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The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

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Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#21

Post by nathan_compton »

dale_glass wrote: post #16
nathan_compton wrote: post #13

[flagged]

> This is such an amazingly delicious piece of schadenfreude. It doesn't work out that way for me due to the deaths of passengers that had no responsibility for anything here, and whose only mistake was trusting Rush too much.

Schadenfreude precludes not true horror or sadness. But if I felt true horror or sadness at every event which warranted it I would have killed myself a long time ago, assuming I could keep up with the astronomical accounting entailed in keeping track of them all. The world is a grotesque suffering engine, you may have noticed. Let us savor schadenfreude where we can, I say.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#22

Post by anshumankmr »

mellosouls wrote: post #7
rvnx wrote: post #4

He already got punished by life, no need to blame him posthumous. He is like one of the inventors of the parachute (Franz Karl Reichelt), still wanted to try because he believed in it. Unfortunately believing is not enough when it comes to reliability. Effort was good though, as apparently it worked at some point. > This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even…

The inventor of the parachute probably didn't take several people with him on false premises.

Yeah that is what the bummer is. And I read somewhere that the contract for passengers explicitly stated they could die, and that it was an experimental vessel approved by nobody.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#23

Post by Pxtl »

Reminds me of Vonnegut's line from Jailbird (without the stuttering of the character who uttered it), on the principal cause of a massacre:

"American amateurism in matters of life and death"

I'm a Canadian. As a Millenial of the "just watch a Youtube video and figure it out" generation, and somebody who has watched some things (like housing) get strangled by regulation, I can see the appeal of American libertarianism on a lot of subjects.

But as Vonnegut said: matters of life and death.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#24

Post by EgregiousCube »

mellosouls wrote: post #3

Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s [CEO] public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation Seems a remarkably similar sentiment to the e/acc types currently loudly influencing tech and business discourse on various media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_accelerationism

One shouldn’t conclude that regulations lead to positive outcomes from this. In addition to having a disdain for regulation, OceanGate was doing bad engineering. Projects that follow regulation strictly can fail due to bad engineering too.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#25

Post by vundercind »

et-al wrote: post #19
rvnx wrote: post #4

He already got punished by life, no need to blame him posthumous. He is like one of the inventors of the parachute (Franz Karl Reichelt), still wanted to try because he believed in it. Unfortunately believing is not enough when it comes to reliability. Effort was good though, as apparently it worked at some point. > This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even…

The only comparison we should make of Stockton Rush is Icarus.

Notably, he was also warned not to fly too low over the ocean.

“Beneath the waves” was right out.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#26

Post by ubermonkey »

Is it "more disturbing," though, really?

I mean, privileged rich dude who thinks he knows better than experts wins Darwin award, and some people dumb enough to trust him got to go along for the (one way) ride.

I'm not any more disturbed by it now than I was a year ago, and a year ago it barely moved the needle. And then it was only about the 19 year old son of one of the passengers -- even at that age, a child ought to be able to trust his father to keep him safe, and Shahzada Dawood utterly failed on that count.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#27

Post by [deleted] »

EgregiousCube wrote: post #24
mellosouls wrote: post #3

Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s [CEO] public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation Seems a remarkably similar sentiment to the e/acc types currently loudly influencing tech and business discourse on various media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_accelerationism

One shouldn’t conclude that regulations lead to positive outcomes from this. In addition to having a disdain for regulation, OceanGate was doing bad engineering. Projects that follow regulation strictly can fail due to bad engineering too.

[deleted]

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#28

Post by specialist »

EgregiousCube wrote: post #24
mellosouls wrote: post #3

Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s [CEO] public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation Seems a remarkably similar sentiment to the e/acc types currently loudly influencing tech and business discourse on various media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_accelerationism

One shouldn’t conclude that regulations lead to positive outcomes from this. In addition to having a disdain for regulation, OceanGate was doing bad engineering. Projects that follow regulation strictly can fail due to bad engineering too.

Regulations is a scary word for rules.

Can you imagine a world without rules? Awful.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#29

Post by qarl »

specialist wrote: post #28
EgregiousCube wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One shouldn’t conclude that regulations lead to positive outcomes from this. In addition to having a disdain for regulation, OceanGate was doing bad engineering. Projects that follow regulation strictly can fail due to bad engineering too.

Regulations is a scary word for rules. Can you imagine a world without rules? Awful.

Some people had extremely bad relationships with their parents. It's difficult for them to accept rules of any kind.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#30

Post by gravescale »

rvnx wrote: post #4

He already got punished by life, no need to blame him posthumous. He is like one of the inventors of the parachute (Franz Karl Reichelt), still wanted to try because he believed in it. Unfortunately believing is not enough when it comes to reliability. Effort was good though, as apparently it worked at some point. > This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even…

Falcon 9s have 2 failures and one partial from 354 launches, so they're proving to be an extremely reliable vehicle on the scale of rockets. The current model is 289 of them and has a perfect record so far.

That's substantially more successful than Soyuz which crashed a lot more and killed someone by parachute failure and crew by depressurisation (and another crew escaped the exploding rocket by launch abort system and another abort subjected the crew to a 21G descent) in the early days and is still considered one of the safer rockets ever (Soyuz-U, the rocket, had 22 failures out of 786 launches, and Soyuz, the spacecraft on top, made 153 missions).

There's still a long future in front of us for SpaceX to screw it up by skimping on things or run into some very bad luck or unforseen issues, but at least as it stands now, pointing at test launches going bang, when they're weren't ever expected to not go bang, and calling the production rocket unreliable is not well supported.

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