Icarus falls again

[firecat]

OceanGate Was Warned of Potential for ‘Catastrophic’ Problems With Titanic Mission:

In an unsigned 2019 blog post titled “Why Isn’t Titan Classed?” [which timed out when I tried to open it]…OceanGate said…“Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.”

“There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years,” he [Stockton Rush] told Smithsonian magazine in a profile published in 2019. [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/worlds-first-deep-diving-submarine-plans-tourists-see-titanic-180972179/] “It’s obscenely safe because they have all these regulations.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus

Comments

[silveradept]

Once again, someone demonstrates the reality that regulations are there for a reason, and usually those regulations have come about because people are dead from situations the regulations now protect.

In some ways, this was better, in that it took people, for the most part, who had that much money to spare and were convinced of their own invulnerability, rather than inflicting something on the rest of us and skipping away.

[firecat]

Yes, regulations can bog down innovation. And yet, what race are we trying to win when we think we need to innovate so fast that we kill people? It makes sense to compromise on regulations in the case of, e.g., bringing a covid vaccine online faster. But bringing exotic tourism online faster?

I admit to being less upset about the deaths than I would be in many other situations.

"Obscenely safe" is not a phrase that fills me with confidence.

[silveradept]

Yes. Saving lives seems like somewhere that may allow for some flexibility (not a complete abandonment, of course), but in places where cutting corners means people die? No, that's not worth it. Of course, so many people mistake "having to spend more money" was a terrible and horrible thing, rather than something that might price some people out of various experiences. Those of us who don't have large amounts of money accept this.