Titan Sub CEO Dismissed Safety Warnings as 'Baseless Cries', Emails Show - Slash...
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Titan Sub CEO Dismissed Safety Warnings as 'Baseless Cries', Emails Show
Warnings over the safety of OceanGate's Titan submersible were repeatedly dismissed by the CEO of the company, email exchanges with a leading deep sea exploration specialist show. From a report: In messages seen by the BBC, Rob McCallum told OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush that he was potentially putting his clients at risk and urged him to stop using the sub until it had been classified by an independent body. Mr Rush responded that he was "tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation". The tense exchange ended after OceanGate's lawyers threatened legal action, Mr McCallum said. "I think you are potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic," he wrote to the OceanGate boss in March 2018. "In your race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry: 'She is unsinkable'". In the messages, Mr Rush, who was among five passengers who died when the Titan experienced what officials believe was a "catastrophic implosion" on Sunday, expresses frustration with the criticism of Titan's safety measures. "We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often," he wrote. "I take this as a serious personal insult." Mr McCallum told the BBC that he repeatedly urged the company to seek certification for the Titan before using it for commercial tours. The vessel was never certified or classed. "Until a sub is classed, tested and proven it should not be used for commercial deep dive operations," he wrote in one email. "I implore you to take every care in your testing and sea trials and to be very, very conservative," he added. "As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk." In his response a few days later, Mr Rush defended his business and his credentials. He said OceanGate's "engineering focused, innovative approach... flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation".
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by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23, 2023 @02:42PM (#63627106)
...to booking a seat on the next charter to view the OceanGate wreckage.
by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday June 23, 2023 @02:45PM (#63627118)
We seem to hear lots of similar disparaging commentary regarding regulations and whatnot from CEOs of newer companies (Musk immediately comes to mind, but he's just one of many). I wonder if it's the new "move fast and break things, don't slow us down" paradigm, or if CEOs have always been like this and we just happen to hear about it more nowadays because internet.
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This was never intended to be much of a business. The guy was just an idiot.
CEOs are usually aggressive but strangely conservative. They want to push stuff to the limit within the bounds of reality, unless they are looking to cash out, in which case they will lie with impunity, but generally in such a way as to protect themselves from future liability.
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Oh no I think he was. It looks like he wanted to use this as en opening into the oil & gas industry: https://www.insider.com/oceang... [insider.com]
He was also an idiot.
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It seems like he kinda-sorta had a business case in mind; but was in a position similar to the manned spaceflight enthusiasts who are frothing at the mouth for something, anything, to justify a man-in-a-can operation over sending out a robot to do some actual science.
It's true that there were almost no deep-diving manned submersibles in use; with the exceptions largely being a handful of academic research devices and a more mysterious handful of specialty military gear intended for deepwater salvage or f-
>> but, because he had an emotional attachment to manned operation,
No, I think that he saw a financial opportunity to leverage the emotional attachments of extremely wealthy people
There is no economic case to make money from joe schmoe, unless that schmoe is a billionaire, and even that economic case breaks down if you require "wasting" time on testing
imo CEO got what he deserved, maybe even the rich dumbass who was willing to pay a ton of money to brag about seeing Titanic with his own eyes
Bummer for
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I'm no Musk apologist, but in his defense, the "move fast and break things" is not endangering people, because he's doing that to find out what's wrong and fix them.
Plus given the very nature of SpaceX, he's in a highly regulated environment.
I think really the same may go for Tesla, as NHTSA has some their regulations as well.
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Tesla has been irresponsible with promoting self-driving tech. It's one reason why I don't drive around San Francisco if I can avoid doing so. I saw the video of the Tesla randomly braking on the Bay Bridge.
It's not limited to Tesla though. Just a week or two ago I read about the Waymo self-driving car that ran over someone's pet dog in San Francisco.
People who work on this tech seem to feel a detachment from any responsibility. I guess as an individual software engineer it's easy to feel that your entire team shares the burden, ao you don't individually need to worry about it. As a result, nobody on the team feels any burden of responsibility.
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I mean these autonomous vehicles don't need to be infallible. If they have fewer accidents than human drivers do, it's a step forward.
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Maybe.
But you have to admit, if your Mom gets run over by a drunk driver, at least you have an individual to be angry at for their irresponsible life choices, and there's someone you can hold to account, and feel a sense of justice.
If your Mom gets killed by a Tesla self-driving vehicle having a software hiccup, and you're told "well that's just the way it is" and there's no one person you can hold to account, you may never feel any sense of justice for what's been done. And nothing may even be done at all.
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Mercedes is about to launch their first level-3 autonomous car, and have stated that they are responsible for crashes when it's in autonomous mode. It looks like we may be moving to this world of manufacturor accountability finally.
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That's not how things work. It is either 100% right or it's not worth it. Look at the covid vaccines. They were not 100% effective at stopping someone from contracting covid so they were worthless. At least that's what the anti-vaxxers told us.
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In my experience, it is the other way around. Tech people warn management, management assess the risk. Just make sure you put those things in writing, in case they "forget" that you warned them.
Always fun when they try to put the blame on someone else. Enjoy the deafening silence when you pull up the paper trail to prove you did your job. And then they carry on as usual.-
It's because the information keeps getting watered down to management's level as it rises up the chain (reverse fertilizer phenomenon). An engineer working on the problem can give them details on where/what/when/why but they only want to hear when and what are you doing to prevent this from happening again. So you can say you raised these issues with the VP of Engineering but if they're not versed in the details they _will_ be surprised.
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Every time something goes wrong, just write another JIRA ticket to resolve it. That's how life works now.
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is this statement intended to include what Musk has done at Tesla or only SpaceX? Because the rollout of autopilot+"full self-driving" certainly has endangered(and killed) people. And i'd categorize it as a "move fast and break things" approach.
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Speaking of Musk, let's not forget rushing to human testing for Neuralink. As if torturing animals wasn't bad enough.
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"Move fast and break things" is Zuckerberg/Facebook, not Musk/Tesla. Though, certainly, one could argue it applies to Tesla, too.
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Maybe their cage fight will break things too. One can only hope. Fucking man children.
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This reminds me of that time Uwe Boll called out his critics to a boxing match. [youtube.com] Then knocked out one after the other. [theguardian.com]
Difference being that Musk is the lard-ass schlub [twitter.com] calling out the obsessive [youtube.com] who doesn't treat it like a game but as a competition. [youtube.com]
The only sad thing is it's probably gonna be just a lot of hugging, so we will be denied the footage of Zuckerberg breaking his fist along with Musk's jaw.
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by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Friday June 23, 2023 @04:06PM (#63627366)
I'm no Musk apologist, but in his defense, the "move fast and break things" is not endangering people, because he's doing that to find out what's wrong and fix them.
His factories are endangering employees
His cars are killing and injuring people
His neural implants are torturing monkeys
His starship didn't kill anyone yet but certainly endangered people (and animals) when it failed to self-destruct poroperly.-
By that standard, you breathing oxygen is making CO2 and contributing to AGW so stop it. If you make cars, from time to time workers will get injured in the factory. As long as he is following federal standard and regulations for how he runs those factories, you really don't have standing to make these types of claims. If he isn't, then it is up to the federal government to step in and levy fines and correct the issues.
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But that means that he is, in fact, endangering employees.
"I'm not endangering live of these hostages, it's the police's job to prevent me from doing bank robberies!
If you're not aware, the government has, in fact, been fining Tesla for it: https://www.thedrive.com/news/... [thedrive.com] and there's the whole covid thing.
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Labeling it "Full Self Driving" and hiding behind the legalese in the confirmation screen? Absolutely moving fast and breaking things. Selling to the public like it's L5 when it's L2.
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You hear about it now because Silicon Valley has fetishized the entrepreneur and turned them into something to be admired and to emulate.
I work with many entrepreneurs. They're all amazing people, but almost all of them, and in particular the successful ones, are damaged or traumatized in some way, and that trauma either gave them the perseverance to overcome or it created a unique skill/coping mechanism that they turned into success. In no way do people really want to be any of these people; it's a d
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This is a post-dot-com shift toward a new culture of business radicalism that fuses traditional business paternalism with Bay Area counterculture social experimentation. As with a cult, a modern disruptive startup sees traditional authorities, or indeed any outside restraints to their experimentation, as illegitimate.
Look at this guy. He held up the fact that the industry had gone 35 years without a fatal accident as proof that industry standards were *unreasonable*. Fifty years ago that attitude wouldn'
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You only hear of the catastrophic failures. I'm not defending the guy but how long did the automobile industry take to make safer cars? I don't need the government to protect me against risk. I need the government to protect me against lies/fraud. It's one thing for someone to tell me it is safe only to find out that it was never tested but if someone tells me it was never tested it's my decision if I want to take the risk.
I don't know why this is getting so much attention when so many are dying where they
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You absolutely hear about successes, as well as catastrophic failures. What you don't hear are about the huge number of quiet and inconsequential failures -- the people who just ran out of seed money before hitting their revenue goals.
There is something to be said for caveat emptor, although there's often an information assymetry between vendors and consumers. But I'm thinking more of things like sidewalks littered with unlicensed dockless electric rental scooters. It affects people who aren't part of th
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Mostly because it's funny that a tech "disruptor" got himself and some billionaires killed after whining about safety rules. Unfortunately there was a 19 year old kid and a legit explorer also onboard.
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All noted. However : Standards are built on top of a pile of corpses so that we learn from the past and dont repeat it. Ignoring the past becauseâ¦â¦innovationâ¦â¦.stop disruptophobe is going to kill innovation, not advance it
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"Bay Area counterculture social experimentation"
Your right wing swipe at "Librul California" is bullshit. It might have been true back at the start of Google, or even Apple, but that is prehistoric compared to today's reality.
Today's Silicon Valley is Theranos, and Google's real slogan, "Be Evil and Make Money." It's not old school counter culture, it's Libertarianism blended with predatory capitalism. That can't be called "experimental" because it standard operating procedure in virtually all large sc
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New companies usually don't like regulations because they're expensive and time consuming to figure out and comply with; a barrier you have to overcome. Established companies usually like them for that same reason.
"Move fast and break things" seems to be a software industry thing. It's really "ship it and fix the bugs later." You can only really get away with that when it's software, because recalling hardware is expensive.
I wouldn't read too much into Rush's comments about regulation. When you're trying to
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That seems really unfair in this case. Yes, this CEO ignored safety issues but it goes deeper than that. He specifically said he didn't want 50 year old white guys to work for him. Who do you think works in the field of marine salvage? They are mostly ex-navy submariners often with salvage experience. And for various reasons having to do with the popularity of various naval specialties, the majority of the people who have experience doing this type of work are 50 year old white guys. This isn't becaus
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What politically motivated ideology? Hating to spend money? Not liking being told "no"?
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SpaceX's approach to "move fast and break things" can also be described as "test early, test often" and "fail fast". It's heavily based on real-world testing to root out failure modes in systems too complex or poorly understood to handle otherwise (as demonstrated with the Shuttle, the alternative is "move slowly and break things anyway, with people on board"). What's industry standard practice may be overly conservative, obsolete, and even flawed, but you need extensive testing to demonstrate that.
This phi
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