BP Knew of Deepwater Horizon Problems 11 Months Ago
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389647
The WSJ also has a lot more detail on how the rig was being run prior to the accident:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870402620457526...
In terms of the Horizon, the reports I'm hearing basically state that every single major safety device on the well fit this category.
To illustrate this point I recommend watching the documentaries Mayday, Air crash investigation, and Seconds from disaster.
Law of large numbers, sure -- there are bound to be incidents. But in industries like air travel there are checks against machines operating for 11 months in unsafe conditions.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390246
Direct link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-niger...
http://www.propublica.org/article/whistleblower-sues-to-stop...
Half of it's critical systems that were installed were not reviewed or tested.
I also hope that America begins to realize that large corporations rarely have the interests of the population in mind. There needs to be checks and balances here.
Agreed. I also hope that America begins to realize that government and politicians rarely have the interests of the population in mind.
In the case in which an industry makes lots of money and/or that money is concentrated in the hands of a relatively small handful of players, the nearly inevitable result is regulatory capture. All the regulations in the world don't help when the legislature rubber-stamps laws written and endorsed by the industry. And enforcement is worthless when the regulators do not have sufficient experience to truly determine culpability.
No it bloody well isn't. The same section of statute contains an exception to the liability cap for gross negligence or willful misconduct: only in the case of genuinely unforeseeable accidents is liability limited to $75m - and even tht does not limit cleanup or repair costs to be borne by the rig operators.
I just hope there's a discussion for more of a direct democracy. We have the technology...
Of course we also need more transparency.
Looks to me that we are in our infancy as techocrats.
These problems have long been worked out, and yes disasters would still happen, but at least in those cases the victims would be compensated.
Remember the EPA and all sorts regulations on pollution are the government saying it's ok to pollute your land and water by X amount without compensating you. Your property rights are violated by government regulation not protected.
Your solution actually still seems to still call for regulation, just by a private company instead of the government. I would submit that there isn't a problem having government do the regulation, the problem would simply be having the US government doing them.
Look at how the FDA works -- they have nothing to lose when the deny a drug, and a lot hassle when the approve a drug that turns out to be harmful. This is why so many potentially effective drugs sit on the shelf waiting for further tests.
"You knew there were bugs in your software and you shipped/deployed it anyway?"
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Capitalism is not a suicide pact.
I'm not sure what's not clear about the notion that large risk should be regulated. If a company is capable, due to size or what have you, of harming a large number of people due to malice or incompetence on the part of its corporate governance, then sanity demands it should be regulated.
However, small companies should be regulated as little as possible. I mean, assuming you want a working economy. I'm not sure you do - actually, I'm not sure what you want, but from the standpoint of pattern recognition of your strawman attacks, I'd assume you want to regulate all business as little as possible.
Where I suspect we differ is the degree of "possible".
In my opinion, any business that can destroy hundreds of miles of coastline for other people while still having a banner profit year? Yeah, that should probably be regulated, since the Invisible Hand ain't gonna do it. Look up the Tragedy of the Commons sometime; you might find it instructive. (Or perhaps not. It's hard to tell how honestly you're approaching this.)
The original subject was that large corporations can't be trusted to regulate themselves. But of course that's exactly what we're doing with the large dot coms. They're minimally regulated, certainly in comparison with the oil industry, which is in fact highly regulated.
Why do we trust large dot coms to regulate themselves? Because we think their leadership is somehow more trustworthy? Are they just naturally better people? On what basis do we make that judgement?
If Apple or Amazon or Facebook or Microsoft or Google had malicious, greedy, or incompetent leadership do you not believe they could cause massive harm? Sure, it wouldn't make ugly pictures on tv (or would it? I can imagine ways in which it could), but that doesn't mean the potential damage is any less real. Why do we trust them to regulate themselves?
If you trust present leadership, what about the next generation, those that are just MBAs from the same schools that turned out the leadership of BP, Shell, and Exxon?
So, again, why do we think they shouldn't be regulated?
But I think you really need to think about regulating risk, not classes of company - except insofar as classes of companies are in fact associated with certain categories of risk. Apple will not be causing a vast oil spill. Microsoft - well, Microsoft might be capable of destroying the global financial markets, but probably not as directly as AIG.
I consider the category of "dot-com" to be entirely orthogonal to this question. It's the risk, not the company. And moreover, it's instances where the risk to the public is far larger than the risk (or cost) to the company in the worst case. That's where regulation has to adjust the balance.
For instance, Google could accidentally deny email to about 176 million people at once, and that could arguably cause some damage. They could choose to stop offering free email with no notice. You could argue that this would cause them enough ill will that they wouldn't do it - but that argument clearly doesn't work for BP or the financial giants. So you might have an argument there.
But if you have such leveraged benefits, you also have such leveraged risk. The same leverage that lets a small team create great value also puts them in a position where they can cause great harm.
I used large dot coms because there was some insistence in the thread that regulation was only worth talking about with large companies. A red herring, of course, since the mom and pop corner dry cleaner is a regulated business, and for the common good. Size isn't really an issue.
The difference is that it's almost a tautology that dot coms have influence, good and bad, far out of proportion to their size...
The theory is that BP cut technical and engineering corners for the sake of saving time, aka profit.
All of these companies could do the same, to great potential public harm.
Say Windows ships with a flaw that causes all machines to shut down at noon on a certain day. Or Apple ships an entire generation of phone that puts out a high level of radiation in certain circumstances. And so on. Amazon sells computing instances. Google has fingers in nearly every pie out there.
These companies can cause significant worldwide harm, financial and in some cases physical.
What if they cut corners to meet goals and endanger people as a result. Do you really believe this will never happen?
My problem with the BP situation is that the risks were fairly well understand as oil is a mature industry. I expect BP to be fully liable for their negligence just as I would expect Apple to be fully liable if they released a radioactive phone. Do you think BP is being held fully liable?
The oil industry, has only the government (which has been bought out) as it's check and balance. This is not a case of the free market at all, but a corrupt and closed one.
Data security, that's a different manner. Yes, companies should be secure if they claim to be, especially if they store data about their customers. Litigation and bad press, in these cases, seem to cover things well, since there tends to be more competition in the .com space. Fortunately most .com's do not need to keep sensitive information. Some do however. Sucks for them.
In the case of a player in an oligopoly for a critical industry (Energy), it's a bit different. In safety-critical industries, there is strong regulation. Why not in industries which can wreak severe environmental havoc?
The environmental damage BP caused may be worth more than the company itself. Like Exxon, I don't see them having to pay the full cost.
Please read section (c). I'm perplexed that this half-truth continues to get thrown around as fact more than a month after the incident.