While normally a tariff would be ruled illegal by the WTO, I think he's right the U.S. is within it's "rights" (a nation is within it's rights in a trade group?) to take action because the currency peg should be an illegal action. It's astounding nothing happens with this, although not due to China as well as multinational corporations out to have an unfair advantage regardless of how that affects a nation or it's workforce.
I was very surprised by Krugman when he came out with this. On the other hand, it's clear he's a "real economist" and frankly, I read some certain posts where it seems they run graph after graph, equation after equation in some sort of deep goal to deny this is a problem. That drives me nuts when I see mathematical spam.
There is no mention of whether this includes civil and criminal fines so I'm betting it doesn't.
This has been percolating at 40,000 barrels a day since it started and they are now recovering 15,000 a day but cutting the elbow increased flow by 20% - its still putting out 33,000 barrels a day. The new estimates are for prior to the elbow being cut.
The flow looks much greater even now than prior to them cutting the elbow imo. Either way start plugging in $4,300 a barrel in fines for violating the clean water act and well this will get ugly when all other things are added in.
Keeping in mind that this could well go on for 6 more months easily BP is toast.
The spill may cost the London-based company $37 billion in cleanup and reimbursements for economic damage to the tourism and fishing industries, according to a June 2 report by Credit Suisse Group AG. The report didn’t include the effect on property values.
Krugman insists we can uses tariffs. Legally the WTO and good theory allow this due to China's repeated violations. Also, movie and software copyright piracy are between $200 and $250bn annually. Just take the money. It is very simple.
I am tired of the co-dependency thing with China. All U.S. Treasuries held by the BOC are in book form. USTBills are entries on a relational database. They can be flagged as canceled (a soft delete).
AIG can bring the world economy to its knees, be insolvent except for nearly $200 billion in Government bailouts and give out bonuses to the people who did it after the bailout.
Yet stealing something three times in California can yield a life sentence.
Nothing in my opinion clarifies the difference between us and them more than the laws themselves which are supposedly written for everyone.
There was a post by someone who said they hadn't posted there in some time asking what had happened to the place. They'd been a member for two years (I checked) and they came out and said that BP had obviously planted some apologists there who were tech savvy.
Those would be the posters I refer to and no they are not the majority.
Toiling away everyday in conditions apparently so bad that suicide is preferable to work, so Americans and Europeans can have Iphones and Ipods and netbooks and cheap electronics etc.,
These companies are already moving to Vietnam, Indonesia and any other lower cost areas so we can continue to have our toys.
But we are surfs to big business here right? I suppose in a micro sense but not otherwise.
Have I-Apple product sales slowed down since? No. Is this a hot topic in the tech blogs or Apple fanboy blogs? No.
BTW there is no way a WalMart employee is living a middle class lifestyle with housing prices inflated through government support of the banks and mortgage subsidies such as interest deductions. Those subsidies keep housing out of reach of that middle class which is much closer to poor.
I had just assuming that the oil flow out of the well or from the ground would be a constant, static, stable, one number. There was an interview with one of the estimate Prof's and said that is false, it's a moving target.
Even worse, he was saying the actual flow rate affects the design of the relief well and also risks safety.
Who knew we'd be doing petroleum engineering 101 self-study online, but the more I read....
How can one make the probability of a blow out 100% at these depths? the only good news is probably ROV technologies will be further funded and advanced, which seems like a very good idea rather than continually trying to put people on planets as if that makes a lot of practical sense.
But I read that the BOP had places where nothing could cut through them, at certain junction points.....I guess we'll read more about those things now and their failure rates. If they claim "improbable" I think all need to dig into those calculations.
Big Pharma does the same thing, claiming "death is a rare occurrence"! Well, you look at the death rates and it's like 100,000 people are gonna die if 10,000,000 take these drugs (Vioxx was something like this), which is absolutely insane. The death rates on "approved drugs" is clearly too high too.
I mean this statistical lying crap is driving me nuts. You notice this? We're seeing a pattern where risk is trivialized away over and over. What do they not understand about delta and epsilon?
this means if the U.S. devalues it's own currency, the Chinese currency ratio does not change at all.
They could play some games like that because China holds so many U.S. treasuries, but if China stops buying them.....buying our debt....we've got a whole other can of worms. But in terms of the hard ratio for jobs and goods, all you can do is by a percentage, make sure the Chinese get less "real money" but cannot reduce their costs advantages as long as they maintain that peg.
Their currency ratio is fixed, pegged, it's not floated. They peg it artificially low to gain an export advantage and they have managed to capture a huge chunk of U.S. manufacturing. Operating in the U.S. companies cannot compete due to this and it just ends up costing too much money to manufacturing and even do services in the U.S.
...which has become apparent through all this, and especially given BP's extremely lengthy existence, is that there appears to be absolutely no contingency plan in place for such a catastrophe as this, and one would believe, given the mix of gas and methane they were drilling into, some type of contingency plan would have existed.
This is truly inexcusable, and points directly to the senior-most management. Tony was to busy watching the price on his stock options to bother with any actual management!
Is it actually possible to unilaterally manipulate ones own currency or does it take at least two to tango? Could the U.S. unilaterally derail China's currency manipulation?
It's also management who could order engineers to do really stupid shit. Odds are they did many times in the past, so keeping them at bay from the technical people is just something I"m worried about. That's what they do. Demand or order something impossible or absurd, then when it shows up they past the blame to the technical people, go unscathed and probably get a bonus. Nothing has changed since high school.
You won't see me argue for BP, or try to claim they do not cut safety, put people at risk, bribe governments, spend billions to dismantle regulatory agencies and legislation or any of it. I'm just looking at that one line in your post.
I'm not reacting to your post, I'm reacting to the massive misinformation on Cable news as well as the press. This stuff is exceedingly nasty to understand, in particular flow rate calculations or what's really going on a mile below the sea and what even people are looking at on spillcam. So, I've watched, heard and read enormous misinformation on the technical details, esp. in terms of current "stop the leak" efforts.
There is a huge difference between engineering management and expertise. So, "management" might have ordered engineers to ignore pressure readings and so on, they may have labor arbitraged them, squeezed them, got them to quit, who knows....
I'm just going after very detailed technical specifics because on the technical end and this is where the spill will stop, although we can go into clean up technology too, to me is the critical thing. Also because most people on the Internets do not have enough technical backgrounds to discern whether something is real or not.
Then, the ones who will stop this leak are the engineers. Yet they are getting lumped in with BP executives and their sociopathic PR people and blood sucking attorneys. They are sitting in a sea of oil, on ships, burning gas and oil off of ships, it's very crowded there and to me, looks very scary for further danger.
This is why I started putting up those threads on the technical efforts, for I fear more corporate pressures could put at risk safety and make the engineering efforts screw up. That's not good. It's also not good for their overall morale to think while they are busting their butts the entire world hates and blames them. This is just the technical people, which is actually a lot of subcontractors, including Transocean and Oceaneering.
My first incident with amoral and unethical management in the Private Sector was when a massive electrical storm blew caused multiple hard drive head crashes at the place where I was an operations supervisor.
After performing an all-night recovery, requiring much technical expertise on my part, I detailed everything which had occurred, and since I was concerned with the programming and hardware side, and not fully engaged with their applications, I warned them to check ALL DATA to see what hadn't been fully recovered.
One month goes by then senior management calls me in and attempts to blame the loss of some billing data on me.
The entire facility had to be pulled offline that night due to multiple lightning strikes against the facility --- even though they had a large scale UPS station, and lightning arrestors (the first lightning strike hit a nearby power line, causing a 30-foot circular eletrical arc, acting as an electromagnet, pulling in further lightning strikes which it then deflected into the facility.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, TOT, Shell, DB and Societe General founded the Intercontinental Exchange in 2000. ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws. The exchange was set up to facilitate ”dark pool” trading in the commodities markets. Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se. They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.
A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate “round-trip” trades. “Round-trip” trades occur when one firm sells energy to another and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple.
Also, Tim Dickenson's article over at the Rolling Stone is outstanding!
We need a good, statistically good, referenced overview post on the IMF, their current motivations and their past behaviors. I have a lot of material, but it's just in bits and pieces, not a great overview. It sure seems they are busy using all of these crisis, not to demand global financial reform to stop contagion, rip-offs and undermining sovereign nations....instead it seems to be a major worker/labor attack as well as a major attack on any retirement funds.
You are misconstruing what I, and others, are saying. The blame is not on the workers and real engineers, the blame is on the criminal irresponsibility of the BP management and the possible fact that they weren't employing capable technical people.
This isn't the first time BP has acted in this manner, by a long shot. Read Propublica's articles.
Also, when they ignored (according to witness testimony, per the NY Times and the USCG investigation to date) the pressure fluctuations, they were doing exactly the same as an auto driver ignoring their oil pressure gauge warning light, etc., and continuing on at full-speed ahead.
Don't react so personally to this. No one is claiming the engineers and techs are evil!
There is so much information out there and I have a hard time believing an untrained, unskilled person was put on the rig. Licensing doesn't mean that much in engineering, most engineers don't take state certifications because they are so out of date and not relevant to the skills required to do the job.
here's one with a lot of technical details, from the House Energy Committee.
I'll try to dig out more. There is a lot on deaths and frankly good sound bytes to pull at the heart strings, plus real stuff to increase death benefits...
but the technical issues are hard to dig out.
Another place to be wary. BP is being pummeled to pay for all sorts of stuff. Now on some of these, it's clear motivations are of a different nature than the public good or solving the problem, cleaning up the spill.
For example, some of these spill clean up technologies are worth millions, if not a few billion in subcontracts with BP. They need to make sure it's not hype to agree to write up such a contract.
Same with businesses, If some business is claiming $250,000 financial loss, well, I'm sorry they need the tax and business receipts to back it all up and that does take time to verify.
So, it's common to blame workers and engineers. But I am watching this, from a technical level, and on that score, what's happening near the spill site, the efforts to cap the leak and so on, I don't see any screw ups, I see a real super engineering bitch instead.
On the clean up, another story. But it's also clear Matt Simmons esp. either is nuts or has some sort of motivation to go on air with these stories which cannot be validated.
So, in other words, expecting a corporation, even as big as BP, to act like the globe's disaster response team is pretty intense frankly. We saw our government royally screw that up during Katrina and that's supposed to be one of their jobs.
But blaming an engineer? Honestly, I'm not so sure. Blaming a BP company dude demanding engineers bypass safety due to some corporate profit bottom line? I can 100% believe that one!
Yes of course BP is evil, but usually the real engineers and technical people are not evil and I'm pretty sure they are busting their ass on those boats because I'm tracking on it all. Even technical corporations, completely dependent upon Scientists and Engineers for their business model, love to poop on them, hang 'em out to dry. The truth is in terms of power within a corporations, these people should rule and the PR, attorneys and marketing people should be pooped on and hung out to dry. As well as idiot bean counters and probably #1 are investors, large institutional investors who pound on a stock the minute a corporation increases it's labor, safety and investments costs, i.e. cuts just a tad into quarterly profits, OMG! they should be pooped on and hung out to dry.
We watched them all upset because China was going to raise wages! I mean anything that isn't outright evil, "investors" issue a "sell order"!
While normally a tariff would be ruled illegal by the WTO, I think he's right the U.S. is within it's "rights" (a nation is within it's rights in a trade group?) to take action because the currency peg should be an illegal action. It's astounding nothing happens with this, although not due to China as well as multinational corporations out to have an unfair advantage regardless of how that affects a nation or it's workforce.
I was very surprised by Krugman when he came out with this. On the other hand, it's clear he's a "real economist" and frankly, I read some certain posts where it seems they run graph after graph, equation after equation in some sort of deep goal to deny this is a problem. That drives me nuts when I see mathematical spam.
There is no mention of whether this includes civil and criminal fines so I'm betting it doesn't.
This has been percolating at 40,000 barrels a day since it started and they are now recovering 15,000 a day but cutting the elbow increased flow by 20% - its still putting out 33,000 barrels a day. The new estimates are for prior to the elbow being cut.
The flow looks much greater even now than prior to them cutting the elbow imo. Either way start plugging in $4,300 a barrel in fines for violating the clean water act and well this will get ugly when all other things are added in.
Keeping in mind that this could well go on for 6 more months easily BP is toast.
$4.3 Billion in Property Values
Krugman insists we can uses tariffs. Legally the WTO and good theory allow this due to China's repeated violations. Also, movie and software copyright piracy are between $200 and $250bn annually. Just take the money. It is very simple.
I am tired of the co-dependency thing with China. All U.S. Treasuries held by the BOC are in book form. USTBills are entries on a relational database. They can be flagged as canceled (a soft delete).
Sometimes, you have to show your cards to win.
Great blog James.
AIG can bring the world economy to its knees, be insolvent except for nearly $200 billion in Government bailouts and give out bonuses to the people who did it after the bailout.
Yet stealing something three times in California can yield a life sentence.
Nothing in my opinion clarifies the difference between us and them more than the laws themselves which are supposedly written for everyone.
The best posters there are really neutral.
There was a post by someone who said they hadn't posted there in some time asking what had happened to the place. They'd been a member for two years (I checked) and they came out and said that BP had obviously planted some apologists there who were tech savvy.
Those would be the posters I refer to and no they are not the majority.
Toiling away everyday in conditions apparently so bad that suicide is preferable to work, so Americans and Europeans can have Iphones and Ipods and netbooks and cheap electronics etc.,
These companies are already moving to Vietnam, Indonesia and any other lower cost areas so we can continue to have our toys.
But we are surfs to big business here right? I suppose in a micro sense but not otherwise.
Have I-Apple product sales slowed down since? No. Is this a hot topic in the tech blogs or Apple fanboy blogs? No.
BTW there is no way a WalMart employee is living a middle class lifestyle with housing prices inflated through government support of the banks and mortgage subsidies such as interest deductions. Those subsidies keep housing out of reach of that middle class which is much closer to poor.
I had just assuming that the oil flow out of the well or from the ground would be a constant, static, stable, one number. There was an interview with one of the estimate Prof's and said that is false, it's a moving target.
Even worse, he was saying the actual flow rate affects the design of the relief well and also risks safety.
Jez.
How many years till WW III ? Zero, it just started with Turkey now being in a technical state of war with Israel.
These are before the cut of the riser, which is amazing. What I want to know is how much is escaping due to the cap.
Who knew we'd be doing petroleum engineering 101 self-study online, but the more I read....
How can one make the probability of a blow out 100% at these depths? the only good news is probably ROV technologies will be further funded and advanced, which seems like a very good idea rather than continually trying to put people on planets as if that makes a lot of practical sense.
But I read that the BOP had places where nothing could cut through them, at certain junction points.....I guess we'll read more about those things now and their failure rates. If they claim "improbable" I think all need to dig into those calculations.
Big Pharma does the same thing, claiming "death is a rare occurrence"! Well, you look at the death rates and it's like 100,000 people are gonna die if 10,000,000 take these drugs (Vioxx was something like this), which is absolutely insane. The death rates on "approved drugs" is clearly too high too.
I mean this statistical lying crap is driving me nuts. You notice this? We're seeing a pattern where risk is trivialized away over and over. What do they not understand about delta and epsilon?
this means if the U.S. devalues it's own currency, the Chinese currency ratio does not change at all.
They could play some games like that because China holds so many U.S. treasuries, but if China stops buying them.....buying our debt....we've got a whole other can of worms. But in terms of the hard ratio for jobs and goods, all you can do is by a percentage, make sure the Chinese get less "real money" but cannot reduce their costs advantages as long as they maintain that peg.
Their currency ratio is fixed, pegged, it's not floated. They peg it artificially low to gain an export advantage and they have managed to capture a huge chunk of U.S. manufacturing. Operating in the U.S. companies cannot compete due to this and it just ends up costing too much money to manufacturing and even do services in the U.S.
...which has become apparent through all this, and especially given BP's extremely lengthy existence, is that there appears to be absolutely no contingency plan in place for such a catastrophe as this, and one would believe, given the mix of gas and methane they were drilling into, some type of contingency plan would have existed.
This is truly inexcusable, and points directly to the senior-most management. Tony was to busy watching the price on his stock options to bother with any actual management!
Is it actually possible to unilaterally manipulate ones own currency or does it take at least two to tango? Could the U.S. unilaterally derail China's currency manipulation?
It's also management who could order engineers to do really stupid shit. Odds are they did many times in the past, so keeping them at bay from the technical people is just something I"m worried about. That's what they do. Demand or order something impossible or absurd, then when it shows up they past the blame to the technical people, go unscathed and probably get a bonus. Nothing has changed since high school.
You won't see me argue for BP, or try to claim they do not cut safety, put people at risk, bribe governments, spend billions to dismantle regulatory agencies and legislation or any of it. I'm just looking at that one line in your post.
I'm not reacting to your post, I'm reacting to the massive misinformation on Cable news as well as the press. This stuff is exceedingly nasty to understand, in particular flow rate calculations or what's really going on a mile below the sea and what even people are looking at on spillcam. So, I've watched, heard and read enormous misinformation on the technical details, esp. in terms of current "stop the leak" efforts.
There is a huge difference between engineering management and expertise. So, "management" might have ordered engineers to ignore pressure readings and so on, they may have labor arbitraged them, squeezed them, got them to quit, who knows....
I'm just going after very detailed technical specifics because on the technical end and this is where the spill will stop, although we can go into clean up technology too, to me is the critical thing. Also because most people on the Internets do not have enough technical backgrounds to discern whether something is real or not.
Then, the ones who will stop this leak are the engineers. Yet they are getting lumped in with BP executives and their sociopathic PR people and blood sucking attorneys. They are sitting in a sea of oil, on ships, burning gas and oil off of ships, it's very crowded there and to me, looks very scary for further danger.
This is why I started putting up those threads on the technical efforts, for I fear more corporate pressures could put at risk safety and make the engineering efforts screw up. That's not good. It's also not good for their overall morale to think while they are busting their butts the entire world hates and blames them. This is just the technical people, which is actually a lot of subcontractors, including Transocean and Oceaneering.
My first incident with amoral and unethical management in the Private Sector was when a massive electrical storm blew caused multiple hard drive head crashes at the place where I was an operations supervisor.
After performing an all-night recovery, requiring much technical expertise on my part, I detailed everything which had occurred, and since I was concerned with the programming and hardware side, and not fully engaged with their applications, I warned them to check ALL DATA to see what hadn't been fully recovered.
One month goes by then senior management calls me in and attempts to blame the loss of some billing data on me.
The entire facility had to be pulled offline that night due to multiple lightning strikes against the facility --- even though they had a large scale UPS station, and lightning arrestors (the first lightning strike hit a nearby power line, causing a 30-foot circular eletrical arc, acting as an electromagnet, pulling in further lightning strikes which it then deflected into the facility.
An excellent, short and concise explanation of ICE and what they were doing below:
Also, Tim Dickenson's article over at the Rolling Stone is outstanding!
We need a good, statistically good, referenced overview post on the IMF, their current motivations and their past behaviors. I have a lot of material, but it's just in bits and pieces, not a great overview. It sure seems they are busy using all of these crisis, not to demand global financial reform to stop contagion, rip-offs and undermining sovereign nations....instead it seems to be a major worker/labor attack as well as a major attack on any retirement funds.
"So, it's common to blame workers and engineers."
You are misconstruing what I, and others, are saying. The blame is not on the workers and real engineers, the blame is on the criminal irresponsibility of the BP management and the possible fact that they weren't employing capable technical people.
This isn't the first time BP has acted in this manner, by a long shot. Read Propublica's articles.
Also, when they ignored (according to witness testimony, per the NY Times and the USCG investigation to date) the pressure fluctuations, they were doing exactly the same as an auto driver ignoring their oil pressure gauge warning light, etc., and continuing on at full-speed ahead.
Don't react so personally to this. No one is claiming the engineers and techs are evil!
There is so much information out there and I have a hard time believing an untrained, unskilled person was put on the rig. Licensing doesn't mean that much in engineering, most engineers don't take state certifications because they are so out of date and not relevant to the skills required to do the job.
here's one with a lot of technical details, from the House Energy Committee.
I'll try to dig out more. There is a lot on deaths and frankly good sound bytes to pull at the heart strings, plus real stuff to increase death benefits...
but the technical issues are hard to dig out.
Another place to be wary. BP is being pummeled to pay for all sorts of stuff. Now on some of these, it's clear motivations are of a different nature than the public good or solving the problem, cleaning up the spill.
For example, some of these spill clean up technologies are worth millions, if not a few billion in subcontracts with BP. They need to make sure it's not hype to agree to write up such a contract.
Same with businesses, If some business is claiming $250,000 financial loss, well, I'm sorry they need the tax and business receipts to back it all up and that does take time to verify.
So, it's common to blame workers and engineers. But I am watching this, from a technical level, and on that score, what's happening near the spill site, the efforts to cap the leak and so on, I don't see any screw ups, I see a real super engineering bitch instead.
On the clean up, another story. But it's also clear Matt Simmons esp. either is nuts or has some sort of motivation to go on air with these stories which cannot be validated.
So, in other words, expecting a corporation, even as big as BP, to act like the globe's disaster response team is pretty intense frankly. We saw our government royally screw that up during Katrina and that's supposed to be one of their jobs.
But blaming an engineer? Honestly, I'm not so sure. Blaming a BP company dude demanding engineers bypass safety due to some corporate profit bottom line? I can 100% believe that one!
Yes of course BP is evil, but usually the real engineers and technical people are not evil and I'm pretty sure they are busting their ass on those boats because I'm tracking on it all. Even technical corporations, completely dependent upon Scientists and Engineers for their business model, love to poop on them, hang 'em out to dry. The truth is in terms of power within a corporations, these people should rule and the PR, attorneys and marketing people should be pooped on and hung out to dry. As well as idiot bean counters and probably #1 are investors, large institutional investors who pound on a stock the minute a corporation increases it's labor, safety and investments costs, i.e. cuts just a tad into quarterly profits, OMG! they should be pooped on and hung out to dry.
We watched them all upset because China was going to raise wages! I mean anything that isn't outright evil, "investors" issue a "sell order"!
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