Thread: Just leaving this one here ...

I dont get it? are you blaming diversity hire for this tragedy?

sounds like something an old white guy would say....


Also not sure why you couldn't just put "submarine tragedy thoughts" as the topic title rather then the complete guessing game of "just leaving this here"

There are people dying in genuinely tragic circumstances all over the world. Why the focus on these five? I feel for the youngest who was persuaded to join his father as a bonding experience. He didn’t want to go.

This story took our interest for so many reasons. The mention of the Titanic guaranteed that. We've probably all seen the movies. I doubt there would be much of a mention had they been descending toward some less well-known wreck. The various references and pictures of the vessel from the fact that passengers were bolted inside and seemingly had no seating to the crafts control system – a video game controller – took our attention. The wealth of the passengers probably added to that. Are wealthy people more important than refugees drowning when their boat capsizes? Apparently so.

In another forum I visit there have been jokes about the event. Some of them are in bad taste. There doesn’t appear to be universal sympathy for the deaths with references to stupidity. However, I've seen a great deal of interest in what went wrong.

According to one commentator the body (tube) of the sub was constructed of carbon fibre. Whilst a tough material the commentator suggested it is better in tension than compression. Not a good property for a sub. Also, had the tube been constructed with a cross-hatch pattern during the manufacture of the tube it may have been stronger, but it wasn’t. There was also a comment made that the ends had been glued onto the tube and that the glue may have failed.

Yes, it’s a sad thing, but there are worse things. I have more sympathy for the people of Ukraine than for the loss of those people.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man [George Bernard Shaw’s (1903) Maxims for Revolutionists].

If we stop diversifying due to accidents or deaths we will stagnate and then go the way of the dinosaurs. The people that diversify grow and those that don't slowly die out if not helped. The deaths were regrettable mainly to the families, the rest of the world ....not so much. I'm sure there will be other attempts to make a safer machine.

Bitter much?

Speaking as an old white guy, I don't have any problems finding or keeping jobs. In fact, I started a new position in November last year.

I average between three and four enquiries a month from recruitment agents and it's not like I've left detail of my working life off my resume (and on LinkedIn). It's there for all to see. Any fool can do the math and work out my approximate age.

That said, I've got an up to date set of marketable skills that I have maintained and expanded on over my working life.

Just gonna leave that there...

I came across this while looking for other stuff. Honest!

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Doug

I am assuming that your primary concern and reason for posting this thread has little to do with the failure of the Titan sub, or the immense media coverage of people with more money than sense or even our infatuation with the antics of the famous and wealthy. These are all separate phenomena and possibly worthy of discussion in another thread. However, I see your main concern being the rejection of people as they age as potential employees and why this, if it is true, is the case.

Of course, we can all find exceptions to this situation and that does not mean the supposition is untrue but more a case of "the exception proving the rule," to quote a hackneyed phrase. The case for not employing older people is that they are not able to work as hard as a younger person particularly if physical labour is involved. They are less likely to accept direction, which is because they may not be so dependent on the job (ie: no mortgage, no car on loan, no family still at home so no real commitments). Older people can be cranky and arguably less likely to accede to stupidity. If the job requires new training the benefit to the employer may not last as long. The older person's enthusiasm may have waned. Their imagination may have diminished. They may have become jaded and disillusioned.

The younger employee may be the opposite of all these things, but most importantly he/she can be moulded and is likely very dependent on the job. The bonus is that he/she may be able to bring inspiration: A little lateral thinking if you like.

So the next question is how true is this situation? For a period of about six months in 2003 I was unemployed. I finally signed up at Centre link, where they admonished me for not have registered sooner. I went through the hoops with the case person, who was younger than my youngest child, but quite a good person. He said that normally they would ask somebody to apply for a minimum of two jobs per week, but in my situation, because I was in a rural area and primarily because of my age (53 at the time) it was an unreasonable expectation and I would only be asked to apply for one job per month.

Their perspective was that a middle aged white man was close to unemployable.

In the general community this may be the case, but in specialised fields those skills may well be desireable well past middle age and I suspect this is where you are coming from with this thread.

Regards
Paul

PS: I am still employed on a part time (job share) basis at 72.

My millennial son's comment on the tragedy, "Did they do a dummy run first?"
From the mouths of babes.

I guess the dummy run was the last one. But I gather it was the 3rd descent, with the previous two obviously being successful.

I think, in our desire to know what happened and to imagine exactly how the Titan disaster occurred we may have missed what caused it. If, like me, your understanding is that the hull of the deep sea submersible failed we should be asking ourselves why it failed.

Well, the first aspect is that, according to the former executive who was taken to court at one stage and then everything was settled out of court, the vessel was only "certified" down to 2800m. The Titantic sits at around 4000m (round figures). The company maintained that it was safe at that depth and, to be fair, the CEO backed up that claim by being inside the vessel himself. However, why did the vessel fail? Was it as simple as the hull crushed under the extreme pressure? Was the carbon fibre not up to the task? Was there a systems failure before the vessel descended to an unsustainable depth. I would have thought, but don't know, that there would ordinarily have been early warning signs of stress both audible and through technology.

Suppose the control systems had a failure: The first thing that would have happened is they would be in the dark, completely, and then they begin to be extremely cold. Without control of the vessel's systems they would be unable to control the descent and unable to jettison ballast to halt the dive.

The reason I am raising these questions is that I called in on a neighbour and I knew her son spends long periods in deep sea dives in some sort of bathysphere or bathyscape. Without looking it up, I am not too sure of the difference, but I would suggest they do not have their own motive power other than up or down compared to the Titan. His comments were that if power had been lost, they had no hope. If the sub had not imploded they probably would have frozen to death first anyway. I can't help feeling that they would have known that their chances of survival were rapidly diminishing, but the final end would have been, as Doug said in the first post, in a microsecond.

Unfortunately, this is all supposition, as it looks likely that the Titanic and the Titan will be sharing the same bed for a long time.

So, where does that leave us on the philosophical question on what piques our interest in this type of venture? Is it the adventure and the sense of nobody has been there before (and come back)? Is it that the wealthy can indulge in this type of caper. A similar venture was the commercial space flights. All this type of thing has huge risk. Are these people nutters?

Regards
Paul

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

I would have thought, but don't know, that there would ordinarily have been early warning signs of stress both audible and through technology.

By my (admittedly arm-chair) understanding, metal pressure vessels may give audible cues but that's not true for carbon fibre. Failure is... rapid. Basically, one millisecond you're biology, the next you're physics. Those sort of pressures scare me.

As with any unwitnessed history, all we can do is speculate. Physical evidence may direct the speculation, but I doubt we'll ever truly know the real story.

Originally Posted by Skew ChiDAMN!!

By my (admittedly arm-chair) understanding, metal pressure vessels may give audible cues but that's not true for carbon fibre. Failure is... rapid. Basically, one millisecond you're biology, the next you're physics. Those sort of pressures scare me.

As with any unwitnessed history, all we can do is speculate. Physical evidence may direct the speculation, but I doubt we'll ever truly know the real story.

Skew

You may well be right about the creaks and groans: I have probably watched too many war movies with conventional subs and mega movies starts sweating copious quantities of water like excretions from their perfectly chiseled faces.

Something I should add, but I am not sure exactly of the relevance, is that the depth of the Titanic at 4000m is not even close to the maximum depths reached by man. Victor Vescovo has achieved the big five dives including the Mariana Trench at almost 11000m!! That is not to detract from the Titan experiment as it was a more conventional vessel, providing you exclude the hull material. Was that the fatal flaw?

Regards
Paul

Originally Posted by Skew ChiDAMN!!

By my (admittedly arm-chair) understanding, metal pressure vessels may give audible cues but that's not true for carbon fibre.

The engineers of the vessel were not of the same opinion.

The company’s engineer responded by saying it was using an in-house developed acoustic monitoring system instead. This involves putting sensitive microphones on the hull – like a stethoscope – to listen for telltale signs of the carbon fibres tearing. This would provide “early warning detection for the pilot with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to the surface,”

https://www.news.com.au/travel/trave...c414843af848b6

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

So, where does that leave us on the philosophical question on what piques our interest in this type of venture? Is it the adventure and the sense of nobody has been there before (and come back)? Is it that the wealthy can indulge in this type of caper. A similar venture was the commercial space flights. All this type of thing has huge risk. Are these people nutters?

To my mind, diving to visit the wreck of the Titanic is a akin to summitting Mt Everest. It's there, it's well known, it's on the edge of what is possible for a human.
Yes, like travel into space, or to its edge, is only affordable for the wealthy. But so is climbing Mt Everest -- last time I looked, the cost to climb Mt Everest was in excess of USD $70,000.

Interestingly, nearly all subsea research at depths below about 500m is done with unmanned submersibles -- certifying crewed vessels to go much deeper is not worth the effort involved given that looking at a TV monitor provides the same information.


From what I have read on the topic, it appears that the Titan's carbon fibre tube may have failed. I understand that the tube may have been fitted with strain gauges, but although a strain gauge will give you some warning of incipient failure, at the depth the submersible was at the time of the implosion (about 3500m), the strain gauge warning would have been mere milliseconds before the catastrophic event itself. There may not have been time for the overstress warning to register with the crew before the implosion itself.