Five tourists are missing on a submarine to the famous wreck
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/titanic-submarine-missing-rescue-mission-underway-newfoundland-canada/
Very sad, but not the Titanic's fault.
🤨
Hard to feel sorry for rich billionaires.
The money they spent on that trip probably could have made some real positive change in this world.
Actually, they may not have paid for the trip. The missing include the billionaire owner of the company that runs the ship, a couple of billionaires and one's teen son, and an actual scientist. So it may have been the company owner taking some guests for a joyride, not a commercial dive with paying passengers.
Seriously, is deep-sea diving becoming a fashionable hobby among the ultra-rich? I know James Cameraon does it, and David Packard of Hewlett-Packard. Are there others?
Forbes says Stockton Rush has a net worth of $12 million...
https://thedistin.com/2023/06/21/stockton-rushs-net-worth-forbes-how-much-money-does-the-oceangate-ceo-make-why-is-he-so-rich/
I might not feel sympathy for their choices, but they're still human-beings, presumably with families.
Also, speaking even as an egalitarian, anti-elitist/anti-wealth leftist, there's generally very little that individual billionaires can do with their wealth to change things long-term. Without long-term, structural programs that entirely change the way societies and communities live and operate, those individual billionaires' fortunes will vanquish very rapidly.
Those changes require governments and other organisations that prevent billionaires/the wealth gap, from existing in the first place.
Once again, that's not the fault of individual billionaires per se, but the fault of the system that allows billionaires to exist.
You can fund a high school kids education.
That little joyride could have probably kept my local animal shelter in operation for five years.
And so on.
You can do stuff with money if you want to - but if you want to keep it all, you get guys with 500 million dollar yachts.
If I was a billionaire, I'd probably have a 500 million dollar yacht.
The irony is that it's precisely because I'm *not* a billionaire, that I don't think like that, and I give what little I have to charitable causes, and my time to volunteering.
When you're that rich, you're not in touch with the real world. You don't need to be. And so, you can afford to isolate your mind from all the shit that's going on in the trenches.
And you cease to be human.
But hey, let someone through a few billion at us and ask us if we'll give most of it back.
This is the thing. If I were a billionaire, I suspect I'd be as big an asshole as any other billionaire. I doubt I'd be a better person than the majority of them.
I like to think I am a good person, but that's partly as a consequence of the experiences that have shaped me.
I've neither been spoiled and over-privileged, but nor have I *really* suffered any *intense* hardship (although I've had my own personal hurdles here and there, like most of us). I'm an upper-working-class/lower-middle-class straight white guy, who's never had much money, and has blue-collar/working-class parents, but, has also never had to live on the streets or beg for food. So, there was never any reason for me to be a major asshole.
There's no hope for them from what I've seen.
They don't know where the sub is and even if they do find them alive, there's no way of pumping in more oxygen. And then they need to raise it.
Unfortunately it seems like a recovery mission now. Hope I'm wrong 🙁.
It sounds like their only faint hope for survival is if the emergency procedures worked, the thing rose to the surface, and their sealed capsule is bobbing on the surface of the ocean where hopefully some aircraft will find it. And take it back to the mothership and open the hatches before everyone inside suffocates, because the door can't be opened from the inside.
If it's at depth, it may be impossible to haul it to the surface. It'd definitely impossible to haul it to the surface in time, the only ships that can get down that far are not built to pull things from the bottom. Even attaching air balloons to the disable ship thing and letting the bouyancy pull it to the top is risky, because the balloons will expand by about a million times during the trip to the top, due to changes in water pressure, there's good odds that a balloon will rupture before reaching the surface. And while there may be cables 12,000 feet long and winches strong enough to pull them up with a ship attached... how long would winching it up take?
Stepson of one of the billionaires posts sad message, then posts message about going to a Blink 182 concert:
https://www.tmz.com/2023/06/20/titanic-titan-submersible-rescue-mission-blink-182-concert/
Nice.
"It might be distasteful being here"
That's absolutely correct.
One expert theorizes the submarine has imploded, which explains the sudden loss of contact. Just one little crack and the pressure completely crushes the thing. Terrible.
shareStill better IMO, than sitting in total cold darkness knowing you only had days before the air was gone and chances of recovery are slim to none.
shareIf I had to guess I'd say that's what's happened.
shareSeems no one will let the Titanic passengers and crew rest. It's a grave-site, people should try and remember that before paying $250K to gawk.
The inside of that sub is like a minivan. If someone starts panicking and hyperventilating, their oxygen supply would run out quick. I can't imagine that kind of claustrophobia during a catastrophic event like that.
People "gawk" at gravesites - where tragic events have happened all of the time - battlefields, places like the Alamo, etc. Perhaps they don't pay exorbitant amounts of money to see them, but they still visit. It's all a part of history, including Titanic's final resting place.
shareIt doesn't sound like the operators had any contingency plans for this. There should have been a well-oiled plan moving into gear as soon as they knew something was amiss. No contingency plan, no activity until there is one. I've dealt a fair bit with risk analysis/mitigation. I'm sure there will be some *serious* questions once this has played out - and that some of the answers will be found wanting.
sharewhere do you get 12,000 foot long cable?
shareWell, the deep-sea ROV which operates from the on-scene French vessel Atalante is reported as having an umbilical cord that can extend for five miles, twice the wreck's depth. I think something could be designed. But the golden rule is, 'no contingency plan, no activity' (or, as was drummed into me repeatedly years back, 'You don't go in without a ****ing exit strategy!'). The vessel shouldn't have deployed if a) there were any concerns about safety, and b) there wasn't a contingency plan for when things go wrong. It's now being reported that OceanGate's former Director of Marine Operations previously 'identified numerous issues that posed serious safety concerns' - including the design of the hull and the way in which it was tested. I've also heard the vessel hadn't been certified as seaworthy, although I don't know how true that is. And there's the eight hour delay between the vessel losing contact and OceanGate informing the Coastguard.
The inherent risks seem to have far outweighed the benefits. I see MAJOR problems for OceanGate, from civil lawsuits to manslaughter charges (depending of course on how this ends).
Update: As (as yet unidentified) debris field is found, BBC quotes US Coastguard as saying 'There was no plan in place'.
If you want some funny reading, not that men dying is funny, but people making fun of loser "journalists" sure is.
This guy David Pogue did some story on the Titan submersible, now he's saying internet connections were stopped so people couldn't report on problems - it's the Twitter responses that shine:
https://twitter.com/Pogue/status/1670835763536183297