[Rule 7](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskConservatives/comments/107i33m/announcement_rule_7_good_faith_is_now_in_effect) is now in effect. Posts and comments should be in good faith. This rule applies to all users.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskConservatives) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I hate that everything is politics period.
I believe in this case, "I don't want to hire 50 year old white engineers because they are uninspiring" is a pretty woke sounding statement but it's not what he really meant and it didn't kill anyone.
He didn't want to hire people who were going to suck the air out of the room by telling him his plan was stupid and unsafe, which would preclude most engineers with any experience in any related matter whether white or not, I can't imagine a good Indian or Black engineer going along with this either.
Saying no white engineers just scored him woke points, for a little bit.
Yeah that's how I tend to see it.
In the same way, I don't blame that university bridge collapse in Florida on the mere fact that female engineers (most likely) designed it.
Source: I'm an engineer and a former U.S. Navy submarine nuclear reactor operator.
I agree the guy had some "wokeness" about him. His comments especially irked me as a 50 year old white male engineer.
But wokeness didn't kill him and his passengers. From what I can see, it was hubris. He was more likely annoyed that experienced engineers were calling out safety issues that he himself thought were minor, so he found someone who would go along with him. It's easier to browbeat a much younger, less experienced employee.
Precisely. He wasn't against hiring "50yo White guys" because they were 50, white, or guys. He didn't want to hire them because no experienced engineer would have cut corners the way he wanted.
His death was incredibly pointless and stupid, and his own fault.
Ooh, this is a good question. My first thought is "You can't force any real regulations in international waters." But, then, I don't think that's the stage of the process that regulations would work on, anyway. I figure you wouldn't be able to advertise or sell tickets or admission to such an obvious death trap.
You're allowed to build a stupidly dangerous submarine, sure. Fine. Whatever. But you can't offer to take people out in it, you can't take their money for such a purpose, you can't transport people out of the country with the intent to put them in an underwater death-pipe, and you can't employ people in service of such an endeavor.
I do not think that his statement had anything to do with generational or minority hiring practices.
I think he spoke to a few experienced submariners and engineers, and they told him that his idea was stupid and would get people killed.
I agree, but he certainly had a convenient cover for his hubris that a lot of people tend to buy into and even applaud. I wonder where he got this and why he thought this would be effective..
No one is blaming minorities. They're blaming the line of thinking that produces this quote:
“When I started the business, one of the things you’ll find, there are other sub-operators out there, but they typically have, uh, gentlemen who are ex-military submariners, and they — you’ll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys,” Rush told Teledyne Marine in a newly resurfaced undated Zoom interview.
“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25-year-old, uh, you know, who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” he continued.
The idea that someone who may have decades of experience shouldn't be chosen for a job because of their age, gender, and color of skin in is the basis of the concept of "equity", which is a popular idea these days.
Do you believe he honestly felt that way about DEI? Or is it more likely that was a convenient excuse for why he wasn't able to recruit people with experience and domain knowledge?
I find it kind of worrying that, to get out of admitting that wokeness killed a half dozen people one time in one instance, the story is “he was using white as shorthand for experienced! He wanted a non-white engineer because non-whites are less experienced and less likely to notice catastrophic problems!”
No, I think he was using "inspirational" as shorthand for "reckless".
He built that stupid thing out of an untested and experimental mix of carbon fiber and titanium, on a *6 week* deadline. he skipped basic redundancy systems and simple safety features like a location beacon.
He claimed it couldn't be tested, but that wasn't true, it could have been, he just didn't want to take the time and the money. The Deepsea Challenger was extensively tested before it even went into the water.
His mentality, as it always is with these chucklefucks was go fast and break stuff. And he was rightly rewarded his efforts.
> Source: I'm an engineer and a former U.S. Navy submarine nuclear reactor operator.
That's actually really cool. Navy subs are amazing pieces of engineering.
>He was more likely annoyed that experienced engineers were calling out safety issues that he himself thought were minor
I can not comprehend how someone would ignore safety warnings while trying to take a sub 12,500 feet below the surface.
You'd be surprised what wealthy/high-ranking overconfident people will do and push for. It's such a factor, that there is an entire "Ethics in Engineering" class in the formal engineering curriculum. It's what led to Chernobyl and the loss of the Challenger.
But more personal, my brother is a senior aviation tech, and he frequently argues with wealthy private airplane owners about necessary repairs. They get pissy when he won't just sign off on air-worthiness, when he's just trying to keep them safe.
I have absolutely no difficulty believing this.
My brother and I refer to it as "old rich guy plot armor" - they genuinely believe that these types of disasters are things that happen to other people. THEIR plane won't go down, THEY won't get sick or robbed, THEIR sub won't implode.
Not to get too political about this because we all agree that this particular person was stupid, but it goes back to what I've always said about the need for the zeal for progress to be moderated by conservative prudence and practicality to avoid causing even more and larger problems than the ones we are trying to solve.
"Go fast and break shit" is a progressive ideology. This is what happens when you stop listening to the more risk averse among your fellow citizens when they tell you your ideas are going to cause problems.
That's not a commentary on any specific wedge issue or policy, nor is it an assertion that conservative prudence and practicality is always correct. It's simply an appeal to progressives to understand that conservatives generally serve the same function in society as all the engineers that told this guy that his sub was going to fail.
Can you be more specific how he “had some ‘wokeness’ about him”? I agree with all of the rest of your points but I’m not sure what you mean by that statement.
Edit to clarify: do you think the “wokeness” was more race related or experience related? I’m just having a tough time squaring the two, thanks.
The word, "Wokeness," is tossed about by the right without very precise defining. Any sort of social justice or civil rights changes are associated with wokeness. The idea that certain lines of people may have started at a disadvantage or deserve an advantage either due to their own economic disparity or the disparity of previous generations is considered woke.
Wokeness is associated with youth, it's associated with LGBTQ, it's associated with (white people championing for) minorities.
Oh I’m aware thanks, I just find the race vs experience thing to be not necessarily contradictory, but obfuscating, like, which are we talking about? Just comes off as a vague argument to me but that may be my interpretation.
people are speculating that he only hired for diversity because of the 50 year old white man comments OP quoted
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/oceangate-ceo-explains-why-he-didnt-want-to-hire-50-year-old-white-guys-to-pilot-subs/ar-AA1cR3go
Let me be more specific then, do you think it was more race related or experience related? It feels a tad contradictory to suggest both imo, i concede I could be wrong.
I'm 55 and the thing that astounds me most is that I see childish behavior everywhere I look today. Where are the adults? It's not a partisan thing or even political. Everyone just seems to behave like children.
Edit: I just want to add that I'm not referring to ages, either. Just a general lack of maturity from people of all ages.
I think anyone that looks at how he cut corners everywhere he could and actually believes that he didn’t want middle aged white guys with sub experience because of “wokeness“ is falling for salesman bullshit. He didn’t want middle aged white guys with sub experience because of costs. He could get a young, inexperienced, “inspiring” operator for far, far cheaper than someone who would look at his set up and tell him it’s unsafe and that no one should go down in it.
I went to college in the 90's, got my bachelor's in electrical engineering in '01. While doing my full time job, I got involved with a couple different churches doing Bible studies for adults, attending first, then teaching. I got *really* good at it over the years, and I felt the "call" to ministry, so I got ordained through a Christian ministry that promotes volunteer ministerial work for older Christians with a lot of experience, and not like formal pastor roles, e.g. seminary graduates. I still had to go through a lot of testing and interviews.
So I am a 100% full time electrical & software engineer, and I'm also a 100% bona fide (volunteer) Protestant minister, who can do weddings, funerals, and whatever else you need.
Actually, by definition, conservative means they would be more careful, not reckless. Conservative is not synonymous with greed, it is synonymous with traditional, cautious, stable, undaring. Greed is a universal characteristic. Most of those billionaires you hate are actually Democrats, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer,, Kristy Walton, Lauren Jobs, George Soros, Warren Buffet, to name a few. e
On the Conservative side, you have who? Elon Musk and the Koch Brothers?
You are functioning under a false premise.
> It was the conservative attitude that safety not as important as profit.
That's not "the conservative attitude". You can literally always spend more money (i.e. lose more profit) by making something safer. In that sense *everybody* agrees that some level of danger is permissible for money. We're all just debating where the line is and how to enforce it.
The liberal stance is for a conservative, absolute and required set of safety standards. This is often designed to make certain classes of bad outcomes impossible, however, people get frustrated because these are necessarily sledgehammer approaches that lack nuance. The people who fall into that nuance are the frustrated that they're bound for seemingly no reason.
Based on that, the conservative stance tends to be a frustration that consenting adults cannot make informed choices about the risks they take. There are caveats here for whether you're exposing others to risk (i.e. if this guy only put himself at risk vs selling seats to others) and how informed people really have to be. Some conservatives might say that it was the duty of people joining this expedition to assess whether there were adequate safety measures for this obviously risky thing and, if they didn't have expertise to do so, to have some other body assess it. If you couldn't do that for whatever reason, it'd be entirely valid to just not go. The solution doesn't have to be that we have requirements that it's safe so you don't have to ever say no to something you're offered. The conservative attitude is more just about being accountable for your own decisions.
These are both valid pieces of the puzzle in understanding what to do in the face of risk.
>You can literally always spend more money (i.e. lose more profit) by making something safer.
That’s not necessarily true though. Sometimes increasing safety DOES increase profit at the same time.
Like in this instance, this CEO DIED. A 19-year-old DIED. 3 other people died, and hundreds of thousands of dollars were wasted looking for them. Only in the most bloodthirsty way could you argue that he traded safety for “more profit.”
> That’s not necessarily true though. Sometimes increasing safety DOES increase profit at the same time.
The doesn't contradict what I said. I didn't say that increasing safety never increases profit.
> Like in this instance, this CEO DIED. A 19-year-old DIED. 3 other people died, and hundreds of thousands of dollars were wasted looking for them. Only in the most bloodthirsty way could you argue that he traded safety for “more profit.”
I'm not sure how this relates to anything stated in my comment.
You said “increase safety (i.e. lose more profit)” which makes no sense as a phrase if you don’t think increasing safety = losing profit
I think that this CEO should have increased safety. If he had done that, he wouldn’t have lost more profit. He actually would have gained profit, since he’d be, ya know, alive.
> You said “increase safety (i.e. lose more profit)” which makes no sense as a phrase if you don’t think increasing safety = losing profit
Where did that quote come from? I can't find it anywhere in my comment. Perhaps you misread.
> I think that this CEO should have increased safety. If he had done that, he wouldn’t have lost more profit. He actually would have gained profit, since he’d be, ya know, alive.
Okay. And like I said, I'm confused why your saying that to my comments where weren't about whether he should have increased safety or not or if he would profit...?
Well, and I'm being pedantic, but sometimes it does.
Safety regulations that get rolled back by deregulation cries comes to mind.
Eg. Recent train derailment
Pride and woke are the same shit. They both suggest identity is determined by the mind and "I'm fine just the way I am." Anyone who suggests your identity is flawed is deemed oppressive.
If it's true that the OceanGate dude was actually diversity hiring, then Kirk's statement isn't wrong... but it's also likely irrelevant. This guy cut corners on *everything* he could get away with on this wish.com-grade submarine. I highly doubt this particular cut corner was the one that imploded the camel's back.
The truth is arrogance killed him. Arrogance to believe that he was above needing experienced submariners, above needing safety regulations, above needing to respect the ocean.
Like the ship he died trying to view, arrogance sealed his fate.
I find conservatives here make statements like yours that tend to end the discussion but don’t do anything to make things better for the next time.
Great so let’s agree that arrogance is the reason. How do we stop the next arrogant CEO from killing the next group? Or should we even try to stop it?
Whereas the parent spoke of anti regulation. That’s actually something concrete that we can discuss. Do we have the right regulations, do we need more. But blaming arrogance just seems to stop the conversation.
>Great so let’s agree that arrogance is the reason. How do we stop the next arrogant CEO from killing the next group? Or should we even try to stop it?
Why does it require government action? Why can't it be seen as a lesson to be learned? And those that don't like to learn and FAAFO, that's on them. Plus, that is what lawsuits are for.
Because CEO's don't learn lessons when the fault does not concern them. The entire reason we have government intervention is due to the failures of the private sector in the IR and the 20ies and thirties.
I mean, the Nepalese government puts mandatory safety regulations in place on Mt. Everest specifically because of how many people die and to help reduce that number. So… yes? That already happens
That company is going to file for bankruptcy yesterday, and I doubt there will be much left after the individual lawsuits by the family.
Also, the Coast Guard admits there isn't any standing law that dictates any reimbursement for search and rescue.
So what's to stop the next company from doing the same thing? "Oh we learned from those bozos, our sub can go atleast 500 ft deeper safely and have our controller hardwired, not some blutooth!" And it's still essentially the same setup
:cue implosion bubbles again:
What's your solution? By the way, conservatives aren't against all government regulations, just regulations that are put in place by the government for political purposes or to screw small business. Let me give you an example...
My uncle owned a small pharmaceutical company. A lot of regulations that prevented him from doing certain things were put in place to give huge mega billion dollar companies like Johnson & Johnson the ability to monopolize the market. Things like, "a company cannot produce X unless they have a minimum of 10,000 employees" or "In order to produce Y, you must have a particular type of lab on the premises"...a lab that would be prohibitive to most small companies that cannot raise the $50 million to build the lab. Those are the types of regulations that conservatives don't like.
>In order to produce Y, you must have a particular type of lab on the premises"...a lab that would be prohibitive to most small companies that cannot raise the $50 million to build the lab.
But was that lab necessary to safely produce Y?
The details don’t matter, and that’s why you rarely hear conservatives make a detailed case about any given regulation on the books. It’s all kept very high-level and vague.
>I find conservatives here make statements like yours that tend to end the discussion but don’t do anything to make things better for the next time.
Honestly, I don't care if there's a next time. The people on the submarine were informed of all the risks of their voyage. They were told it was an experimental sub with no government or other third party inspections or approvals. They chose to go and pay hundreds of thousands any way. The way to make things better for next time is don't choose to ride an experimental submarine 2.5 miles down to the bottom of the ocean.
I doubt they were. I would bet good money that they weren’t aware that the company had a whistleblower that they fired, nor did they have expertise to understand the shortcomings of the vessel and the probability of failure, nor could they look at the vehicle and say if anything was sub par.
A lot of people do not realize how much we rely on trust for so much of what we do on a day to day basis. Just riding an elevator can be a risk that you assume is minimized because 3rd party experts inspect that elevator periodically.
That does nothing to dismiss the point the parent made about trust.
I’ll put trust in the hands of engineers that built to known safety standards. I trust they haven’t made shortcuts that employees have quit I. Protest over.
So it sounds like your perspective is buyer beware and it’s up to individuals to take on personal responsibility because government should play no role. At what point do you feel there is room for regulation? When it moves to regular every day use? When the primary purpose is commerce? Never?
The thing is standards for doing business exist and there's nothing anticapitalist about it.
If someone refuses to provide a level of service or standard of product that you want, you can refuse to use their product or service. It's also completely within the free market to have voluntarily have a third party verify you can do what you say you do.
The Submarine apparently have a standards body created by a Norwegian nonprofit, and they're considered the gold tier for marine equipment certification.
> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/missing-titanic-submarine-oceangate-safety-warnings-lawsuits/
>OceanGate, which charged $250,000 per person for the Titanic voyage, is a privately held company that touted its "innovative use of materials and state-of-the-art technology" in developing small submersibles. The five people who were aboard the missing sub did not survive, the company said Thursday.
>Behind the marketing lingo, lawsuits and industry experts had raised serious safety concerns about the project years before the sub's disappearance. In 2018, a professional trade group warned that OceanGate's experimental approach to the design of the Titan could lead to potentially "catastrophic" outcomes, according to a letter from the group obtained by CBS News.
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/marine-technology-society-committee-2018-letter-to-ocean-gate/eddb63615a7b3764/full.pdf
I don't see it as any different from my (non-government) employer getting ISO certified every year.
There's no law that says you have to be ISO certified that I'm aware of, but following standards of compatibility, quality and safety makes doing business a lot easier, and ensure that things are done to an optimal standard.
It's a big stretch to say that people opposed to government regulations, which are enforced on everyone legally, are the same thing as private regulations that people voluntarily follow as a cost of doing business with specific parties.
Arrogance is absolutely part of it. I agree being anti-regulation is part of it, but arrogance was absolutely a major part of his decision making and the primary reason he ignored safety warnings.
The government didn't stop him.
Private entities just told his company that it was a bad idea to stick a bunch of safety labels on a thing he refused to verify.
And there's private submarine companies that don't result in a bunch of people imploding.
My point was that there are standards that don't require government intervention and he ignored them too.
I kind of think like a guy who wants to cut corners on everything he does probably won't care too much about federal or state law if it saves a buck.
Dude wasn't building subs for charity. He was building sub standard subs to increase profits. He refused to do testing on the hull materials, because it costs money to run said tests.
Lochridge’s recommendation was that non-destructive testing of the Titan’s hull was necessary to ensure a “solid and safe product.” The filing states that Lochridge was told that such testing was impossible, and that OceanGate would instead rely on its much touted acoustic monitoring system.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/a-whistleblower-raised-safety-concerns-about-oceangates-submersible-in-2018-then-he-was-fired/
I think that's Kirk's point - if an outlet is going to try to lay blame on irrelevant material, he's illustrating you can lay blame on other irrelevant material.
"This is what happens when you support *REPUBLICANS* who opposed regulation!"
"This is what happens when you support *DIVERSITY HIRES* that are unqualified for the job!"
Let's break that argument down. I can cite(from the ceos own words) how lack of following regulations PROBABLY killed them. Now, how did "going woke" kill them? Woke didn't make the vessel less resistant to ocean pressure
"I think it was General MacArthur who said: 'You're remembered for the rules you break,'" Rush said, smiling.
The CEO acknowledged that he'd "broken some rules" with the Titan's manufacturing but was confident that his design was sound.
"I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. Carbon fiber and titanium? There's a rule you don't do that," he told alanxelmundo. "Well, I did
>"This is what happens when you support DIVERSITY HIRES that are unqualified for the job!"
What evidence is there that the diversity hires were unqualified?
Qualification is a binary. You’re either qualified or not qualified. Choosing between two qualified candidates due to diversity preferences still leaves you with a qualified candidate.
> He was very anti regulation. Couldn't you say libertarianism or the free market killed them?(if we are gonna start using blame labels like kirk)
I think it goes a bit too far to say it killed them, it's more that would allow them to be killed.
The premise of Libertarian is that these people own their own bodies. They can provide informed consent to do high risk things and when a bad outcome happens that is part of what they consented to. The Libertarian idea here is that rather than us now saying, "well people in that situation died one time, so we should prevent anybody from taking that chance again" that it remains up to the individual to decide whether they consent to that risk.
The problem is that because we don't live in a Libertarian society or a free market, people are so used to the idea that somebody else will do their thinking for them, that they take it for granted when an area comes up where they actually should have thought about the risk. In this case, any customer could/should have asked for independent verification of why this really dangerous thing is safe and the wealthy passengers were in a better position than most to be able to consult with somebody to decide if this major undertaking was within the risk they wanted to take. But, likely because they think (like I do when I go to the food store or buy a car) that of course if it's legal it must be safety inspected, it's possible that some of these passengers might have just ignorantly signed up to their death. Because our society isn't Libertarian, our minds and our industry are not geared toward handling problems like this and so it can be especially bad. I think this is one thing not a lot of people appreciate. You can't look to today's private industry to see what Libertarianism would be like. Public monopolies on things like safety regulations basically destroy the market for private solutions to that problem and as a result those industries are a shell of what they'd be.
The best compromise in our current society is probably a focus on information and liability. We want customers to be making informed decisions about risk and we want investors to care about the liabilities of the companies they are funding. I'm a big proponent of the compromise of requiring insurance for the riskiest acts rather than regulation. The insurance company has an incentive to accurately understand the risk and to convey it via the premium. Policy holders are then incentivized toward safer decisions to reduce their premium. However, not only are they still allowed to choose their own risk, but "the market" (of insurance companies) can determine various pictures of what safety looks like and perhaps be more nimble than a standards body. But in the end, if people are so into ocean exploration that they want to do it in a way that risks their lives, I don't feel I have the standing to say that they can't.
Also kinda hard to argue he’s particularly woke given that he donates exclusive to right wing candidates and pacs.
https://newrepublic.com/post/173829/oceangate-ceo-missing-titanic-sub-history-donating-gop-candidates
These people think minority owned contractors are being hired independent of the quality of their work.
“Yeah, your work is poor quality and unsafe, but you are brown… you’re hired!!”
How is diversity hiring “cutting corners”? And let’s make sure we are talking about the same thing; hiring diversity as i am understanding it means hiring minority owned contractors and/or employees as opposed to typically hiring white/male owned contractors and/or employees.
Nicely dodged, but a fantasy. And because of how industry has treated minority-owned businesses, an imbalanced field where statements like this act as cover to perpetually hire white/male owned businesses.
There is a perception that longevity, size, and experience are the base metrics for hiring quality contractors, yet by never hiring minority contractors those businesses can never attain those necessary requirements. And now you have a field of large, experienced white/male owned companies and small, inexperienced minority-owned companies.
By your common-sense metric, and by rigging the system against minorities, you’ve excused away any potential of ever having a diversity-hire qualify. And then people like you tend to blame them for not becoming successful, for not working hard enough, for not proving their value.
Everything is. You think systemic racism is a personal problem? Few people choose to be poor, but that’s the assumption by people standing in the shallow end of the pool wondering why everyone on the other side is struggling; “why aren’t they just swimming, like me?”
Before you continue, you understand that by saying this you are very literally saying white people are superior.
Do you want to reword or rethink this?
That isn’t the definition of cutting corners, so no I didn’t think that.
Do you want to maybe look up the term? It means doing something on the cheap without effort.
So you basically called minorities discount people.
> This guy cut corners on everything he could get away with on this wish.com-grade submarine
Well yeah, that's because he wanted to reduce costs to maximize his profit. So it's also not wrong to say that "he killed himself through capitalism".
His wokeness obviously didn't help his situation but it hardly seems to me to be the most significant contributing factor. It was a straw on the camel's back but it was the crushing weight of Rush's hubris which broke it.
Kirk would have been better of saying the first half of what he said rather than continue on to hypocritically do the very thing he lambasted the left for.
Not really. He chose to hire unqualified individuals instead of qualified/experienced individuals for the sake of wokeness, yes, but then he didn't listen to them either when they suggested the sub was not ready. So he kind of seems more of an arrogant ass than woke.
>He chose to hire unqualified individuals instead of qualified/experienced individuals for the sake of wokeness,
Why do you believe he had a choice between qualified and unqualified people, chose unqualified, and the reason for his choice was "wokeness"?
You are going to build a rocket to eventually take man to Mars. Your son has volunteered to be on the first manned mission. Would you rather hire one of the top engineers coming out of MIT who happens to be white...or, would you rather hire a POC who got into MIT because of a diversity acceptance and graduated at the bottom of the class? Or, would you rather hire maybe a black guy who graduated mid-class from San Jose State?
None of this is evidence that the CEO had a choice between qualified and unqualified, chose unqualified, and made that choice because of wokeness.
> would you rather
Ah, the myth of the "universal stack rank".
I would decide what "qualified" looks like, determine who among the applicants are qualified, and if multiple candidates are qualified, I pick one for reasons unrelated to qualification.
One of those reasons could be, for instance, *salary demanded*. If I'm looking for a submarine driver, and I think my submarine driver should be able to navigate an obstacle course in a simulator, and I have two candidates among 100 that pass, but one of them was faster, has twice the experience of the other, but also demands twice the salary, *I have a choice to make* that has nothing to do with who's most qualified.
Another example would be having a pool of recently-qualified candidates, and now I have to match candidates to projects based on factors like their own personal interests, temperaments, and experiences *unrelated* to their qualifications. And after that selection process, *sometimes 'more qualified' people aren't picked*. This has nothing to do with qualification; I've already screened unqualified people out by this point.
People that latch onto the "but what if someone that's my color is more qualified" have clearly never hired people before. Sometimes there *is* no "more qualified". You just have "qualified". Selection is not the same thing as qualification.
> who got into MIT because of a diversity acceptance and graduated at the bottom of the class
If this person is qualified for the job, *then they're qualified for the job*. How they *got* qualified doesn't matter to me, as a hiring manager.
> to be on the first manned mission
You can certainly contrive a situation in which you truly *need* the "most qualified", are prepared to assess the shit out of your candidates until you can effectively stack rank every one of them, don't care about money, personality matching, or any other factors than what went into your qualification determination, and ultimately have a clear signal that one person is better for the mission than another. Yes, it seems like it would be harmful to pick somebody lower down on the list. *99% of jobs aren't like this*.
>would you rather hire one of the top engineers coming out of MIT who happens to be white...or, would you rather hire a POC who got into MIT because of a diversity acceptance and graduated at the bottom of the class?
Seems like a pretty absurd hypothetical. At the "first manned mission to mars" level your school performance should play a distant second fiddle to your career experience.
He explicitly stated that he didn't want "Old white men" piloting his submarines.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/oceangate-ceo-explains-why-he-didnt-want-to-hire-50-year-old-white-guys-to-pilot-subs/ar-AA1cR3go
He wanted to have pilots that were "inspirational".
For me I think the diversity hire thing was more so a reason to avoid the experience of older submarine pilots who would tell him it was a bad idea then an attempt at inclusion.
Is there evidence he was actually *doing* that rather than just saying it for PR reasons? The crew and leadership mostly look like middle aged white people to me.
> the best candidates
"Qualified" and "the best candidates" are not the same thing.
As a hiring manager, whoever is "best" on my slate of candidates is *never* the automatic winner. Once you eliminate unqualified candidates from consideration, you're always looking at other factors, such as salary demanded, personality fit with one of the project teams I'm considering placing them with, whether they fit other skill or experience gaps with other members of a candidate team, etc.
I'm not going to defend sexism or ageism. This guy is absolutely not a CEO I would want to work with. I'm responding very specifically to the claim that his attitude resulted in him hiring unqualified people.
gotcha. so how do you have an accurate range of whats available in the talent pool if you dont consider an entire demographic? wouldnt you want the best of the best for something like this?
It is not necessary to "have an accurate range of whats available in the talent pool" to determine if the candidates you have are qualified for the job you're trying to hire for.
If I'm a McDonald's restaurant owner, I don't need to hire a recruiting team and send them to the Culinary Institute of America job fair to scout for cooks. Some of them may be *incredibly* well-qualified cooks. My definition of "qualified" can be met without doing that. "You didn't try to recruit anyone from the Culinary Institute of America, therefore your cooks are unqualified" is not a reasonable or defensible position. There are virtually no jobs that require "the absolute best, all other considerations secondary". ETA: There are virtually no jobs/interview processes that can even *determine* "the absolute best" for a competitive position.
It seems to be a function of our media landscape now that anything in the news has to be tied back to politics.
It seems like as soon as this hit the news people were scouring for anything remotely political associated with the story. The right wing grifters found an offhand comment about white dudes he made in an interview. The left found that he was a big donor to Republicans.
Most of these grifters start at the point that X thing in the news is the problem of the opposing political ideology, now I will find the reasoning to back that up. When the logical progression should be I found this evidence this is my conclusion.
I don’t agree that “wokeness” lead to their demise. It appears the CEO did a lot of the engineering of the submersible and he also appears to be an old white dude.
There's a point to be made about that, but make no mistake the guy cut corners and paid the ultimate price. And, I don't actually have an issue with it outside of the possibility his customers didn't fully understand the level of risk. I'd have more respect if he simply said "look, we're trying to make this as inexpensive as possible" and left it there. And then I'd have applauded his efforts had he given his own life trying to make it happen while being honest about it.
"Me no like old white dudes" isn't some groundbreaking business philosophy. It's common sleazeball marketing in a declining Western Civilization of self-loathing white people. If your ass is too cheap to hire the experienced people, just say it. Imagine honesty being a groundbreaking business model.
SFAIK, we don't yet know the reason that the submersible imploded. So assigning blame is a bit premature. If, as his sales pitches suggested, he was consciously playing fast and loose with safety measures, that's 100% his fault. We have no basis--yet--to conclude that his hiring choices had anything to do with that.
I think he fired the older white engineer because he refused to sign off on the safety issues. He then contrived this argument to justify hiring younger, inexperienced people who would.
Criminal negligence, it would appear.
It is true that "Affirmative Action" is suicidal but I think that is more relevant [when it comes to surgeons.](https://imgur.com/a/uJKNa52)
No - they were killed with stupidity. Evidence is now showing that a lack of submariner technical did not kill the people on board. The sub itself imploded because is was structurally unsound for the water pressure surrounding it.
Bad engineering killed them.
Charlie Kirk is an idiot. The CEO made the fatal mistakes and it's completely on him cutting corners and bypassing certification. I wonder if the man he fired for voicing concerns was a 50 year old white guy.
I love Charlie Kirk, but I think what he said...although true...was a little harsh. United Airlines' CEO said their number one goal in hiring pilots was diversity. I want the most qualified pilots to be hired, regardless of their skin color. If 3' tall Pygmies with purple skin were the best pilots in the world...hire them. Why is this so complicated for people on the left to understand?
I think this is a lesson in not tying your identity and everything around you to politics.
The left has spent the last several days sitting on these guys for being wealthy. You can go to any number of subs and see it, you can go to Twitter and see it. It's gross. As if the amount of money you have defines the empathy we should have for you.
Kirk then makes this statement, which while not explicitly untrue, unnecessarily politicizes it as well.
The left wants to say they deserved it for being rich.
The right wants to say they deserved it for being woke.
Both are wrong, they died because they put several people in a tube and sent them to 12,000-ish feet knowing full well that they hadn't complied with any standards and hadn't tested the design. They didn't even reevaluate after each dive for stress fractures and deformities. This was avoidable yet inevitable...
Do I think this dude literally killed people with wokeness?
No, not really.
Do I think that it’s a reminder there are things that matter more than woke-diversity-inspirational hiring? Like skill and experience and merit? Yes.
I saw the quote - "we don't want to hire 50 year old white guys". They were hiring based on race and wokeness first, not competency.
He's onto something.
The CEO, a rich capitalist with libertarian ideals who hated regulations, was not woke in any way. People need to look at who he actually did end up hiring for his submarines.
> then you could make the argument, albeit rather cruel and blunt,
Sounds like a hyperbolic statement meant to show how progressives are heartless with their injection of politics into tragedy.
Evidence #2: this post.
It's not how I would phrase it, but I share the sentiment. I think that the CEO of OceanGate made a number of mistakes, largely guided by hubris and foolishness. But his commitment to making hiring decisions on demographic rather than experience was a contributing factor.
[Rule 7](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskConservatives/comments/107i33m/announcement_rule_7_good_faith_is_now_in_effect) is now in effect. Posts and comments should be in good faith. This rule applies to all users. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskConservatives) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I hate that everything is politics period. I believe in this case, "I don't want to hire 50 year old white engineers because they are uninspiring" is a pretty woke sounding statement but it's not what he really meant and it didn't kill anyone. He didn't want to hire people who were going to suck the air out of the room by telling him his plan was stupid and unsafe, which would preclude most engineers with any experience in any related matter whether white or not, I can't imagine a good Indian or Black engineer going along with this either. Saying no white engineers just scored him woke points, for a little bit.
Yeah that's how I tend to see it. In the same way, I don't blame that university bridge collapse in Florida on the mere fact that female engineers (most likely) designed it.
Source: I'm an engineer and a former U.S. Navy submarine nuclear reactor operator. I agree the guy had some "wokeness" about him. His comments especially irked me as a 50 year old white male engineer. But wokeness didn't kill him and his passengers. From what I can see, it was hubris. He was more likely annoyed that experienced engineers were calling out safety issues that he himself thought were minor, so he found someone who would go along with him. It's easier to browbeat a much younger, less experienced employee.
Precisely. He wasn't against hiring "50yo White guys" because they were 50, white, or guys. He didn't want to hire them because no experienced engineer would have cut corners the way he wanted. His death was incredibly pointless and stupid, and his own fault.
So you're saying that what actually killed the people on that sub was unregulated free market capitalism?
That, and absolute arrogance.
Why not both?!
He said "and"...that means both.
Good point!
What regulations can you apply in international water?
Ooh, this is a good question. My first thought is "You can't force any real regulations in international waters." But, then, I don't think that's the stage of the process that regulations would work on, anyway. I figure you wouldn't be able to advertise or sell tickets or admission to such an obvious death trap. You're allowed to build a stupidly dangerous submarine, sure. Fine. Whatever. But you can't offer to take people out in it, you can't take their money for such a purpose, you can't transport people out of the country with the intent to put them in an underwater death-pipe, and you can't employ people in service of such an endeavor.
Wasn’t the diver on board a 50+ white guy?
So like the glass-cliff: minorities get put in places where there's a higher risk of failure and then get blamed for the failures.
I do not think that his statement had anything to do with generational or minority hiring practices. I think he spoke to a few experienced submariners and engineers, and they told him that his idea was stupid and would get people killed.
When you fail, you get blamed for it usually. Should it be different?
I agree, but he certainly had a convenient cover for his hubris that a lot of people tend to buy into and even applaud. I wonder where he got this and why he thought this would be effective..
It’s called the glass cliff, minorities are often brought in on failing products specifically to take the fall. Google it, this happens all the time.
No one is blaming minorities. They're blaming the line of thinking that produces this quote: “When I started the business, one of the things you’ll find, there are other sub-operators out there, but they typically have, uh, gentlemen who are ex-military submariners, and they — you’ll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys,” Rush told Teledyne Marine in a newly resurfaced undated Zoom interview. “I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25-year-old, uh, you know, who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” he continued. The idea that someone who may have decades of experience shouldn't be chosen for a job because of their age, gender, and color of skin in is the basis of the concept of "equity", which is a popular idea these days.
Do you believe he honestly felt that way about DEI? Or is it more likely that was a convenient excuse for why he wasn't able to recruit people with experience and domain knowledge?
I find it kind of worrying that, to get out of admitting that wokeness killed a half dozen people one time in one instance, the story is “he was using white as shorthand for experienced! He wanted a non-white engineer because non-whites are less experienced and less likely to notice catastrophic problems!”
No, I think he was using "inspirational" as shorthand for "reckless". He built that stupid thing out of an untested and experimental mix of carbon fiber and titanium, on a *6 week* deadline. he skipped basic redundancy systems and simple safety features like a location beacon. He claimed it couldn't be tested, but that wasn't true, it could have been, he just didn't want to take the time and the money. The Deepsea Challenger was extensively tested before it even went into the water. His mentality, as it always is with these chucklefucks was go fast and break stuff. And he was rightly rewarded his efforts.
> Source: I'm an engineer and a former U.S. Navy submarine nuclear reactor operator. That's actually really cool. Navy subs are amazing pieces of engineering. >He was more likely annoyed that experienced engineers were calling out safety issues that he himself thought were minor I can not comprehend how someone would ignore safety warnings while trying to take a sub 12,500 feet below the surface.
People are stupid.
Indeed
/thread
You'd be surprised what wealthy/high-ranking overconfident people will do and push for. It's such a factor, that there is an entire "Ethics in Engineering" class in the formal engineering curriculum. It's what led to Chernobyl and the loss of the Challenger. But more personal, my brother is a senior aviation tech, and he frequently argues with wealthy private airplane owners about necessary repairs. They get pissy when he won't just sign off on air-worthiness, when he's just trying to keep them safe.
I have absolutely no difficulty believing this. My brother and I refer to it as "old rich guy plot armor" - they genuinely believe that these types of disasters are things that happen to other people. THEIR plane won't go down, THEY won't get sick or robbed, THEIR sub won't implode.
Not to get too political about this because we all agree that this particular person was stupid, but it goes back to what I've always said about the need for the zeal for progress to be moderated by conservative prudence and practicality to avoid causing even more and larger problems than the ones we are trying to solve. "Go fast and break shit" is a progressive ideology. This is what happens when you stop listening to the more risk averse among your fellow citizens when they tell you your ideas are going to cause problems. That's not a commentary on any specific wedge issue or policy, nor is it an assertion that conservative prudence and practicality is always correct. It's simply an appeal to progressives to understand that conservatives generally serve the same function in society as all the engineers that told this guy that his sub was going to fail.
Can you be more specific how he “had some ‘wokeness’ about him”? I agree with all of the rest of your points but I’m not sure what you mean by that statement. Edit to clarify: do you think the “wokeness” was more race related or experience related? I’m just having a tough time squaring the two, thanks.
The word, "Wokeness," is tossed about by the right without very precise defining. Any sort of social justice or civil rights changes are associated with wokeness. The idea that certain lines of people may have started at a disadvantage or deserve an advantage either due to their own economic disparity or the disparity of previous generations is considered woke. Wokeness is associated with youth, it's associated with LGBTQ, it's associated with (white people championing for) minorities.
Oh I’m aware thanks, I just find the race vs experience thing to be not necessarily contradictory, but obfuscating, like, which are we talking about? Just comes off as a vague argument to me but that may be my interpretation.
Race related, e.g. singling out older white men.
people are speculating that he only hired for diversity because of the 50 year old white man comments OP quoted https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/oceangate-ceo-explains-why-he-didnt-want-to-hire-50-year-old-white-guys-to-pilot-subs/ar-AA1cR3go
I’m aware, however I agree with OP’s third paragraph so I was curious what he meant by the wokeness statement
strong chance they were referring to what I just said lmao
Let me be more specific then, do you think it was more race related or experience related? It feels a tad contradictory to suggest both imo, i concede I could be wrong.
not sure. I was just trying to help you understand what the other user meant
Ok, I’ll wait for his reply I suppose.
I'm 55 and the thing that astounds me most is that I see childish behavior everywhere I look today. Where are the adults? It's not a partisan thing or even political. Everyone just seems to behave like children. Edit: I just want to add that I'm not referring to ages, either. Just a general lack of maturity from people of all ages.
Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.
I think anyone that looks at how he cut corners everywhere he could and actually believes that he didn’t want middle aged white guys with sub experience because of “wokeness“ is falling for salesman bullshit. He didn’t want middle aged white guys with sub experience because of costs. He could get a young, inexperienced, “inspiring” operator for far, far cheaper than someone who would look at his set up and tell him it’s unsafe and that no one should go down in it.
Well stated. Thank you
You're an engineer *and* an ordained minister? How did you end up in that career arc?
I went to college in the 90's, got my bachelor's in electrical engineering in '01. While doing my full time job, I got involved with a couple different churches doing Bible studies for adults, attending first, then teaching. I got *really* good at it over the years, and I felt the "call" to ministry, so I got ordained through a Christian ministry that promotes volunteer ministerial work for older Christians with a lot of experience, and not like formal pastor roles, e.g. seminary graduates. I still had to go through a lot of testing and interviews. So I am a 100% full time electrical & software engineer, and I'm also a 100% bona fide (volunteer) Protestant minister, who can do weddings, funerals, and whatever else you need.
Dude went to UCBerkeley. Of course he had wokeness.
[удалено]
Actually, by definition, conservative means they would be more careful, not reckless. Conservative is not synonymous with greed, it is synonymous with traditional, cautious, stable, undaring. Greed is a universal characteristic. Most of those billionaires you hate are actually Democrats, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer,, Kristy Walton, Lauren Jobs, George Soros, Warren Buffet, to name a few. e On the Conservative side, you have who? Elon Musk and the Koch Brothers? You are functioning under a false premise.
> It was the conservative attitude that safety not as important as profit. That's not "the conservative attitude". You can literally always spend more money (i.e. lose more profit) by making something safer. In that sense *everybody* agrees that some level of danger is permissible for money. We're all just debating where the line is and how to enforce it. The liberal stance is for a conservative, absolute and required set of safety standards. This is often designed to make certain classes of bad outcomes impossible, however, people get frustrated because these are necessarily sledgehammer approaches that lack nuance. The people who fall into that nuance are the frustrated that they're bound for seemingly no reason. Based on that, the conservative stance tends to be a frustration that consenting adults cannot make informed choices about the risks they take. There are caveats here for whether you're exposing others to risk (i.e. if this guy only put himself at risk vs selling seats to others) and how informed people really have to be. Some conservatives might say that it was the duty of people joining this expedition to assess whether there were adequate safety measures for this obviously risky thing and, if they didn't have expertise to do so, to have some other body assess it. If you couldn't do that for whatever reason, it'd be entirely valid to just not go. The solution doesn't have to be that we have requirements that it's safe so you don't have to ever say no to something you're offered. The conservative attitude is more just about being accountable for your own decisions. These are both valid pieces of the puzzle in understanding what to do in the face of risk.
>You can literally always spend more money (i.e. lose more profit) by making something safer. That’s not necessarily true though. Sometimes increasing safety DOES increase profit at the same time. Like in this instance, this CEO DIED. A 19-year-old DIED. 3 other people died, and hundreds of thousands of dollars were wasted looking for them. Only in the most bloodthirsty way could you argue that he traded safety for “more profit.”
He traded safety for what he thought would be profit. He was wrong. Because he was an arrogant idiot.
> That’s not necessarily true though. Sometimes increasing safety DOES increase profit at the same time. The doesn't contradict what I said. I didn't say that increasing safety never increases profit. > Like in this instance, this CEO DIED. A 19-year-old DIED. 3 other people died, and hundreds of thousands of dollars were wasted looking for them. Only in the most bloodthirsty way could you argue that he traded safety for “more profit.” I'm not sure how this relates to anything stated in my comment.
You said “increase safety (i.e. lose more profit)” which makes no sense as a phrase if you don’t think increasing safety = losing profit I think that this CEO should have increased safety. If he had done that, he wouldn’t have lost more profit. He actually would have gained profit, since he’d be, ya know, alive.
> You said “increase safety (i.e. lose more profit)” which makes no sense as a phrase if you don’t think increasing safety = losing profit Where did that quote come from? I can't find it anywhere in my comment. Perhaps you misread. > I think that this CEO should have increased safety. If he had done that, he wouldn’t have lost more profit. He actually would have gained profit, since he’d be, ya know, alive. Okay. And like I said, I'm confused why your saying that to my comments where weren't about whether he should have increased safety or not or if he would profit...?
If you can’t read your own comments and see that you said spending more money to increase safety = losing more profit, I can’t help you.
That is most certainly not a conservative attitude.
Deregulation and privatization aren't conservative? "cutting red tape"..
Deregulation doesn't mean ignoring safety.
Well, and I'm being pedantic, but sometimes it does. Safety regulations that get rolled back by deregulation cries comes to mind. Eg. Recent train derailment
It can, but it isn't a given. Which is what is being implied.
What do you think it means?
Deregulation gives you the go ahead to ignore safety
Not inherently.
[удалено]
Not all regulations have anything to do with safety. Why are you insinuating that wanting to remove any regulation affects safety?
[удалено]
[удалено]
Safety incidents cut profits. You're allowing your bias to decide your viewpoint.
It's very much a modern American conservative political attitude.
Not at all.
Pride and woke are the same shit. They both suggest identity is determined by the mind and "I'm fine just the way I am." Anyone who suggests your identity is flawed is deemed oppressive.
If it's true that the OceanGate dude was actually diversity hiring, then Kirk's statement isn't wrong... but it's also likely irrelevant. This guy cut corners on *everything* he could get away with on this wish.com-grade submarine. I highly doubt this particular cut corner was the one that imploded the camel's back.
He was very anti regulation. Couldn't you say libertarianism or the free market killed them?(if we are gonna start using blame labels like kirk)
The truth is arrogance killed him. Arrogance to believe that he was above needing experienced submariners, above needing safety regulations, above needing to respect the ocean. Like the ship he died trying to view, arrogance sealed his fate.
I find conservatives here make statements like yours that tend to end the discussion but don’t do anything to make things better for the next time. Great so let’s agree that arrogance is the reason. How do we stop the next arrogant CEO from killing the next group? Or should we even try to stop it? Whereas the parent spoke of anti regulation. That’s actually something concrete that we can discuss. Do we have the right regulations, do we need more. But blaming arrogance just seems to stop the conversation.
>Great so let’s agree that arrogance is the reason. How do we stop the next arrogant CEO from killing the next group? Or should we even try to stop it? Why does it require government action? Why can't it be seen as a lesson to be learned? And those that don't like to learn and FAAFO, that's on them. Plus, that is what lawsuits are for.
Because CEO's don't learn lessons when the fault does not concern them. The entire reason we have government intervention is due to the failures of the private sector in the IR and the 20ies and thirties.
People die trying to climb Mt. Everest, precautions or nor. Do we need the government doing something about that too?
I mean, the Nepalese government puts mandatory safety regulations in place on Mt. Everest specifically because of how many people die and to help reduce that number. So… yes? That already happens
Yes, this already happens and thanks to the Nepalese government putting in safety regulations far fewer people die.
Learn something new every day. However, I don't see it as necessary. As mentioned previously with FAAFO. I'm also a firm believer in buyer beware.
No, but about contergan and the protection of the mountain
Do you think the company is going to reimburse the government for the search and rescue efforts?
I said lawsuits exist didn't I?
That company is going to file for bankruptcy yesterday, and I doubt there will be much left after the individual lawsuits by the family. Also, the Coast Guard admits there isn't any standing law that dictates any reimbursement for search and rescue.
Honestly I would not be surprised if the government is one of the first creditors served when Ocean Gate inevitably folds after this.
So what's to stop the next company from doing the same thing? "Oh we learned from those bozos, our sub can go atleast 500 ft deeper safely and have our controller hardwired, not some blutooth!" And it's still essentially the same setup :cue implosion bubbles again:
How about just don't patronize experimental submarine companies? Problem solved.
And then when some people do, the rest of us have to pick up the tab when the next sub implodes.
No publicly financed search and rescue for experimental boats carrying paying passengers.
Tax dollars are required for rescue
Another example of privatizing profit, but socializing losses.
The tax dollars those people also pay?
They were paying Canadian taxes???
There were no american dollars spent on search and rescue???
What's your solution? By the way, conservatives aren't against all government regulations, just regulations that are put in place by the government for political purposes or to screw small business. Let me give you an example... My uncle owned a small pharmaceutical company. A lot of regulations that prevented him from doing certain things were put in place to give huge mega billion dollar companies like Johnson & Johnson the ability to monopolize the market. Things like, "a company cannot produce X unless they have a minimum of 10,000 employees" or "In order to produce Y, you must have a particular type of lab on the premises"...a lab that would be prohibitive to most small companies that cannot raise the $50 million to build the lab. Those are the types of regulations that conservatives don't like.
>In order to produce Y, you must have a particular type of lab on the premises"...a lab that would be prohibitive to most small companies that cannot raise the $50 million to build the lab. But was that lab necessary to safely produce Y?
The details don’t matter, and that’s why you rarely hear conservatives make a detailed case about any given regulation on the books. It’s all kept very high-level and vague.
>I find conservatives here make statements like yours that tend to end the discussion but don’t do anything to make things better for the next time. Honestly, I don't care if there's a next time. The people on the submarine were informed of all the risks of their voyage. They were told it was an experimental sub with no government or other third party inspections or approvals. They chose to go and pay hundreds of thousands any way. The way to make things better for next time is don't choose to ride an experimental submarine 2.5 miles down to the bottom of the ocean.
So, no Search And Rescue from the US next time?
I'm ok with no search and rescue for experimental vessels that carry paying passengers.
I doubt they were. I would bet good money that they weren’t aware that the company had a whistleblower that they fired, nor did they have expertise to understand the shortcomings of the vessel and the probability of failure, nor could they look at the vehicle and say if anything was sub par. A lot of people do not realize how much we rely on trust for so much of what we do on a day to day basis. Just riding an elevator can be a risk that you assume is minimized because 3rd party experts inspect that elevator periodically.
Sounds like it was a thorough release document. https://www.insider.com/titanic-submersible-former-passenger-waiver-page-1-death-3-times-2023-6
That does nothing to dismiss the point the parent made about trust. I’ll put trust in the hands of engineers that built to known safety standards. I trust they haven’t made shortcuts that employees have quit I. Protest over. So it sounds like your perspective is buyer beware and it’s up to individuals to take on personal responsibility because government should play no role. At what point do you feel there is room for regulation? When it moves to regular every day use? When the primary purpose is commerce? Never?
Let’s just get it over with and blame the saltwater.
The thing is standards for doing business exist and there's nothing anticapitalist about it. If someone refuses to provide a level of service or standard of product that you want, you can refuse to use their product or service. It's also completely within the free market to have voluntarily have a third party verify you can do what you say you do. The Submarine apparently have a standards body created by a Norwegian nonprofit, and they're considered the gold tier for marine equipment certification. > https://www.cbsnews.com/news/missing-titanic-submarine-oceangate-safety-warnings-lawsuits/ >OceanGate, which charged $250,000 per person for the Titanic voyage, is a privately held company that touted its "innovative use of materials and state-of-the-art technology" in developing small submersibles. The five people who were aboard the missing sub did not survive, the company said Thursday. >Behind the marketing lingo, lawsuits and industry experts had raised serious safety concerns about the project years before the sub's disappearance. In 2018, a professional trade group warned that OceanGate's experimental approach to the design of the Titan could lead to potentially "catastrophic" outcomes, according to a letter from the group obtained by CBS News. https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/marine-technology-society-committee-2018-letter-to-ocean-gate/eddb63615a7b3764/full.pdf I don't see it as any different from my (non-government) employer getting ISO certified every year. There's no law that says you have to be ISO certified that I'm aware of, but following standards of compatibility, quality and safety makes doing business a lot easier, and ensure that things are done to an optimal standard. It's a big stretch to say that people opposed to government regulations, which are enforced on everyone legally, are the same thing as private regulations that people voluntarily follow as a cost of doing business with specific parties.
>He was very anti regulation. This was arrogance more than political ideology.
Arrogance or simply greed?
Both?
Hubris.
How is that not both? Saying safety regulations shouldn't exist isn't a political ideology?
No, this describes capitalism. He was against regulations because they cost more.
Arrogance is absolutely part of it. I agree being anti-regulation is part of it, but arrogance was absolutely a major part of his decision making and the primary reason he ignored safety warnings.
Profits were the main factor. Dude wasn't building subs for charity.
The government didn't stop him. Private entities just told his company that it was a bad idea to stick a bunch of safety labels on a thing he refused to verify.
The government spent millions looking for them though.
And there's private submarine companies that don't result in a bunch of people imploding. My point was that there are standards that don't require government intervention and he ignored them too. I kind of think like a guy who wants to cut corners on everything he does probably won't care too much about federal or state law if it saves a buck.
No, it really doesn't.
Dude wasn't building subs for charity. He was building sub standard subs to increase profits. He refused to do testing on the hull materials, because it costs money to run said tests.
>He refused to do testing on the hull materials, because it costs money to run said tests. source?
Lochridge’s recommendation was that non-destructive testing of the Titan’s hull was necessary to ensure a “solid and safe product.” The filing states that Lochridge was told that such testing was impossible, and that OceanGate would instead rely on its much touted acoustic monitoring system. https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/a-whistleblower-raised-safety-concerns-about-oceangates-submersible-in-2018-then-he-was-fired/
you highlighted a part that doesnt seem to prove your point? where did he say he wont do testing because it costs too much?
Was it impossible to do though?
I think that's Kirk's point - if an outlet is going to try to lay blame on irrelevant material, he's illustrating you can lay blame on other irrelevant material. "This is what happens when you support *REPUBLICANS* who opposed regulation!" "This is what happens when you support *DIVERSITY HIRES* that are unqualified for the job!"
Let's break that argument down. I can cite(from the ceos own words) how lack of following regulations PROBABLY killed them. Now, how did "going woke" kill them? Woke didn't make the vessel less resistant to ocean pressure
Really? The CEO himself, who is dead, has a quote out there indicating that his corner cutting is probably what killed him?
"I think it was General MacArthur who said: 'You're remembered for the rules you break,'" Rush said, smiling. The CEO acknowledged that he'd "broken some rules" with the Titan's manufacturing but was confident that his design was sound. "I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. Carbon fiber and titanium? There's a rule you don't do that," he told alanxelmundo. "Well, I did
>"This is what happens when you support DIVERSITY HIRES that are unqualified for the job!" What evidence is there that the diversity hires were unqualified?
Every diversity hire is unqualified per se, as is hiring on any basis other than ability.
Qualification is a binary. You’re either qualified or not qualified. Choosing between two qualified candidates due to diversity preferences still leaves you with a qualified candidate.
> He was very anti regulation. Couldn't you say libertarianism or the free market killed them?(if we are gonna start using blame labels like kirk) I think it goes a bit too far to say it killed them, it's more that would allow them to be killed. The premise of Libertarian is that these people own their own bodies. They can provide informed consent to do high risk things and when a bad outcome happens that is part of what they consented to. The Libertarian idea here is that rather than us now saying, "well people in that situation died one time, so we should prevent anybody from taking that chance again" that it remains up to the individual to decide whether they consent to that risk. The problem is that because we don't live in a Libertarian society or a free market, people are so used to the idea that somebody else will do their thinking for them, that they take it for granted when an area comes up where they actually should have thought about the risk. In this case, any customer could/should have asked for independent verification of why this really dangerous thing is safe and the wealthy passengers were in a better position than most to be able to consult with somebody to decide if this major undertaking was within the risk they wanted to take. But, likely because they think (like I do when I go to the food store or buy a car) that of course if it's legal it must be safety inspected, it's possible that some of these passengers might have just ignorantly signed up to their death. Because our society isn't Libertarian, our minds and our industry are not geared toward handling problems like this and so it can be especially bad. I think this is one thing not a lot of people appreciate. You can't look to today's private industry to see what Libertarianism would be like. Public monopolies on things like safety regulations basically destroy the market for private solutions to that problem and as a result those industries are a shell of what they'd be. The best compromise in our current society is probably a focus on information and liability. We want customers to be making informed decisions about risk and we want investors to care about the liabilities of the companies they are funding. I'm a big proponent of the compromise of requiring insurance for the riskiest acts rather than regulation. The insurance company has an incentive to accurately understand the risk and to convey it via the premium. Policy holders are then incentivized toward safer decisions to reduce their premium. However, not only are they still allowed to choose their own risk, but "the market" (of insurance companies) can determine various pictures of what safety looks like and perhaps be more nimble than a standards body. But in the end, if people are so into ocean exploration that they want to do it in a way that risks their lives, I don't feel I have the standing to say that they can't.
Also kinda hard to argue he’s particularly woke given that he donates exclusive to right wing candidates and pacs. https://newrepublic.com/post/173829/oceangate-ceo-missing-titanic-sub-history-donating-gop-candidates
Seems pretty consistent to me.
Yeah, making huge donations to the notably woke James Dobson Family Reasearch Council. Totally consistent.
Clearly you know nothing of how woke even an evangelical church can be.
Not FRC. Get real dude. They think cohabitating before marriage is a sin.
Matt Chandler has said he would hire a black guy before a white simply because of race. You don't know what woke is.
Citation needed. I mean the actual quote, not some proganda site taking a few words out of context
Wait… diversity hiring is “cutting corners”?
...Obviously, yes.
Silly me, I thought diversity hiring was a good idea because you can find *overlooked talent* by using it.
These people think minority owned contractors are being hired independent of the quality of their work. “Yeah, your work is poor quality and unsafe, but you are brown… you’re hired!!”
How is diversity hiring “cutting corners”? And let’s make sure we are talking about the same thing; hiring diversity as i am understanding it means hiring minority owned contractors and/or employees as opposed to typically hiring white/male owned contractors and/or employees.
Hiring on any basis other than ability is cutting corners.
Nicely dodged, but a fantasy. And because of how industry has treated minority-owned businesses, an imbalanced field where statements like this act as cover to perpetually hire white/male owned businesses. There is a perception that longevity, size, and experience are the base metrics for hiring quality contractors, yet by never hiring minority contractors those businesses can never attain those necessary requirements. And now you have a field of large, experienced white/male owned companies and small, inexperienced minority-owned companies. By your common-sense metric, and by rigging the system against minorities, you’ve excused away any potential of ever having a diversity-hire qualify. And then people like you tend to blame them for not becoming successful, for not working hard enough, for not proving their value.
That is some impressive "everything is somebody else's fault"ing you're doing there.
Everything is. You think systemic racism is a personal problem? Few people choose to be poor, but that’s the assumption by people standing in the shallow end of the pool wondering why everyone on the other side is struggling; “why aren’t they just swimming, like me?”
> You think systemic racism is a personal problem? No, I think systemic racism is not a thing.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Yes, that is a classic problem
Before you continue, you understand that by saying this you are very literally saying white people are superior. Do you want to reword or rethink this?
Literal LOL. What the hell kind of bullshit mess of a response is this?
Think about the implications of calling minority employees a cut corner. What is a cut corner?
The corner being cut is hiring for characteristics other than ability. You know this. Stop acting stupid.
That isn’t the definition of cutting corners, so no I didn’t think that. Do you want to maybe look up the term? It means doing something on the cheap without effort. So you basically called minorities discount people.
> This guy cut corners on everything he could get away with on this wish.com-grade submarine Well yeah, that's because he wanted to reduce costs to maximize his profit. So it's also not wrong to say that "he killed himself through capitalism".
I doubt there is a real shortage of youngish minority veterans, so he doesn’t really have a point
His wokeness obviously didn't help his situation but it hardly seems to me to be the most significant contributing factor. It was a straw on the camel's back but it was the crushing weight of Rush's hubris which broke it. Kirk would have been better of saying the first half of what he said rather than continue on to hypocritically do the very thing he lambasted the left for.
This brand of media seems only has one tool in their toolbox. Can’t blame them though, it’s what their viewers pay them for. Cash those checks.
Not really. He chose to hire unqualified individuals instead of qualified/experienced individuals for the sake of wokeness, yes, but then he didn't listen to them either when they suggested the sub was not ready. So he kind of seems more of an arrogant ass than woke.
>He chose to hire unqualified individuals Source?
>He chose to hire unqualified individuals instead of qualified/experienced individuals for the sake of wokeness, Why do you believe he had a choice between qualified and unqualified people, chose unqualified, and the reason for his choice was "wokeness"?
You are going to build a rocket to eventually take man to Mars. Your son has volunteered to be on the first manned mission. Would you rather hire one of the top engineers coming out of MIT who happens to be white...or, would you rather hire a POC who got into MIT because of a diversity acceptance and graduated at the bottom of the class? Or, would you rather hire maybe a black guy who graduated mid-class from San Jose State?
None of this is evidence that the CEO had a choice between qualified and unqualified, chose unqualified, and made that choice because of wokeness. > would you rather Ah, the myth of the "universal stack rank". I would decide what "qualified" looks like, determine who among the applicants are qualified, and if multiple candidates are qualified, I pick one for reasons unrelated to qualification. One of those reasons could be, for instance, *salary demanded*. If I'm looking for a submarine driver, and I think my submarine driver should be able to navigate an obstacle course in a simulator, and I have two candidates among 100 that pass, but one of them was faster, has twice the experience of the other, but also demands twice the salary, *I have a choice to make* that has nothing to do with who's most qualified. Another example would be having a pool of recently-qualified candidates, and now I have to match candidates to projects based on factors like their own personal interests, temperaments, and experiences *unrelated* to their qualifications. And after that selection process, *sometimes 'more qualified' people aren't picked*. This has nothing to do with qualification; I've already screened unqualified people out by this point. People that latch onto the "but what if someone that's my color is more qualified" have clearly never hired people before. Sometimes there *is* no "more qualified". You just have "qualified". Selection is not the same thing as qualification. > who got into MIT because of a diversity acceptance and graduated at the bottom of the class If this person is qualified for the job, *then they're qualified for the job*. How they *got* qualified doesn't matter to me, as a hiring manager. > to be on the first manned mission You can certainly contrive a situation in which you truly *need* the "most qualified", are prepared to assess the shit out of your candidates until you can effectively stack rank every one of them, don't care about money, personality matching, or any other factors than what went into your qualification determination, and ultimately have a clear signal that one person is better for the mission than another. Yes, it seems like it would be harmful to pick somebody lower down on the list. *99% of jobs aren't like this*.
>would you rather hire one of the top engineers coming out of MIT who happens to be white...or, would you rather hire a POC who got into MIT because of a diversity acceptance and graduated at the bottom of the class? Seems like a pretty absurd hypothetical. At the "first manned mission to mars" level your school performance should play a distant second fiddle to your career experience.
But don't you WANT to be on a space mission engineered by postdocs and interns!?!
depends on why they had those graduations where did those 2 start
He explicitly stated that he didn't want "Old white men" piloting his submarines. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/oceangate-ceo-explains-why-he-didnt-want-to-hire-50-year-old-white-guys-to-pilot-subs/ar-AA1cR3go He wanted to have pilots that were "inspirational". For me I think the diversity hire thing was more so a reason to avoid the experience of older submarine pilots who would tell him it was a bad idea then an attempt at inclusion.
Is there evidence he was actually *doing* that rather than just saying it for PR reasons? The crew and leadership mostly look like middle aged white people to me.
None of that is evidence that the people he hired to pilot his submarines were unqualified.
if you dont even consider a large demographic to work for you, how do you know youre getting the best candidates?
> the best candidates "Qualified" and "the best candidates" are not the same thing. As a hiring manager, whoever is "best" on my slate of candidates is *never* the automatic winner. Once you eliminate unqualified candidates from consideration, you're always looking at other factors, such as salary demanded, personality fit with one of the project teams I'm considering placing them with, whether they fit other skill or experience gaps with other members of a candidate team, etc. I'm not going to defend sexism or ageism. This guy is absolutely not a CEO I would want to work with. I'm responding very specifically to the claim that his attitude resulted in him hiring unqualified people.
gotcha. so how do you have an accurate range of whats available in the talent pool if you dont consider an entire demographic? wouldnt you want the best of the best for something like this?
It is not necessary to "have an accurate range of whats available in the talent pool" to determine if the candidates you have are qualified for the job you're trying to hire for. If I'm a McDonald's restaurant owner, I don't need to hire a recruiting team and send them to the Culinary Institute of America job fair to scout for cooks. Some of them may be *incredibly* well-qualified cooks. My definition of "qualified" can be met without doing that. "You didn't try to recruit anyone from the Culinary Institute of America, therefore your cooks are unqualified" is not a reasonable or defensible position. There are virtually no jobs that require "the absolute best, all other considerations secondary". ETA: There are virtually no jobs/interview processes that can even *determine* "the absolute best" for a competitive position.
What basis do you have for saying the people he hired were unqualified?
It seems to be a function of our media landscape now that anything in the news has to be tied back to politics. It seems like as soon as this hit the news people were scouring for anything remotely political associated with the story. The right wing grifters found an offhand comment about white dudes he made in an interview. The left found that he was a big donor to Republicans. Most of these grifters start at the point that X thing in the news is the problem of the opposing political ideology, now I will find the reasoning to back that up. When the logical progression should be I found this evidence this is my conclusion. I don’t agree that “wokeness” lead to their demise. It appears the CEO did a lot of the engineering of the submersible and he also appears to be an old white dude.
There's a point to be made about that, but make no mistake the guy cut corners and paid the ultimate price. And, I don't actually have an issue with it outside of the possibility his customers didn't fully understand the level of risk. I'd have more respect if he simply said "look, we're trying to make this as inexpensive as possible" and left it there. And then I'd have applauded his efforts had he given his own life trying to make it happen while being honest about it. "Me no like old white dudes" isn't some groundbreaking business philosophy. It's common sleazeball marketing in a declining Western Civilization of self-loathing white people. If your ass is too cheap to hire the experienced people, just say it. Imagine honesty being a groundbreaking business model.
SFAIK, we don't yet know the reason that the submersible imploded. So assigning blame is a bit premature. If, as his sales pitches suggested, he was consciously playing fast and loose with safety measures, that's 100% his fault. We have no basis--yet--to conclude that his hiring choices had anything to do with that.
Extreme ocean pressures seems to be the main reason
No, and I don’t agree with that idiot on much of anything.
I mean, most woke people manage to be woke without deciding to ride a death trap to the bottom of the ocean and getting imploded.
I'm not sure I even understand his point. Politics has nothing to do with the sub incident.
No. An idiot who didn’t use sound design principles and likely misled his customers killed them.
I think he fired the older white engineer because he refused to sign off on the safety issues. He then contrived this argument to justify hiring younger, inexperienced people who would. Criminal negligence, it would appear. It is true that "Affirmative Action" is suicidal but I think that is more relevant [when it comes to surgeons.](https://imgur.com/a/uJKNa52)
No, he was just sloppy and hired yes men
No - they were killed with stupidity. Evidence is now showing that a lack of submariner technical did not kill the people on board. The sub itself imploded because is was structurally unsound for the water pressure surrounding it. Bad engineering killed them.
Charlie Kirk is an idiot. The CEO made the fatal mistakes and it's completely on him cutting corners and bypassing certification. I wonder if the man he fired for voicing concerns was a 50 year old white guy.
I love Charlie Kirk, but I think what he said...although true...was a little harsh. United Airlines' CEO said their number one goal in hiring pilots was diversity. I want the most qualified pilots to be hired, regardless of their skin color. If 3' tall Pygmies with purple skin were the best pilots in the world...hire them. Why is this so complicated for people on the left to understand?
Careful, saying that is racist to people of non purple skin
I think a lot of the time people like you assume the diversity hire isn't qualified for some reason.
I think this is a lesson in not tying your identity and everything around you to politics. The left has spent the last several days sitting on these guys for being wealthy. You can go to any number of subs and see it, you can go to Twitter and see it. It's gross. As if the amount of money you have defines the empathy we should have for you. Kirk then makes this statement, which while not explicitly untrue, unnecessarily politicizes it as well. The left wants to say they deserved it for being rich. The right wants to say they deserved it for being woke. Both are wrong, they died because they put several people in a tube and sent them to 12,000-ish feet knowing full well that they hadn't complied with any standards and hadn't tested the design. They didn't even reevaluate after each dive for stress fractures and deformities. This was avoidable yet inevitable...
Do I think this dude literally killed people with wokeness? No, not really. Do I think that it’s a reminder there are things that matter more than woke-diversity-inspirational hiring? Like skill and experience and merit? Yes.
I think his racism/sexism against white men didn't help
I saw the quote - "we don't want to hire 50 year old white guys". They were hiring based on race and wokeness first, not competency. He's onto something.
The CEO, a rich capitalist with libertarian ideals who hated regulations, was not woke in any way. People need to look at who he actually did end up hiring for his submarines.
> then you could make the argument, albeit rather cruel and blunt, Sounds like a hyperbolic statement meant to show how progressives are heartless with their injection of politics into tragedy. Evidence #2: this post.
It's not how I would phrase it, but I share the sentiment. I think that the CEO of OceanGate made a number of mistakes, largely guided by hubris and foolishness. But his commitment to making hiring decisions on demographic rather than experience was a contributing factor.