One More Bites the Dust

Bye.

Good Bye Steve.

Take care of yourself.

So long. Stay well.

Stay cool man.
Del

Its been a pleasure, look after yourself and pop in now and again.

Regards JD.

It's been good to talk, argue & laugh

Care to tell us why?

I would be interested in knowing what has caused your decision. At any rate, your legacy of excellence will continue to inform and educate.

Best Wishes Steve S.

I just looked at 2 of his last postings

high blood pressure is my guess

too bad

My guess is Steve decided he had too much going on, and this is something he needed to drop out of (hopefully for a short season). Each of us have only 24 hrs a day, and he might have higher priorities than posting and debating on this board.

Why? because he said it's been fun?

You don't believe that do you?

Steve S. wouldn't even believe that.

..saying he "One more bites the dust" and leaving with a bye.. Is not the friendliest exit, but it's close.

I agree he has higher priorities.. all of a sudden.

....This is a community forum. We learn lot, and in the process we also listen to a lot of BS.

... It can only make you stronger!

..did you know? Some people fly off the handle at the simple use of emoticons!

IMOHO

Hey JE - how come your post count is the same for 2 posts? Have Our Benevolent Overloads abandoned ship?

Que?

Tis 356 posts in both

Quite correct and a GA. As I said earlier, I wish Steve all the best. While a part of me is curious about the reason for the departure, I'm glad he said Good Bye. I just hope that he lurks back once or twice to see our farewells.

Thanks for being around! Sad to see you go, I hope it is only a short break.

Take care! I appreciated your presence on this biard.

Ried

All the best. See you around sometime.

Cheers Steve,

Thanks for the input over time. Hope you can dust yourself off in time and drop a few lines of wisdom or funnies again.

Yep, life gets like that. All the best, Ky.

Sorry to see you go - you talked more sense than most.

Cheers Steve. No one will be upset if you re-consider: quite the opposite.

Perhaps we should all go vote for Steve's objection to unnecessary moderator interference (of course I have no idea how much of the original post was edited).

http://cr4.globalspec.com/comment/570098/Re-How-About-Concentrating-on-One-Thing

I am sad Steve.

My thoughts are this

Bruce, don't forget that for many people there is a certain level of animosity directed at the oil industry due to the fact we all must basically pay what the oil companies demand for their products and many, in fact most, people don't have a very clear understanding of what goes into the prices we all must pay. People in fact conveniently forget about all the myriad things that they use on a daily basis that are derived from the oil industry. I would submit that most people haven't even given it a second's thought how impossible modern life would be without oil derived products. And because they don't understand, they assume (wrongly 99.9999% of the time) that they are simply being bent over without even the benefit of some petroleum based lubricant simply because the industry can. The market forces and the costs and risks involved are complex and even industry insiders sometimes have a hard time understanding them, at least in detail. It can be quite maddening/infuriating for those of us in the industry and know the issues involved better than most to have people who clearly have no clue what they are talking about trying to lecture us on what to do and how to do it and who get all upset when the stark reality of the situation is explained to them, simply because they "feel" things should be different. Teleology runs rampant in society today. It is part of what makes being a misanthrope so appealing sometimes. =b

I would challenge anyone who wishes to comment negatively on the oil industry to stop, take a deep breath, and try to catalog all the thousands of ways in which each of us use an oil derived product every day and how modern life might exist without it. Once you've done that and realize just how pervasive the oil industry influences are in our lives then we can discuss the need to reduce the production of oil and gas. Until then, STFU!

The straw that broke the camels back seems to be the lack of transparency by the site moderators

after many assurances of improvement by the new regime

Back to the same old shyt

sure there was probably some cussing involved in the post in question

so what,

sometimes the conversation is less than polite, just like the real world....

the eco system that is CR4 can be damaged beyond repair

It's an astonishing testimony to the industry that oil is cheaper than milk. What happened with BP (if indeed the blame can be put on their doorstop) could have happened with a multitude of other companies. Beasting up BP does not address the problem. If anybody sincerely felt it was in someway 'wrong', they wouldn't go fuel up their car tomorrow. An accident occurred, and it needs dealing with. We would not be talking on the internet without petroleum, and have to accept the associated risks.

I'll take just a moment to step back up on my soap box. Kris's last few words "and have to accept the associated risks" could, in my opinion, use a little expansion. We the people with the right to vote made the short sighted decision to have today's gas price be the most important issue. And the combination of oil companies and government answered our demands with, as Kris pointed out, gasoline that is less expensive per gallon than milk. But, in my opinion "have to accept the associated risks" lets us off the hook too easily.

Some sort of a mini sub with a variety of cutting, plugging, welding and/or other tools could have been developed along with the procedures and training to address this type of accident. The well should have been an active spill for only 2 or 3 days. I don't know what percentage of blame to try to assign to each company for the accident happening. But I doubt that we would be fair to blame any of them for not being prepared to deal with it. The "well plugging sub" resource would be very expensive and not used very often. Development of this technology would probably have to be industry wide (therefore government mandated) or international (governments working together).

So, to take the liberty of reworking Kris's last sentence:
* We all must accept that accidents will occur, and
* We all (people and government) should accept the blame for not being prepared.


P.S.
I am not anti oil industry and I'm hoping the last paragraph of Rorschach's #27 was not directed to me. I worked for big oil for one year, my father 30+ years and quite a few years for my mother and grandmother. Big oil fed me as a child, put me through college and provides me with all the toys that I enjoy working with as an engineer. I am also expecting either tar balls or an oil slick in my town within a week or so. I am a supporter of big oil, but I also support the idea that adjustments might need to be made from time to time. So far our response to oil spills seems to be about as good as our response to hurricanes and earthquakes. I think we could use a little work on all of them.

As I step down from my soap box I hope Steve will not forget the CR4 URL.

Bruce

No Bruce it was NOT directed at you. I will withhold the names in order to protect the guilty, but they know who they are, or should at least...

As to your super duper oil well plugging sub, you also fail to note that testing such a device in a real world environment would probably be very messy and since accidents are, by their very nature, unpredictable, designing the sub with every permutation conceivable is still no assurance that the tools on hand will work in your emergency instance. This is I would add the exact case here. We have lots of tools in our inventory, but it isn't just having a lot of tools, you have to have the RIGHT tool for the situation. Often those tools are designed on the fly because you cannot predict what the tool may have to work around.

By the way, these subs exist and are in use every day. They are called ROV's and they are the workhorse of subsea work. It is the tooling packages that the subs use that would need to be developed, and most of them already have been. the trick is finding a methodology that will work in a given circumstance.

You leave nearly 2000 posts which visitors can benefit from. The ratio of posts to GA's indicates how much your input has been valued. Thank you, and best wishes.

..I dunno.. take a look at that "Caption This" he jumped on.

kinda bizarre..

but a GA! ...AND it seems he missed the point of the photo completely!

Steve, I'm sorry to see you leave, you've been an excellent poster. I'd be curious as to your reasons, if you don't feel like sharing in the forum, feel free to email me.

It's been good chatting with you and you'll be missed around here.

Moderators,

There has been a lot of discussion with talk by some of you moderators recently, after which I gained the impression that you had the intention of making moderation more transparent; namely:

• To identify the moderator,
• To indicate that the post had been 'moderated', and
• To give some indication regarding the 'moderation' (cuts/edits/pulled posts).

Could you please explain why none of these laudable proposals was implemented?

I hope you realize that your actions - and lack of transparency - are (I believe - but I stand to be corrected) the reason for the loss of yet another intelligent, knowledgeable and articulate CR4 member.

JohnDG.

Postscript: May I propose some form of 'sin bin' into which (unmodified) moderated posts could be placed. I have not yet thought through the issues of access. JDG.

I have not yet thought through the issues..

Me neither, though I do watch the list of departees with horror.

Let moderors use a particular ID when editing or deleting posts. No need to be personal, just who <# number> deleted and why. Somebody banned should be allowed the chance to state their point of view on their profile page. The naughty step is not an unfamiliar place to me, though I have been accorded the chance to explain myself (exception being last time, when I got reprieve by saying no more than 'sorry I phrased that bad' - the sentiment was true, but lack of explanation is not my loss. Somebody with a differing opinion gaffer taped me.) Least I was allowed that chance when Chris was around. Savvy has taken on one awfully hard job, and it must be hard to go home with a crowd bitching at you. My tuppence is that things are gradualy returning to 'normal. Hopefully this knee bended grovelling will save me from the next vsit to the naughty strep '

O.K. Here's a slight twist on all of this.

I've spent the better part of my career (38 years and counting) "fixing" things; mostly electronic.

CR4 forum threads are quite often about problems that need "fixing". I have remarked to my wife over the last few years that I'm pretty tired of "fixing". Because of the information age, we all now become aware of the problems that exist in our world that need "fixing". The majority of these problems involve people suffering in one way or another. And it is overwhelming for anyone who cares. Sure, I know I can't fix all the problems in the world, but the stress of wanting to is still there. If it's your nature it's hard to turn if off.

From my perspective the "systems", like government, business, financial, and health care, just to name a few seem all out of whack to me. From an engineering perspective they ALL could stand a redesign. Steve S. obviously cares in a similar way. Stress has a direct bearing on one's health.

The feeling of futility that comes up in discussions where large problems are presented to be solved is stressful. I wish I knew how to not care; to turn my feelings of frustration with the way things are off... but I am not built that way. I do let go to a point. I rarely watch any daily TV news and only occasionally hear news on the radio.

There was obviously a "straw that broke the camel's back" for Steve S. But I suspect the root of it is what I have described. It's systemic to many humans. Sadly, there are many who could care less about anybody's suffering except their own.

Gonna Miss You and your thoughtful perspective. Milo