I mean I think the bigger take away is to not cut corners when operating with such a small margin of error as DSVs. Safe deep-sea exploration is possible, and has been for a long time, in manners such as the DSV Alvin, DSV Limiting Factor, etc., etc. The manner in which the Titan was made and tested indicated a severe lack of safety oversight from OceanGate. As unfortunate as this is, there's the saying that rules are written in blood, and this is yet another case. I doubt there will be many such cavalier attempts at deep sea exploration and tourism in the future as a result, for the better.
What I don’t get is why there is no beacon on this device. That should be law. This search is costing tens of millions and without a beacon they never had a chance. From what I understand of the construction and debris there is a very low order of probability they will be recovered alive. Even if they are found conserving air they can’t extract the module in time. It takes at least 24 hours to build the necessary rig. They knew this going in, so why search at all? I mean they’re lost at sea no matter how you slice it. Apparently while touring at the wreck of others lost at sea which isn’t a rational gamble to risk your life over. I mean they bolted the door from the outside because the pressure was so high surely that was a clue. And if they did survive the impact, five people panicking without air in that confined space can’t have been pretty. What a mess
As Futurama famously said, airplanes are rated for a pressure differential somewhere between zero and 0.7 atmospheres. With the positive pressure being inside the plane.
This submersible needed to survive a differential of ~350 atmospheres. With the positive pressure being outside the craft.
Also the airplane shell has to endure tension forces, as inside has greater pressure than outside, whereas the sub has to endure pressure. Some materials work well under tension but not pressure and vice-versa.
There are a number of reasons why it might have failed, fatigue, deviation from process/protocol but pressure vessels are well understood and not the problem here.
Are carbon-fiber pressure vessels well understood?
I get that there's a lot of armchair quarterbacking from internet material experts here, but this does seem to be an outlier with this particular submarine.
They're well-understood to not be what you want to build a high-pressure submarine out of.
They can take the pressure. But they're incredibly expensive to check for defects, and the result of a defect is "sub-second catastrophic failure" instead of any warning of imminent structural degradation.
The issue seems to be hull integrity, namely being able to inspect the hull before it's failing in order to detect issues without risking anyone's life. The only thing they could do with a carbon fiber hill is use an acoustic hull monitoring that only told you that the hull was in the process of failing - so potentially getting no real warning at all. It does you no good finding out your hull is going to implode in 10 seconds when it will take you an hour to get to safety. This is what the ex-OG employee got fired over because he made a stink about how the carbon fiber hull was unsafe for this reason.
> The media will always stretch out the agony of these stories for as long as it generates clicks
Off topic random thought: the increase in mass shootings and their normalization in the US media means those stories don't get as many clicks as they used to.
People on various websites looked at the people who made and worked on the submersible, I say at least 70% were white or white-ish, probably more for the designers, potentially approaching 100%. There were young men and women though, that's probably the problem.
I think it’s more along the lines of “learn from the experiences of others”. It’s my understanding that there are quite a lot of very smart people who have spent decades figuring out how to build these things relatively safely. This company decided to ignore the existing knowledge base entirely because what the industry had learned was expensive and inconvenient for a fledgling tourist company.
What’s that analogy about taking down a fence without understanding why someone put it up in the first place?
- safety regulations, especially for high-risk low-margin-of-error endeavours are there for a reason, and we've already learned all these lessons the hard way
- the probability of any given billionaire being dumb as rocks is close to 1
A commercial airplane is a pressure vessel. So is the hot water heater in your house, the espresso machine on your countertop, on and on.
I'm going to keep flying, but just not get on any experimental, uncertified craft of any kind, airplanes, submarines, etc.
Your comment is akin to saying well, that sub had bolts on it so I'm not going to trust bolts from now on. Really, it's just that the bolt was used incorrectly by a person with less than virtuous intentions.
The outcome everyone knew would happen. I don't understand the desire to go to that depth to see a sunken ship when I presume there is camera footage of it available. You can't get out and do anything, your view is probably pretty crappy given the thickness of any see through material. I see the allure with Everest and the view for your 60 seconds at the top must be impressive and it is a physical feat. But a sunken ship? I don't get it.
It would be pretty cool to send down a camera to get footage all around it at various angles and then build an app for a VR headset.
Yes that was the intent with my comment. A specialized camera for that depth is going to capture better images than what you'll see thru whatever "window" is on the sub.
The desire is motivated 100% by bragging rights for the uber rich. So they can recant their journey as an intrepid explorer (/s) at a cocktail party with their other smug uber rich friends. Same for going to space.
This is such a bad take. As if rich people suddenly lose the ability to feel novelty. As if a normal person going to see the grand canyon is "So they can recant their journey as an intrepid explorer (/s) at <a neighborhood barbecue.>"
Maybe, just maybe, the ultra rich have similar motivations as most other people and want to see cool shit. They just have way more spending money to make whatever they want a reality.
In a weird way, this is almost relieving. The speculation that they were suffocated and entombed in their own filth somewhere on the ocean as they died slowly seemed so, so much worse.
Just thinking about that outcome yesterday caused my blood pressure to skyrocket. Dark, cold, cramped, fetid, hungry, thirsty, knowing oxygen is running out.
In that scenario, as long as they could keep CO2 levels down, running out of oxygen isn't so bad (ignoring the other troubles). The human body can't detect a lack of oxygen, you just get tired and light headed and pass out.
Yes, but as you hinted at the human body can detect a rise in CO2 levels and it doesn't take much for things to start getting really uncomfortable and fast. To your point, if you could somehow manage the CO2 levels then you would just peacefully fall asleep and die.
i understand what you are basing your statement on (a cleaner version would be asphyxiation by breathing an inert gas) but you are very wrong. as a matter of fact people with an impaired amygdala who can't experience fear will panic when forced to breathe co2. also your breathing will get very shallow and cause co2 to accumulate triggering those very receptors you argue will stay silent.
You are arguing for the exact same thing as the person you’re replying to—while attempting to disagree with them. They said that provided you can keep CO2 levels down, lack of oxygen will cause drowsiness and cause you to pass out. This is true.
You then argued that breathing increased levels of CO2 will trigger survival instincts. This is also true, and exactly what grandparent said.
OP, correctly, pointed out that we don't detect the lack of O2, we detect a buildup of CO2 (because it causes respiratory acidosis). If the CO2 is removed, there's nothing to cause the panic response, the situation itself notwithstanding.
It's still nea that it works with an impaired amygdala, though.
These kind of long, agonizing, pointless deaths are all too common when dealing with the ocean.
There was a horrifying case after Pearl Harbor where bodies were found in the airpocket of the USS West Virginia. They had flashlights with batteries and fresh water and had marked off 16 days on a calendar.
Legend has it that sailors could hear banging for weeks knowing they could not cut through the thick battleship armor in time and just drowned out the noise.
Somewhere a redditor did the math and I believe it would have taken 24ms for the glass to break and the water to rush in. Instant death if it was indeed the glass.
Just how instant is that death? Do you die from quickly drowning in the water or is the water pressure enough to also crush your skull quick enough to make sure you die without having the chance to feel anything?
Guillotined people can still be alive and feel about 30 second safter their head has been removed from their body.
I have been in a car accident that, in the instant of impact, felt indistinguishable from an explosion, too fast to process anything. I imagine the massive pressure change would cause near-instant incapacitation if not death.
Both the water pressure, and the submarine material around you. It'd be more akin to your entire body would nearly instantly be squished in all 3 dimensions, with non-compressible items (bulk-head/steel) also inhabiting the same space.
I reckon its instant death. If the sub imploded or the carbon fibre hull failed, then it means large amounts of debris come rushing to you very quickly.
I don't think there will be any bodies to recover.
logically not in this case. at that point where the water level is sufficient to make someone drown the remaining air would be compressed to several hundred atmospheres pressure.
Strange, they never asked those condemned to actually utter some sound or mimic something, isn't it? Well, that's because residual muscle twitch is not controlled and is not conscious. Rapid drop of blood pressure renders the person (well, their head, in that case) unconscious within a couple seconds and it is downhill from there.
It would be more like dying from a shockwave from a massive explosives blast. You're going to turn entirely to jelly. Within a few ms there will be nothing left working properly.
I did read somewhere (I don't remember exactly where) that when there is an implosion at great depth the air in the submarine is compressed so quickly that anything flammable (specifically human bodies, plastics, etc) would burn up instantly. So it's a bit like the explosion of the fuel-air mixture in a diesel engine.
Probably was the porthole. It looks like the view port was rated for 1,300 meters. (They were descending to 4,000 meters) An engineer even warned them of the issue, and was fired. I suppose they didn't want to spend the money to develop an adequate one.
Then again, the rover would have found the sub from the location even if it were intact, and there could have been a small chance of survival since they had the equipment. Hope is more important than agony.
One would survive at the Armstrong limit for much longer indeed:
> Exposure to pressure below this limit results in a rapid loss of consciousness, followed by a series of changes to cardiovascular and neurological functions, and eventually death, unless pressure is restored within 60–90 seconds. [0]
Above the Armstrong limit you're looking at 9-15 seconds of useful consciousness. (The time you are conscious enough to take actions to save yourself.)
When a deep sub implodes you're going to be hit by water moving at the speed of sound in said water (1,500m/s, considerably faster than in air.) That's far above the speed of nerve impulses, there's no way a pain signal could reach the brain before there isn't a brain left to get the signal.
No idea why every single journalist kept forcing the "air remaining" theme.
It was far more likely that the sub suffered a catastrophic implosion at the time contact was lost. Glad to see it confirmed, and finally people stop posting the nonsense about air.
Obviously unfortunate for the passengers, but definitely the preferable outcome instead of being stuck on the bottom or the surface until air ran out. The implosion would have essentially vaporized them within milliseconds, there was no chance they even had started to process their own demise, which, in a way, is somewhat positive, in context of the narratives that were pushed for a while.
> No idea why every single journalist kept forcing the "air remaining" theme.
To keep people coming back for updates as the clock ticks down. Now that most people pay for news with impressions, they have to cultivate impressions.
I hate how everything journalists do has to be framed so negatively. "Forcing"? "Keeping the audience engaged" (from the replies)? They were just reporting how much air is left, in the case that they were alive - not insisting that they definitely are alive. It's an obvious thing to want to know, and an obvious thing to report. I'm sure some outlets ham it up, yeah of course. But anybody would report that information.
I agree. They're just people, doing their job. Their job is to write articles that people click on. We choose what we click on. If you want to see better journalism click on better things collectively. They're a cog in the machine, not the driver of the machine
You're being downvoted, but you're being correct. The guy you respond to is ignoring actual reality, which is that people do not actually make conscious decisions. They don't "choose to click", because then clickbait wouldn't actually work and clickbait is meant to manipulate people into clicking. There's no decision process involved.
Apparently the parent lives in a fantasy world where he believes that people aren't constantly being manipulated into doing things. So deathscrolling isn't a thing either. Clickbait doesn't exist. Advertisements are all useless. Subliminal messaging doesn't work. Etc. etc.
Apparently, also, he thinks that because people are just "doing their jobs" that means it's okay for them to do the things they do, because they were told to do them, which is a horrible thing to think.
In that same style you could also wonder why anyone would bother sending help at all, given that they very likely had perished. We hope until we are proven wrong, and the times we are right makes all the effort worth.
While this was alway probably the most _likely_ outcome, "shoddy submarine breaks down/gets trapped without actually imploding" was certainly always _possible_. This thing had a lot of potential failure modes.
You have to look at the subset of the probability space where anyone is alive and base the rescue attempt off that. There's no reason to do a body recovery in this case, it's not like when a dead SCUBA instructor is blocking up a underwater cave and you want to use the cave again, or if it's easy to get the dead body out. It's not, it's really hard and dangerous. In the Thai cave, it was thought that the probability that at least one or two of the children were still alive was high enough to risk a couple of old divers having a look. In my opinion the Thai SEALs (as well as dumb ideas like sending people in to string up lights and pump water) should not have taken the risks they did, the more people you put in the cave the more likely something will go wrong for one of them. So, after ruling out body recovery, the only plans you have to make include the submersible being intact, hence needing to know how much air was left.
- No noises were heard during rescue operation (the implosion likely happened around the time the communication was lost, as opposed to in the days following)
- The "banging" noises discussed earlier were unrelated to the submersible.
this "scoffing at safety and regulation" shit being seen as "hip, cool and rebellious" and somehow a desirable trait is actually completely fucking bonkers to me.
Careful analysis and engineering to make things as safe as possible and well characterized is incredibly rewarding and satisfying.
Yes, who cares if someone killed a child and several other adults by repeatedly ignoring warnings of clear dangers! Why shouldn't people be allowed to experiment with negligence at the cost of human life?
A previous passenger (a reporter) said the disclaimer mentioned “death” three times on the front page. I think they were as informed as anyone could be.
It's nothing to do with hating billionaires. Presumably they didn't realise how risky the whole thing was. I find it hard to believe that a father was going to put his son in so much danger, if he had realised. We are all working with the assumption that the crew believed that the trip was reasonably safe.
The comment you're replying to only mentions other people dying, not the billionaire. Second, the search and rescue effort involved a lot of government people and equipment, and the company complained that they weren't doing enough.
Now, it would be really interesting to know whether they really knew actual risk involved. Not just that they might die ... but also how likely it seems to be.
Also, hating someone does not imply wanting them to be dead. Not all of us are want to kill people we find assholes. Sometimes we just want them to have less power so that they cause less damage.
I think it’s one thing to build your own insanely dangerous exploration device and try it out yourself but to try to make money by selling people tickets for rides on it is far beyond mere “experimenting”. There’s also the very substantial public cost of rescuing the victims of these short-sighted ”experiments”.
Because they are bringing down the reputation of the whole industry, and potentially the engineering profession as a whole?
If I'm drunk driving and crash my car and killed everyone inside my car, that must be OK for you. The passengers knew their risk by jumping on my car when I'm clearly drunk!
1 - it's not as if he made an experimental unsafe submarine and then killed himself in it. It's as though he made an experimental, unsafe submarine that many people told him was unsafe and unsuitable to dive at that depth at a minimum, but really unsafe to dive at any depth and then told people that it was safe and good to go, and then sold seats on it before even properly testing it.
2 - they have caused the taxpayers of several countries to foot the bill of this hugely expensive rescue operation, with no plan or way to pay it back.
It's not right for innocent people to bear the burden of this person's irresponsible negligence, both with their lives in the case of the passengers, and with their tax dollars in the case of us taxpayers
I agree with you, but I'll admit that I still think bike helmets and safety goggles look stupid. It's much cooler to be safe, but too often it's impossible to look cool while doing it.
Because it's usually only others who suffer from their easily preventable fuck ups. They always love the government when it helps them personally. The underlying pathology is pure selfishness.
> The late CEO of OceanGate told David Pogue last fall, “at some point, safety is just pure waste.”
In and of itself, what is actually incorrect about that statement?
I think a lot of normal people are going to smugly harp on that statement, but in and of itself it seems perfectly reasonable to believe that there's a diminishing return to safety measures for anything at some point.
The issue with this sub thing seems to be that they made some really bad choices, including apparently having glass that wasn't rated for the actual depth they were going to, choosing a gaming controller that apparently had a history of wireless issues, and other dumb issues with the design of the sub.
> In and of itself, what is actually incorrect about that statement?
+1- the statement as phrased seems to be correct.
The issue here seems to be one of dismissing legitimate safety concerns rather than that statement itself. They quit adding safety before they reached the "pure waste" point.
It's waste the same way insurance* is waste. The difference between something certified and something not is exactly this instance, when the uncertified thing fails unexpectedly. The rest of the time, the difference is a "waste". Insurance is a waste until the accident happens and you get value from insurance.
*the general concept insurance, not the disaster that is US health insurance.
* Asymmetry of information. The insurance company has all the data on the statistics, costs etc.
* Insurance companies very happily take your money, but when it's their turn to do the thing you literally paid them for, they look for every possible reason to weasel out.
> > The late CEO of OceanGate told David Pogue last fall, “at some point, safety is just pure waste.”
> In and of itself, what is actually incorrect about that statement?
I mean, if we're going to take it out of context, sure... At SOME point it's a waste. That sounds correct to me.
In context: The fact that the person making the statement was crushed into a marble at the bottom of the ocean, along with his passengers, suggests that the point at which safety becomes waste was much later than he thought it was.
There’s a Stewart Lee bit about old people equating health and safety with political correctness. Now on one level, it’s absurd; it’s a comedy bit. But there’s a point there; particularly for those on the extreme right, the very idea of being careful has become somewhat politicised. Some (and it is only some; there’s no _inherent_ requirement to act like this) right-libertarians disregard basic safety principles precisely because they consider them to be a creation of The Other Side.
(There's a bit of irony here; Conservatives aren't the conservatives, anymore...)
Less than a millisecond. Water at that pressure could slice steel in half. The heat from the explosion would be equal to that off the sun. It would probably one of the quickest ways to die, frankly.
The air in your lungs presumably becomes extremely hot. I'm not sure how hot. Perhaps you explode instantly before the implosion scatters you a considerable distance.
I don't think there will be much heating in the lungs--yes, the air is being compressed and heated to extreme temperatures in the process but pressure can only drive a fluid (liquid or gas) to the speed of sound in said fluid. The wall of water is coming much faster than that, it's going to squash you before much of that hot air gets into the lungs.
I don't think you do. Outside pressure is almost 400x the inside pressure.
The implosion must have been very very violent and sudden. Being surrounded by carbon fibre and titantium means all that material and your body is trying occupy the same space.
I think it happened fast enough that nobody realized or felt what was happening.
I would be surprised if there was no criminal negligence or something like that in store for them. At least going on by what was published, the company functioned in a way that made it essentially guaranteed that something like this will happen ... while having no real "in case of catastrophe" plans in place.
I suspect (anecdotally, n=1) that part of the problem comes from what TV/movie tropes have taught people a tire-failure looks like: Typically it's a slow-leak or very controllable effect. Actors have plenty of time to emote over it, the vehicle can be pulled-over to the side of the road without lots of filming-difficulties, and no need to bring in stunt-doubles. (Then that sets the stage for the haunted house or the rural diner-encounter or whatever.)
In contrast, dangerous or chaotic tire-failure doesn't get shown as much unless it's an action movie and somebody's using bullets or bombs or robot swords or whatever, things someone with bad tires doesn't expect to happen to them.
One thing it's being frugal for your personal needs and another one it's firing people because of marketing/fear to shareholders. Specially when the odds of dying are over 90%.
Does anyone know if they had any “deep-sea” or “submersible” cameras recording the expedition and can recover those cameras/footage to help in knowing what happened?
Massive condolences to the families of those involved :(
I wonder, what happens to OceanGate as a company now? They've lost the CEO who I suppose bore the ultimate responsibility but are other executives on the hook here? Would a full investigation look at design decisions, etc.
185 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadWhat set them apart was a distinct lack of SV VC-level "move fast and break things" bullshit and utter reckless disregard for safety.
What I don’t get is why there is no beacon on this device. That should be law. This search is costing tens of millions and without a beacon they never had a chance. From what I understand of the construction and debris there is a very low order of probability they will be recovered alive. Even if they are found conserving air they can’t extract the module in time. It takes at least 24 hours to build the necessary rig. They knew this going in, so why search at all? I mean they’re lost at sea no matter how you slice it. Apparently while touring at the wreck of others lost at sea which isn’t a rational gamble to risk your life over. I mean they bolted the door from the outside because the pressure was so high surely that was a clue. And if they did survive the impact, five people panicking without air in that confined space can’t have been pretty. What a mess
This submersible needed to survive a differential of ~350 atmospheres. With the positive pressure being outside the craft.
I get that there's a lot of armchair quarterbacking from internet material experts here, but this does seem to be an outlier with this particular submarine.
They can take the pressure. But they're incredibly expensive to check for defects, and the result of a defect is "sub-second catastrophic failure" instead of any warning of imminent structural degradation.
Just because the CEO is on the firing line with you, doesn't make him right, just overly confident.
DO hire "50 year old" people with experience, not just kids from university.
Don't build your pressure vessel out of materials which are hard to monitor for wear and fatigue.
Listen to your experienced employees when they tell you that you've built a death-trap.
If you have $250,000 to spend on a short vacation, maybe pick one with better odds of getting home.
and finally...
...The media will always stretch out the agony of these stories for as long as it generates clicks.
Off topic random thought: the increase in mass shootings and their normalization in the US media means those stories don't get as many clicks as they used to.
This take seems a lot like you looking for something to be offended by.
Hopefully this is the last time anyone tries to make a negative pressure vessel out of carbon fiber.
What’s that analogy about taking down a fence without understanding why someone put it up in the first place?
- safety regulations, especially for high-risk low-margin-of-error endeavours are there for a reason, and we've already learned all these lessons the hard way
- the probability of any given billionaire being dumb as rocks is close to 1
Probably the same lesson we learned last time an ocean vessel named after a Titan went missing in that vicinity
I'm going to keep flying, but just not get on any experimental, uncertified craft of any kind, airplanes, submarines, etc.
Your comment is akin to saying well, that sub had bolts on it so I'm not going to trust bolts from now on. Really, it's just that the bolt was used incorrectly by a person with less than virtuous intentions.
It would be pretty cool to send down a camera to get footage all around it at various angles and then build an app for a VR headset.
Not sure if this is sarcasm...
Recently they published a full 3d scan of the Titanic wreck constructed from 700,000 images taken.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602182
Getting a submarine certified to commercially dive it is another magnitude of cost compared to this venture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Limiting_Factor
If you compare to the submersible trip, Vision Pro is quite the bargain.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-o-bx_E5OkM
Maybe, just maybe, the ultra rich have similar motivations as most other people and want to see cool shit. They just have way more spending money to make whatever they want a reality.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.12350
Wouldn't that wake them up?
I also assumed that too much CO2 fast is the key not the super slow version of what those people in the sub have experienced
You then argued that breathing increased levels of CO2 will trigger survival instincts. This is also true, and exactly what grandparent said.
OP, correctly, pointed out that we don't detect the lack of O2, we detect a buildup of CO2 (because it causes respiratory acidosis). If the CO2 is removed, there's nothing to cause the panic response, the situation itself notwithstanding.
It's still nea that it works with an impaired amygdala, though.
why do i have to argue here with so many people about something so simple to understand?
Unless you know you are trapped and running out of oxygen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw
There was a horrifying case after Pearl Harbor where bodies were found in the airpocket of the USS West Virginia. They had flashlights with batteries and fresh water and had marked off 16 days on a calendar.
Legend has it that sailors could hear banging for weeks knowing they could not cut through the thick battleship armor in time and just drowned out the noise.
Guillotined people can still be alive and feel about 30 second safter their head has been removed from their body.
Imagine a Ford F150 sitting on every square inch of your body.
I don't think there will be any bodies to recover.
logically not in this case. at that point where the water level is sufficient to make someone drown the remaining air would be compressed to several hundred atmospheres pressure.
And because making sounds without lungs attached to your throat is kinda hard
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_piston
Similar to the Arbogast in The Expanse, but even greater disassembly.
> Exposure to pressure below this limit results in a rapid loss of consciousness, followed by a series of changes to cardiovascular and neurological functions, and eventually death, unless pressure is restored within 60–90 seconds. [0]
[0] http://www.geoffreylandis.com/vacuum.html
When a deep sub implodes you're going to be hit by water moving at the speed of sound in said water (1,500m/s, considerably faster than in air.) That's far above the speed of nerve impulses, there's no way a pain signal could reach the brain before there isn't a brain left to get the signal.
Especially in the case where I’ve drugged one of my children to come with me.
It was far more likely that the sub suffered a catastrophic implosion at the time contact was lost. Glad to see it confirmed, and finally people stop posting the nonsense about air.
Shame about the passengers though.
To keep viewers engaged in the search I'd imagine
Because there was no proof of a different outcome, and the suspense also works as a powerful bait (== more clicks/copies/attention).
To keep people coming back for updates as the clock ticks down. Now that most people pay for news with impressions, they have to cultivate impressions.
So were the guards at Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz.
If your job is being a ghoul, that doesn't constitute an excuse for being a ghoul.
Apparently the parent lives in a fantasy world where he believes that people aren't constantly being manipulated into doing things. So deathscrolling isn't a thing either. Clickbait doesn't exist. Advertisements are all useless. Subliminal messaging doesn't work. Etc. etc.
Apparently, also, he thinks that because people are just "doing their jobs" that means it's okay for them to do the things they do, because they were told to do them, which is a horrible thing to think.
That guy's fucking clueless.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12220565/The-nerve-...
It did feel weird to see countdown timers, at least it felt gross to me.
In that same style you could also wonder why anyone would bother sending help at all, given that they very likely had perished. We hope until we are proven wrong, and the times we are right makes all the effort worth.
- No noises were heard during rescue operation (the implosion likely happened around the time the communication was lost, as opposed to in the days following)
- The "banging" noises discussed earlier were unrelated to the submersible.
Careful analysis and engineering to make things as safe as possible and well characterized is incredibly rewarding and satisfying.
Also, hating someone does not imply wanting them to be dead. Not all of us are want to kill people we find assholes. Sometimes we just want them to have less power so that they cause less damage.
He didn't, though, did he?
Regs are written in the blood of misguided libertarians and their unwitting victims.
It might be more acceptable if the government (taxpayers) didn’t inevitably pick up the tab for bailing out their recklessness.
If I'm drunk driving and crash my car and killed everyone inside my car, that must be OK for you. The passengers knew their risk by jumping on my car when I'm clearly drunk!
1 - it's not as if he made an experimental unsafe submarine and then killed himself in it. It's as though he made an experimental, unsafe submarine that many people told him was unsafe and unsuitable to dive at that depth at a minimum, but really unsafe to dive at any depth and then told people that it was safe and good to go, and then sold seats on it before even properly testing it.
2 - they have caused the taxpayers of several countries to foot the bill of this hugely expensive rescue operation, with no plan or way to pay it back.
It's not right for innocent people to bear the burden of this person's irresponsible negligence, both with their lives in the case of the passengers, and with their tax dollars in the case of us taxpayers
That said there's a lot of posers that put unsafe aftermarket safety items (e.g. 4 point belts without a HANS device, roll cages without helmets)
In and of itself, what is actually incorrect about that statement?
I think a lot of normal people are going to smugly harp on that statement, but in and of itself it seems perfectly reasonable to believe that there's a diminishing return to safety measures for anything at some point.
The issue with this sub thing seems to be that they made some really bad choices, including apparently having glass that wasn't rated for the actual depth they were going to, choosing a gaming controller that apparently had a history of wireless issues, and other dumb issues with the design of the sub.
+1- the statement as phrased seems to be correct.
The issue here seems to be one of dismissing legitimate safety concerns rather than that statement itself. They quit adding safety before they reached the "pure waste" point.
*the general concept insurance, not the disaster that is US health insurance.
I can't quite put my finger on it but there is something dubious about "insurance" or at least as it currently exists.
* Asymmetry of information. The insurance company has all the data on the statistics, costs etc.
* Insurance companies very happily take your money, but when it's their turn to do the thing you literally paid them for, they look for every possible reason to weasel out.
I mean, if we're going to take it out of context, sure... At SOME point it's a waste. That sounds correct to me.
In context: The fact that the person making the statement was crushed into a marble at the bottom of the ocean, along with his passengers, suggests that the point at which safety becomes waste was much later than he thought it was.
(There's a bit of irony here; Conservatives aren't the conservatives, anymore...)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The implosion must have been very very violent and sudden. Being surrounded by carbon fibre and titantium means all that material and your body is trying occupy the same space.
I think it happened fast enough that nobody realized or felt what was happening.
Look up the Mythbusters test for the old timey dive suit, and/or the Byford Dolphin if you want nightmares.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/06/21/oc...
Money addicts, take notes. This is what happens when you put money cartels before real life physics.
I suspect (anecdotally, n=1) that part of the problem comes from what TV/movie tropes have taught people a tire-failure looks like: Typically it's a slow-leak or very controllable effect. Actors have plenty of time to emote over it, the vehicle can be pulled-over to the side of the road without lots of filming-difficulties, and no need to bring in stunt-doubles. (Then that sets the stage for the haunted house or the rural diner-encounter or whatever.)
In contrast, dangerous or chaotic tire-failure doesn't get shown as much unless it's an action movie and somebody's using bullets or bombs or robot swords or whatever, things someone with bad tires doesn't expect to happen to them.
I wonder, what happens to OceanGate as a company now? They've lost the CEO who I suppose bore the ultimate responsibility but are other executives on the hook here? Would a full investigation look at design decisions, etc.