For those who are unaware: A couple billionaires, a pilot, and one of the billionaires’ son are currently stuck inside an extremely tiny sub a couple thousand meters under the sea (inside of the sub with the guys above).
They were supposed to dive down to the titanic, but lost connection about halfway down. They’ve been missing for the past 48 hours, and have 2 days until the oxygen in the sub runs out. Do you think they’ll make it?
I think they are gone. Safety regulations are a thing for a reason.
There is only so much others can regulate when you are building an inverted rocketship
They are paying their price right now. Other dives have gone much deeper, safer. This guy is a fly by night con guy in my opinion.
Read the Bloomberg piece in him.
By the way used to work a lot in defense procurement. There are a ton of regs they do follow, though they sure as hell don’t care about RoHs for the most part.
It’s an interesting philosophical question: how much should we regulate to protect people from themselves?
In a theoretical perfect world with perfectly informed infinitely smart people, a good argument could be made that all regulation should be abolished and everyone should be able to make a free choice. In practice, we know where this would lead - many would choose the cheaper, less safe airline and we’d have a lot of dead people, and at some point we’d find out the hard way that the allegedly safe airline stopped caring about safety years ago and pocketed the profit.
On the other side of the spectrum, should we ban people from making poor decisions that only affect them? Seat belts are a prime example where we do that. There are many others, and honestly, I think life is a lot more fun when you’re allowed to take some risks (if we were strict about safety, motorcycles would be banned).
This falls somewhere in between. The builder killed other people, but this was not a mass market event. There’s a good chance they understood and accepted at least some of the risks. But they likely did so because the “go visit the titanic” market is very limited, so it was this or nothing. More regulation could have prevented any trips from happening, but it could have also opened the path for a more responsible operator to try.
The idea to not include any kind of underwater beacon baffles me - they exist (for flight data recorders) and can handle those depths.