from the internet, give BP a thumbs up for their business ethics and logical aptitude means nothing. As it stands now, how have any BP executives suffered anything remotely harmful in the aftermath of the spill? They don't have much incentive to not cut corners. It's a gamble that they make, where if they lose, we pay, they maybe get transferred to a new market (god forbid they get fired with a multimillion dollar severance package), and BP takes a quarter or two break and then goes back to making record profits. |
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I never argue for no regulation. I think there is a balancing point, don;t you? ---------- Post added at 04:19 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:12 PM ---------- Quote:
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Hi,
Thanks very much for this comment. It help me to think about my ideals. Tks again and pls keep posting. |
The British Petroleum oil leak was capped in July of 2010. A year afterwards, the tourists are returning to the Gulf beaches. Considering this, British Petroleum has petitioned the court to reduce its damages settlement. But some say reports of the tourism rebound are inflated or deceptive. I read this here: Rise in gulf tourism prompts BP to ask for discount.
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