There’s a long article about the Titan submersible that imploded a few days ago that’s worth reading. It’s by Ben Taub at The New Yorker, and if you hit a paywall open it in an incognito or inprivate window. I don’t subscribe to the New Yorker but can manage to read something in it now and then if I’m persistent.
The main character in it is Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate. Rush is depicted as someone with such unbounded faith in his own greatness that he didn’t believe the laws of physics applied to him. A number of people within the submersible industry, such as it is, knew or suspected that Rush’s submersible was a lemon. Author Ben Taub walks the reader through how decisions were made to build the thing the way it was built, which was basically the way Rush wanted it built so he could take passengers below to see the Titanic. Potential safety problems, when brouht to Rush’s attention, were dismissed out of hand. People tiptoed around him because he had a lot of money and influence and could ruin careers.
Here’s a sample:
“Stockton strategically structured everything to be out of U.S. jurisdiction” for its Titanic pursuits, the former senior OceanGate employee told me. “It was deliberate.” In a legal filing, the company reported that the submersible was “being developed and assembled in Washington, but will be owned by a Bahamian entity, will be registered in the Bahamas and will operate exclusively outside the territorial waters of the United States.” Although it is illegal to transport passengers in an unclassed, experimental submersible, “under U.S. regulations, you can kill crew,” McCallum told me. “You do get in a little bit of trouble, in the eyes of the law. But, if you kill a passenger, you’re in big trouble. And so everyone was classified as a ‘mission specialist.’ There were no passengers—the word ‘passenger’ was never used.” No one bought tickets; they contributed an amount of money set by Rush to one of OceanGate’s entities, to fund their own missions.
“It is truly hard to imagine the discernment it took for Stockton to string together each of the links in the chain,” Patrick noted. “ ‘How do I avoid liability in Washington State? How do I avoid liability with an offshore corporate structure? How do I keep the U.S. Coast Guard from breathing down my neck?’ ”
Here’s another bit.
“If you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating,” Rush said, at the GeekWire Summit last fall. “If you’re operating within a known environment, as most submersible manufacturers do—they don’t break things. To me, the more stuff you’ve broken, the more innovative you’ve been.”
The Titan’s viewport was made of acrylic and seven inches thick. “That’s another thing where I broke the rules,” Rush said to Pogue, the CBS News journalist. He went on to refer to a “very well-known” acrylic expert, Jerry D. Stachiw, who wrote an eleven-hundred-page manual called “Handbook of Acrylics for Submersibles, Hyperbaric Chambers, and Aquaria.” “It has safety factors that—they were so high, he didn’t call ’em safety factors. He called ’em conversion factors,” Rush said. “According to the rules,” he added, his viewport was “not allowed.”
It seemed as if Rush believed that acrylic’s transparent quality would give him ample warning before failure. “You can see every surface,” he said. “And if you’ve overstressed it, or you’ve even come close, it starts to get this crazing effect.”
“And if that happened underwater . . .”
“You just stop and go to the surface.”
“You would have time to get back up?” Pogue asked.
“Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s way more warning than you need.”
Ben Taub then interviews an expert on acrylic hull technology who said Stockton Rush had no idea what he was talking about. And from what I understand, the submersible’s ballast had been dropped and the vessel was beginning to ascend when communication was lost. The “mission specialists” knew something was wrong but didn’t have time to get out of trouble before implosion.
I started to title this post “Morons with Money.” But I changed my mind. I don’t know that Stockton Rush was a moron, but he definitely was a fool. One suspects he had always been cushioned with enough privilege and money that he never had to fully experiences the consequences of failure. The path to wisdom is paved with doubt.
And this takes us to Elon Musk. I take it this weekend he made changes to Twitter that just about made it unusuable for some people. See Elon Musk Finally Broke Twitter by Alex Shepherd at The New Republic. And I wouldn’t get into one of Musk’s spacecrafts if I were given a free ticket. One hopes that Musk has stayed out of managing SpaceX while he’s been busy destroying Twitter. See also 17 fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot at WaPo. “… some of Musk’s decisions — such as widely expanding the availability of the features and stripping the vehicles of radar sensors — appear to have contributed to the reported uptick in incidents, according to experts who spoke with The Post.”
The recent court decision on affirmative action gives us concern for those who have too many barriers to face. But maybe we should be concerned for those who don’t have enough barriers. If there really were such a thing as an even playing field, would I be writing about Elon Musk or Stockton Rush right now?
Stockton Rush was named for two of his ancestors who signed the Declaration of Independence: Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush. His maternal grandfather was an oil-and-shipping tycoon. As a teen-ager, Rush became an accomplished commercial jet pilot, and he studied aerospace engineering at Princeton, where he graduated in 1984.
No, probably not.
In other news. We’ve had a nice rash of mass shootings over the 4th of July weekend. Ain’t freedom grant?
Happy Fourth of July to maha, and one and all!!!!!!
OT on fools with submersibles, and psychos and small-"handed" young males with guns:
I see where many towns and cities are getting away from fireworks displays on special occasions, and doing laser-light, and synchronized-drone, shows.
I think this is great!
Now, mind you, I've been to some of the greatest fireworks displays in NYC/US history: The 1976 bicentennial in NY's harbor, and the centennial for the Statue of Liberty, and the one for the Brooklyn Bridge.
So, you can say I'm spoiled. Or that I've had my fill.
But truly, I hate the smells and sounds of fireworks. And I think I have "2nd Hand PTSD" from my family's experiences in WWII, because the "BOOMS" shake me to my bones.
Fireworks are horrible for pets, which are terrorized by the racket – and the smells and lights if they're outside.
Fireworks can also start uncontrollable fires.
And finally, they can be terrible for veterans – and other people with PTSD.
So, I whole heartedly approve of the changes from fireworks, to laser-light, and synchronized-drone see shows.
Now, what are the odds we make it to America's 250th, in 2026? I might still be alive for that one.
And the 300th – for which, thankfully, I'll be looooong gone by then!
I happened to be in Greenwich Village in 1976 and will never forget the fireworks going on all around me. The memory I have is light and smoke all around me, with my hands over my ears. It was great fun for a 20 something, visiting the big city.
"And I think I have "2nd Hand PTSD" from my family's experiences in WWII…". That's nothing like 1st Hand, and I speak as a Vietnam vet, May 67 to May 68, where during 8 months in 25th Infantry Division in G-3 on the night shift, I experienced 66 mortar and rocket attacks. For a few years, and explosion had me looking for the nearest bunker, but now I just flinch.
“If you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating,” Rush said, at the GeekWire Summit last fall”
Mission accomplished.
"People tiptoed around him because he had a lot of money and influence and could ruin careers", here let me fix that: "would ruin careers". People aren't scared of people unless they are assholes, money or not. I think that the estate of this fool and every fool that died with this moron should be zeroed out and the money split among the agencies that risked people's lives to try and find these idiots. I wouldn’t have lifted a finger. Leave all that money to the taxpayers! We have had a small "rally" (10-12 idiots, Stump flags, signs) by magats at our exit of the Indiana toll road for the last couple of days. That’s how they "celebrate" the 4th, waving Stump flags and flipping people off who don't honk. Gee I hope they stay safe!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRCLHBhZPQ4
There's a good lesson in there for the young ones.
I’ve worked for guys after having been told that we’d be building a foundation of greatness together for the long term. They’d even smilingly call me stuff like “buddy” and “bro”. Unfortunately, I forgot about the Beware of Assholes Rule and all of them wound up selling out and/or dumping my ass no matter how loyal or valuable I’d been, without ever looking back.
I think that behind any visionary chutzpah or entrepreneurial moxie, if you’re sensing an asshole (or maybe even just a Dunning Kruger), it’s always wise to strategize accordingly since it’ll always be a matter of time before they turn against you.
"…someone with such unbounded faith in his own greatness that he didn’t believe the laws of physics applied to him." Terrific turn of phrase, Maha,
Suppose someone with the same faith in his own greatness wasn't inclined to engineering. Suppose this product of too much money and scarcely-concealed confidence in his genetic superiority increased his wealth thru various frauds and failures and became a media "icon", still propped up by deception but idolized my millions for scarcely-concealed racism and open contempt for everyone but himself.
The fool decides to enter politics, starting at the top, of course. He has a ready-made constituency of racists who worship him for his wealth and rudeness. He hates who they hate – nothing else matters. When I say nothing, I mean not truth, not honesty, not loyalty to anyone under him (and everyone is under him.) He's found out as a business cheat, a cheat on his wife, a business fraud, a tax cheat with an open admiration for despots around the world. Hypothetically, of course.
Inevitably, the fool decided he was too great to be bothered with rules, conventions, traditions, historical alliances, and even the law. When the majority rejects him in an election, the fool organizes an insurrection in a multi-level scheme to overturn his loss. We're still dealing with fiction, mind you.
At the end of this tale, like the CEO who thought he could order the laws of physics to conform to his will, the crush of the law wipes out the fool, his fortune, and his lawyers leaving the mindless, impotent cult mouthing threats against the majority who rejected their false prophet.
It would make a good book – maybe even a movie.
Not realistic, a country would have to be rotten, corrupt, feckless and stupid beyond belief to allow all that to happen.
It is the ultimate cautionary tale of a fool with money, but also should be considered a sobering lesson for those inclined to be anti-regulation.
A fool and his money…can get into a lot more trouble than a fool without money.
Stockton Rush and Elon Musk are points on the line of hubris, with Rush being the more extreme of the two, deliberately skirting any regulation or oversight, even going down with his own creation.
Musk's SpaceX and Tesla have to abide by the regs and standards of the problem domains they play in. For SpaceX this is NASA's engineering requirements, for Tesla, it's all the ways cars driven on American highways have to meet certain safety regs.
I’m a big fan of Aptera, an exciting solar/electric vehicle that’s being born a few score miles south of me. I’ve followed their journey for years (including near death of the whole project), noting the various compromises they had to make for the sake of meeting US highway regs.
This isn’t to say Musk has or hasn’t taken shortcuts with Tesla – after all, things like autopilot probably are still unregulated, so there’s lots of room for mistakes. But the potential to save tons of money – especially by trucking firms – is an enormous draw to get these systems perfected, and to get there first.
As for his views on Twitter, he strikes me as the typical engineering nerd with little or no exposure or interest in the humanities, and so this is his Achilles heel, which he ingenuously exposes to the world whenever he starts typing.
BTW, Jay Leno driving an early version of the Aptera
We are seeing a bit of change in the political rhetoric. The right-wing position on guns was politically dominant and was that guns were not the problem. Any contention that they were, was met with the contention such a statement was false or mostly false, but now not so now so much. Guns and their uncontrolled proliferation are now seen as the problem, and politically referred to as such. Guns as a problem and a main factor in the violence epidemic is now more acceptable in political rhetoric, and statements to that effect are considered true or mostly true in more circles. Any change from the status quo of the dominance of the right-wing mis-think about guns is a move in a progressive direction. I expect blue dogs to molt to a lighter shade in this matter.
So too, on the notion that the free market and big capital unregulated has some sort of magical moral sense. That too, is now seen as being false or mostly false. That appears to be a large tenet of the gospel of greed, where wealth is considered as a sign from God that the holder is endowed with special powers and for sure predestined for heaven (at least if they are a big donor). Now we see evidence this too is a right-wing fantasy. How close is right-wing to becoming a synonym for poppycock?
"We are seeing a bit of change in the political rhetoric. The right-wing position on guns was politically dominant and was that guns were not the problem"
I don't see it? The only change I see regarding gun violence is by democrats and main stream media, with every "mass shooting" less and less time is spent, lives are categorized by race, urban or not, political motives? The gun lobby seems to have won. The GOP stays silent unless of course the shooter is black, Hispanic or a mooslim! It's getting normalized at a rapid pace. Why would the GOP change their stance on guns? I don't see "our side" mounting even the simplest attack. The gun lobby seems unbeatable, I don't understand it, maybe if half the country gets gunned down the other half might wise up?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRls7nXI__U
I suppose the percentage of winning republican candidates sporting weapons in ads will be good evidence. True at this point skepticism is warranted.
I'm going way off topic but I read an article by Digby from today on the aging (and white) population of the GOP. There's some nice pie charts for those who don't like numbers. But the article got me thinking.
Looking at the oldest and youngest segments of the chart gives a major clue why liberals will prevail if our ideals and the Constitution survive for 15 years. Let me wander into some wonkish projection. The youngest segment of the GOP 18-34 makes up 9% of the GOP. The oldest slice 65+ is 39% of the GOP. How much of the old gang will die off in 15 years? Using 2020 census numbers, about three-fourths of the oldest group will pass in 15 years.
How does that translate in numbers? About a third of the GOP (33%) will kick the bucket and be replaced by 9% (or less) for a net loss of 22%. Assuming everything in the Democratic party is constant, in any election that the GOP won by 22% or less, the Democrat will prevail.
Fifteen years ago, we were in an economic tailspin. It was a while back, but not ancient history. Two things are certain – 1) fifteen years will pass and 2) the mortality projections will be close – unless we have a catastrophe many times worse than Covid. A bunch of you are about my age and some of us will live long enough to see the seismic shift.
If the GOP brain trusts employ people smarter than me (not a high hurdle) they know these numbers better than I do. Democracy can't survive as a reality if Conservatives are to keep power. They're barely in the game now, and a 20% reduction in voting strength is a certainty (unless there's a major shift in GOP policy that the current GOP voters won't consider.) The objective for the kingmakers on the conservative side has to be to destroy the power of Democracy but leave the illusion of elections intact.
What that suggests to me is that progressives need to fan the flames of young idealists. Carry the vision of economic and social justice despite the attacks on human rights. Recruit young people to VOTE as the way of making the dream real. Endure. The clock is on our side. Educational censorship that's happening in Florida is no accident. Keeping young people woke is the entire battle.
Good analysis, one exception might be that some people who may identify as democrat or independent go to the dark side once they turn 65 and get on the county (SSI-medicare)? Don't ask me why but I've seen it happen in my own family and close friends. So the GOP seems to create support that defies many polls. I do think in the long run your analysis will hold but maybe 15 years is a bit optimistic, I hope not!
@Doug – I'm a big picture person so I love what you wrote. Just as money (conservatives) is able to do, Dems have to learn to play the long game. We have to trust in the demographics, while realizing that victory isn't going to come without work.
I watched "Navalny" over the 4th (free trial of HBO Max). It's a pretty amazing movie about the Russian dissident politician who was poisoned by Putin. In the movie, Navalny actually talks over the phone to those who tried to poison him, coaxing out a report over what went wrong, by pretending to be a superior officer (pretty devious, yes?). The conversation went viral. The film concludes with Navalny addressing his fellow Russians: "the only thing evil needs to succeed is for good people to do nothing". The same thing applies here.
maha,
You ok?
We Old Libtatds have to look after one another. 😉