About that submarine rescue
It would be nice to see even a fraction of the rescue efforts being made to save a handful of billionaires also deployed when migrant boats are in trouble.
Wondering too who’s paying for the Canadian part of the search. A Canadian military plane is scanning for the missing craft and some of the efforts are being staged from St John’s, as it’s relatively close to the Titanic site.
carswell 10:23 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
Meanwhile, German sea captain faces 20 years in jail for migrant rescue efforts.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/node/71822
Mark 11:07 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
On one hand, apparently this is a rare opportunity for search and rescue teams to try out a bunch of technology in a real world (as opposed to simulated) operation. I think a lot of military tech is being tested out here, as deep sea radar and sonar is very strategically important. The fact that the French are sending this device that will only arrive in 2 days (long after they will be presumed dead) means that other factors are at play here, not just saving lives. Also, the additional costs are not as high as one would think, as the staff are already being paid, so it’s mostly additional fuel and so on.
Now that I’ve said the devil’s advocacy piece, it’s shockingly disturbing to see how many efforts are being deployed for this mission. A bunch of billionaires paid 250k to some lunatic with a blatant disregard for safety procedures, just to check something off their mega wealthy fantasy bucket list, and millions of dollars are going into saving them, as if they are banks that are too big to fail.
There isn’t even a good argument that his submarine is helping research and development of other important technology that could help us with real world challenges. A lot of the tech needed to study climate change has its origins in military development. This on the other hand is just a badly designed machine. It’s not the well publicized Logitech game controller that’s the issue, those are used in lots of military applications. It’s the lack of testing, lack of safety redundancy, the fact that one of their staff was fired for asking for more safety protocols, etc. This Stockton Rush character wanted to make bank on billionaire sea tourism.
From a human compassion perspective, I hope they died quickly and didn’t suffer too much. But the families should be paying the governments backs for some of the S&R costs. You know that won’t happen. When they talk about the 1%, what they really mean is the 0.0001%, the 15,000 billionaires, politicians and people in power that live in a completely different world than ours.
Kate 11:15 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
I hope that they have not suffered, certainly. But I wonder whether wealthy people doing these stunts shouldn’t have to sign advance provisions and guarantees about rescue.
People wanting to climb Everest have to pay thousands to Nepal for a permit, and that makes sense, since it’s up to Nepal to rescue them, clean up the messes they leave, and so forth. Like that.
Chris 11:29 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
>…it’s shockingly disturbing to see how many efforts are being deployed for this mission…
Even worse is how much attention the media is giving it. It’s wall to wall coverage on almost every news site.
Kate 11:32 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
Individuals in a jam are drama and it’s inevitable that people will take an interest. Even the mythic presence of the sunk Titanic adds to the mystique.
I was thinking back to the rescue of the 33 Chilean miners in 2010. The last couple of days were pretty gripping. Of course, those men were not oligarchs on a junket, they were doing a hard and grinding job, which put a different spin on the story.
Chris 11:40 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
>Individuals in a jam are drama and it’s inevitable that people will take an interest. Even the mythic presence of the sunk Titanic adds to the mystique.
Yes exactly. It bring eyeballs and sells ads. It’s not doing what the media style themselves as: speaking truth to power, saving democracy, and all that rhetoric.
Blork 11:53 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
There’s definitely a lot going on here. The rescue efforts aren’t just a costly expense, they’re valuable real-world field training and research for the various rescue teams. This time it’s wealthy people in an unregulated submersible. Next time it could be scientists doing undersea research.
And as Kate says, this kind of story captures the world’s attention because it’s real-life drama of a sort we rarely see. People write novels and make movies about things like this, and here it is happening in real life. You can’t blame the media for eating it up.
If nothing else, this story is a good example of how “maverick” entrepreneurs who eschew regulations because they “stifle innovation” can have it come back to bite them (and others). This idea of tempting fate for the sake of rapid and inspired but unregulated innovation, without concern for possible consequences, needs a poster case, and this might be it. Did somebody say “AI?”
I can’t help but think this is a precursor for the day when an Artemis or similar space mission goes awry and we all sit here on Earth as a space capsule zooms off into oblivion, off course and with no hope of rescue or recovery, and yet the people on the craft are still alive… for now. That day will almost certainly come, whether it’s this decade or 50 years from now.
Kate 12:07 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
Blork, that’s more or less the premise of Avenue 5.
Chris, I don’t remember media promising to speak truth to power or save democracy.
shawn 13:05 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
Wreckage has been spotted https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65967464
Kate 15:26 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
Debris consistent with catastrophic implosion – US Coast Guard (BBC)