Comment by ke88y | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ke88y | Hacker News Reader

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> There is something to be said about the CEO going onboard themselves...

We should be allowed to take personal risk.

But taking any form of consideration from others -- particularly $250K -- introduces at least moral responsibility for being competent and truthful.

This is not just my opinion -- it's how most guiding professions work. Ski guides, mountain guides, rock guides, etc. all have professional cultures and codes of conduct which make it very clear that a guide's risk tolerance in recreational settings has absolutely nothing to do with appropriate risk management in paid settings with clients.

Take all the recreational risks you want. The moment you take cash from someone in exchange for guiding services, the moral and legal responsibilities change drastically.

If a mountain guide took a client off-route to put up a new line with ratty gear and no beacon -- at the client's request, even -- and they both died? Our response would be "that guide is an irresponsible asshole", not "at least he had skin in the game".

> Listening to "Sub Brief" video by an 20 year US Navy submariner veteran about this case, there is a bit there that just sounds embarrassing: the CEO is on a call boasting he doesn't like to hire those "50 year old white guys" and instead hired young college graduates who are "inspirational"

Indeed. Using DEI as an excuse to justify paying bottom-dollar and not investing in a real competent safety team is pretty deplorable.

I'm a controls engineer, and I deal with people like this all the time while developing safety systems for industrial automation.

"It's safe if you don't do something stupid."

"Those [generic components] should be reliable enough, they often last for years."

"It's a good thing you didn't see the chainsaw work I did at my house last weekend"

"I'd feel perfectly comfortable with that machine if I was going to stand there"

"We've always done it that way"

When you're getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to deliver a machine, or using that machine to make millions of dollars worth of product, fighting about a $200 safety relay or $800 light curtain is not the same risk analysis as lighting fireworks in your backyard. Because it's not about your risk, it's about the risk of the new high school grad with no options except a $15/hr factory position, who has neither the knowledge nor the freedom to mitigate that risk.

Just nitpicking but is size of the fee ($250k) really relevant?

I view it as relevant, but not as they probably intended...

Personally I think a $250K luxury service falls pretty firmly into the realm of buyer beware.

This isn't some student loan for a degree in fortune telling an 18 year old was scammed into, you have to have some real wealth to consider doing this and have a responsibility to do your own research before you go diving 12,000 feet in the ocean.

Extremely expensive guiding services are not a new thing. And the degree of risk is often proportional to expense. So, rich people paying a lot of money to a guide service for the chance to risk their life is not new.

More importantly, my critique isn't about the degree of informed consent to risk. It's about competent guiding and professionalism.

Don't get me wrong: guiding people on dangerous objectives is fine. Good guides die. Clients die in circumstances that are truly accidental where there is no blame to assign, or where the client deserves the blame. That's not my critique.

But if your client dies because you use el cheapo carabiners that failed cyclic load tests or weren't certified for the application, then that would be completely inexcusable incompetence.

My critique is about incompetence, not failure to inform about risk. guides are paid both for the equipment/outfitting and also for the guiding. Being incompetent in a guiding setting is, at the very absolute least, an immoral failure to provide the goods for which you've been paid.

Again, this isn' just one internet guy's opinion. Guiding is now a mature profession, and the conduct of OceanGate runs afoul of ethical guiding conduct. And, again, the issue isn't about informed risk.

> This isn't some student loan for a degree in fortune telling an 18 year old was scammed into

Suleman Dawood was 19.

I hope theres still a lawsuit even though they signed waivers.

It seems the company misrepresented the safety risk.

> Suleman Dawood was 19.

And his father had half a million dollars to blow on seeing the Titanic in person.

That would be a more coherent argument if we were discussing design and regulation financial products. But it turns out that money can't buy a do-over on life.

Again, people hire guides to do things that they cannot do on their own. Being competent and making appropriate risk assessment choices for your client, where possible, is a huge part of the service that a guide is being paid to perform. OceanGate failed on both counts.

I'm not defending OceanGate, I'm just saying it is relevant to the discussion because we're talking about an inherently risky leisure activity for wealthy elites, they should have done better research on the company.

You hire a shitty guide to take you to the bottom of the ocean because you're bored and the guide gets you killed, that's two mistakes, not one.

> that's two mistakes

That's certainly fair. OceanGate and its investors should be wiped out, to the extent liability allows, and I would be supportive of a prosecutor who pierces the veil if capital was extracted. The proceeds should go to the only set of victims who didn't have a say in risk -- perhaps the 19 year old, but BY FAR most importantly the taxpayers of the nation states who paid for this ridiculous SAR exercise.

> Just nitpicking but is size of the fee ($250k) really relevant?

Yes - because, in general, large rewards can disproportionately skew a decision maker's risk evaluation. Especially in a situation where there may be only verly limited opportunities to get paid.

For an example see the 1986 K2 disaster [1].

I'm not saying this did or didn't happen in the present tragic situation. But its a risk.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_K2_disaster

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