[PSUBS-MAILIST] Titan submersible missing at Titanic site

[Sean T. Stevenson via Personal_Submersibles]

SAR must remain a publically funded endeavour, because the alternative would incentivize people not to call when they need help, unavoidably resulting in loss of life. You can't bill someone retroactively for SAR either, for the same reason. The best thing we can do for mountaineers and mariners alike is education, outreach, and making critical safety equipment readily available at reasonably achievable price points.

An argument could be made (and I suspect, will eventually be made in court by the survivors of the deceased) that the extent of the controversy surrounding the safety of the Titan design was not fully disclosed to the passengers, and that they signed their respective liability waivers taking the presented language at face value, when in fact some critical directly relevant information was deliberately withheld, and that this could render the waiver legally ineffective. I'm sure the courts will sort it out.

Whether you agree or not that one should be free to assume any amount of personal risk in an endeavour (the argument against being that no fatality does not present downstream risk or injury to others, whether that is friends and family, SAR and emergency services personnel, etc.), it is clear that this incident further imposed a significant risk to the paying passengers, who may not have been fully informed of the risks despite signing the waiver. If such pertinent information was deliberately withheld, that would seem to be a situation which is indeed firmly in the public interest to regulate.

Sean

-------- Original Message --------
On Jun. 23, 2023, 19:13, Marc de Piolenc via Personal_Submersibles wrote:

> Reason magazine had it right. Nobody has the right to prohibit somebody else from risking his life, whether it's the nincompoop going over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel or skydivers passing a parachute to one another in mid-air. The only possible wrong-doing would have been if the operators had told prospective passengers that the submersible was Certified, Authorized, Classed or otherwise Blessed by the Omniscient Nanny State or The Experts, but that is not what happened. In fact, they were told (and made to acknowledge this in writing) that the craft was experimental and that their use of it could result in loss of life. The other "issue," acerbically brought up by the political Left, was the use of public resources to search for them, but that differs only in scale from a Sheriff's Department helicopter being used to rescue mountain climbers. If one is wrong, so is the other, but if one is right... The central question is: do we own our own lives? If so, we are free men and free to take risks and accept the consequences of taking them. If not... Marc de Piolenc -- Archivale catalog: http://www.archivale.com Mass Flow (ducted fans): http://massflow.archivale.com ProZ profile: https://www.proz.com/profile/639380 Substack account: https://fmarcdepiolenc.substack.com Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.ph/piolenc _______________________________________________ Personal_Submersibles mailing list Personal_Submersibles at psubs.org http://www.psubs.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/personal_submersibles
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.whoweb.com/pipermail/personal_submersibles/attachments/20230624/03451732/attachment.html>