Gib, that's not simply a joke - collecting the spilled oil does have some value. Of course it's small in the grand scheme of things. My more serious point is that the hysteria is unbalanced and unreasonable and the accusations absurd in the absence of evidence of exactly what went wrong and who was at fault. People give absurd opinions in the other direction so I give a less silly one in that direction. For example did you see the ridiculous filming of the black tarry balls as though that was evidence of the spill?
You haven't seen the contracts either so you have no idea who has what liability and you can be sure lawyers will be employed for years at enormous expense to argue the various positions with learned judges considering and deciding and being reversed on appeal.
You are perhaps over-rating SI which is essentially a reasonably high-end chat room. It's not a court of law and opinions and facts are not professional advice which you can take to the bank and sue in the event of dissatisfaction.
It's a forum for ideas and information from which we all extract what we think is valuable. Anyone wanting to pick up complete ideology and information on which to act, abrogating their responsibility to think for themselves, is asking for trouble
I find the signal to noise ratios very high. I can quickly scan the noise and extract the good bits which help me develop successful ideas.
There are various parties involved such as Halliburton, Transocean, the manufacturers of various components and the designers of them, the government officials who regulate and approve and of course BP which owns a substantial share of the oil production. You have no idea who has what liability under what contracts and laws. The pieces of rubber which apparently broke off the inside of the blow out preventer look like a serious piece of evidence. Exactly why they did, what the relevance was and who was responsible for the design and failure is to be determined.
Don't forget the concrete which was supposed to be in place.
To me those are details which don't matter too much. There were obviously blunders and that will likely be sorted out. Meanwhile, what matters is the damage and it doesn't look as though that's going to be very significant. The value of the harm including the deaths, lost platform, lost production, economic loss [fishing losses, oil loss, production loss, environmental amenity loss] and what have you is going to be in the low single figure $billions.
Bids in the government of the USA for new spending start at $1 trillion these days. $1 billion is the third or fourth significant figure and is barely on an American politician's radar.
The reaction to the failed well looks like mass hysteria. And worse. Talk of having their boot on throat of BP is a very ugly expression and the mentality behind such a comment is of more concern than the spill. A spill can be fixed up. The geopolitical carnage that results from vicious megalomaniacs in charge of governments leads to Godwin's Law.
I'm more interested in the continuing financial relativity theory carnage with debts piling up on debts with no way out. My shorts of JPM and WFC are now in profit. I suppose it's a nice sign of the times that people have the time to devote to the intricacies of pelican life in some swamps in southern USA. Let's hope it stays that way.
$40 billion off BP's market capitalisation [a third down from the pre spill price] suggests there might be a bargain in the offing. But with crude oil prices on the slide and so on, there's more to the decline than the cost of the spill.
Mqurice |
