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To: Gib Bogle who wrote (73695)	5/26/2010 5:17:11 AM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

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

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (73695)	5/26/2010 6:00:07 AM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Respond to of 74559

Gib, I know you are far too busy on important matters of the planet but here's a good link covering the oil spill situation: initforthegold.blogspot.com I put the hysteria down to various aspects: It's totally cool to be environmentally hip and successful posing gets one high on the pecking order. BP is part of The Seven Sisters and the Rockefeller descendants are still politically active. Big Oil is evil. Anyone with loads of money is ipso facto an evil-doing selfish greedy crook. BP has loads of money so deserves contempt and having it stolen from them by politicians and their supporters. BP is English. Yes, I know it's technically British but Americans who think they are Irish are anti-English, not anti-Irish, anti-Welsh or anti-Scottish. Also, there are shareholders from around the world but Tony Hayward is obviously English and that's good enough. Remember 4 July!!! Paul Revere warned that the British were coming and now they are right there, destroying the environment because they get money for every pelican they kill. Engineers and scientists are suspect at the best of times. Engineers are low on the pecking order - not many politicians are engineers and have you checked the NZ Honours lists over the decades for engineers? Giving them a kick is good form. People are economically illiterate so have little ability to put the situation into perspective. Their opinions and emotions are driven by news media in a feedback loop. Most people have little idea what $1 billion means other than it's lots more than they have. People are ignorant about science and engineering so have no idea about the processes involved in the situation. As the writer in that link pointed out for example, the submarine oil plumes are trivial compared with the Gulf Stream and the loop. The pursuit of money - there's money for many people in the situation. BP is paying out heaps and loads of money is being made. When BP spends money, somebody is collecting it. Swarms of people are crowding in for a piece of the action. Of course they make a lot of noise to get some of the loot. Mqurice

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (73695)	8/14/2010 5:31:40 PM
From: Snowshoe	Respond to of 74559

OK Gib, you can emerge from your bunker and take off your gas mask. The catastrophe is over... Obama declares Gulf Coast 'open for business' news.yahoo.com

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (73695)	8/15/2010 4:05:14 AM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74559

Gib, you can now see that I was right about it all. Sure, the cash out the door from BP ended up well into the $billions, but they were robbed blind by all sorts of swindlers in like hungry dogs at a time when BP was not in a position to negotiate better prices for help with avoiding harm from the oil lest they be considered negligent, and wantonly careless at a time of crisis. No doubt the shrimp boaters made more money catching a bit of oil than they did from any shrimp they might have caught. Quite a few $billion have been transferred from BP to clean up and other people involved with the accident. That is an economic gain to the region. The big losers are the BP shareholders [apart from those who were actually killed]. The rest get cash and quite a lot of it. Note that the infamous plumes were nothing [as I wrote all along]. The whole business was a load of mass hysteria. Tony Hayward was right = the spill was small and the ocean huge. Come on, "You were right Mq. I have to hand it to you, you had it right from the beginning". Thanks Gib. Mqurice

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (73695)	8/15/2010 10:35:55 AM
From: elmatador	1 Recommendation Respond to of 74559

When I was banning MQ people were complaining, now you see the damage I have always foreseen...

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (73695)	8/31/2010 4:13:50 PM
From: Maurice Winn	5 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Gib, ElMatador wanted to apologize to you: Message 26790345 He means well, but having been brought up in the barrio, shirtless and barefoot, he sometimes finds it hard to maintain Virtuous Victorian Values in their entirety. ElM, it would be better if you would direct your apology to the person you are concerned about. Mqurice

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (73695)	10/29/2010 11:52:56 AM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Respond to of 74559

A shame you left Gib because you got the dinkum oil about the BP well failure right here, including the expectation that Halliburton's concrete was a major component of the failure process. Mq the Marvellous was right again - sure enough, Halliburton's concrete allowed the blowout to get going. finance.yahoo.com The spill was minor, the ocean was big the oil was small, the sea was warm, the sun was shining, the wind was blowing, the fungi were eating, the concrete was at fault, BP was not comprised of English ogres plotting to wreck the USA and drown pelicans in oil. It was a fizzer and the news media lost a great resource and the USA profited handsomely from the spill by pumping many $billions from BP shareholders to USA people mostly around the coastline. As usual, the government messed things up by introducing an absurdly stupid drilling moratorium which was totally unnecessary. Mqurice