THE BRITISH THREAD II

Will the new headmistress cane their backsides to encourage the next effort?

I would have thought that Mrs Thatcher would have provided an example of tradition not being as daft as some might think.

I don't disagree with many of your remarks about misuse of, and over-reliance on, oil resources.
And I admire the exuberance of your verbosity.
But my main remark was a simple one, one which you have not so far conceded and one which (as I follow American politics through the prism of the Jon Stewart Daily Show) the mainstream commentators there are only now coming fully to terms with:

The oil exploration regulator did not do any regulating. And secondly, there was no mechanism for dealing with a leak before it became a catastrophe, and there should have been.

And in the light of that, is the "shakedown" of BP appropriate or fair?
One dissenting voice in the Congress was swiftly hushed up.

New Zealand should be highly commended. All their professional players , every single one of the 25, was over in South Africa ! Not a bad result considering.

Of course I have dealt with it. There's nothing else to deal with. Regulation and safety are relative terms. There's a trade off between those and efficiency. There's a tremendous downward pressure in the US on the price of gas. It is a strategic consideration. Our price of $7 is unthinkable. They have already downsized their cars to try to cope with the problem.

I watch CBS, Fox and CNN most days. They soon start screaming if the price gets near to $3. And well they might given the distances they deal with which were fixed when gas was almost nothing and 50 cents, not even a shoeshine, could shift 40 tons about 8 miles. farmerman admitted to a 40 mile round trip to get a pizza and it wouldn't be a surprise if had a giant freezer stuffed with grub.

And imported oil not only has to be paid for but finances terrorism to a certain extent. And the attempt to get nukes.

The risks were taken knowingly and now it has come on top everybody is trying to cover their backs. The city slickers don't give a shite about the Gulf coast people. The dramatic news is being brought to you by the top 0.01% of the world's gas guzzlers. Maybe 0.001%.

They could build in enough regulation and safety to sink a ship if it was affordable. The bargain hunter at the gas pump and the bulk buyers of fuel are without the slightest spark of decency.

Who would even drill at all if every safety aspect had to be covered? Anybody can talk after the event about what should have been done.

Disagree. Not only after the event, but before too.

We have shipping lanes, air corridors, traffic lanes, quarantine regulation, and a million and one other restrictions on our free-spirited actions, because we can clearly see the value of those. We can see what would develop if the restrictions were not in place.
Drilling for oil, even in marginal areas, is no different from that.

So the regulator (what was he there for, anyway?) should have regulated it.

That says nothing Mac. It's flannel. The oil drillers will have been subject to many enforced regulations just as your other examples are and which don't always work. It is the seriousness of this accident, and it might have been an accident nor forseen by anybody, which is driving the fuss. And also the prospect of getting money out of BP. It cannot be denied that people talk up their grievances when compensation is in the offing and especially when the volume of claims is such that they can't all be properly scrutinised.

You are not focussed on the importance of the price despite my drawing it to your attention as the key factor.

From my experience of other industries a strict enforcement of every regulation brings it to a standstill. A work to rule is worse than a strike because the employees are still being paid.

I trust you are as perfect a human being as you expect everybody else to be.

I seem to remember that after Katrina the US government suspended many of the trucking regulations in order to get stuff to N.O. as quickly as possible. Quite rightly too.

The difficulties you describe are real enough. However, there are indeed examples of regulatory regimes (which include both government regulation and/or industry self-regulation, as well as the liability laws that govern restitution for mishaps) that are both practical and far more effective than what we have observed with BP in the Gulf. A degree of inefficiency and even paralysis is indeed a common enough side effect of regulation. However done wisely it leads to better (and cheaper) long term performance. Direct government oversight is effective only in certain circumstances in which government actually has the knowledge and the skill to act wisely and not be manipulated for political purposes (clearly that was not the case in this instance).

The best examples of effective regultory regimes with which I am familiar, involve the aviation and nuclear power industries. Both involve fairly clearly defined engineering design standards that directly address known plausible mishaps, their consequences and the redundancy or inherent prevetative standards to ensure an acceptable outcome. This is something that clearly was not present in the BP decision-making in the Gulf well. Whether this is typical of the industry or just of BP is something we will eventually learn.

And I'm drawing to your attention the fact that you are barking up the wrong tree.
Every business in the capitalist world is concerned with driving down cost in order to increase profit.
Just because the oil explorers are engaged in a vital search for a dwindling resource, does not mean they should not behave at least prudently (firstly to protect the lives of their workers) and not seek to cut cost below the level where their operation is unsustainable and unstable.

It's a very plausible argument you put forward George but it doesn't address the issue that in a regime of scarce resources the safe operations in one industry is bought at the cost of safety in others.

It's all very well to talk about acceptable outcomes when nothing dramatic has yet happened. I'm sure BP was producing an acceptable outcome until something happened.

It's a complex subject. And especially when emotions become engaged. BP are caught between a rock and a hard place and it will have to shift for itself.

That's a tautology Mac.

I still think you are talking after the event. And trying to deflect blame off the consumer. Which I will agree makes you more popular than me.

You might remember that in Moby Dick Melville used Shakespearean introspection sililoquies as a device to further his philosophy.

In one of them Ishmael is musing upon his presence on the Pequod and is given by the author the fervent hope that the ladies back home will trim their wicks or at least turn them down and reduce their dependence on the oil which the whaling industry is encouraged to bring them by paying it to do so.

As an expert in allegory and metaphor and someone who had visited the north of England where "oil" or "oyl" is the dialect expression for "hole", (see Olive Oil, Popeye's squeeze, a most excellent joke), Melville is obviously killing two birds with two stones.

The question is thus raised that the dependence on oil and on allowing self-indulgence in wick trimming so that self-flattery at the dressing table mirror may proceed apace is the cause of the voyage of the Pequod or, if you like, all the other voyages on one of which Ahab lost a leg for which he sought revenge on Moby Dick, an interesting name itself.

So, if your worships and reverences can follow the logic of cause and effect, as we are continually being enjoined to do by the scientific fraternity, there is in Mr Melville's scene as he has Ishmael (orphan, outcast) meditating upon this matter a prefiguring of the effects of self indulgence in the use of wicks and of the oil needed to satisfy it on an ever increasing scale what with yesterday's thrill being today's cold potatoes (see fashion industry).

Thus, on this most high authority, I submit that the real cause of the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is the self-indulgent use of wicks and the concommitant addiction to oil which facilitates such use.

Whether the Pequod's fate was a metaphor for that of the USA I will refrain from speculating upon. Or of BP's fate. We are hunting Nature which some commentators have said is what The Whale represents.

Incidentally, it is worthy of note that there was little agitation to stop the hunting of whales until an alternative supply of oil was found and exploited.

As an interesting aside, my mother used to say to us kids "You'd sit there till your brains were train oil!"

That made little sense, although we knew what she meant. It's a old-fashioned phrase, and the oil referred to was refined whale blubber, I found out later.

A nonsensical and unfounded proposition that, in addition, has no relevance to the issue at hand.

It is likely we will find that many of the links in the chain of failures that led to the blowout were in place long before the event. This is the usual outcome of the investigations of such events. The failure, when it occurred, set a process in motion that will likely reveal them all, and that BP's actions (and possibly those of other producers) were not acceptable.

It is not nearly as complex as you are making it.

Yeah--right.

Okay, crap was duly beaten, but not quite according to plan.

I could see why this was:

We did not have the wit, organisation, skill, imagination, spirit nor energy necessary for the task.

What's this "we" Mac. You're not English.

Perhaps we will get an English manager now. In which case it will be worth it.

Did you hear Chris Waddell on Radio4 this morning? He talks a lot of sense.

I think Franz Beckenbauer was right, too, when he said our players play too many matches in a season and are jaded come summer competitions. Lampard, Rooney, Garrard and Terry were unrecognisable.

Credit to the Germans, who were great, but our/ your lot were unrecognisable.