When wealthy adventurers take risks,who foots the bill for rescue attempts?
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Search and rescue isn’t the same thing as health care.
Not all. Additional. No moving the goalposts.
The symmetry would be from the (gross, hand-wavy) average cost of a cancer treatment for 1 individual * the number lost at sea. I thought this was implied. This is not relevant to private insurance and other supplemental solutions. The issue is in regard to state owned response.
The nations whose responsibility it would be to help these people have been trying their best to look the other way.
It seems the public expense spent on rescuing those lost at sea is very much in proportion to the net worth of the people in distress.
Who has this responsibility is at the heart of the controversy.
This was a submarine under water with alive people running out of air. The location was known and people monitoring were able to contact government immediately which gave them a chance. When a piece of wood is used to sail across the ocean and the boat capsizes rescuers don't know the location, no one is monitoring on shore to alert countries and they cannot survive days under water.
Rich / poor doesn't play into this but makes a great narrative to sell a story that you bought
By not saving people in the Mediterranean, it acts as a deterrent to future attempts.
The public expense in the Mediterranean sea is very large when you add up diversions of commercial traffic, rescue volunteers funded by donations, national agencies coast guards, and EU Frontex.
You’re acting like this is obvious to everyone rather than the center of massive controversy.
Some of those who cross the Mediterranean in flimsy boats are adventurers, maybe not so different from the passengers of the Titan. Many others are children and adults trying to escape genuine threats to their lives, and they’d be entitled to refugee protection. Personally I don’t think we should sacrifice the latter to dissuade the former.
Money gives you a huge megaphone to ask for help
Why would the novelty of a leathal crisis influence the amount spent on the effort? I dont understand your reasoning.
Frequency more than novelty, though novelty certainly brings attention. If we were launching multi-million dollar submarine rescue missions every day, we’d quickly see a system of cost controls and incentive management arise around it, too.
Lets face it, this one had the right mix of ingredients (Titanic, adventure, recklessness, tech, scams, greed, dramatics, and most of all, a 90 hour deadline clock ticking, perfect for a news cycle) to get in the limelight, and maybe there were some other breaking stories that would benefit from something else drawing away attention ...?
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the US medical system, and government support programs, but the lack of nuance detracts from your position.
The question is what exactly "huge risks" are; I've been hiking on my own and sometimes didn't see anyone for days; is that a "huge risk" or just a "risk"? Do I need an evaluation to see how "prepared" I was? In the end everyone takes some amount of "risk" at times, so how do you define "exceptional" risk and codify that in law? I'm certainly not looking forward to a future where everything that could possibly perhaps be risky are regulated to the microscopic level.
And if we look at the overall costs, are we really talking about that much money? Is it unreasonable for the public to carry these costs? Personally I'd say yes. But is it enough money to act upon, considering any legislation will also restrict normal people? A lot less sure about that.
Arizon’s stupid motorist law “states that any motorist who becomes stranded after driving around barricades to enter a flooded stretch of roadway may be charged for the cost of their rescue” [1].
This transfer of liability is simpler than insurance requirements. And it doesn’t strike me as callous when dealing with wealthy people voluntarily engaging in risky activities within a jurisdiction that has the capability to save them.
This is really the problem, because you can narrowly define specific situations like "drive around barricade to enter a flooded road" or "go on a deep-sea dive in an uncertified experimental sub built by some cowboys", but the list is basically infinite so it's not really practical to codify all of those situations, except those that occur frequently enough that it's a structural issue (which I presume is the case with this specific law).
It should be. Recreational risks with a reasonably high probability of peril seems to fit the bill. Perhaps limited to cases where the life is actually saved, and capped when reasonable safety precautions are taken to avoid disincentivising one from calling for help.
Leave it to the agencies who need to actually conduct the rescues. The APA’s public notice requirements should ensure it’s predictable.
I don't have the confidence that they will.
0. https://www.sail-world.com/Australia/Unsinkable-A-Young-Woma...
What's the point of being wealthy if you're treated like just anyone else?
[0]: https://beaconregistration.noaa.gov/RGDB/registrationRequire...
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/20/1171063782/missing-american-s...
Attractive, rich people get more attention.
People who try and push the envelope, as misguided as it might be, get more attention than everyday human #66384385 on the street.
GPT4 gets more attention than some neural net demo I make on my Raspberry Pi.
Why would it ever be otherwise? A world like that would have us still in caves.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
why does the public have to pay for all those extreme sports people who need rescuing?
they obviously should be required to have additional insurance...
Also, how would requiring insurance for this even work logistically? Do we station cops anywhere a risky activity could conceivably happen? Do we arrest people if we think, post facto, they did something with a risk of rescue (like go on a hike) and didn't buy insurance for it?
And second, these rescues are typically cheaper then searching bottom of the sea or moving massive military equipment half the world around without advanced warning. Rescures in these situations simply do not have infinite resources and work with what they have.
And third, climbers typically do not try to use the situation to launder liberarian "public sector bad" while being actively rescued by damm military. The company called for help 10 hours after loss of contact, the company made whole series of "yolo" decisions too and then tried to turn the situation against their political enemies... who were just paying their customers rescue.
Not in France. Not sure which alps are expensive?
The mountains themselves are not expensive. The expensive part happen when you need rescue after your climbing and don't have insurance. The insurance itself is not expensive and is super easy to get.
The calculation is based on your perception of the quality of their choices leading up to their circumstances. Like if there were the hands in the water of people drowning that you can pull into a boat, when do you grab the one with the possibly-racist tattoo?
You rescue small groups of adventurers because they are engaged in a socially valuable activity. The whole point of having search and rescue helicopters to rescue skiiers and hikers is that hikers and skiiers represent people who help themselves, and they are part of the positive group we have organized our society to encourage and incentivize. Some societies encourage and incentivize corruption and exploitation, and so they don't need to rescue hikers unless they can be used to extract favours from foreign governments. There's a limited amount of effort you're going to make to rescue a narco-sub crew because they're a hostile and invasive force that is importing poison, violence, and exploitation into your society. There is a notion of "us," and "not-us," everywhere in the world, and in the case of some rich toursts in a sub, they were still "us."
The sadistic glee about these rich people dying in a sub, and the fantasies some people have written about their suffering, makes me wonder who among us would be really worth saving.
> How many times a year do you think people get cancer vs get lost at sea?
> Not to mention that if a poor person does something stupid and gets lost, millions could still be spent in their rescue.
> Every rescue attempt is a practice run for something more important in the future.
I want to remind, that at same time about 700 refugees were lost in Mediterranean. Without any SnR, practice run or another.
Were there Americans on board?
Governments treat their citizens’ lives differently. It’s not fair, but it’s an obvious consequence of our organisation around nation states.
I know a bit about Everest rescues. The government is pretty useless being nowhere near the action and insurance services are kind of useless on the whole too. Rescues are mostly done if at all by other climbers / sherpas on the mountain and usually free though offering the sherpas a few thousand in cash probably would help. Helicopters won't fly without credit card payment (about $15k from base camp).
That was particularly distasteful of that company.
While there are of course major differences, I think the point is that public opinion would dictate that if we know about something like this people would want a search are rescue mission launched. The only reason it wouldn't be launched for someone with less money is because that person's family/friends wouldn't have the PR team to tell everyone about it.
I don't want to live in a world were if we know someone is lost at sea we just sit back and say, "well they made their bed." That's a pretty callous world to live in, where we see someone in trouble and turn our backs...
and by the way there is a parallel for poor people, just ask Italy/Spain, they're constantly dealing with migrants trying and failing to come across the Mediterranean in boats not built for that, as soon as they see it's not gonna work, they do launch rescue missions.
Descending far below rated depths in a carbon-fiber single-hulled "submarine" operated by a lunatic seems to the average person to be a simple reckoning of supreme foolishness or gullibility on the parts of the victims of the Titan implosion.
It does not matter whether adventurers are wealthy or not, there are plenty of high-risk activities that sometimes require costly rescue missions, while being affordable to middle-class people (e.g. mountaineering or caving). The mechanism to footing the bill should be the same, so there is no reason to single-out wealthy ones.
Explorers always make plenty of rookie mistakes. I'm sure there are plenty of lessons for future explorers, first respondents, regular people from these events.