We'll get to the Woke in a minute. Missing Titanic Sub Once Faced Massive Lawsuit Over Depths It Could Safely Travel To | The New Republic
One of the people working for OceanGate, the operator of the lost Titanic-tourist submarine, had concerns over safety. He was fired, and sued for "disclosing confidential information." He counter-sued claiming he was terminated for being a whistleblower.
The tourist submersible that went missing while exploring the Titanic wreck was previously the target of safety complaints from an employee of OceanGate, the parent company that owns the sub and runs tourist expeditions of the wreck. That employee complained specifically that the sub was not capable of descending to such extreme depths before he was fired.
As for the Woke: Did Wokeness Doom the Titanic Tourists?
OceanGate wasn't interested in hiring the best, most experienced people. That isn't Woke. They wanted youth and inspiration. They may have gotten youth, I'm not sure if anyone is inspired at this point.
“When I started the business, one of the things you’ll find, there are other sub operators out there, but they typically have gentlemen who are ex-military submariners, and you’ll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys,” Rush told Teledyne Marine in the interview. “I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational, and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology. But, a 25-year-old, you know, who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational.”
As Pixy Misa (or Mixy Pisa) has noted, the universe doesn't care about how many diversity boxes you have checked.
When you build a bridge, it doesn't matter if you respect people's pronouns and their lived experience. It doesn't matter if you hate "fascists" and cheer "progress" and drink only sustainable organic fair-trade soy lattes.
You get the fucking math right or it falls down.
That applies to a lot of things: Bridges. Airplanes. Submarines.
Hat tip on the 2 articles goes to The Other McCain: As a Commentary on Our Decadent Elite, the Missing Luxury Sub Is Near Perfect
As a metaphor for the failures of our decadent elite, this story is almost perfect.
After thought: This story reminds me of the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2007. This sub had worked "several times" since 2019, so there was no reason - in their minds - to think it wouldn't work again. The I-35 bridge had stood for 50 years before it collapsed. There was no reason to think it would collapse on that day, or any day. Though a better example may have been the faults found with the I-40 bridge in Memphis, because in that case the faults were found and corrected before the bridge collapsed. In the case of the sub, the faults, whatever they were, were not detected, but in the I-35 case there were other problems than just normal, daily wear and tear.
The problem with carbon fiber construction is it is great, until it isn't. And it's hard to find beginning faults. You can't x-ray it or visual check for microscopic cracks like you can with metal.
ReplyDeleteThese were known issues with the sub in question.
Compare to SpaceX. They were going to make their Starship out of carbon fiber, but then decided that the chance of catastrophic failure due to temperature and pressure issues was too high, so they chose stainless steel, which can be checked easily for issues.