Agreed. I've bitched about seeing right (or libertarian)-wing propaganda sites like mises.org here - same thing goes for motherjones - it's politics, and politics do not belong here.
It also has nothing to do with HN, as far as I can tell. And of course the "OMG, disaster could go on forever" is calculated to rile up their readers. I don't know, maybe I'm too skittish about off topic stuff, but I really like this site, and politics is an easy way to derail a community...
Yep, especially since BP's presentation to Congress [1] would indicate that that anonymous commenter doesn't have a complete understanding of what's going on.
Or, more importantly, the willingness to admit that fact, or to admit the truth. Initially they decried all the people who suggested the flow was much larger than their estimates. Then, more and more sources come out suggesting it. And just recently, they have admitted it might be true.
This seems to be modus operandi for companies these days. Deny everything, then weeks later come up with your own sources suggesting exactly the same thing, when the issue has died down.
Nothing that has happened in the last 40 years has given me any reason to believe that anybody, or even everybody in aggregate, has a complete understanding of much of anything that is going on.
It's a diagram of the failure modes of the BOP and some discussion of how it failed. I can't see any indication it shows the well under the BOP is intact or that the movement of high pressure oil-and-sand isn't chewing the assembly to pieces as BP tries to suck some of the oil out of the well.