With oxygen supplies dwindling - under 24 hours’ worth remains - the next few hours are critical.
I hope they’re able to bring them back up. Must be terrifying trapped on the sea floor. But also… seriously questioning the decision making process these supposedly super successful people go through.
Oh wow, almost like every single mammal on the planet. What evil shits, amirite? How dare they do things that are exciting and available to them.
It’s more about them getting into a slapdash deathisphere because as rich people they’re rarely exposed to real risk.
I mean, yeah. Why would anyone fucking free climb without ropes?? Like, are you insane??
Why would anyone go spelunking through holes that takes an extraordinary effort to squeeze through? See: nutty putty cave incident.
People expose themselves to radiation so they can visit Chernobyl. Why? It’s fucking dangerous. You’re going to get sick if you stay too long.
Why would you DRIVE INTOXICATED WHEN EVERYONE TELLS YOU NOT TO? You can order a car on your phone, yet people are still driving drunk.
People do stupid shit all the time.
I can imagine that if you have the money, that you would want to do something exotic like this. Same way like other people want to visit unique places on holidays. I do question their thought process when they saw the actual submarine before take-off. It doesn’t really scream “high-tech” or robust from the footage that I have seen. However, even then, they cannot assess that being just a tourist in this situation.
I think there is quite some blame for the CEO of OceanGate (love the name by the way, screams scandal). It appears the framework was not in place to conduct these trips safely. Lack of safety features and backup vehicles to retrieve the vessel in case of an emergency are some serious oversights.
Some More News, the podcast and YouTube show, has a great episode on this called “Are Rich people OK?”. Basically, they dive into all the research suggesting that getting rich basically breaks people’s brains. As relevant here, rich people tend to believe that they are rich because they are super smart, and that leads to them thinking any decisions they make must be correct because how could they be wrong?
The Some More News episode discusses this study which stuck with me
One experiment by psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, invited pairs of strangers to play a rigged Monopoly game where a coin flip designated one player rich and one poor. The rich players received twice as much money as their opponent to begin with; as they played the game, they got to roll two dice instead of one and move around the board twice as fast as their opponent; when they passed “Go,” they collected $200 to their opponent’s $100.
In various ways — through body language and boasting about their wealth, by smacking their pieces loudly against the playing board and making light of their opponents’ misfortune — the rich players began to act as though they deserved the good fortune that was largely a result of their lucky roll of the dice.
At the end of the game, when researchers asked the rich players why they had won the game, not one person attributed it to luck.
“They don’t talk about the flip of the coin. They talk about the things that they did. They talk about their acumen, they talk about their competencies, they talk about this decision or that decision,” that contributed to their win, Piff said in an interview with host David Brancaccio.
We have some not-close friends who are very wealthy. Not billionaires but very deep into the millionaire range. Mansions, fleet of expensive cars, private jet. That sort of thing. The husband took up all sorts of extreme hobbies. He does rather risky vacations and adventures (wife refuses to go with him because she’s more grounded and not willing to risk the lives of their kids). It’s almost like the husband has come to believe that being rich makes him immortal, as if any situation he might find himself in can be remedied with enough cash. He seems to not understand that there are simply some perils that all the money in the world cannot save you from.
I cannot get over the CEO going on a sub that has so many whistleblowers on it’s structural flaws that it might as well be a floating piece of wood.
