No amount of poor decision making changes the fact that several precious human lives were lost. Frustration over the company's potential negligence and sadness over the loss of life can coexist.

Thank you for calling this out. It's also disheartening and quite frankly scary, to see how the passengers get dehumanized on other online platforms due to their wealth.

Sure, or maybe, just maybe it's because of the brazen hubris enabled by their wealthy and not the wealth itself.

Still not a reason to completely dehumanize people.

I'm not dehumanizing anyone, that's just silly. It's about as dehumanizing as when I don't care when teenagers doing Tik Tok pranks suffer consequences of their ignorant, braggardly actions.

So much hand wringing and I've seen about two whole comments talking about the boat that sank carrying 100x as many people while this saga was unfolding.

How is it dehumanizing for me to not care about one, when virtually no one gave a single shit about the hundreds of non-wealthy people dying?

I'm just trying to understand your philosophical position: I don't have to care about certain people, as revenge for others not caring about a different group of people?

For me all human life is precious and equally worthy of effort to save, as well as sympathy and grief for their loss. I suppose that's not your position, but I don't quite understand what it is.

I guess I'm saying it's a spectrum. Other than the teenager, my empathy extends as far as "at least they didn't suffer as a consequence of doing something that they knew damn well was likely to kill them".

"Equally worthy of effort" - ironic because the amount of money spent trying to save these 5 people could save hundreds or thousands of times as many people. But I don't see people clamoring for equality in helping the disenfranchised.

Respectfully, I’m not allocating those funds myself. I share your frustration about the unequal devotion of resources to helping people. But that doesn’t mean that these people aren’t worth saving, or grieving.

Same, we regularly see lots of language used in the media and parliaments of Europe to do anything not to refer to these refugees as refugees or even people ("migrant ships") and I've never seen this called out on HN or in similar circles.

The hypocrisy is staggering.

You realize this thread is about the sub that was lost, not the thread about the ship that sunk. It shouldn't come as much surprise that people aren't talking about migrant ship that sunk.

Here it's off-topic to talk about the sunk ship and the migrants that died. Here it's on topic to talk about the people on the sub that died. People should have empathy with both situations, but are much less likely to express it when they're frustrated by someone complaining about something off-topic.

Yes but the issue is that there is no thread about this ship and the many hundreds who are routinely dying are never brought up. The only time I see it mentioned in the media or in parliament is when we're discussing how we can keep them further away and shed our responsibility to them.

At the same time we're being asked to support tax money going to search for these 5 risk tourists and being accused of ignoring their humanity when we simply point out the utter stupidity and greediness of their escapade.

Why not? Rich have no qualms about dehumanizing the poor. And many more of them at that. Because rich are few and poor are many.

"the Rich" aren't some kind of homogenous block that all act and speak in unison. Putting people in groups like that really worries me.

It's curious that you didn't oppose "the poor" group, only "the Rich", with capital R.

Because it's much worse when you put people in a group and then attack that group than when you just group. "We need to help the poor", not very problematic. "The poor are lazy and deserve to suffer", very problematic.

You raised your shield to defend the people who have all of the resorces to defend themselves. Are you sure this is the best way to spend your time?

Yes, I don't want some communist revolution or othering or dehumanization which frequently is a precursor to violence. Are you sure criticizing how other people spend their time is the best use of yours?

Poor behavior by one party does not excuse bad behavior by another.

Spending $250K to go sightseeing while there are starving people in your community is an act of dehumanization in your own right.

Starving? Homeless? Too bad. We have so much money that we gotta blow it to go look at this thing over here instead.

Do you know how much money they donate? I don't, it might be nothing, but I also wouldn't jump to conclusions. It's not like we don't have very wealthy people like Bill Gates put significant time and money into making the world a better.

I don't care how much money they donate, because the tax systems of the world are designed to minimize their losses versus the people who work for them. That's still money they clearly didn't need and certainly didn't earn.

Bill Gates has hubris because Bill Gates has a fuckton of wealth that he did nothing to directly earn. Merely having capital yields capital results.

I wonder to what degree the hubris causes the wealth. You need a high degree of certainty in yourself and your ideas to succeed in many ventures. I've seen people work their way up organizations who I think are much less competent and thoughtful than I'm, but they at least outwardly present themselves with certainty. Often times people liker that already got promoted away before the downsides of their decisions materialize. In other instances we might never hear about them, because nobody cares about the guy under the freeway bridge who has similar character traits to Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, but got less lucky or was slightly less smart or well connected.

Whatabouism.

Also tragic. Being sad over this does not preclude being sad about those events.

I think people are angry when, as others have mentioned, there are more resources and international cooperation going into helping these 5 people who took a needless risk while we watch 100s dying regularly while they try to flee literal war ones in regions we've destabilised for years.

You can also see in this thread people calling them "precious lives" as though that doesn't apply to the people making the ultimate sacrifice to try and bring their families to safety.

I have nothing against people being rich but it's frankly scary to see these refugees be dehumanised, framed as economic immigrants and become victim to to increasing legislation to keep them out of safety on the basis that we can't afford them using our resources when we suddenly have resources enough to spend on extensive missions to search for people who made bad decisions for fun and risked the lives of others for nothing but profit and fame.

Who’s we that destabilised these countries? Cos I bet you it’s is not the countries that they are sailing to.

If you want to call them refugees then take them home. They are economic migrants where “we” live.

I live were those poor people try to go, and I call them refugees. I also say we, because as a voting citizen of one of those countries that did some of said destabilazing over the years, I cannot wash myself of all responsibility.

I’m starting to think that’s the primary purpose of voting - to get people to feel complicit in actions they didn’t want by people they didn’t want in places they didn’t know existed.

In Switzerland it pretty much works exactly like that.

That, and providing legitimacy to the existing power structures, no matter how much of a say people actually have.

And delegitimising all others forms of feedback and expression.

Than you have a clearly distorted view of democracy. And I do not feel complicit, why would I? But, as part of the Western democratic world, I cannot simply ignore everything we did all over the world in the last 20 odd years and pretend it was some outside force doing all of that. Democracy, regardless of shape in form, is exactly about giving people a voice in those affaires. Which is a good thing, IMHO.

The recent boat that sank was sailing to Italy from Libya, one of its ex-colonies.

France, the UK, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy have each spent a couple centuries having fun destabilising the whole world for their own gain.

The US was a bit late to the game, but appears to have caught up quite well.

And while in Europe these people often first set sail for the western Balkans, it usually isn’t their destination.

You missed Portugal and Germany.

Yes, I did! Sorry about that.

I thought it wise to only mention those whose colonial history I knew about, and avoid exposing my whole point to criticism by over-extending myself.

"We" would be roughly the members of NATO and its allies, former colonial powers and the countries traditionally within the sphere of Catholic influence.

Where are they sailing to that this doesn't cover? The recent example being spoken about in this thread was trying to make it to Italy, which has been involved in various conflicts in the middle east since the middle ages.

All that's awful and I hope we can make it better. That said, the humans on that silly submarine have very little to do with what we are and aren't doing about refugees in the Mediterranean.

It's not inherently dehumanizing to point out that, well, this was death by misadventure, and was profoundly avoidable.

If you die doing something dumb, then yeah, people are gonna point that out.

If you die doing something dumb that you spent house money to do, the pointing out will be much more pointed.

it's not the assertion that it was avoidable I'm objecting to, it's the 'not gonna shed a tear' <3

Potential negligence? Dude fired the guy who was trying to get the hull checked for voids before doing crew testing. Then they sued him and proceeded to run this thing with passengers without bothering to do non-destructive testing. Sounds more Stockton Rush went well beyond negligence and straight to malfeasance to me.

You're probably right but I, like you, am a lurker on the internet and not in possession of every single fact, so I'm choosing my words.

Sorry, I live in a country with a for-profit health care system. I have been assured my entire life that a few poor decisions are indeed complete justification for dismissing the value of human life.

P.S.: Hate all you want. I don't give a fuck. I'm tired of being told to give a shit when some billionaire fuckwad dies of his own reckless stupidity while at the same time being told we can't treat treatable illnesses because rich fucks can't make enough money off of doing it.

Well I wouldn't agree with either position. Human life is human life, but I guess some people seem to believe that either poor OR wealthy people are less deserving of sympathy, care, and investment of resources.

I happen to disagree, but you do you.

I feel for them about as much as I do the ~100 people who died today in car accidents in the US. Most of whom were probably also doing reckless things. In a sane world we would do something about that, but people like Rush actively work against sanity in the name of profit, so here we are.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please don't fulminate."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I hope the other souls onboard fully understood the risk of death, otherwise that isn't fair to them.

To relate it to flying in an airplane, “If you take one flight a day, you would on average need to fly every day for 55,000 years before being involved in a fatal crash.”

I'll take those odds.

Take a deep dive in an experimental vessel with public safety concerns expressed over years, nope I'm out.

They all had to sign multi-page waivers that mention "death" no less than three times on the first page.

That is simply wild, is the multi-page waiver available to read?

I haven't seen the full waiver anywhere. The death being mentioned three times comes from someone who took an earlier Titan dive. However, it is mentioned in David Pogue's story about OceanGate: https://youtu.be/29co_Hksk6o?t=160

It also occurs to me that there should be no more sophisticated consumer than a billionaire. If one really wanted, I'd imagine they could build their own submersible to their own safety specifications.

Many billionaires, including the one on board, frequently demonstrate how wholly unsophisticated and arrogant they are. Extreme hubris was on display by everyone involved.

I would reserve judgment on that, there was a teenager involved and I highly doubt they were of an age which allowed them to absorb the knowledge to properly evaluate the risks. There also was his dad and the CEO of the company on board which may have given him an extra degree of feeling that the risks were acceptable.

Yes. I feel bad for that guy the most. So young, and of course he probably didn’t had the resources to independently verify the safety of the sub. Unlike the millionaire passengers could have just thrown tenth of the ticket price at any marine engineer who would have been able to explain to them how dangerous the whole thing is.

Ok. Extreme hubris was on display by everyone involved except maybe one of them, the adult son.

Common misconception, don't need to be intelligent or sophisticated to be one, social skills and utter ruthlessness seem to be way more indicative.

Easily dismissed by "the lawyers made us do it" for people who were drawn to the "adventure" of the trip or the allure of the Titanic.

> They all had to sign multi-page waivers that mention "death" no less than three times on the first page.

You sign similar waivers for all kinds of benign things - including amusement park tickets, concerts, skateboard parks, etc.

I have a feeling the safety of this contraption was grossly oversold to the passengers...

It's one of the best arguments over that whole 'this product is known to the state of California to cause cancer' warnings.

When you have to start putting that on coffee cups, it loses all meaning.

People have to sign those waivers very often for significantly less risky activities like going ziplining, so let's not pretend signing a waiver is the same as actual informed consent.

It also looked so terribly janky. I feel like all the lights were flashing red for this craft, but maybe people were swayed by assurances from people who were a bit too enthusiastic about their product.

Billionaires get to the money by the art of charisma and bullshitting so it is entirely possible they got bullshitted all the way to the bottom on that too