[gaius]

A "solution" isn't an idea. Ideas are 10 a penny. How many of those solutions were actual plans that could be put into effect, bills of materials, Gantt charts, cost breakdowns?

Personally I would rather BP be getting on with the job than reading unsolicited email from the peanut gallery.

Oh, and to put that $2.35Bn into perspective, Union Carbide paid out $450M for, umm, killing 20,000 people at Bhopal. BP has made a huge mess sure, but after the initial explosion, no-one has died. I think Americans need to take a good long hard look at themselves in a mirror before getting on their high horses.

[Mc_Big_G]

Oh, and to put that $2.35Bn into perspective, Union Carbide paid out $450M for, umm, killing 20,000 people at Bhopal

First of all, let's not pretend like all American's are happy with Union Carbide's "punishment" for that incident.

Second, BP isn't paying for deaths. They must pay for the monumental cleanup and economic damages resulting from the environmental disaster they caused. It's expensive.

According to the article, Innocentive has a global network of more than 200,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, and business people who are experts in physics, chemistry, math, life sciences, computer science, and many other fields.. I wouldn't be so fast to discount the worth of their ideas. It's that kind of arrogance that got them in trouble in the first place.

[gaius]

According to Innocentive, perhaps. But my point stands: how many of these solutions were actually actionable? And even if all thousand of them are - the engineers qualified to evaluate them are all busy working on the problem themselves!

This just looks like some free publicity for Innocentive. Maybe they're the arrogant ones?

[rosskimbarovsky]

That's certainly a fair point - proposed solutions aren't guaranteed to work. But given InnoCentive's long history of helping the government and some of the world's smartest companies solve really complex problems, surely it was worth at least an exploration. I'm certain the InnoCentive community would have helped - and still will - whittle the ideas down to those that make the most sense.

The simple truth is that BP isn't able to solve the problem. I hope they will. But for the moment, rejecting potential solutions seems short sighted.

[temphn]

Little known thing that shocked me when I read it: credible reports (including that of the external investigator) concluded that Bhopal was sabotage, not negligence. A disgruntled employee backed up a tanker and dumped water into a chamber without realizing the consequences. This individual obviously couldn't pay damages an it is more convenient to have the evil corp bad guy.

It is interesting that one never even HEARS the other side of this story.

[Groxx]

So environmental damage to many thousands of square miles (how many cubic?) has no/low implied cost, only human damages?

That's not exactly a good message to be sending to businesses.

[gaius]

That's not what I said. Rather, much is made about how BP is not doing enough, yet what it has already done dwarfs what UC did. And Americans didn't bat an eyelid.

[Groxx]

Aaaaaahhh, my mistake. I read it wrong, I see it now. Though that doesn't counter the amount of attention the spill has had, nor the damages (it's direcly affected more than 20k people, certainly, though yes it's not the same). Americans have a decent isolationist bent to them, I think that's part of the reason. It happens when you're the biggest fish in the pond - you get to thinking you're untouchable, so others matter less.