Instead, BP chose to cut corners in an attempt to save a tiny amount of cost on what was likely to be a hugely profitable operation regardless. There's no excuse for that.
Blaming the foreigners for the US safety regs is like a country with no driving tests or traffic laws blaming Ford for car accidents.
Personally, I don't view BP as a "foreign" entity, they are a trans-national corporation.
Regardless, you do make a good point, if the US had as stringent of standards as required in the North Sea likely none of this would have happened.
I also don't know what the contract was, was BP in day-day charge of the rig or was that the company the rig was leased from? The capping operation was apparently being done by Haliburton!
I do know that the US has 4x the industrial accident rate of Uk/Germany/Scandanavia and it's not due to foreign companies.
Yes signal attenuation affects all phones if you hold them a certain way. But it's worse with the iPhone. So in that sense SJ is making the same kind of false statement that BP would have made with this response.
Other phones put their antennas in the base for a reason - the hand doesn't cover the whole area. Try as I can, I cannot replicate the problem holding an HTC Desire in a normal, comfortable grip.
Got a reference for that? Since Transocean owned the rig, my understanding is that most of the responsibility for how to operate the rig lay with Transocean.
No one would have felt small-minded to focus on those details, especially as the total number of barrels climbs toward 5 million.
Bottom line, you need to be near the top of the hill to take the moral high ground, and by all accounts, BP was near the bottom.
They might appear to be logically equivalent[1], but one clearly has hope of gaining empathy from the public and the other does not, especially considering BP was already on the hot seat about their safety record.
[1]I don't think they are - Apple's design decisions are no where in the same league as BP's ongoing record of putting the health of their employees at risk. The only entity benefitting from BP's decision would have been BP, whereas the antenna design supposedly gives better reception when the signal is not being attenuated by the user's grip.
And the only response was that it's on a different magnitude. The discussion wasn't about the magnitude, it was about willful ignorance. It's actually worse. BP was taking a risk by being cheap. Apple knew that the decision they were making would have consequences rather than just a chance.
Given that this is a media driven news cycle type event, a short term fix may be the only thing that could work to deflect criticism. Besides, large corporations are not known for thinking in the long term usually, so your retort does seem a little odd to me.
That does raise a question… Does this industry need to be harmed to make further progress elsewhere? (I don’t consider myself much of an eco-sympathizer; I tend to look at oil politics from a more conservative “national sovereignty” angle.)
BP doesn't have to be thinking twenty years out to see the folly of admitting that there is an unavoidable risk in drilling.
I would adore BP if they said that. We all would. And then we'd suddenly be that much more motivated to support alternative energy.
That's why they didn't say it.
Xerox never supported computers because they thought it would hurt their core business, even after they invented everything at PARC.
Here’s an ugly question… Given the choice, would you rather suffer a terrorist strike or an industrial accident to continue to operate some technical apparatus you rely on?
The "risk" in drilling for oil should be empty wells, not massive uncontrolled spills. If BP did a proper job they probably wouldn't be in this mess.
Why should they do a proper job? Nothing had gone wrong the way they were doing it, it was fine, right?