This Whole Goddam Post Is Gold.

This whole goddam post is gold.

people saying that users aren’t being compassionate enough towards the billionaires stuck in the death coffin at the bottom of the ocean and calling us “ghouls” for bringing up the absolute absurdity of the entire situation and it’s like……of course no one ever deserves to die by suffocation or freezing to death and it’s a hope that by some miracle that these people are found and somehow saved. however people are aloud to point out the irony of how our current wealth gap is so high that there are people who are able to spend 250k, an amount that most people don’t see in their entire lives, like it’s a movie ticket. except instead of seeing a movie they are entering a death chamber to the bottom of the ocean so they can gawk at the mass grave of over a thousand people

“the CEO of the company tricked them and he’s the real capitalist villain while the other passengers are blameless” I agree that the CEO (who is also stuck in the submarine with them) is as grimy as they come and cut corners in order to make as much money as possible. that’s a given. but as we are seeing now, most people who have never even stepped foot in the ocean their entire lives could see that this was a disaster waiting to happen. you don’t have to be a maritime expert to see that. the submersible has no emergency beacon, is controlled by an off brand game controller, made from parts from a camp store, navigated by texts from above, is bolted in from the outside, and has a contract that passengers sign that mentions “death” three times on the front page. most people couldn’t be paid to step foot in it - and these people paid 250k to go to the bottom of the ocean in it

once again, no one is relishing at people dying stuck in an essentially gutted out minivan at the bottom of the ocean. especially when one passenger is 19 and the other is a legitimate titanic researcher. but people are allowed to be mad that thousands upon thousands of dollars of taxpayer money and resources are being used to try and literally pluck these people out of the ocean and save them from a grave that they literally helped dig themselves into without a care in the world. they are the 1% who can put themselves in peril as much as they please and spend money and waste resources like it’s water but will always expect to be saved from the brink of death by us regular folk so they can call themselves an “adventurer” at their next luncheon

once again rich capitalists treat safety regulations as a pesky way for the government to take money away from them and not as the literal testament in blood of all the people that have died or been injured because of unsafe situations

As an engineer, I see the wreckage of The Titanic as a monument to a critical failure in design that must never, never be repeated. The single "positive outcome" of The Titanic Disaster was that it exposed just how woefully unsatisfactory the safety regulations for seafaring vessels were at the time.

The Titanic had 20 lifeboats which, in total, at max capacity, could hold 1,178 of the 2,209 passengers on board the ship. Only 18 out of 20 lifeboats were launched, many of which were half full, cutting down the number of passengers on board to just 712.

That is a disgrace. That is a profound waste of human life.

But the real tragedy is that the Titanic actually exceeded the safety regulations of her day. According to the letter of the law at the time, she had more than enough lifeboats. It was assumed that if, god forbid, the hull was breached, she would stay afloat long enough that passengers could wait on board to be rescued.

To compound this issue, the ship had no real evacuation protocol, and the crew members who were expected to execute a mass evacuation were completely untrained in how to do so. There was one cursory drill performed while she was still in dock, during which only two lifeboats were lowered.

Nearly every mistake made in the Titanic's safety protocols can be attributed to the naive assumption that the worst case scenario couldn't possibly happen.

OceanGate's Titan submersible flies in the face of every safety regulation put in place since The Titanic Disaster. Just like The Titanic, The Titan was built and deployed assuming that every aspect of its voyage would be executed perfectly. When you're dealing with human life, perfection is a dangerous thing to plan for.

We have safety regulations for a lot of reasons, and The Titanic is one of them.

Do you guys like my first ever Legend of Zelda fan art????