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Comment by solarmist | Hacker News Reader

How is this related? Or is this an “oh did you know in addition to the titanic…”

Edit: I meant this literally. I didn’t know about this or that it also happened this week.

There are finite resources out there for sea rescues. The argument is that they're being applied to 5 people on a pleasure trip instead of 500 migrants who presumably have much better reasons to risk their lives.

The resources intended to locate a deep sea submersible probably don't overlap with the resources needed to search for survivors in the Med.

By the same token you could just argue that since both cases involved people who were certainly already dead, the pageantry of a search serves purposes other than efficient use of resources.

I imagine part of the government's involvement here is trying to test their own submarine detection and rescue tooling. There aren't otherwise many other real-world places to attempt them. I'm sure they've gained confidential valuable insights so far.

https://archive.is/pSpem

The Navy heard it as it happened. Apparently they were aware of the loss of communications nearly in real time.

There are finite resources for everything. Why are these five people more worthy to be saved than the thousands of people who will die today from hunger?

That's a very good question.

It's related in that both are maritime disasters that happened in the past week.

Ah. Okay, I didn’t know about that.

I think the amount of resources being marshaled, including those of the US Navy, to try and save a bunch of wealthy people who went on a pointless suicide run, actually says quite a bit about how are world is ordered. The US Navy could easily be deployed to save migrant ships or in a similar humanitarian capacity, but that would set a “bad precedent” in terms of our obligation to these people.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the US Coast Guard (not Navy) and the Canadians were deployed because the mini-sub went missing off the coast of America and not off the coast of Greece in the Mediterranean. By that logic, they could just as easily dispatch the Indian Navy.

No, the US Navy, in addition to the US Coast Guard is involved as well:

> However, on Wednesday a U.S. Navy official told ABC News it had sent a portable crane system that can reach 20,000 feet deep to St. John’s, Newfoundland, so it can be welded onto a ship to take it to the search area for the missing submersible.

> Additionally, the Navy announced it was sending experts and a Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System, or FADOSS, which it described as a “motion compensated lift system designed to provide reliable deep ocean lifting capacity for the recovery of large, bulky, and heavy undersea objects such as aircraft or small vessels.”

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/missing-titanic-tour-sub-rescu...

And the Sixth Fleet operates out of the Mediterranean, so, sure, there’s no political valence to any of this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Sixth_Fleet

Classic "whataboutism".

500 > 5

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