You know, if I were ever to go down to the depth of the ocean with my friends and family on board to see the Titanic, I would make sure that the vehicle I’m riding in is overbuilt for safety and that everything that could go wrong is considered beforehand.
Why take any risk at all? With the amount of money that they had they could have hired an entire crew of an actual submarine for a day or two.
Most submarines/submersibles can’t actually get that deep, and of the few that can, some are government run and others are already on other projects.
What made OceanGate’s Titan unique is that they were selling expeditions to the Titanic.
Now with all that said, if I had the disposable income to take on such an expedition, $250k sounds way too cheap/good to be true. Unfortunately in this case it was indeed too good to be true.
I am going to go the opposite way from one of your other replies. I think they did not understand the risks due to their backgrounds at least the customers.
Being rich it’s probably been a long time since they have been exposed to consequences of their actions. Or at least serious consequences. Especially the 19 y.o.
Logically an action that is risky because it is inherently dangerous is different than one where the danger is punishment but people are not 100% rational beings. After all lots of people (not just rich ones) do stupid thing like overspeeding, dui etc and do not actually believe themselves to be in danger.
Finally they might believe regulations to be useless because most of the time they are limiting them (their businesses) to protect other people.
Am curious how long this has been there and whether perhaps the “banging” was not related whatsoever.
I really hope that the sub imploded during the descent, and they’ve been dead all this time. Rather than the hull giving out after they sat on the ocean floor for days.
With the current news surfacing (so to speak) about neglect and dismissal of safety concerns by the owner, that lawsuit is potentially going to be massive.
Before wreckage found: We hear banging every 30 minutes
After wreckage found: We heard a big pop on Sunday
This is actually quite normal, and similar situations have occurred during search and rescues for missing submarines. The ocean carries sound quite well, and hydrophones will inevitably pick up noises of from all sorts of of things if observed for long enough. Add into that the extra noises of the all the search and rescue assets in the vicinity and the natural biases of the human operators to want to decipher patterns from the background noise; false positives are quite typical.
A similar situation happened with the sinking of the USS Thresher. https://www.forces.net/usa/banging-sounds-heard-during-search-sunken-us-submarine-uss-thresher
Much better way to go right. Better than having sit in there for days.
Better to die in an instant than the alternative.
I really didn’t care too much about what was going on until last night when I realized the horror of sitting in a metal tube, knowing you probably won’t be rescued with a ticking timer of when your resources would run out. It seems like the perfect horror movie but irl. I hope implosion was the cause because the alternative has cause my brain to go into a full panic / existential mode and I am just an observer.
Anyway, what did everybody have for lunch today?
Spanish rice with black beans. Tasty, filling, cheap.
Black bean tacos!
Soft shell tacos.
Pizza rolls! Or logs. Whatever, same thing.
At least they didn’t have to suffer for any stretch of time, I hope.
Sounds like they did not. An update:
A Navy official says “an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion” was detected shortly after the Titan lost contact with the surface. This official said the information was relayed to the Coast Guard team which used it to narrow the radius of the search area.
There’s a whole lot of hindsight happening in this thread. “They should have known. They ignored the risks. I would have done better.”
If James Cameron had died on his deep sea expedition, people would have said all the same things. He didn’t, so we all just lauded him for being a badass.
Hindsight is 20/20!
Except James Cameron didn’t willfully ignore the existing collective knowledge of the industry, did not set out to completely ignore basic safety in the name of “innovation” (read: being a cheap ass), didn’t actively fire people who gave the slightest shit about safety, the list goes on and on and on. The CEO was some techbro moron who payed for his own hubris. It’s unfortunate anyone but him had to die to prove literally everyone but him right, except maybe the two millionaires being the incarnation of bourgeois stupidity and hubris too.
I feel bad for the french oceanographer and the 19 year old. I sneer at the two billionaires. I laugh at the CEO. I also feel bad for the taxpayers who had to shell out millions of dollar in the rescue effort, a rescue which honestly, while legally necessary, was morally arguable given the track record of the company to shit all over government regulations.
I just can’t understand why ANYONE with that much money wouldn’t be a little more careful about where they choose to take risk. A little investigation on their part would have turned up the previous safety concerns.
One thing you can’t buy with money is intelligence.
Except that you can: you hire intelligence. He paid people to build it and fired them when they weren’t comfortable with the design and had safety concerns. Lol
I don’t know anything about this guy, so take my pet theories with a pinch of salt, but…
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In my experience, people who think of themselves as entrepreneurs are often simply bad at perceiving risk. They start out with a certain hubris that is a product of this deficiency in assessing risk. Many of them will be taken down by this, but others will get lucky.
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When they get lucky, these people tend not to notice the element of luck but ascribe their success wholly to their smarts and hard work. This can lead to an inflated sense of how good one’s judgement is.
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It can also lead to a lack of humility. It takes both good judgement and humility to know when to defer to someone else’s judgement. These people had hubris to start with, and their success can compound this to the point where they consider themselves the best judge of everything. Then they stop listening to people who may know better than them.
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They also have the power to surround themselves with yes-men, so they are challenged less and less as time goes on.
Maybe this guy wasn’t like that, but his comments about safety measures being a waste, his disregard for safety standards in constructing this submarine, and the way he fired the employee who complained that the sub was unsafe, suggest he may have been in this mold.
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quick and painless, probably better than they deserved.
Bruh wat
I know a lot of people (not here necessarily) have been commenting on how these were rich people, but regardless of their financial situation they were just people first. I don’t know anything about them and that being the case I’m going with this being a tragedy. I feel for the families that were left behind.
TBH what gets me angry is the fact literally less than a week before the single biggest sea faring tragedy that hit the Mediterranean sea, and easily one of the top 20 straight up sea tragedy in recent memory happened and literally nobody gave nor is giving a shit.
A boat full of migrants sunk between Greece and Italy, 80 have been confirmed dead, more than 500 are missing, and the worst is, the boat was being surveilled the entire time by Frontex and the Greek coast guard who straight up lied (or chose not to see) the distress the ship was in.
I can understand people lashing out at the death of rich people driven largely by their hubris and trusting a downright irresponsible psycho. In some way its a shadenfreude-like feeling over the overt and indirect violence that average people experience compared to that of the rich. It’s distasteful to be sure, but it is what it is. In an unjust society both the exploitor and the exploited are pushed to brutish, revengeful, detached feelings towards one another and broader ressentiment. The solution is the end of exploitation.
The main difference here is their families had the money to fund the publicity and search efforts. The Refugees on that boat that sunk didn’t have anyone rich that cared about them.
You’re correct. I feel far worse for the refugees than the billionaires in the sub. But that being said i feel awful for the 19 year old on that ship. I know i would have said yes too because how many people can say “im going on holiday to the titanic” sounds great in concept. He may have been a rich kid but still a kid.
He is 19, he should be old enough to come to a reasonable conclusion that his family if profiting off of the suffering of the Pakistani people. He lived overseas, far away from the problem and I bet if you find his social media pages they are full of expensive things that you would never be able to get in Pakistan.
Edit- it’s very evident that none of you have lived in an impoverished country before. I hate to use this word, but the privilege here is palpable.
He is 19, he should be old enough to come to a reasonable conclusion that his family if profiting off of the suffering of the Pakistani people.
No, he shouldn’t be. You really have no idea what you’re talking about.
So it’s not ok to care that a kid died because of some nebulous idea about stuff his dad has done? I’m sure there’s at least a grain of truth in what you’ve said but that’s still a pretty toxic worldview in my opinion.
