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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (43733)	6/10/2010 11:55:56 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

'Incentives' come in a VAST RANGE of SIZES. (Teeny/tiny... middling... big... mammoth, etc. :-) And here you have a mammoth incentive. A small to moderate possibility of having to pay out tens of billions, combined with a decent possibility of having to pay our multiple (but still single digit) billions, combined with the fact that not doing much to stop the leak will increase the actual damages, and the perception that you don't care about them, both of which will increase the likelihood of a larger payout to a significant degree, amounts to a mammoth incentive. The possibility that it would be cheaper for BP to do nothing closely approaches zero. The fact that it isn't absolutely zero, that it can't be said with authority that there is no chance at all it would not be the case, is a fairly insignificant fact. Such a very small possibility is not going to drive BP's decision making on this issue, over the large possibility that doing nothing will cost them a lot of money in damages (and also in bad PR, political and regulatory impositions against them and their industry, etc.) I notice that you rarely seem to think you have to exactly quantify every detail of a point to make the overall point reasonable, but you insist that people who disagree with you do this. That's unreasonable not only because its a double standard, but also because your imposing criteria that are not reasonably needed to come to a conclusion. In this particular discussion - One doesn't have to show that there is an absolutely zero percent chance that BP could be better by doing nothing, to realize that BP will be motivated to do a lot.