Comment by iheartmemcache
9 years ago
Not in petrochemicals, but neither is this is this reporter. I get it, it's supposed to be a joke, but it's such a poorly executed one fraught with so many major components glossed over that it detracts from any humor the article could have had. When the Onion writes something, it's humor is wonderful because not only the wit is there but there are few if any inconsistencies even for pedants who dissect things such as I.
1000ppm of hydrogen sulfide surely can kill you. The work-around this is to take delivery of a barrel of "sweet" rather than "sour" crude. Even in the "sour form", you get "up to" 1000ppm. However, barrels 1) are sealed properly by institutions with safety regulatory agencies just like any other industry, and 2) to get H2S exposure at that rate, you'd have to effectively stick your head into a barrel and inhale directly. To calculate actual PPM you'd likely be exposed to, you'd have to evaluate the aromatic distribution of H2S. (see: Gas-Phase Reactions: Kinetics and Mechanisms, Chapter 2). The journalist is right about the insurance policies.
She later even mentions she has sweet crude. :facepalm:
>> My boss insists that I must factor in the cost of lost productivity for the many minutes spent on the phone with FedEx in an attempt to trace the package as it zigzagged across Manhattan. On that basis, I’m probably already in the red.
Bloomberg - I love your reporting for what it is. Tom crushes it in the morning. Alyx Steel makes poignant remarks. BBC doesn't try to be The Daily Show. Stick at what you're good at & don't try to be VICE. Especially for someone who reports on finance, she's overlooking so many things. Insurance she mentioned earlier but didn't bother to mention factor that capex. Storage is an opex (she mentions consignment venues (tech analogy: co-locating your servers) but those are fees she didn't factor in). In real life, if she's arbitraging US oil, the journo needs to be a CME member. For a March maturity date, a ~3 mo membership lease is $1k as an opex.
* Further reading:
"Petroleum and Gas Field Processing", et al. Chapter 7: Crude Oil Stabilization and Sweetening
"Gas-Phase Reactions: Kinetics and Mechanisms" V.N. Kondratie, et al. Chapter 2 (or there abouts).
Merck on pulmonary irritants: http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/pulmonary-disorders...
CME fees: http://www.cmegroup.com/company/membership/membership-pricin...
Edit: To anyone who's downvoting me, by all means please respond (with some cordiality if you would), as to why! I tried to cite my sources properly, but if any professionals who deal with futures (especially crude oil, and even more so those who have taken delivery or performed the arbitrage she "simulated") see anything factually incorrect, I'm really happy to be corrected.
Edit 2: I responded as to why I found this article so aggravating below. Please read it before you down-vote me. It's comparable to how frustrated my tech friends and I get when television shows cross the threshold of comical technical inaccuracy and progress into a zone of visceral opposition. HN traditionally had a "Don't downvote people solely because you disagree with them" policy. My remarks are relevant to the article and (to my knowledge) factually correct.
To reply with the response such posts usually get: You must be really fun at parties!
This post was entertaining to most of us because we are not in the industry, knew little about the presence of hydrogen sulfide, and did not realize that the industry was so reluctant to sell to random interested buyers. Yes they could have written "This reporter tried to buy a barrel of oil, but sellers were reluctant, and it was calculated that individuals buying crude oil is not a profitable venture. She was also cautioned that Hydrogen sulfide is toxic, and is released by crude oil". They chose not to do that because, well -- that's not fun to read.
You are being downvoted because you are essentially telling us: 'you idiots, this is not funny, this is not news, this is stupid, there are smarter people there doing serious work, why waste your time on this' in extended form.
One might be well suggested to, as they say, 'cheer up'.
I like that comment.
One of the thing I like of HN I that you can have a serious technical discussion about any subject. Some users know more about chemistry, some users know more about computers, some users know more about rockets, ... Many press articles have a lot of hype and exaggerations, and it's nice to have comments with more technical balance and details.
About the downvotes: It's common to get a few downvotes, even with very good comment. Just ignore them. (But if you get 10 downvotes, try to read your comment again.)
Bloomberg is a really targeted news institution on which people rely for not comedy but financial information. It's reflected in the fees you pay to get access to their terminals, it's reflected in their promos, and even the corporations who select to advertise with them know they're trying to hit a target reader. Usually, that reader is not someone looking for a comic laugh.
Imagine pulling up a Linux news site and seeing something that's funny to someone who is in marketing because of some wacky antics. You went there to see what sort of critical patches need to be administered, but instead you saw "What happened when I tried to install Linux on my leather shoes!".
I'm upset because context is important. Especially for news outlets which are called the fourth estate for a reason. When I turn on PBS Newshour I don't want 50 minutes of Paris Hilton. If they re-oriented an entire episode to cover Paris Hilton just to get more viewers (equivalent of click-bait), I'd be equally upset. I'm not calling anyone here stupid, but this clearly is not news.
"This post was entertaining" -- that's my whole problem. Bloomberg is a news outlet. Jon Stewart went on the O'Reilly factor and eloquently articulated the problem with select subsets of media (oversimplified to "to fill 24 hours of content, some outlets have resorted to silly antics to increase/retain viewership rather, rather than do what they're supposed to -- report the news). This article was under "News" not "Op/ed".
RE: parties, again, context. I don't engage in pedantry there, because one can generally categorize that form of interaction as "social" rather than "news/informative". At which point, I politely engage in small talk until I find something they like which I find interesting (whether its model aircrafts or modern farming, I can find something interesting to talk about with anyone generally).
Just a FYI but Bloomberg has significantly changed their editorial direction recently. Think some senior editor left or something. I really don't mind because it does not seem that their standard news coverage has suffered as a result and I can easily avoid things but yeah.
It's a fine line. Newspapers were always partly entertainment; their goal is to get read so they can sell advertisement. You wouldn't have crosswords and comics and the NYT style section otherwise. A bit of infotainment is okay, when done in an ethical manner, as I think is the case here; Voltaire and Karl Kraus were doing something similar.
Now, when it verges on disinformation, like Geraldo or the NYT style section and their silly trend articles...
Bloomberg was a really targeted news institution. It deliberately is not just that anymore.
> "What happened when I tried to install Linux on my leather shoes!"
I, for one, would definitely click through and read this.
What you're saying is true, but it could have been much better if they'd paid attention to the details.
One of the things I love about HN is that not only will interesting and funny articles like this come up, but also that I can hit the comment section afterward for the real story. Your parent's comment was more interesting than yours.
In a world where journalism ethics and standards take a back seat to laughs or more clicks, I keep coming back to hn because you can find knowledgeable comments to help you understand what's going on.
Sure, people could communicate more effectively. Would we be more forgiving of the comment were the article a (slightly) ignorant joke about a topic hackers are passionate about?
> HN traditionally had a "Don't downvote people solely because you disagree with them" policy.
You are confusing HN with Reddit. HN never had such a policy, nor any, for that matter.
pg specifically said before handing over the site that he didn't mind downvoting to disagree. I have seen no movement from new leadership on this; in fact, new leadership have doubled down on some of pg's worse calls. With the graying out of comments added in to the downvote encouragement, effectively that situation encourages you to only offer uncontroversial opinion lest your thoughts become invisible and silenced. It's not a heavy thought exercise to see where allegations of groupthink come from.
That, along with the fact that my account was marked as an instantly-penalized troublemaker at some point and I only found out by emailing many months later even though my email was in my profile all along, is one of the reasons I no longer contribute here. That was a startling discovery, that individuals get marked as troublemakers based upon the opinion of a moderator and, in my case, a single comment. Think about that for a second, and think about all the comments you've ever made, and the fact that HN usernames are part of the YC application process. A lot clicked for me once I stepped back and thought about it.
As I said, don't confuse HN with Reddit. The leadership of Hacker News has a large amount of zeal and actively steers conversation toward arbitrary positivity and civility, including moderation decisions you would find questionable anywhere else. Before appealing to decency and policy when a comment gets downvotes as you have, just remember that. The irony is that HN loves to mock Reddit, but in many ways it is three times the community HN is.
And please don't complain about downvotes. That is specifically discussed here.
Fun fact: I find downvoting to be a completely worthless feature of this site for all of the reasons you've listed and more!
I find it useless to be in possession of the capacity to downvote, as well as the recipient of downvotes from others. This has provoked me to adopt enhanced counter strategies with the full awareness that my behavior is both unorthodox, and contrarian to the culture and preferred/espoused norms/mores of this site as a whole.
In particular, I've noticed that one contrarian comment, which directly contradicts a parent, and indeed violates the typical cultural views of the site as a whole, while remaining on-topic, maintaining valid points, and supporting evidence, receives way more attentive mileage, than any downvote. This is usually because those with vested interests in expressing a typical norm struggle deeply to contradict sound evidence and factual observations.
So, I've stopped maintaining normal accounts, stopped using accounts that have the ability to downvote, stopped downvoting, and instead downvote with words that actually explain my motivations for what would be a downvote, if I were the sort of person to actually resort to petty downvoting.
Instead of pining for the "privilege" of downvoting my peers, I simply unspool evermore single-use accounts and tell people exactly why I disagree with them, point-blank, and never look back, or care about the superficial shade of text coloring my comment, nor the meaningless negative number in a point system on an account that will never be used again.
Downvoters are really only silencing themselves, by refusing to go out on a limb and risk downvotes themselves, rather than express disagreement.
Another key point: My contrarian remarks aren't made in such ways that would result in getting flagged to death or hellbanned. My goal is discussion, not shock value or being incendiary for the sake of receiving negative attention. Some things need to be said, and I'll be happy to oblige if no one else will.
> It's comparable to how frustrated my tech friends and I get when television shows cross the threshold of comical technical inaccuracy and progress into a zone of visceral opposition
I don't mind it when comedy bits are inaccurate about the things I'm a subject matter expert on, because it's not meant to be taken seriously.