05-05-2010, 06:06 AM | #41 (permalink) |
Who You Crappin?
Location: Everywhere and Nowhere
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The conservative spin machine has really gone off the rails with this.
A sampling of sound bites I've heard: - This is Obama's Katrina (wut?) - Environmental radicals sabotaged the pipeline to make a political stance - Obama administration WANTED a crisis like this - This is good for Obama because he's so anti-oil (even though he just opened off shore drilling and ran on a pro-drilling platform)
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05-05-2010, 07:59 AM | #42 (permalink) |
warrior bodhisattva
Super Moderator
Location: East-central Canada
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Reading the bits coming from scientists and academics regarding the impact of the oil and the continuing problems of its still spewing into the ocean (the rate at which it spews, and how long it might take to stop it), I have a rather frightening sense that they're coming to a consensus, whether consciously or not:
We're not nearly as alarmed as we should be, probably because it's happening in slow motion.This is likely become the greatest environmental disaster in American history. And now for some updates, of varying significance: Gulf of Mexico oil spill: one of three leaks capped - Telegraph Texas Governor calls Louisiana oil spill 'act of God' - Telegraph
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot Last edited by Baraka_Guru; 05-05-2010 at 08:01 AM.. |
05-05-2010, 08:15 AM | #43 (permalink) | |
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Location: essex ma
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more conservative spin. first a kinda hilarious argument from rick perry, governor of the backward state of texas:
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so don't "give in to a knee jerk reaction" to what is possibly the worst environmental disaster in us history and rethink the drill drill drill approach. this is god's fault. the national review makes a similar argument, but adds in cost-effectiveness as an extra bon-bon. http://article.nationalreview.com/43...ng/the-editors so yeah. the right is still on its knees in front of the oil industry.
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05-05-2010, 09:37 AM | #44 (permalink) |
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While it may have been an act of God which caused the spill (which is sort of a legal term for a nature event causing the damage as opposed to human error), that does not change the fact that man was entirely unprepared and sluggish in containing the damage the act of God could(will) cause - which is the egregious part. We have a moral obligation to have safety/containment measures in place for something like this. This event has certainly exposed to me the cavalier approach that man has taken in underwater drilling. I still believe that collecting this oil is necessary, but I can't believe they didn't have a system, a backup system, and a backup's backup for instantly capping a pipe at the ocean floor.
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05-05-2010, 09:43 AM | #45 (permalink) |
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Location: essex ma
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this piece from the washington post may explain some of the specific lack of preparedness around this bp site. it was exempted from safety reviews undertaken by interior thanks to bp lobbying efforts. the safety reports that were issued presupposed that what has happened was impossible. best to look at the linked article because it contains links to supplementary materials.
washingtonpost.com
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05-05-2010, 09:54 AM | #46 (permalink) |
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You know, the more I think about this the more it pisses me off. If I want to move an electrical outlet in my house 1 inch to the right, I have to go get a permit. An inspector comes to my house and looks at the site and my plans. I have to have the work performed by a licensed professional. Then, the inspector returns and makes certain that the work meets regulations. That's for me, my house, my risk.
This is the fucking Gulf of Mexico. 50 million people, a trillion pieces of wildlife. And another thing: didn't they pull 11 people of this rig? Why do we have to speculate what happened? Can't we waterboard those guys and find out?
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05-05-2010, 10:31 AM | #47 (permalink) | |
Junkie
Location: Ventura County
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05-05-2010, 10:36 AM | #48 (permalink) |
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Location: essex ma
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ace---i'm busy at the moment, but have a look at the post i put up above that references a blog from mit press: there's an interesting and useful overview of the regulatory regime that frames oil drilling in general that talks specifically about the processes that are referenced again in the post article. it provides a bit of context that i found useful.
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05-05-2010, 10:39 AM | #49 (permalink) | |
Junkie
Location: Ventura County
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So, MSNBC interviews someone and all of a sudden that person in your mind is the "conservative spin machine". Why not call it the "MSNBC spin machine", it seems their only goal is to try and make conservatives look bad - don't you see that for what it is?
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05-05-2010, 10:47 AM | #50 (permalink) |
Still Free
Location: comfortably perched at the top of the bell curve!
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Ace,
My point is this. It's been, what?, 14 days or so? They constructed some box with a funnel and a pipe on it to put over the hole and route the oil to a ship. Why didn't they have that built and sitting under a tarp in Mobile Alabama - ready to be shipped to the gulf on a moment's notice? Why did it take 7 days to even start to build such a safety measure? That's my problem with this whole thing - you have to figure shit like that out BEFORE you drill, not after the spill.
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Gives a man a halo, does mead. "Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly." |
05-05-2010, 11:01 AM | #51 (permalink) | ||
Junkie
Location: Ventura County
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---------- Post added at 07:01 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:54 PM ---------- Quote:
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"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch." "It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion." "If you live among wolves you have to act like one." "A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers." |
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05-05-2010, 11:19 AM | #52 (permalink) | |
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05-05-2010, 11:51 AM | #53 (permalink) | ||
Junkie
Location: Ventura County
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And here is the WH response: And here is MSNBC interview: Reading what he said compared to the spin is interesting and I bet our conclusions differ - but one thing we know is that Brown got fired by Bush. And my point was that liberal glob on to stuff and make more of it than it is. Brown is one man with his own views. {added} Just for the record, Covuto, in my opinion is fair with conservative leanings, and as I see the interview, Covuto did not take Brown's charge seriously, nor do I. Perhaps, conservatives can actually see things for what they are. Here is the entire interview: {added} I am listening to Covuto now, responding to the inaccurate spin from the WH, interesting.
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"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch." "It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion." "If you live among wolves you have to act like one." "A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers." Last edited by aceventura3; 05-05-2010 at 01:01 PM.. |
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05-05-2010, 12:17 PM | #54 (permalink) |
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Location: essex ma
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even the national review is backing away from the drill baby drill insouciance about the consequences the bidness of amurica is bidness line of the head-in-the-oil-saturated-sand conservative set. but here we have a milton friedman *defense* of the lax regulatory scenario that allowed *both* the deepwater horizon disaster and---worse---the inability to control the spills or to manage effectively a clean-up.
no-one would say that the accident itself was a result of an a priori situation (were that the case, there'd be no accident, just an unfolding of the consequences of a situation set up in advance)...problems arise from the ways in which the context was amenable to manipulation by bp for its own financial advantage at the expense of--well as it's turned out the gulf of mexico. the line that "business knows business better than regulators know business" seems to me lunacy in this context. business as milton freidman defined it is the extraction of profits for shareholders. the only environmental protections that follow logically from that are the barest minimum to conform with legal and technical requirements---anything more would impact on vital shareholder profits. and uncle milton went on to argue that for a bidness to go further and try to actually be responsible for the resources that they plunder---erm use----in a more-than-bidness kinda way is both outside the competence of bidness and also unethical. for milton freidman anyway. whom no-one in their right mind takes seriously in 2010 as a philosopher of bidness. you could, were you to for some reason find it amusing to play along with the uncle milty game, argue that it is **Exactly** for the reasons he outlines that extensive and ongoing regulation of business aimed at protecting not only natural resources (a yucky capitalist phrase) but also the environment from which they come that stewards one way or another these resources and contexts (bidness ain't great at context) from a non-business viewpoint would be necessary to compensate for the boundedness of a business rationality. markets are obviously neither rational or equitable left to themselves and no-one in their right mind believes that firms will provide adequate environmental protections if ways around having to do it can be found (in the interest of vital shareholder profits of course)---i mean if you want proof just look at the colossal environmental disaster this thread is about and to the increasingly clear history of bp acting all milty friedmany about its responsibilities to plan for contigencies. and it's still ongoing, this disaster. the disaster is largely is not a direct result of the accident itself. it's a result of the inability of british petroleum to manage the situation, which is a result of its not having planned for it, which is a result of their manoevering a pliant, pro-petroleum industry regulatory apparatus to exempt them from having to plan for it.
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05-05-2010, 12:55 PM | #55 (permalink) | |||||
Junkie
Location: Ventura County
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"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch." "It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion." "If you live among wolves you have to act like one." "A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers." Last edited by aceventura3; 05-05-2010 at 12:58 PM.. |
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05-05-2010, 01:06 PM | #56 (permalink) |
Who You Crappin?
Location: Everywhere and Nowhere
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I love how ace jumps to some imagined MSNBC story as the source of my "conservative spin". I was actually referring to (in part) Michael Brown's interview on CNN (where Anderson Cooper nailed him to the wall).
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05-05-2010, 01:18 PM | #57 (permalink) |
Junkie
Location: Ventura County
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Sorry that I can not read your mind. And, I don't watch CNN (check my comments on CNN, there is a thread somewhere on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC). But, what I posted is not imagined - so what is your point? What i posted are not even my words, they are direct sources. The WH spin was a lie, why can't you see that? MSNBC is late to the party as usual and only seems to be motivated by turning everything into a big grand conservative conspiracy. MSNBC is better than the Comedy Channel, and I take it as serious.
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"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch." "It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion." "If you live among wolves you have to act like one." "A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers." |
05-05-2010, 02:44 PM | #58 (permalink) |
Who You Crappin?
Location: Everywhere and Nowhere
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I don't watch MSNBC. They don't speak for me.
And Brown's comments didn't need to be spun....they were blatant lies/falsities that anyone with a brain could see for what they were
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05-05-2010, 07:52 PM | #59 (permalink) |
High Honorary Junkie
Location: Tri-state.
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I'm with you Cimarron -- this is a serious environmental disaster with far-reaching economic and social effects. BP should be held seriously liable and absolutely punished for their negligence, both in having only one back-up shut-off valve and for their slow reaction time.
The real problem is that there is little incentive to build in multiple shut-off valves and to fully account for the risk of spills. Government is there to hold people and companies accountable for their actions as they pertain to the greater good. BP, then, must be held accountable for this massive spill, so that other oil-drilling corporations recognize that the price of an accident is greater than risky profits, at which point they will find ways to make profit less risky. |
05-06-2010, 08:45 AM | #60 (permalink) |
Still Free
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Mike Brown is an ordinary citizen who got canned for doing a bad job during a national catastrophe and is trying to restore his personal reputation by pointing fingers. He is not acting as a spokesperson for a party.
Honestly, I thought Cavuto did a good job interviewing him and don't understand Gibbs' reaction. Cavuto just let the moron talk and hang himself. A good interviewer doesn't interject personal opinion or analysis of the interview during the interview. Of course, we have all forgotten what real journalism looks like. Brown's words are an adequate example of his idiocy, I don't need Cavuto, Gibbs, or Williams to enforce that fact.
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05-06-2010, 10:46 PM | #61 (permalink) |
immoral minority
Location: Back in Ohio
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I wouldn't say I would blame Obama, but I do blame the EPA & the Coast Guard for not having some type of dome on stand-by within 1000 miles. They should have been able to have it on-site within 3 days.
And I don't 'blame' BP, unless they did cut corners on safety and the number of safeguards to prevent something like this. Accidents will happen, but they should be prepared and know what to do to stop it from becomming worse. I would also blame the users of gas and oil, this is one of those things that subsidizes the true costs of gasoline. When gas went over $3 or $4, shipping companies added surcharges, yet the federal government and other clean-up organizations will spend millions on this (and BP won't pay for all of it), and the price of gas in Ohio won't go up or get taxed any more. The Federal income tax might have to go up or some other programs will get cut, but actually buying gas won't be impacted by this event. I wonder if having the beaches in the gulf damaged for a few years will change people's minds though. *And even though I haven't been here for the past few days, it was because I got a new laptop, not because I am the person The_Dunedan talks about... I get sea sick. However, I had a good laugh about that conspiracy therory when the person called into Rush's show. It doesn't matter if there is no proof, and I would think it would be very hard for someone like James Bond to take a motor boat 50 miles off the coast at night, get onto the rig, place explosives on critical parts, leave, and then motor away. Last edited by ASU2003; 05-06-2010 at 10:48 PM.. |
05-07-2010, 03:50 AM | #62 (permalink) |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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right. it's all a great big abstraction.
edit: this footage is obviously of one of the submarines that's being used to try to deal with the leak. the first 1:30 appears to be taken up with checking on something with the device that's to do the sealing, which has a strangely anthropomorphic end to it, something like a mannerist fountain. i find these accidental design choices interesting and distracting dont you? anyway there's an edit at 1:37 seconds and from there on the submarine is at one of the 3 leaks. since the footage is from an attempt to position something with reference to the leak and not of it you have to focus on the background of the images to process what you're seeing. it's an interesting experience to watch this because of the movement through and then maybe away from seeing this as an abstraction.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 05-07-2010 at 04:14 AM.. |
05-07-2010, 06:14 AM | #63 (permalink) | |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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but of course a corporate person must needs protect that corporate person's image.
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this seems very much a privatized george w bush flight over new orleans, doesn't it?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite |
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05-07-2010, 10:44 AM | #64 (permalink) |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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more on the regulatory background for this mess, if regulatory you want to call it. this piece from today's wall st journal is about the minerals management service, a fine bunch of republican-instituted fellows who essentially tell the oil companies that it would be nice to be safe but don't do anything about practices that aren't....and cheerlead for "energy independence"---the way these missions get squared is by way of monitoring industry records about amounts of oil extracted and getting royalty payments. well, the other way they're squared is across a seemingly endless supply of handjobs for oil corporations. but read on:
U.S. Oil Regulator Ceded Safety Oversight to Drillers - WSJ.com
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite |
05-07-2010, 12:13 PM | #65 (permalink) | |
Junkie
Location: Ventura County
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Given continuing emerging technology that is often developed through industry R&D that has not been/can not be fully tried and tested in operational conditions before implementation, how would you develop safety/fail-safe regulations covering all contingencies without input from the "industry"? For everyone else, again, BP has/had no incentive to waste millions of gallons of oil through an oil spill in the gulf, nor incur compensatory and potential punitive damages that will put their on going operations across the globe at risk. No one has yet to offer any hard proof that BP and any regulator failed to act in good faith.
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"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch." "It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion." "If you live among wolves you have to act like one." "A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers." Last edited by aceventura3; 05-07-2010 at 12:18 PM.. |
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05-07-2010, 12:59 PM | #66 (permalink) |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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i only have a couple minutes (i have to be somewhere)....so am wondering: with a spill of this magnitude and potential for damage (and i hope it remains potential--i really hope the dome works) what difference does the attitude of bp make?
accidents happen..i don't think anyone is arguing except perhaps as an inversion of your characterizations of what people are arguing or saying, so as a straw man, that regulation can prevent accidents. but regulation can and should require that adequate contingency plans be in place to deal with them. it is self-evident that those plans were not in place in the gulf and that a significant explanation for that was the series of exemptions that bo got for itself in general and this facility in particular---which were only possible in the context of the long-standing relation of regulatory bodies to oil concerns that relies WAY too much on self-reporting.
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05-07-2010, 01:44 PM | #67 (permalink) | |
Still Free
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You keep calling this hindsight, but they are touting this device as having worked in 400-500 feet, but untested in 5K feet. So clearly, at the conceptual level, they didn't just figure out this funnel/straw technique. There's no reason why this device could not have already existed and already been tested at 5K feet - because that's where the oil is! The fact that they already had this technique but they didn't have it built or tested for this depth means that they did NOT act in good faith to prepare for every possible scenario. Looks to me like they put ALL of their faith in 1 singular dead man switch at the ocean floor. That's pretty crappy. I'm a pro-capitalism, anti-big government guy. But, there was obviously some pathetic disaster plans created for these deep wells. Do I fully understand who developed and approved those plans? Nope. Am I willing to allocate a percentage of responsibility to BP/Feds? Nope. But common sense shows that BP didn't do all they could, and every indication is because they were lazy, naive, or...frugal. With so much at stake, it's immoral to be any of those things.
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05-08-2010, 04:49 AM | #68 (permalink) | |
immoral minority
Location: Back in Ohio
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But the regulators needed to ensure that safety proticols were being followed (they were within 200 miles of the US coast, so they were in US waters), and they should have had this dome structure on the move to the site the next day after they realized it was leaking oil, and before the robots got there. It seems like they put all of the hopes on the robots, and then when those didn't work, then they started moving the dome. |
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05-09-2010, 12:42 PM | #69 (permalink) |
Junkie
Location: Ventura County
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Some of the criticisms in the material cited in this thread seem to suggest that the safety protocol where inadequate (not in dispute by me) because, one reason given, the "industry" is largely involved in crafting the safety protocols. The latter is what I dispute. What I have been posting has had more to do with that question than anything else here.
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05-10-2010, 06:13 AM | #70 (permalink) | |
warrior bodhisattva
Super Moderator
Location: East-central Canada
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---------- Post added at 10:13 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:10 AM ---------- Oh, and more bad news: The dome they are using to attempt to contain the spill has failed. It became clogged with crystallized gas.... The Great Beyond: Giant dome fails to fix Deepwater Horizon oil disaster
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot Last edited by Baraka_Guru; 05-10-2010 at 06:19 AM.. |
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05-10-2010, 11:06 AM | #71 (permalink) |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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Gulf oil spill: plugging the leak | News | guardian.co.uk
there is something so massively irresponsible about engaging in drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean if the firm that's doing the drilling has neither the technology nor the understanding required to build the technology necessary to contain damage that's caused if something goes wrong. and things do go wrong. even in an all milty freidmanny alternate universe, things will go wrong. so basically at this point there are no ideas as to what to do. i hope i'm understanding this wrong. but that's what it looks like.
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05-10-2010, 11:09 AM | #72 (permalink) |
warrior bodhisattva
Super Moderator
Location: East-central Canada
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You mean besides the "junk plug"?
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot |
05-10-2010, 11:21 AM | #73 (permalink) | |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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the junk plug.
take tires and golfballs scrunch them all together. shoot them at the hole one mile below the surface of the ocean. and there's this: Quote:
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite |
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05-10-2010, 11:35 AM | #74 (permalink) |
Still Free
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Junk plug. Apparently Beavis and Butthead are running BP research.
I can't believe there isn't some cylindrical robot that can "crawl" in the pipe and then expand to the diameter of the pipe, thus plugging it off. Man has been plugging tubes with cylidrically shaped objects for millenia. It doesn't seem that difficult. I'm sure some nerds at MIT are whipping one up as we speak. Of course, the robotic pipe plug would have been nice to have say, three weeks ago. Yeah, yeah. Hindsight and all that. ---------- Post added at 03:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:32 PM ---------- 12 times faster!?!? Yeah, that sounds like a great, low risk idea. Let's move on to that one. And I thought the funnel/pipe was a bit kooky. Wonder why you can't take some sort of heat source to the crystallized methane and melt it off - have the robot take, I don't know, some sort of flare or high heat light down there. It seems that it is a finite amount that must be removed and then the box thingy is back in business.
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05-10-2010, 06:47 PM | #75 (permalink) |
immoral minority
Location: Back in Ohio
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Should US nuke the BP oil spill - like the Russians used to | News & Politics | News & Comment | The First Post
1550 nuclear bombs on the wall, 1550 nuclear bombs, drop one down, blow it to hell, 1549 nuclear bombs on the wall... I don't know what is sadder, that this might be the best option or that nobody can come up with something to stop this leak. |
05-11-2010, 06:11 AM | #76 (permalink) |
Junkie
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Actually, a tactical (sub-kiloton) nuke shot might not be a bad idea. The intense heat and pressure (locally) would "weld" the leak shut by melting and glassifying the seabed, and due to the extreme depth and pressures at the leak site very little radiation and zero fallout would even be measurable at the surface. Experience in the 50s and 60s would seem to indicate also that radioactive particle contamination at those depths would be slight, and would consist mostly of fragments of the munition casing itself along with a fine layer of radioactive seabed material which would be quickly sedimented over, especially in the particle-rich waters off the Mississippi delta. Given that nobody's pulling any three-eyed fish out of Bikini Atoll or any of the other submarine test-shot sites (mostly shallow-water) and that this spill has the destructive potential (in economic terms at very least) of an actual atom-bomb attack on a major city, something like what the Russians are suggesting might not be a bad idea.
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05-11-2010, 06:34 AM | #78 (permalink) | |
warrior bodhisattva
Super Moderator
Location: East-central Canada
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Detonating a nuke for something like this on the sea bed sounds like a bad idea to me. It seems like a huge risk considering the minimal amount of control you have over the situation and the environment. If something goes wrong, it would seem to me that it would go very, very wrong.
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot |
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05-11-2010, 07:11 AM | #79 (permalink) |
Junkie
Location: Ventura County
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There is a reason why BP wanted to use the "container" before trying the "junk shot". My assumption is that the "container" would have made it easier to salvage oil or to get the well into production sooner. We can make jokes about the high tech compared to the low tech solutions, but the irony is that when we talk about being irresponsible using the high tech solution before using what will actually work is probably the best argument against BP in this whole thing.
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05-11-2010, 07:59 AM | #80 (permalink) |
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i wasn't making a joke, ace. i actually hoped the giant funnel would work and was disappointed when all that pesky methane turned up to spoil things.
a nuke? that this is on the table is an indication that things are reaching a space of desperation, yes? does that seem plausible?
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