Down among the dead men?

The news getting everyone worked up at the moment is the missing Titan submarine, with five people on board, en route to check out the Titanic.

A lot of the commentary I’m seeing has, frankly, been kind of heartless if not ghoulish on account of the four passengers being purported billionaires cos apparently you have to be a billionaire to afford this sort of thing… and while the $250,000 asking price is obviously not cheap, it’s something *I* could actually afford myself. (Not easily and it wouldn’t exactly leave me with much ready money left over for the rest of my life, but I could do it. Obviously glad I didn’t…). And I am manifestly not a billionaire of any sort. I am also obviously not a fan of billionaires, even someone with a single billion to their credit has earned it rather dubiously, I know, eat the rich and all that, whatever… I can still find the gloating about their misfortune a bit tasteless, especially now we know one of them was actually the teenage son of one of the others (and one actually has decades of legitimate research of the wreck to his credit)…

The fifth person, though, is evidently Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, the company that does the Titanic tour thing (I’m guessing he was the pilot of the sub). And that’s where things get complicated, cos it looks increasingly like the current situation is very much his fault.

I read earlier today this piece, which describes some shenanigans at the company that now seem doomed to have ended in disaster at some point. David Lochridge, the OceanGate employee in charge of its marine operations and consequently the safety of everyone on the sub, was ordered to do a quality inspection of the sub in 2018, three years before it actually went into service. He basically came back and said the sub was a dangerous piece of shit and the company had hindered him in his work because they knew it was dangerous, because the viewing window wasn’t designed strong enough for the depths the sub was meant to go to and OceanGate weren’t willing to pay the necessary to strengthen it, and he refused to certify it as fit for purpose.

Whereupon the company fired him. As you do.

Not that Stockton Rush was overly worried about being seen to cut corners, though, cos he kind of bragged about doing it:

He said there was a “limit” to safety, telling Pogue: “You know, at some point, safety is just pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question.”
Rush added that his Titan sub features, and trips to the Titanic wreck, can be done outside of what’s been previously done, saying: “I think I can do this just as safely while breaking the rules.”
The Titan sub was never checked to see if it was up to standard because of its “innovation,” OceanGate said in 2019. The sub features a carbon fiber hull that had never been used on submersibles before, according to the “Unsung Science” podcast.

I feel it was more of a fuck around-find out question, especially when that “innovation” included using a game controller to pilot the fucking thing. No, REALLY:

Good. Fucking. Grief. So yeah, the Titan sub appears to have been a catastrophe waiting to happen. One person sublimely unconcerned, though, is Brian Szasz, stepson of one of the passengers, Hamish Harding, who was so upset by the whole affair he went to a Blink-182 concert. As you do. But young Brian is apparently a champion cunt for more than this, though, having as he does a history of stalking and threatening to shoot up an EDM festival a couple of years ago. That was a sideplot twist in this story I don’t think anyone was expecting…

Anyway, there is one line of criticism of the story that’s hard to argue against:

I’ve seen a lot of people saying things like this online, and while I’m cynical about their reasons for doing so (like, how much do they really care about refugees dying tragically when they don’t have those immigrants to use as a cudgel against billionaires?), the point is well made. There is an undeniable failing in media in that respect, not to mention the political will of governments.

To be honest, I don’t really care that much about Stockton Rush and his passengers, I just find some of the coverage and commentary egregious. If anyone on that sub is a billionaire, I wouldn’t object to that wealth being redistributed… I just don’t need them redistributed to the bottom of the ocean; I don’t really need or want them dead. (I’m sure David Lochridge doesn’t feel much like saying “I told you so” just now either). At any rate, despite reports that they may have detected signs of the likelihood of this ending well gets slimmer with every minute, and whoever’s now holding the bag at OceanGate is going to be facing lawsuits that should bankrupt them. Somehow I have no sympathy for them.