It’s a submersible, actually, but that doesn’t fit the song as well.
A small group of wealthy tourists went on an outing to dive down to the wreck of the Titanic, and they haven’t come back up yet.
A search and rescue operation is underway for a missing submersible operated by a company that handles expeditions to the Titanic wreckage off the coast of St John’s, Newfoundland, in Canada.
The vessel has up to 96 hours of life support, officials said Monday.
That 96 hour number is a comforting fiction, so I won’t be waiting on tenterhooks for a happy ending. The Titanic wreck is about 3800 meters down. When things go wrong at that depth, they go catastrophically wrong. To lose both radio contact and the ability to rise to the surface suggests a major disaster.
But maybe there will be a rescue in the next day or two, and then I can point and laugh at the 3 tourists who spent a quarter million dollars each to experience what must be the most terrifying thrill ride ever.
Eh? I think it’s exactly the opposite: a worrying deadline.
After that, the odds of rescue diminish greatly.
Rescue? I’m not even expecting they’ll be able to do a recovery.
@1: He’s saying that they’re probably already dead.
insert grumpy cat “good” meme
Given the depth, even a pinhole leak turns into a cutting jet. Crush, well, incandescent air hot enough to flash anything lose in the cabin until the water arrives about covers it.
Power loss, it’d then turn into a race of death by asphyxiation or hypothermia.
Or they made an emergency ascent without power, in which case it’s Where’s Waldo in 3 – 6 foot seas and no communications.
Still, I’d go on such a trip – with an ROV. If an ROV screws up, one either just replaces it or haul up what’s left of it to the surface and replace it.
An emergency ascent without power could well paint the passengers all over the inside of the hull. I hear that one of the lost is a billionaire. I don’t know anything about him, but chances are the world would be better with his passing.
96 hours of life support? That’s four days. Because of the tremendous pressure at a depth of 3800 meters, they need to take at least 4 days to surface, stopping ascent every few hundred feet. Too rapid an ascent causes oxygen bubbles to form in the bloodstream. Methinks those rich guys are history.
The pressure inside is controlled; they can bob up to the surface as fast as they want.
If the pressure inside were to be equalized, they’d get crushed.
Nemo,
Yes, I know, I quoted him.
But probably is not definitively, and details are scarce.
Also, people are using the depth of the wreck as the depth where whatever incident occurred, so that it would be catastrophic. Again, details are scarce, this is not a fact.
Yeah, if the internal pressure were equilibrated with the external pressure, you wouldn’t have to worry about implosion. You’d just have to worry about weebly-wobbly biology.
What do you call a submersible full of rich people at the bottom of the ocean?
The time for the descent was supposed to be about two hours. They stopped transmitting an hour and 3/4 after beginning the descent. They were probably pretty close to the maximum depth.
There have only been four successful submarine rescues in history. Three were in shallow waters. In the one deep water rescue (490m), the crew was in contact with a surface vessel the whole time and rescuers knew exactly where it was.
In this case the depth could be 3800m, the submersible lost contact, and nobody knows where it is. The most likely event here is a hull failure with sudden implosion and influx of water at 38.5 GPa (380 atm) pressure. These pressures are brutal. The horrific Byford Dolphin decompression accident (look it up if you want details, I won’t repeat them here) involved a pressure gradient of 9 atm.
The response should proceed on the assumption that rescue is possible, but realistically the chances of success are very, very small.
BTW it’s “interesting” that these five rich tourists are the top news. The 650 dead in a boat in Greece? Meh, no biggie.
John, as PZ says, the submersible would have been close to max depth when it lost contact. And if there’s been any flooding of its inner compartments, it will have sunk to the sea bed. Yes, we can hope it’s just a comms failure but that’s not likely.
numerobis@14–
The sinking off Greece made big news around the world and the UN is already gearing up to investigate the actions of the Greek authorities. But your point still applies to the disparate levels of rescue effort. (And I recall a similar sinking in the Mediterranean a few years ago where boats that rescued survivors were refused docking in the nearest ports.)
chrislawson,
No, PZ wrote “They were probably pretty close to the maximum depth.”, which accords with my own estimation.
I mean, yes, odds are not good, all indicators are bad, but the idea that the oxygen deadline was there to provide comfort is not one I share.
For me, it’s a more relevant fact than the wealth of the passengers.
(I presume this is it: https://oceangate.com/our-subs/titan-submersible.html )
@11 do tell.
It was made from carbon fiber& resin with titanium structure to make a five person sub light enough to lift onto a ship deck. Carbon fiber is really strong but vary sensitive to damage and defects. A previous version of the sub was scrapped after it showed material fatigue after cyclic pressure testing.
A very expensive and complicated coffin.
microrapter@11>
A good start?
I feel like it’s fairly safe to assume all of them are billionaires, or close enough. If the trip is costing them a quarter billion each, I doubt they are throwing most of their net worth at a recreational stunt. even if they are, they still have too damned much money.
At ~$10 million, ignoring interest/investments/etc. someone can live out their entire natural life, burning $100K of that a year, and it would take a full century to exhaust that fund, and would require absolutely no work, effort, etc.
That we have so many unhoused people, deaths of despair, hungry/malnourished children, people struggling under medical and educational debt, in the same world where we have people throwing a quarter of a million at a stupid stunt of privilege, is just another sign, in a long list of signs that we have failed as a society.
Most of the deep submergence vehicle failures, be they submarine or ROV, tended to be abrupt crush type failures. As others have said, the pressures are brutal at that depth.
Biochemistry gets a lot weird at those pressures and people are incredibly squishy, with every air pocket in the body subject to collapse, so anything retrieved would not be pleasant to view.
chrislawson @ 13, most of the Byford Dolphin victims didn’t have visually apparent injuries, save the poor guy at the hatch. He was forced by the air flow through a very narrow opening, with disastrous results.
The victims, who were sleeping, did have interesting effects internally, largely in their blood. Lipids separated and congealed, the proteins denatured by the explosive decompression.
But, counterintuitively, with mechanical compression assistance, there were prototype spacesuits that were literally only spandex, save for the thoracic and abdominal region, where respiratory assistive bladders were present. That resulted in skin exposure to vacuum without injury. People are squishy, but skin is surprisingly durable.
Cpt Kittinger did a jump from 102000 feet minus a spacesuit glove, which he apparently had forgotten. That hand was useless at altitude, swelling to twice normal size, but a couple of hours after landing, showed no lasting effects. That pressure is only a little bit higher than the surface pressure on Mars.
People are squishy and forgetful, which is why we make checklists.
lochaber:
A most relevant consideration.
Still, yes, it was a thing only rich people could afford, with the consequence only rich people were passengers. This is a fact.
Since 2021, the Bahamas-based OceanGate Expeditions has ferried about 60 paying customers and 15-20 researchers to the wreck.
(https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/19/titanic-tourist-submarine-missing-north-atlantic)
—
Gloating over the expected demise of people merely due to their wealth is, in my estimation, the opposite of admirable.
Assuming they are all billionaires is, um, ignorant at best.
(I suspect that, like most people, you don’t get the scale of the distance between the merely wealthy and the billionaires, who are reviled on this blog’s attitudinal landscape)
You know this is going to become a low budget movie.
@23 “You know this is going to become a low budget movie.”
I thought it already was.
I was fully prepared to worry until I read it was a tourist thing at $250K a pop. Felt a lot less sorry. Heartless soul I am.
…
Where does it say the trip cost $250 million per passenger? CNN says the typical fee for the expedition starts at $250,000 which sounds much more realistic.
The one named passenger is a British billionaire who claims to be a “mission specialist” but in reality seems to be a thrill seeker who’s bored with the life of an ordinary oligarch, having previously signed up for other highly risky ventures. I guess his luck may have finally run out.
I hope the millions of dollars that are being spent on the rescue efforts are billed to the surviving paying passengers, or failing a successful rescue, their estates, otherwise it’s just another example of socializing the losses.
(sigh)
tacitus #26
On this thread, only in your comment.
A Mystic class DSRV costs around $822 million. They run around 17 million a year in maintenance. So, some operations get offset by overcharging joyriders, while giving discounted or free rides to researchers.
This is bad, so all expensive research from now on should be exclusively paid for by the organization employing the researcher. Want to see what’s alive deep in the ocean, have your institution spring for their own DSRV and maintain it.
That’s the solution that’s being advocated here, when one considers eliminating such things. What an interesting view to read espoused on a science blog!
@ 28 weeaboo lad
It’s linked in the OP, duh.
Silentbob, @20, yes, chigau (not “weeaboo lad”) evidently knows that, thus the comment.
It was perhaps too subtle for you.
(You should have addressed that to tacitus @26)
Hey Silentbob. Chigau was quoting Tacitus who asked:
and Chigau offered…
to which you replied:
But it was actually lochaber @ 20 who wrote:
A quarter billion can be accurately expressed as 250 million, even if the quarter billion claim itself is not accurate.
Chris Lawson @ 15,
“Flooding” sounds much to gentle. There is no flooding, there’s only “FLOOMP!”
People want to be part of something big, important, charismatic—like the wreck of the Titanic. No one would pay big bucks for a deep dive investigating tube worms, where some real knowledge might be learned.
After 9/11, people from all over the country were offering to drive their pickups to New York to “help” in an exciting and important event. They could have instead given aid to desperate people in their own towns, which would be real help that made a difference. But wouldn’t have been glamorous or newsworthy.
There are many experts who “study” great white sharks, because they’re large, charismatic animals that make for sensational TV. They pester these sharks trying to get them to jump, etc. If they were really interested in helping these creatures, and science they would leave them the f*ck alone, and study plankton, cone snails, or zebra fish.
@John Morales:
Concern noted and dismissed. Don’t know anything about the dead billionaire but fuck him and good riddance. There are no good wealthy men/women.
opossumboy, @ #7:
Others have noted that the vessel in question is not operating at anything like external pressure, but also, decopmression sickness (DCS, aka “the bends”) is caused by inert gases (typically nitrogen, but possibly others depending on the breathing mixture used) rather than oxygen.
lotharloo:
You imagine that was an expression of concern? Nah.
It’s a value judgment of moral worth.
Mmm hmm.
“Michael Jordan
Athlete
$2B
Real Time Net Worth as of 6/20/23”
(https://www.forbes.com/profile/michael-jordan/)
“(I suspect that, like most people, you don’t get the scale of the distance between the merely wealthy and the billionaires, who are reviled on this blog’s attitudinal landscape)”
You are an exemplar.
And here i was thinking atheists would see through the Christian teaching that being poor is a virtue. (I wonder whom it serves for you to believe that?)
@John Morales:
Thanks.
Yeah, Michael Jordan, great guy! Made billions, gave way scraps away in philanthropic grift, while being a major spokesman for multi-billion dollar companies, and the one who signs deals and promotes companies who built their fortune on exploitation of poor people in third world countries. Yeah, great fucking guy. Is this the most “moral” billionaire you could find?
There are no good billionaires, because being a billionaire requires diving deep into business practices that readily exploits, robs, and kills people and good people don’t do that.
lotharloo, since you are belabouring the point, I will indulge you.
I kinda think you’re missing the point. Your criterion is wealth alone, your belief that whoever is sufficiently wealthy perforce is the opposite of a great fucking person and must be immoral at the very least. I know.
As I wrote, an exemplar. An epitome.
So… what is the threshold of wealth whenceupon someone becomes such an anathema to you that they should be reviled and whose death becomes a pleasure to behold?
I mean, someone with a mere 990 million dollars is not a billionaire, but close enough, right?
Someone with 99 million dollars, do they merit it?
What about a mere 9 million dollars?
One million?
(One presumes it’s a greater sum than your own wealth :) )
@John Morales:
You are being a dumbass on purpose. Here, I make your job even easier: You should have asked, “What if someone is a really really good person but his billionaire uncle dies and he inherits all the wealth. Does he suddenly become evil? EH? EH? EH? Checkmate bro!”
The point that you are missing is that saying that “billionaire = evil” is a criticism of the global economic system and it is built on the realization that there is no moral way to amass billions of dollars in wealth.
If you want a good faith debate, then answer these questions: Do you think the global economic system and the means by which people at the top make money are just? Do you think the billionaires have no choice but to participate in this system?
And as to your dumbass questions, you can amass millions of dollars morally but at some point it would be difficult to maintain it. It’s like saying that you can be a moral Nazi foot soldier but as your climb the ranks the claim would be pretty impossible to maintain.
And Fuck off dipshit. This is the classic talking point of the conservative cretins, “U nO lIkE billOnaiREs, yOu MuSt bE JEloUs!”
lotharloo:
It is not I who fails to apprehend that I refer to the type of sentiment you express and its basis and how I judge it, and instead imagines I am somehow defending billionaires.
Why would I ever ask such a stupid question?
I asked what I asked, and this is a very noticeable evasion of it.
You truly are saintly, the apotheosis of morality incarnate.
A true keyboard warrior for weal.
Whyever you imagine I am defending the existence of the global economic system and of billionaires is something about which I can only speculate, but I’m not.
I’m noting your moral stance, that’s all.
But, since you ask: (1) No (2) As long as they live on this globe, yes — there is nothing outside global economic system. No extrasolar colonies, never mind extraplanetary.
No, the talking point here is my noting that you are an exemplar of judging people merely on their wealth, and hating on them, and gloating about their presumed demise.
Which you claim to consider a fair criticism of the global economic system.
Here, I will quote it for you: (I suspect that, like most people, you don’t get the scale of the distance between the merely wealthy and the billionaires, who are reviled on this blog’s attitudinal landscape)
Why you imagine I am accusing you of being jealous of something you purport to find despicable is also open to speculation.
(Feel free to clarify, it’s probably good to let that hateful pus out)
Then you are lying to yourself. I’m also too bored to respond to your vapid posts. In this entire discussion, you basically just linked to MJ and his wealth. Good job.
“No, the talking point here is my noting that you are an exemplar of judging people merely on their wealth, and hating on them, and gloating about their presumed demise.”
If that wealth is over a billion dollars, yes. There is no ethical way to earn a billion dollars. My personal opinion is that everything above 20 million is being a greedy bastard who ruined people to get where they are but everybody has their own line they should consider moral. But a billion is definitively amoral, always.
Yeah, he is. Took me a lot of time to figure it out myself. Not only a dumbass but needlessly pedantic, argumentative asshole who uses any possible way to twist your words so he can argue, including pulling sentences out of context. To have a productive discussion, you need good will on both sides and Morales consistently fails to provide any. No wonder people call him a troll.
Simplified example:
You: I love pancakes. Waffles are good too and I like them, but I really love pancakes.
John Morales: You said that you love pancakes, that means that you hate waffles.
John Morales: Oh, look at that, you are in conflict with yourself. You either hate the waffles or you don’t.
John Morales: Yes, you already said that, but what about the waffles, you waffle-hating bigot?
John Morales makes a lot of dumb points but this one I have to highlight: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy
Really, you want a fucking threshold? Sure, I’ll give it to. The threshold whence one leaves good and embraces evil lies at exactly fiftty two million three hundred eight nine thousand and sixty seven dollars and eighteen cents. It is known that such a precise quantity is necessary for all systemic criticism as it is well-documented that the existence of any continuum breaks all logical arguments!
While it’s true Morales is a die hard troll, I must admit watching him utterly eviscerate these idiots who couldn’t argue their way out of the metaphorical wet paper bag is a thing of beauty to behold. X-D
It’s okay lotharloo, it’s only a flesh wound.
my bad, in my hasty reading of the article/summary, I somehow jumped a metric prefix.
Still, they are pretty well off if they can throw that sort of money around, and I’m not going to be staying up late worrying about their well-being.
Admiring trolls says a lot about you buddy.
“When things go wrong at that depth, they go catastrophically wrong.”
Yeah, that four-day O2 thing reminds me of the time I listened to a doctor tell a patient (and his family) full of cancer with only a few days to live say; “There is always hope.”
While I do not agree with how John Morales presented his point, it is a valid one. Judging someone as good or evil simply on a basis of how much wealth they have does not seem reasonable. While Michael Jordan can be accused of being complicit in the propagation of the current destructively capitalistic culture, it is quite possible that he was simply ignorant of the implications of his endorsements. That isn’t necessarily an excuse, but even a good person may not question things too deeply if someone dumps a truckload of cash on their lawn.
Setting aside the question of good or evil based on wealth, I see two inflection points in the curve of wealth. The accumulation of wealth seems to be driven by a number of factors. One is planning ahead for expected life changes (e.g. retirement), another is a fear of inadequate future income to meet expected needs (e.g. marriage, child-rearing). On the less attractive side, some people are motivated by envy and greed. Some people are not even looking to accumulate wealth, and it happens through chance or inheritance. An actor on a hit show undoubtedly works hard at their craft, but there are a lot of hard-working actors who could have played the same part. One actor gets rich, by chance, a lot of other people who had similar talents and skills do not. My experience in business suggests that while certain fields of study do increase the chances of getting to the executive level, much like actors there are lots of people who have the abilities/skills of executives but other factors, cultural or chance, determine who can accumulate a great deal of wealth. I know some people claim that anyone in those positions must be psychopaths, but I don’t agree. I see them as mainly ignorant.
That still leaves a group of people who are focused on rapid accumulation of wealth. These are the con men, stock jobbers, and regrettably, a lot of politicians (by no means all). These are the people grasping at any chance for wealth, mainly because it brings them power over others. These are the ones I would consider immoral, even evil, not because of their wealth but because of their lack of empathy.
But to get back to my inflection points.
The first one occurs when a person has accumulated enough wealth for it to start generating interest. This is a liberating level of wealth. It means that if the wealth is left alone it grows. It means that if the interest is used for purchases, the wealth is not reduced. It can reduce the fear of a future life-changing event, as more liquid resources will be available to resolve it. This level of wealth is what a lot of people aspire to. Enough income to meet daily needs and a bit left over for the occasional luxury.
The next inflection point is when the wealth grows to a point where the income generated by it exceeds the expenses of the person controlling it. At this point the wealth will grow on it’s own, and it’s growth will accelerate over time. I did a back of the envelope calculation while mowing the lawn over the weekend. To spend a billion dollars, outright, would require spending about $1000/hour, every hour of every day, for 120 years. Roughly $8.5 million dollars a year. Yet, if that billion dollars was earning even only 1% interest, that same billion is generating $10 million a year. If you have a billion dollars with a 1% rate of return, you can spend $1000/hour, forever.
Now, I know that most billionaires do not have cash sitting in banks. Most of their assets are not particularly liquid, and a lot of them are only in inflated notes. A billion dollars invested in stocks may be only worth one-tenth of that value if the owner starts selling. Just the act of being sold will drop the value of the stock.
So to Lotharloo’s point, are billionaires evil? While I may be missing-understanding their point, I can see the argument that once someone is wealthy enough to have all their desires met for the rest of their lives, accumulating additional wealth is only hurting others. That additional wealth should be distributed to improve the world. The methods to improve the world can vary, building clinics, investing in research, protecting wildlife, funding education, etc. Even if the wealthy person doesn’t want to do the work of finding and distributing excess wealth themselves, they are able to hire people to do so.
Which, I feel, leads to the accusation that wealthy people, especially people who are so wealthy that their wealth grows no matter how much they spend on themselves, are evil. When a person’s needs are completely satisfied, there should be a cultural expectation that they will share their excess, and not doing so, not caring enough to even consider doing so, or remaining ignorant of the need and benefits of doing so, is not a morally acceptable position.
A better solution, to avoid having to judge individual wealthy people by their actions (because they will always disappoint), would be to guard-band wealth accumulation through cultural and legislative means. Create cultural and legislative dis-incentives to accumulating so much wealth that others are hurt. Wealth doesn’t go away if it isn’t going to the rich. It can be collected by society and re-distributed, spent, to improve society. Fortunes which grow without limit should be seen as a boil on the body politic, but these can be lanced with the proper legislation. We did it once, the forty years where the US had a high top marginal tax bracket also saw the greatest investments by government in infrastructure, the greatest investments by government and industry in research, and the greatest rise in the US standard of living. All those started to decline when Nixon, and then Reagan, dropped the top marginal tax rate. Something to think about.
In a “Live Updates” email from the NY Times I just received, the heading is: “Rescuers Race to Find Missing Crew Near Titanic Wreck as Air Supply Dwindles.” Note that the people on board the submersible are called “crew” here, which to me implies people who are workers, not rich tourists.
One of the “crew” is a thrill seeking British billionaire. If he has a job, it’s basically just a smoke screen.
tacitus, no, not really. The craft isn’t rated as a passenger craft, it’s an experimental craft, so anyone aboard for a trip is classified as crew. The same is true for spacecraft.
Although, NASA did change regulations for such paying “crew” who are just up for a joyride so that the joyriders don’t automatically get awarded astronaut pins.
And to be pedantic, one is a British billionaire, the other’s a nearly as wealthy Pakistani and his son. Then, there are two explorers who were part of the Titanic expedition of 2000.
But, since all things are evil that get patronage from wealthy benefactors, we’ll have to burn all of our classic scientific knowledge, especially that prolific prostitute da Vinci.
My greater concern is that we’re moving backwards toward such patronage, rather than when we sponsored such things at a collegiate level. Oh well, of a college wants to research the deep ocean, they’ll just have to spend a billion on their own submarine.
People are people.
Whover and whatever else they may be whether billionaire or pauper.
Those people also will almost certainly have friends and family who love and care about them will miss them and grieve their very probable deaths here.
I don’t know yet who these people are. One of them is a billionaire, one seems to be an experienced leader of French naval background – Paul Henry Nargeolet. Thanks #22 John Morales.
Perhaps one was a passionate Titantic researcher seeking to accomplish their life’s dream having worked hard and spent a career where this was going be the highlight of their life.
Perhaps one was a Make-A -Wish kid dying of terminal cancer but getting this one chance to achieve again, a personal wish and dream.
Probly not, but I don’t know.
We don’t know.
Its easy to Other others we don’t know.
Of course this same holds true for those dying in the Indian heatwave also occurring now and all the refugees also lost at sea and getting vastly less media attention and dedicated rescue attempts.
Still. See first three words here.
This conversation is weird. It’s normal to see John Morales choosing not to understand something in a pedantic way, but not so much Silentbob or flex.
Those of you who are smugly stroking your philosophy beards and saying “It is stupid to judge someone solely on wealth” are… not understanding the argument at all, acting like wealth is a totally arbitrary number that just beams out of nowhere like cosmic rays. It’s not. In order for monstrous ‘billionaire’ style wealth to have accumulated in a single place, a great deal of something immoral had to happen: massive worker exploitation, massive hoarding of life necessities (eg. real estate), massive middleman skimming, or some other form of massive rent seeking. This is the thing that Lotharloo et al are getting at; it is not merely an argument that it is immoral to sit on a dragon hoard of wealth while others suffer because their needs are not being met (though that’s an argument that can be made), rather it’s the argument that in order for that hoard to exist harm had to have been done, usually to thousands or millions of people.
They haven’t even made the argument, which is backed by current science, that the accumulation of wealth tends strongly to stunt empathy and make the accumulator uncaring at best and selfishly sadisrtic at worst – in which case while it isn’t nearly as certain as the exploitation required for the wealth to exist in the first place, there’s a surprisingly sound argument that if a dragon hoard DID beam out of space with no warning, the recipient would in short order lose pieces of their moral compass.
All of which is to say: Nobody is judging anyone on a meaningless number, you abnormally dense wankers! The wealth is not the crime, it’s a powerful near-certain indicator of the presence of many completed and ongoing immoral acts! And if you can’t consume at LEAST the fact that this is the position being taken by the opposing faction, you need to stay out of the argument because your smug “it’s just a number, you cretins” argument is missing literally every single point being made.
I only take issue with the wealthy when they act like they owe nothing back to society–when they seem to think they did it all themselves, they’re self-made, it was all their own effort, intelligence and business savvy that built that wealth. This is rarely the case–so often the business they started or ran (assuming they didn’t inherit their money) was built on the labor of workers educated at mostly at public expense, using roads and services built with public money, and sometimes with revenue from government contracts and even taxpayer-funded subsidies. To ignore all that, and believe that you should pay little or no taxes because, hey, mine, I’m creating jobs yada yada yada, that’s where we’re entering into borderline sociopathic behavior.
Another “mistake”–or feat of willful ignorance you often see among the wealthy, particularly conservatives, is that bit of linear thinking that says if one guy makes 1000 times more money than another guy, he must work 1000 times harder or be 1000 times smarter and thus 1000 times more deserving. In reality, wealth, like many things in society and in nature, grows according to “preferential attachment.” In other words, the rich get richer and money makes more money. In that sort of network, slight advantages in the beginning lead to results down the line that are not proportional to the initial advantage. The initial advantage, which can be very small and could be the result of harder work, or a slightly better product, or maybe “getting there first,” or maybe just dumb luck, grows into further advantage at every stage. The result is a distribution of wealth according to a power law–rather than a normal distribution, in which most possess wealth in amounts clustered around an average, most of the wealth is held by a few. At the other end of the scale are a whole lot of people with very little, because they never had that initial advantage, and very possibly had clear disadvantages.
This distribution may be normal for any society above hunter/gatherer, but it comes in different degrees, and it’s an easy argument that higher inequities and unequal opportunities results in a less stable and less healthy society. It’s why you need to tax great wealth and redistribute it, both to stabilize society and fund the infrastructure that enables wealth to be built in the first place.
In short–(??? sorry, looking at my comment now, that ship may have sailed)–it’s not the wealth that bothers me, it’s usually the attitudes of the people that possess it.
It isn’t wealth or its lack that counts, it’s the deeds made by the individual.
But, it is beyond rare to see someone with billions of dollars in wealth to live by modest means and give that wealth to worthy causes, instead choosing a few pet causes and to hell with the rest, while living a lavish lifestyle and the homeless across the street from their mansion get chased away.
But, we instead get an argument on wealth being a condemning factor and frankly, that argument was made and lost in the atrocities of the French Revolution.
Oh, to clear one thing up again, submarines operate at 1 atmosphere pressure – sea level. So, rate of ascent and descent aren’t relevant to the occupants. There is one relevant area for descent on the craft, as sudden extremes in pressure increase can risk damage and potential catastrophic failure.
The pressure at the Titanic site is around 340 atmospheres. One of our record setting depth ROV’s was lost at sea due to a catastrophic crush failure near a depth it had experienced numerous times before.
340 atmospheres is enough to crush bone, since there air pockets in bone, I’ll not even go into what’d happen to the thorax and the body going from 1 atmosphere to 340 being a lot explosive, pretty much like sitting on top of a MOAB – actually worse, as the MOAB at 300 feet would only generate 20 PSI overpressure in the shockwave, that’s small potatoes compared to the pressures and instantaneous overpressures experienced in a crush.
Indeed, the crush process is typically so violent that debris is scattered widely, with only the largest structures of a craft remaining together.
It is interesting to see the liberal take on the question of billionaires. @abbeycadabra basically articulates the correct formulation, if in brief.
@16. chrislawson : :”..(And I recall a similar sinking in the Mediterranean a few years ago where boats that rescued survivors were refused docking in the nearest ports.)
Then there was the Tampa where a ship that dared to rescue refugees and sail to Australia with them was actually taken over by Australian military forces as puishment.. See :
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/22/the-tampa-affair-20-years-on-the-ship-that-capsized-australias-refugee-policy
Plus : https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2001/08/tamp-a30.html
In addition to : https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/tampa-affair
I have experience observing about a dozen of those who have developed an overwhelming desire to acquire vast, unnecessary wealth. They have all exhibited what I would call extreme greed and a complete lack of empathy for the plight of anyone who is poor (including their employees). Given my values system of desiring to care about and do what I can (with my limited resources) to help those less well-off and vulnerable, I would label the values system of these dozen as ‘(negligently) evil’. Robert Reich has a current column about the fraud of ‘getting paid what you are worth’. Our organization rates the success of any society (and, by extension, its people) by how well it treats the the most vulnerable and least well-off of that society.
I am amused at all the ‘worship’ of the entire ‘legend’ of the titanic. It was a massively hyped, terrible design. One of its coal bunkers was on fire even before it sailed. Its captain was obviously an arrogant fool, speeding up to facilitate the flooding of the ship. The drooling masses that revere the titanic and its tragedy are the same that would likely start a tailgate party at a horrible highway accident.
Nerves process slower than the crush if that happened. No awareness of the end.
It sounds like a horrible way to die, regardless of the circumstances that led to some people building a sub-tourism business that explicitly caters to billionaires.
It appears that private businesses are rather prone to skirt safety standards, judging by the exploding rockets and lost sub. You would think it would have a built in emergency transponder.
There is currently a tremendous amount of effort and expense being expended in searching for them, despite the very low odds of success.
As far as
goodnot too evil, at least neutral, billionaires and extremely rich people goes how about George Soros the reichwings fave boogeyman?Or how about from my guilty pleasure of enjoying motorsports; what about Ayrton Senna – see :
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/16/motorsport/ayrton-senna-foundation-sister-viviane-interview/index.html
Plus Lewis Hamilton :
https://www.straitstimes.com/sport/formula-one/motor-racing-im-a-social-justice-warrior-says-lewis-hamilton-fia-fine-with-his
& even someone who I couldn’t stand for many years as a Mark Webber fan, Sebastian Vettel :
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jul/28/four-times-world-champion-sebastian-vettel-to-quit-formula-one-at-end-of-season
Among others like, say, Niki Lauda?
Just how rich these F1 champions were / are never really interested me although I know it was very at atleats the mult-millionaire level and yet what mattered was their racing and stats there and other things. Yes, they probly would never have had the chances and opportunities they had if they weren’t from at least middle class backgrounds but.. are we really gunna hold that against them as individuals? Were they oblivious to some things? Sure. Does that make them “evil” rather than just ignorant – in these cases NOT willfully so – well, nah, I don’t think so.
Could they have done more? Maybe. Is that our call to make and does it make them evil that they didn’t? No. I don’t think so.
Then there’s the pitiable yet extraordinarily rich and somewhat aristocratic background Princess Diana of England as well who, dunno (or care) how much she had but was at least far as I know a pretty decent hman being..yeah?
Elton John? Bono? Bob Geldof? George & Amal Clooney? Dunno exactly how much $$$ they have and whether billionaires or mere millionaires but certainly rich yet pretty okay if not totally unproblematic people maybe?
All this said, no, there should NOT be such a thing as a bilionaire at all & our capitalist exploitative system is totally messed up in all sorts of cruel and brutal and unfair ways. But some individuals are exceptional even if the majority in their class of uber-priviliged, uber-lucky, uber-generally sociaopathic wealth are just scum you’d scrape off your shoe ethically speaking.
The billionaire inquestion and his crew /passengers aboard that sub? I dunno. I do not know enough to say. Not defending him.
@ 62. Tethys : It sounds like a horrible way to die, regardless of the circumstances that led to some people building a sub-tourism business that explicitly caters to billionaires.”
They died that way? Crushed by pressure implosion? Do we know that for sure yet?
I don’t think its so bad a way to go personally if so. Doubt they knew anything about it and it would’ve been quick and while they were presumably pretty happy and enjoying life.
My inner horror writer can think of about a bajillion worse ways to go tho’ I’ll spare yáll the listings of them..
Looking at the available information, you couldn’t pay me to get on that thing!
In a CBS video one of the creators of the sub was quoted describing the ballast release mechanism as “somewhat janky”, which doesn’t fill one with confidence. Some of the ballast is reclaimed lead pipes. To ditch that ballast, everybody in the sub has to get to one side of the sub making the pipes roll off a shelf. What could possibly go wrong?
As an engineer who has spent his entire career in carbon and glass fiber reinforced plastics, I question the use of this material for the hull. It is well known that these materials are much stronger in tension than in compression. My rule of thumb is that the compression strength is only about 1/2 of the tensile strength. Also, waterjet cutting (albeit at >10x the pressure on the depth where the Titanic lies) is often used for secondary processing of these materials. That makes me wonder what would happen with a single pinprick leak.
@63 StevoR said: As far as not too evil, at least neutral, billionaires and extremely rich people goes how about George Soros the reichwings fave boogeyman?
I reply: I appreciate your optimistic point. Like you, I don’t keep score of how much of their huge wealth they put towards decent causes. Yes, there are some who may be positively philanthropic to some unknown extent. Bill Gate$ ‘giving away his fortune’ was designed so it actually kept him hugely wealthy, even today. I do remember a story a few years ago (and I hope it was true) where an elderly woman gave to charity the only thing she had of value: her car. If we are going to quantify philanthropy, hers was probably a much greater percentage of her net worth than most/all of the wealthy philanthropists.
@63 StevoR also said: our capitalist exploitative system is totally messed up in all sorts of cruel and brutal and unfair ways
I reply: I Agree With You Completely on This. That’s why we refer to it as Crapitallism!
George Soros isn’t exactly a great guy, like not for all the reasons the nazis say, but because he made most of his money as a currency trader manipulating an attacking national currencies. The effect of this is generally a gutting of social welfare states as governments are starve of short term funds, in this particular case he made his money by transferring the savings of british and south east Asian workers into his companies’ accounts. So no not really a good guy no matter how many pennies he may throw to the occasional good cause.
I’ll save my concern for the sub pilot who is working a dangerous job and not for the rich passengers who can blow $250K on a trip. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out the accident was caused by the billionaire deciding that since he was so rich, he was allowed to go to the controls and play sub pilot, or otherwise at fault for the accident. I’m not expecting rescue, but I would like them to recover the sub for the sake of the survivors and find out what the cause was so it can be addressed in the future.
Also this;
and:
So yeah, hard pass on ever being bolted into that thing.
The crew member who pilots the sub is reportedly one of the owners of OceanGate.
Something tells me they didn’t much thought into the name. Watergate is synonymous with criminal disasters.
correction to my #70
Didn’t put much effort.
I would suggest that those who so denigrate wealthy people exhibit the same lack of humanity they are accusing the billionaires of.
And I think that is the point that John Morales was tacitly making. it is disappointing to see so many here making such good use of the rope he was supplying.
I don’t much like the idea of a society in which the massive accumulation of wealth is encouraged and rewarded either, but these are human beings! Billionaires are a fair target for scorn but not being dehumanised. What are you ? Fucking nazis?
Clive Palmer is an example of a nasty billionaire whose activities are tacitly endorsed by the news media. He is suing Australia for $300 billion because of a decision that impacted his ability to make a couple of billion in profit. That is almost $10k for every man, woman and child in the country. And yet this barely made the news even though it should be on the front page every fucking day! This is a man who refused to pay his workers their own wages. Yes, he used to be a member of parliament, but even his own supported eventually saw through his lies. But he is still a father, so has immense value to someone to whom his absence would be traumatic.
Whereas Mark Shuttleworth is more a benign example (though only a half-billionaire). Did he have a start on the ladder? Surgeon father and teacher mother, white south-Africans growing up under apartheid, so yes. But his record indicates that he is far from an arsehole – further from being an arsehole than some of the commenters here.
In fact there are a lot of arseholes slinging shit at each other around here. I don’t think I want to participate any more.
Tethys@62: I have doubts that a transponder would do much anything. The thing is most likely lying on the ocean floor, the occupants having died a quick death.
As for lax safety standards with rockets, Roscosmos is a state corporation, not a private business. Everyone else who’s reached orbit is pretty careful about it. Even Roscosmos used to be; their soviet-era safety record was only surpassed recently by SpaceX.
@tuatara
“Oh my god, you’re dehumanizing billionaires! That’s bad!” And it couldn’t happen to better people and less-deserving-of-scorn group!
Maybe results of this little experiment will change your mind?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ8Kq1wucsk
They already dehumanized themselves. They are still humans, they are just pieces of shit/amoral humans. Because you have to be a piece of shit to earn, have and keep a billion dollars. Aknowledging that fact (and it is unfortunately a fact) is not dehumanizing them.
I like this quote because it explains the issue:
“If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would try to figure out what’s wrong.
When humans do it we put them on cover of Forbes.”
Oddly enough, I was a billionaire once, when I was five years old. Maybe even a trillionaire fir a short time.Unfortunately, I was the wrong sort of billionaire and I shared that faith with around 7 million people and it is not an experience I would like to repeat. Everybody is a billionaire during hyperinflation. Doesn’t do you any good unless you have farmer cousins.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Federal_Republic_of_Yugoslavia
Yes, I am an asshole but I am not “fucked up 7 million people’s lives” asshole or “defending the guy who fucked up 7 million’s people’s lives” asshole.
@numerobis
Or they are sitting in a tiny capsule awaiting their demise, though I agree that it’s more likely the sub and its passengers died on Sunday. Either scenario is a horrible way to die, so my sympathy is for the families.
I find it very disturbing that people here are chortling about the untimely deaths of strangers because they are billionaires.
In the news:
More info at the source.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/us/missing-submarine-titanic-search.html)
@55, abbeycadabra, who wrote,
I didn’t address this because this was not my point. As I said, once a certain level of wealth is reached, it tends to accumulate on it’s own regardless of whether the owner of that wealth is benevolent or selfish. This is true of any excessive accumulation of wealth, not only for people but also companies, churches, or other places where wealth accumulates.
How a person accumulated the wealth to reach that inflection point is a different, albeit related, topic. Some people certainly engaged in unnecessary rent seeking, other accumulations of wealth may have been inherited. And yes, there are people who accumulated enough wealth to reach the inflection point where wealth is self-regenerating through chance. That does not mean that massive amounts of wealth are handed out by aliens, but that the cultural/economic system we use includes processes that allows those chance events to happen. We can change that system.
The accumulation of wealth is certainly enhanced the immoral methods you list, but the impact of vast wealth inequalities in a society occurs regardless of whether the owner of that wealth is benevolent or malevolent. We should aspire to a system where reaching the inflection point where wealth increases without effort is not achievable. My proposal for such a system is a high top marginal income tax rate, and time. I propose that solution because we know it has worked in the past.
Apparently this Hamish Harding guy is pretty infamously opposed to safety regulations. And the sub they went down in apparently didn’t meet any.
@78:
Maybe his children, who might just be about to inherit the kingdom, might choose to invest that inheritence into a worldwide campaign to improve general health and safety regulations.
And even higher marginal inheritance tax rates. Accumulate the wealth if you want, but you don’t to create a super-rich dynasty by passing on billions to your super-privileged children. Closing loopholes and shutting down the tax havens will be necessary, along with the ability of corporations to evade taxes in the territories they earn their profits by incorporating in more tax-favorable jurisdictions.
None of this is easy given those with the money already have the vast majority of the power and influence over such matters — not to mention the ability to turn right-wing voters into stooges through the major media outlets they own (e.g. “death taxes”), but something’s going to have to change if our future generations are to have any hope.
I have no particular hatred for the billionaires on board the sub, nor do I particularly want them to come to harm, but nor am I going to spare any time or effort feeling sorry for them or their families. They are on that sub by choice and they knew the serious risks involved, and the impact it would have on their loved ones if there was an accident. They sought out the “adventure.”
Millions of other people put themselves in harm’s way because they have to — for one, the Ukrainians currently giving their lives on a daily basis in order to save their country from annihilation by Putin spring to mind as being far more worthy of our “thoughts and prayers.”
jo1storm.
Disappointed I am, to say the least.
Was Timothy McVeigh a billionaire? What about Stephen Craig Paddock, Nikolas Cruz or Salvador Ramos? Brenton Tarrant perhaps?…….
How about those who perpetrated a massacre of nearly a million men, women and children in Rwanda, or Radovan Karadžić, or many of the white immigrants to the ‘new world’, or…………………………………………………..just how many non-billionaire people whose murderous actions were the result of dehumanising others do you want me to list?
When should I add you to it? It is rather a long list so one more will not make much difference.
tacitus, credit to you for hot having a particular hatred, unlike others.
I mentioned Nargeolet @22, now I mention this:
“Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, is also on board, the company confirmed.”
(https://abcnews.go.com/International/missing-titanic-submersible-5-passengers/story?id=100224250)
So the dude was likely not dishonest in thinking the trip was safe, being there and all.
And, presumably, neither was he clueless about the whole submersible thing or safety issues.
—
This in particular, this:
A sentiment with a wide-ranging scope.
(I don’t think I need to elaborate)
—
I suppose, this also bears remark:
See, for some of us, feeling sorry for someone does not entail either time nor effort — it just happens.
(Again, I shan’t elaborate)
—
I here take the opportunity to note I’ve read abbeycadabra’s contribution.
Another person who is a bit clueless.
Wow, this is getting ugly. As mentioned above, the viewport is rated to 1300 meters, 1/3 of the depth they’d be going to. The company refused to pay for the human rated, depth rated viewport.
The submarine is piloted with a Logitech PC game controller. They installed a thruster backwards on one trip, causing the vessel to spin uncontrollably. Control was reestablished by turning the game controller on its side.
An article published in Smithsonian magazine referred to Rush as a “daredevil inventor”. In the article, Rush is described as having said the U.S. Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993 “needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation”.
In a third 2022 dive, according to November 2022 court filings, OceanGate reported that the submersible suffered from battery issues and as a result had to be manually attached to a lifting platform, causing damage to external components.
The viewport alone makes it akin to a Saturday morning cartoon, where Bugs Bunny hammers in an artillery shell fuse to test it.
Banging up the vessel should get a full, detailed inspection, including ultrasound and x-ray inspections of every pressure component, but if they scrimped and saved on an unsafe, underrated viewport, you know damned right well they didn’t spring for such an expensive inspection.
A game controller for a critical control assembly?! I think we can dismiss any notion of redundant control.
From the sound of it, I’d not only never get on that tub, I’d be afraid to walk past it, lest something fall off and injure me.
Oh, from another dive, one conducted by professionals (I think that video was by Bob Ballard), the narrator described a viewport failure as a real concern and likened it to looking down the barrel of a cannon going off if it failed.
Cowboys can typically run the risk of themselves or their horse getting gored. Cowboy around at those depths, one will quickly be turned into gore.
wzrd1, seems I pre-empted you.
Say what you will about Stockton Rush, he walked the walk.
@83: The more I read about the whole endeavor, the more it sounds like suicide with delusions of survival.
microraptor, which is why the very (very!) experienced diver and the CEO went down with it. Suicide with delusions of survival, exactly the sort of thing that draws paying customers.
(I do love the instant expertise)
John Morales, maybe so, but he decidedly wished his squish. Unfortunately, he took others with him.
@72. tuatara : I hope you stick around for the pruely selfish reason that I value and would miss your comments here. Things do get heated and nasty at times on this blog but there are a lot of other better times too.
wzrd1, sure, and also the clueless Nargeolet (cf. 22).
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/us/nargeolet-titanic-submarine.html)
Of course, it’s understandable that his expertise in these matters and his judgement are seen as weak by Jubal.
[nightmare fuel: it was not a catastrophic failure, merely the failure of the power system — no comms, no control — and a snagging upon ballast release. Oxygen will last a while yet]
@81 tuatara:
Family of Radovan Karadžić ended up millionaires by Serbian standards and so did Radovan himself, by pretending to be “natural healer” Dabić under the protection of regime who hid him and refused to immediately deliver him to Hague for trial. Greater part of the resson for his crimes was nationalistic and religious hatred. Much smaller part but still existing was his desire to get rich by robbing the people he murdered. There was whole convoys in 90s of “bela tehnika”, taking washing machines, ovens and tvs etc from killed or evacuated households to Serbia. Also cars and agricultural machines. Some “local bussinessman and pillars of the community” in Serbia started their wealth and empires by doing war crimes. That war criminal should have stood trial in 2000, but the regime that replaced Milošević turned out not to be as great as we hoped when we brought that dictator down. Btw, Milošević’s family is living it large in Russia with the millions they stole from my country despite being on Interpol’s arrest warrant.
https://www.blic.rs/vesti/politika/gde-je-i-sta-radi-marko-milosevic-ruski-mediji-tvrde-vodi-sumnjive-poslove-i-u-vezi/w96s4fr
Feel free to add me to the list the moment I kill my first billionaire or I become one. One is as likely as the other: not likely at all.
@shermanj :
Yes – although if we were to be meanly cynical about that we could argue she did it because she was getting too old to safely drive and was feeling mega-guilty for something I guess? People can always maliciously attribute the worst of motives and denigrate the characters of other people if they so choose. (I don’t recommend doing that & try NOT to it it myself. Imperfectly of course.) Yeah philanthrophy is pretty poor excuse for wealth hoarding of Smaug types levels and should NOT be needed because, well, the whole Crapitalist system is messed up and totally unjust and all of that. Still. That some super-rich do some good things with their ill-gotten, undeserving piles of money despite having gained it and kept it exploitatively and unethically is .. something I guess? Relatively speaking. Better than nothing, better than those who don’t do that and better than those billionaires (e g..Murdoch,. Koch, bros, Palmer, Rhinehart, ad nauseam) who actively make things worse for the world. If not much more than that?
@55.abbeycadabra & #56 feralboy12 : Excellent comments. Well writ and true.
I think we can agree that billionaires and the system is wrong whilst still having at least a trace of respect for the humanity of the individuals here.
Judge people for what they did and said, sure. Condemn the system and how fucked up it is that we get metaphorical dragon and bannana hoarders here who are often uncritically adored and have hugely disproportionate power and influence. I agree with all that. But gloating over deaths of people we don’t know much about simply because we assume* they could afford to do something most people can’t? Yeah, not our finest nicest moments
.* Which yeah, turns out to eb a correct assumption it seems for all but arguably Paul-Henri Nargeolet who seems to have been a professional Titanic tour guide and the hired if willing expert here.
@92
I wish I never heard about the accident or about the people involved. But I have, only because most people in there are ultra-wealthy.
You can’t change the system without taking the power and wealth of those benefiting from it. And they WILL fight to keep it. I always recommend the book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” by Anand Giridharadas. The premise of the book that Anand proves quite well is that there is whole ecosystem artificially limiting the scope of available solutions to “win win” area favoring the rich. For example, you won’t propose to increase the taxes and invest in social programs, you’ll instead propose making expenses tracking apllication and disseminating it to the poor for free. If you want the money of wealthy donors (and that’s the only way to get things done), you’ll stay away from the solutions that make them uncomfortable and stick to those they like.
There’s multiple chapters describing the conflict between democracy and the affluent. The belief that you as the rich guy and “the pillar of community” know better what the community needs than the community itself. Thus, taxes anddemocratic decision making bad, rich guy investing in what he thinks is best good. Doesn’t matter how hortible the means you got your money, it matters you give some it back via charity and wash the rest with that act etc. Smithsonian started that way. Just read the book.
Anyway, I hope they get out of this alive and changed for the better.
Breaking news here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-21/underwater-noises-reported-in-search-for-missing-submersible/102505782
if that is the Titan then they didn’t die quickly and are suffering now.. but may be potentially rescued?
just want to point out, that being a billionaire, or even merely “wealthy” isn’t an immutable characteristic.
Granted, I don’t think it will erase the harm they have done, but if the billionaires felt some remorse, some empathy, some social responsibility, or, well, pretty much anything other than superiority, they could, pretty much overnight, sign away ~99% of their wealth to charities, non-profit groups, schools, universities, government agencies, and any other number of organizations that actually do good work to improve the lot of humanity, and all without reducing their quality of life by any notable measure.
But, they don’t. And they are often putting vast sums of money into lobbying against taxation, regulation, etc.
Being a billionaire is a choice, it’s not a choice many people get to make, those people who do have that choice available, make it on the necks and livelihoods of working people. They are not billionaires because they worked hard or were particulary bright, they are billionaires because they were in the position to profit off of the theft and suffering of poor people.
I’ve always been told about how “possession of stolen goods” is a crime here in the U.S., even if you aren’t aware the goods are stolen, paid a fair market price for them, etc. Why should billionaires be exempt from this?
The Ecosphere that supports human life is dying, and it’s dying because billionaires can be a bit more billionairy a bit more faster. And we can’t seem to address this problem, because all them billionaires are funding climate change denial, and otherwise opposing any sort of reasonable regulatory measures.
I’ve been seeing this Vonnegut quote pop up pretty frequently recently, and it’s spot on: “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”
What next, are Pharyngulites going to start complaining about how unfairly landlords are treated online?
@ 90 Morales
Sorry to add to the nightmare fuel, but many have mentioned the thing is bolted shut from the outside – it cannot be opened by the occupants.
So even if ballast release didn’t fail, you’re still left in a sealed air-tight container bobbing about in the ocean until someone finds you and unbolts the hatch.
@ 95 lochaber
Forgive me if I missed it, but I didn’t see anyone defending billionaires.
Or are you saying that if landlords were suffering a horrible death from asphyxiation, the consensus on Pharyngula would be to applaud?!
Because that’s not the blog I’ve been reading.
Is consensus right now to applaud?
@tuatara:
Yes, billionaires are human beings. So was Osama Bin Laden, Ted Bundy, and Roger Ailes. So what? And I don’t want any of them killed but I want the freedom to not shed a fucking tear or show any fake fucking concern for their demise. I want the freedom to rejoice their passing for the same reason I rejoiced the passing of aforementioned three people: their lack of existence improves the world, even if slightly.
You have that freedom.
(What, am I harshing your vibe?
Oh yes, it is entirely the fault of them billionaires and has absolutely nothing to do with the needs and desires of any other humans.
I see it all the time in my work. Most people I deal with don’t want renewable energy to save the world. They want it to save their world which can often but not always contain their heated swimming pool, their electric car, their high-speed internet etc. Their only concern is being able to have all those things while only reducing the financial cost of having those things. They have no concern as to the environmental cost of manufacturing or disposing of those things. In other words they are just as fucking needy and greedy as them there billionaires.
What next, are Pharyngulites going to start taking to the streets wearing jackboots and sporting swastika armbands demanding all billionaires and landlords get into this truck here to go and have a nice holiday?
Absurdities are easy.
I will say again. I don’t like the idea of a society that encourages and rewards wealth accumulation. But our modern society exists within a hull of dispossession (that we bizarrely call ‘freedom’) and floats on a river of blood. We think that the accumulation of wealth can protect us from the nasty natural world that we no longer know how to survive in. You know it and I know it. It is about time we faced up to what our society actually is before it kills us. It is our prison.
The mess we are in has only a little to do with billionaires.
“Of course the aboriginal people are sick and drunk. We feel the earth as if we are within a mother. When the earth is sick and polluted human health is impossible.
To heal ourselves we must heal the earth, but to heal the earth we must heal ourselves’.
I cannot remember where I cane across that quote, exactly, but I remember it exactly.
My maori father taught me that the earth is my body and my body is the earth.
My father is now dead. My father is my body. My father is the earth. The earth is my ancestor. I am my ancestors. This is what I know to be true. Everything else is a transient dream.
So we here are all the same body. Those nasty billionaires presumably trapped and dying in that sub are our kin, yet some here choose to cling to their disconnections from them rather than their connections to them.
Rant over. I am done.
@microraptor
The random billionaire turns out to be a huge asshole. Wow, I definitely did not see that coming.
It’s also pretty pathetic to see the horde of posters trying to find a few good apples among this rotten class of people. You are missing the point. It’s also doubly ironic because you would have seen how stupid this looks if the subject matter was different. You have no problem with criticizing cops and calling them a crate of rotten apples even though there are a lot of good cops. In fact, I dare to say that the percentage of good cops vastly, hugely, and significantly exceeds the percentage of good billionaires. You get it then but somehow you don’t get it now. I have a guess why but I’ll let you figure out for yourselves.
Bro, you deal with people who have “heated swimming pools”? I am living a comfortable life and so are my friends but I don’t know of anyone who has a heated swimming pool.
MEDITATION XVII
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
John Donne
[totally OT]
lotharloo, like me, tuatara lives in Oz. We have those here. Doesn’t take a millionaire.
My mate has one.
Solar panels drive the pump, water is usually heated via passive solar (basically, black piping on the shed roof, which is where the pump is), has a pool cover if not in use.
Bloody nice.
—
Point being made was that just because people aren’t billionaires doesn’t mean they aren’t every bit as greedy or self-serving or selfish as are actual billionaires.
PBS Newshour :
Here : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/retired-navy-captain-explains-how-a-rescue-of-the-missing-titanic-sub-could-be-carried-out
Via SBS news :
Source : https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/what-we-know-so-far-about-the-missing-titanic-bound-submarine/e9bjce4jv
Oh and also :
Source : https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-missing-titanic-bound-submarine-is-steered-by-a-40-household-item-there-are-more-safety-concerns/5uyl83x6b
Talk about Famous Last Words! (Yeah, yeah, I know. They weren’t his actual last words.) Albeit, Rush may still be alive for some drawn out 30 or now what twenty hours yet trapped inside with five others breathing ever fouler and fouler air and yeah..Nightmare fuel indeed. Maybe.
If that banging was them rather than a false alarm and they’re at the bottom of the North Atlantic* as opposed to the Titan sub having imploded or best case for their unlikely rescue being somewhere at the surface – with them still trapped inside and maybe flung about injuring each other too..
.* Which in a much more significant story that isn’t getting headline coverage is rapidly warming with a line onthe graph for this year’s sea surface temps being dramatically higher than any time recorded before
Sample fucking size. All isosceles triangles are triangles, not all triangles are isosceles triangles. All equilateral triangles are isosceles triangles. The fact that there are other shapes with same size side lengths doesn’t change that point. Billionaires are equilateral triangles here.
All billionaires are greedy, self-serving and selfish. Else they wouldn’t be billionaires. What you’re arguing is that just because someone is a convicted thief that doesn’t mean he is a thief. Unlikely, but it happens. Wrongful convictions happen every day. But if you look at the sample size of all convicted thieves in one country, you’d have to admit that almost all of them are actual thieves. Now do the same for billionaires and the result will be the same.
Re 105
Yeah, heated swimming pool is a middle class thing at best where I live. Apartment blocks will have communal swimming pools. These are not luxuries for “billionaires”.
Can’t do that I’m afraid; best I can do is communist revolution. Because swastika guys were very big on capitalism and hierarchy. You see, the richest guy in the area had to be a member of the Nazi Party: at one point Herman Goering was officially the richest man in Europe, if not the world thanks to this little thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichswerke_Hermann_G%C3%B6ring
There was also a socialist wing of Nazi party that wanted to do exactly as you proposed. Take over, take the wealth, spread it to the people. They were called Strasserists. Still fuckin’ Nazis, still the nationalism, still ravenous hatred of Jews and obsession with racial purity and superiority. Hitler got them all killed because it turns out socialism wasn’t part of his plans but capitalism was. The moment they came into power, Nazis destroyed all labor unions and syndicates, captured and killed all socialists and communists and free thinkers and only THEN they started on minorities. Because they were very big on hierarchies and power and money IS power!
We are all in the same boat and some guy has decided to drill a hole in it. You can be damn sure I’ll try to disconnect from him as quickly and as far as possible and cling to that disconnection for my life. Physically separating him from the means to drill holes in the boat is a normal and sane thing to do.
(sigh)
Again, I’m pointing out the omphalos of tuatara’s rather frustrated comment, since the respondent to it got caught up on the idea of heated pools and missed the actual idea being conveyed. I’m not making any sort of argument.
Yes, I know… the idea is that by virtue of their wealth, it follows that billionaires are not virtuous. This, to some, is an inescapable truth.
Thing is, not everyone aboard the sub was a billionaire.
Still, they hung around with billionaires, so they’re probably bad people too.
The wealthier one is, the worse one is, presumably — perhaps as a step function? Thing is, when I brought up the threshold, I got a bit of a freak out. Notably, flex @50 actually answered that rather well, I thought.
I will note I have watched a number of documentaries about subsistence living in undeveloped places, and I suspect that to those people every reader of this blog is wealthy beyond imagination.
As I see it, wealth beyond the necessities of life is an absolute thing; either one has enough or one does not have enough. Having more than enough, then, constitutes wealth, and the more one’s wealth exceeds one’s needs, the wealthier one is.
I emphasise this again: each of us reading this blog probably has more than enough to meet our needs (needs, not desires!), and so we are wealthy — less wealthy than billionaires, but still wealthy. And wasteful.
—
“I will say again. I don’t like the idea of a society that encourages and rewards wealth accumulation. But our modern society exists within a hull of dispossession (that we bizarrely call ‘freedom’) and floats on a river of blood. We think that the accumulation of wealth can protect us from the nasty natural world that we no longer know how to survive in. You know it and I know it. It is about time we faced up to what our society actually is before it kills us. It is our prison.”
Worth a moment’s thought, perhaps with a perspective shift.
I can’t believe even you John are so unbelievably fucking stupid to write this. Just because your life is cozy and you have no wants, you think everyone else here has a cozy life with no wants? You think that there’s no one reading this who is struggling with rent, with paying medical bills, or otherwise struggling with situations where more money would make it better? I bet you most people on here have heartbreaking stories which could be greatly alleviated if only they had more money.
John, you entitled privilege-blind asshole. Go fuck yourself, and die in a fire already.
On this, I completely disagree. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a comfortable life with some amenities, and there’s a vast difference between having and desiring conventional residential high speed internet, say 100 gigabits / sec, compared to being a fucking billionaire. I am aghast at you making a moral equivalence here.
Also, I don’t want renewable energy to save the world. I am not ideologically wed to a particular solution. I just want to protect the environment and biosphere while also raising people out of poverty. It seems that to you, poverty is somehow a virtue. I am absolutely horrified by this neo-Malthusian mindset. It’s such an extreme regressive and anti-humanist mindset. You are against progress – at least industrial progress that raises our standard of living, seemingly as an a-priori starting point because of some quasi-religious Gaia-worshiping nonsense which in this case just happens to be Malthusian nonsense by another name with a fancy coat.
PS: With current technology, the answer is nuclear power. Let’s please not get too side-tracked into this, but you started it with your ideological drivel about green energy, and thus I feel the need to rebut this stupid idea.
Sorry, I was just ranting about how Star Trek was always woke to a friend of mine, and this has relevance to this discussion. Tuatara, do you actually find the Utopian vision of Star Trek to be objectionable – a society that is largely post-scarcity (and fully-woke)? It’s able to be mostly post-scarcity by relying on cheap “limitless” nuclear power combined with highly advanced 3d-printers. I’m not saying that this is technologically feasible in our lifetime (especially the magic 3d-printers), but I am saying that this is a desirable outcome. It seems like you’re saying that this is not a desirable outcome, and that there’s something morally wrong with anyone who wants that kind of society. You just completely lose me at that point, and your rhetoric just seems so incredibly anti-human that I don’t even know what to say to it. Worse, you seem to elevate quasi-religious ideals about the well-being of “the planet” or “nature” or something over the prosperity of real humans, which just mystifies me.
Aww, Gerrard. Your confessions are so revealing!
Relax, I believe you when you write that you don’t believe I am so stupid.
What part of (needs, not desires!), which you actually quoted, escapes you?
We mostly want what we need, but we also mostly want more than we need.
You obviously have not seen any documentaries such as I’ve seen.
You are not sufficiently informed.
Again: wealth is relative, but absolute poverty is absolute.
Perspective, you need some.
Maybe there was a fire in the submersible. Oxygen-rich atmosphere.
Not an impossibility.
There, there.
Quite a few times now where I have exceeded all bounds of previous stupidity, according to you.
A shelter and health care are not “more than we need”, you fucker, which were the two examples that I gave.
What is this? Some kind of economic “Dear Muslima”? You’re making the argument that the poor oppressed people in the USA who are homeless and without health care can’t complain because there’s someone worse off in some other part of the world? I’m serious. Pour gasoline on yourself and light yourself on fire please. It will make the world into a better place.
Actually, in canon (TOS) it uses matter-antimatter annihilation as the power source, and originally it was just the food synthesiser that “3D printed”.
Replicators came after TOS. Perhaps you’re thinking of transporters?
(BTW, using ‘woke’ unironically in its current sense — as created by its opponents, that is — indicates to me that you’re off-vibe).
John,
The matter-antimatter reaction was just a convenient medium of energy storage, like a battery. Where do you think the anti-matter came from? Why did they have bussard collectors on all their starships?
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bussard_collector
How did Spock die from radiation poisoning in Star Trek 2 if they aren’t using nuclear power?
Etc etc.
If you look into the designer of the original USS Enterprise model, it is fairly grounded in science. Basically, put the crew in some shape that is a compromise between heat radiation to space and good pressure vessel, and you get a flattened sphere. Most of the people live there. He figured the main engineering area was likely to be radioactive or at least dangerous, and so you put main engineering far away from the main living area (the saucer hull) via a long thin tube. His original designs involved a much longer, thinner connection between the main saucer hull and the engineering hull, but it looked “too goofy” and so it was shortened. Finally, he added the magic scifi warp nacelles to visually balance out the shape, and also attached them via tiny little tubes to engineering, under the same assumption that those warp nacelles were likely to be highly radioactive or highly explosive or both.
Star Trek was always a vision of the future with highly compact (and very cheap) energy sources that enabled a post-scarcity economy. The Star Trek replicator, aka the magic 3d printer, came along in the second series, The Next Generation, further building up the clear post-scarcity utopian vision of the future.
You are Tuatara are having this weird conversation where a post-scarcity economy enabled by magic 3d printers powere dby highly compact, very cheap, and very powerful energy sources is somehow immoral, and you are so, so wrong. This kind of economic future is what we should all be striving for, and not the Amory Lovins “soft energy path” that is promoted by Green energy advocates like Amory Lovins, Tuatara, and yourself. This “soft energy path” where people only use what they need, where using more than the bare minimum to satisfy our needs – it’s inherently anti-human, and I hope that the invocation of a clear alternative vision of the future, Star Trek, can make you see this.
PS:
Did I say “Star Trek The Original Series”? Pretty sure I didn’t. Pretty sure I just said “Star Trek”.
Ugg, didn’t type what I wanted. Sorry. Fixing one big error:
Gerrard, last one from me to you about this digression, which has little to do with submarines — or nuclear power, or Star Trek.
I did not say they are more than we need, you nong.
Here, let me quote myself so that you can argue with what I actually claimed, instead of whatever you imagine I claimed.
“As I see it, wealth beyond the necessities of life is an absolute thing; either one has enough or one does not have enough.”
This is the actual claim: “I will note I have watched a number of documentaries about subsistence living in undeveloped places, and I suspect that to those people every reader of this blog is wealthy beyond imagination.”
You follow a predictable pattern, Gerrard.
First, the misunderstanding, then the expostulations, then the angry fanciful claims, then the ascent into true fantasies.
Anyway, no, I am making no argument whatsoever about the poor oppressed people in the USA who are homeless and without health care, because I don’t reckon any such are among this blog’s readership, you know, the specific subject of the contention.
I may be wrong and they may not be disjunct sets, but that’s what I think and so that’s what I wrote.
—
You do know you’ve told me that literally dozens of times by now, here and elseblog, no? Doesn’t work on me.
I know it’s just frustrated venting, but I don’t think it elevates the blog, that sort of thing. Maybe fewer death wishes and more regulation insults and vitriol, instead?
No. I think there will be more death wishes in the future, not less. Go light yourself on fire already for the good of the planet, please.
And as a survivor of third degree burns, I know how horrible of a death that is. That is how much I despise you.
@John Morales:
Wow, you say you have watched documentaries? With voice, and picture and even in color? Wow, I gotta say such a strong piece of evidence settles it.
@ ^ lotharloo
I love how you cannot refute the substance, so resort to mockery.
To clarify, your position is that humans at bare subsistence level would not consider the commentariat of a biologist’s blog wealthy?
@ GerrardOfTitanServer
Morales is a troll, but I’d rather a thousand Morales than one piece of shit who repeatedly calls on people to commit suicide.
Just FUCK OFF
lotharloo, if you want to believe they were fake, I can’t stop you.
You want to believe bare subsistence does not exist and has not been documented, I can’t stop you.
But no, quite real.
I’ve read books, too, of course. But audiovisual is more visceral.
And your attempted sarcasm still misses the point, which was related to trying to clarify what tuatara was saying to another person.
Oh no, how did I do mockery? I’m just admiring John Morales’ deep cutting philosophical observations, his astute mind and precise instincts. As you point out, it is no trivial observation to note that people living in absolute poverty will find middle class Americans to be wealthy. I honestly think such a brilliant observation deserves a Noble prize. Wow, what a deep thought. I honestly think you are underselling it by simply calling it “the substance”. It’s much more than that.
Although to be technical, John Morales said “beyond imagination”. However I suspect people living in poverty might be able to imagine living the luxurious middle class life of having a house, and a car and waking up early in the morning to drive to work, and then driving back home in the evening, reheating some food in technological marvel known as the “microwave oven” (200 years ago, Kings would have killed for such a convenience), and then falling asleep in front of a TV to repeat the same cycle in the morning.
No.
SilentBob
You know, ignoring my irrational dislike of John, I’d probably still prefer for a thousand Johns than a single tankie like you repeating bog-standard Russian misinformation regarding the current war in Ukraine. However, you don’t trigger the same sort of irrational dislike that John does. So meh.
In a conversation about a human treating another human as a human – a stance that I am astonished was argued against by anyone here, we get this…
Wow just….wow.
tuatara
Meh. Just upset about being purposefully trolled by this one asshole for like 10 years now. John. Not you. You’re not a troll. I’e said it before, but I don’t have anything personally against you, and I wish you the best, even though I think that significant parts of your world view are horribly misguided.
“your position is that humans at bare subsistence level would not consider the commentariat of a biologist’s blog wealthy?”
just to clarify… you WOULD conclude that?
interesting.
“using ‘woke’ unironically in its current sense”
impossible, given it has the meaning of “anything they want it to mean whenever they want it to”
There are two last points that I want to clarify before I defect to twitter.
Number one. Star trek is not a fucking documentary!
Number two. Our global economy is a pile of shit. Most of us in it are the bugs that get to eat a bit of the shit pile, live inside it, and move some of it around. But that shit pile, such as it is shaped, unavoidably grows some rich people.
You know Gerard, to turn a popular phrase here in Oz upside down, if pissing on you would save you from dying in a fire I would piss on you. I would get the small pleasure of pissing on you followed by the greater pleasure of saving your life. Win -win!
I’m off to twitter now. At least I won’t be as surprised there as I have been here in this thread.
I’m pretty sure I made that clear myself. However, you didn’t answer my challenge – do you think the future of Star Trek is immoral because they consume more energy than the bare minimum? In other words, do you think that this is the kind of future that we should be striving towards? Or we should be aiming for a future where everyone is economically poor and energy use is kept to a bare minimum ala Amory Lovin’s soft energy path?
I want to raise everyone out of poverty. I want to do more than that. I want to make the world into a post-scarcity utopia ala Star Trek, or as close as we can reasonably come. I know that I probably won’t see it in my lifetime, and maybe it’s impossible to get reach it because magic 3d printers don’t exist, but I still think this should be our goal, to remove the need for coerced labor as much as possible, to leave people free to pursue their dreams, their passions, and to live a life of comfort and safety, without the need for (coerced) manual labor and wage-slavery. For example, some people might run a restaurant, but they would do so because they enjoy cooking, and not because they need to do it to avoid being kicked out of their house and starve. Again, maybe it’s impossible to achieve, but that should be our goal, our aspiration, for our civilization (and we’re sure as hell not going to get there on solar and wind power).
BTW, if you look at the statistics on average wealth and wealth distribution, you will notice that the “Median Wealth” in US is around the same as the “Mean Wealth” Globally, meaning, the “average” American has the “average” wealth globally, meaning, roughly half the American would get more wealth if you distributed the entire wealth of the human species equally among every single human. But let’s not be too mean to billionaires, remember they are also human beings!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult
lotharloo, be as mean as you care to be.
No skin off my nose, no skin off theirs, either.
I very much doubt any are even aware that you exist, or that you rail about them on this blog.
But. You’re nothing to them, they are a source of anger for you.
Point is that it’s rather revealing about your character.
That oxygen deadline, BTW, is just about to expire as I type this.
And somehow, I feel sorry for them all. Bad for their families.
Not volitionally, it takes no effort, it takes no time. Just happens.
(And I tend to be perceived as callous and amoral, been told so many many times, so consider whence that judgement about your character)
—
tuatara, I hope you don’t leave for good.
And I really don’t get what John finds so objectionable about the rather obviously true claim that nearly all billionaires (perhaps excluding some who simply inherited their wealth) are assholes who became billionaires by the immoral exploitation of countless others. Why this perverse need to defend the undefendable? Simply an in-the-moment need to be a contrarian which John often displays? Dunno.
You seem to be calmer now, Gerrard.
I’m not sure why you feel the urge to address me in the third person and obliquely, but here we are. So, I will try an adumbration for you.
Regarding #138, I think it’s a very arguable position whether the mere fact that one is a billionaire (two of them in the apparently doomed submersible, not the other three) entails that they’re evil, much less an asshole.
That many are, the majority even, is less arguable, but even so, when one knows nothing at all other than their name and their wealth status and thereby thinks it’s damn dandy and morally righteous to gloat about their deaths and is even critiquing the global economic order, I think that morally suspect and does not predispose me to like their character.
That’s basically the gist of it.
It started with one measly comment in response to a particular sentiment which had recently been expressed (lochaber @22), and spiralled from there as people interacted with me. So, in the moment on the basis that it was a direct retort to a very recent comment, and there was nothing contrarian about it, since I did not say he shouldn’t express that sentiment, but rather what I thought about it.
Doesn’t seem that complicated to me, it’s a single thread of not even two hectocomments yet, and every comment is there, available for review.
Yea. I just don’t know why you’re being that much of a contrarian. Or maybe you’re just that bloody ignorant. Dunno.
Freethoughtblogs, this is.
I’m thinking for myself, Gerrard, and what I think is this: “Yes, I know… the idea is that by virtue of their wealth, it follows that billionaires are not virtuous. This, to some, is an inescapable truth.”
Now, if you want to believe that not holding that particular idea as a self-evident truth is being contrarian, go ahead. But it’s a mistaken belief.
—
In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/22/titanic-sub-rescuers-intensify-search-as-fears-grow-over-titans-remaining-oxygen-supply
Freethought is not an excuse for willful self-delusion and ignorance.
Gerrard, indeed it is not.
At best, it’s an causative explanation, and it can only possibly be an excuse if it’s adduced in order to exculpate or at least mitigate the misdeed.
However, it was you who claimed willful self-delusion and ignorance as the basis for what you imagine to be my contrarianism (contrary to my clarification in response to your musings) and so it cannot be functioning as an excuse. You clearly intended it to be a condemnation, of course, but that sort of thing only works when there’s merit to the claim.
So, it’s neither an excuse in the exculpatory sense, it’s not even an excuse in any other sense.
I was going to get around to Dolby’s 1982 album eventually. The irony of that song, along with others hitting their anniversaries around this time.
It turns out that in 2022, game maker David Szymanski released a game called “Iron Lung” where a person is trapped in a submarine trying to survive. From his twitter account:
@121. GerrardOfTitanServer :
What.
The.
Actual.
Fuck!
Dude?!
No. That kinda shit is NOT acceptable ever.
The fuck is wrong with you to type that?
People are peoplr, Individuals. Its okay to disagree even vehemently disagree and explaining why is good but that type of shit. Just fucking. NO
Beyond the Pale here.
The oxygen thing is bs, it’s basically a way for news netwo to maintain a perpetual news cycle with no actual substance to report. I am watching CNN but it wouldn’t surprise me if at some point they place a fucking countdown on the screen.
The passengers were turned to pancakes instantly. Among the millions of ways to die from, it’s probably one of the best, to be instantly crushed with no time to suffer. So they kinda achieved top 0.001% both in life and death.
Damn, it should say, “I AM NOT WATCHING CNN!!!”
Abe Drayton puts it all very well here in my view :
https://proxy.freethought.online/oceanoxia/2023/06/21/as-a-species-we-cannot-afford-rich-people/
StevoR
Just like Silentbob, you’re tone policing, aka tone trolling. I see little difference between this and “fuck yourself with a spiky hedgehog” or whatever the meme was / is. Same effect. You should be bad at the serial troll, the person willfully acting in bad faith, and not mad at someone who is upset about the serial troll.
Gerrard @149: Wishing (repeatedly) a horrible death on someone is not a ‘tone’. It says far more (in an unflattering way) about you than it does about John.
Rob,
Ok
@149. GerrardOfTitanServer : “I see little difference between this and “fuck yourself with a spiky hedgehog” or whatever the meme was / is.”
The “meme” (if youcan all it that) that we stopped using becuase enough people said it was problematic? It was to “self insert a decayed dead porcupine up your anus”and there’s a big difference between that joke insult that we long ago stopped using anyhow and literally telling someone to committ suicide in a particularly horrific way. Doing the latter as you have here crosses a real red line here that is, again, just not okay.
FWIW. I don’t share your asessment of John Morales here. Nor it seems and more importantly does PZ Myers.
@ ^
Dude, you realise while you’re defending him, that troll’s calling you stupid in another thread?
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2023/06/22/unfortunately-my-expectation-has-been-confirmed/#comment-2183820
(He is not your friend.)
#115: While I agree that Morales can be annoying and infuriating, that’s true for most of us here (maybe everyone?) You seem to have developed an ugly obsession, and at least Morales hasn’t told anyone to .
The one person I’m tempted to ban in this argument isn’t John Morales, it’s you. Knock it off or go elsewhere.
So, even PZ is tone trolling, berating the person complaining about the serial troll instead of banning the troll. I remember when this place looked down on tone trolls, e.g. fuck someone with a pointy porcupine and such.
You are wrong PZ. John is not just as bad as everyone else. Almost everything John posts is an asinine, pedantic, purposefully missing the point, smug remark. Nothing of value would be lost of he was banned. But I bet there’s a good chance that you’ll ban me for complaining about him and your tone troll police. Whatever.
Thanks SilentBob.
Not just that, but John Morales is irredeemably an dishonest, disingenuous asshole, who, even when called out on his errors and his errors are clearly explained to him, he never admits fault. I cannot recall a single instance where he ever admitted he was wrong in his trolling. That is what really pisses me off. The perpetual bad-faith engagements.
I still remember when he claimed that the Hornsdale battery proves that grid scale energy is economically feasible. I corrected him, saying that Hornsdale earns most of its money from frequency control markets and not primary energy markets. He said I was wrong, and posted a link to rebut me that said exactly what I already said, aka supporting my position. I called him on it, and he refused to admit or apologize for his error. This is par for the course. This is what he does all the time. Fuck John Morales.
[ref]
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2021/04/15/so-many-frauds-so-few-nathan-robinsons/#comment-2090276
https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/
Actually, no, I was thinking of this one:
https://proxy.freethought.online/oceanoxia/2022/02/19/a-useful-but-somewhat-frustrating-video-on-nuclear-power/
Me:
John:
Clearly posting a rebuttal in his snide, indirect way:
Me:
John
Continuing the rebuttal:
Me:
This is when I started actively hating you John and I became convinced that you are a disingenuous troll who never admits when they’re wrong, even when it’s undeniably so.
I will take John Morales over any of the three whining dudes who are currently engaging in an online pedant pissing contest with JM.
This is some heavy-duty projecting. How long is that thread over on Marcus Ranum’s blog that features GOTS being dishonest and disingenuous about his pet debate subject of nuclear energy? A month?
While John can certainly be irritating with his strict adherence to pure logic, he is not dishonest and generally accepts correction (with good evidence).
In this instance, he is not wrong that it is inhumane to claim that all billionaires are inherently evil and thus deserve to die.
It is entirely possible to scroll past his comments or not engage with him at all.
Tethys
I’m sorry to have ever made you upset. I have nothing against you. I wish you the best. However, it makes me sad that you cannot tell the difference between someone who posts disingenuous and dishonest comments for the sole purpose of pissing off other people for their own self masturbation (John), vs me, someone who disagrees quite strongly with some of your beliefs, but who engages in good faith, honestly, with integrity, and who admits when he believes someone has shown he is wrong.
Re nuclear power, I believe this is the biggest issue facing humanity in the short term, climate change, and that’s why I post so extensively and so passionately about it. I am not a troll because I think and argue that almost everything you believe about green energy and nuclear power is wrong. John is a troll for saying “X is false, and here’s a source to show it”, quotes from that source, and the quote explicitly and clearly says X is true, and John refuses to admit it.
tl;dr
Someone can passionately disagree with you without being a troll.
but who engages in good faith, honestly, with integrity,
Didn’t PZ just tell you to quit trolling this thread?
7 more comments that accuse the blog owner and JM of lying, plus bonus verbal abuse and gaslighting isn’t conveying integrity, honesty, or good faith.
Accuse PZ of lying? Where? I did no such thing. Gaslighting? What? Just… sigh. And yes, I’ll give trolls verbal abuse all day every day.
@GerrardOfTitanServer : A lot of people here will and have accused you of being a troll or a bot here y’know.
FWIW. I don’t think you’re a troll or a bot personally. A monomaniac on your obsession with nuclear power who refuses to accept the majority view rejecting it but then I guess we all have our own issues to varying degrees some of us more than others – myself included especially.
@ 155. GotS : “So, even PZ is tone trolling, berating the person complaining about the serial troll instead of banning the troll.”
You’re NOT being berating for complaining about someone you think is a troll you are being “berated” for calling on someone to committ sucide – in a particuarly horrible way which, yet again, is something totally different. Call JM or me or others
rude names, hell that’s part of this blog. Tell him or us to fuck off or whatever if it makes you feel better and express your rage sure but urging someone to literally kill themselves? No Just no.
@Silentbob : Yeah, I read that. Obvs I disagree and thought that was rude as well as inaccurate. However, JM is a regular who is also regularly really rude and frustrating and lacking in tact but also does soemtimes contribute things of interest here. I’m pretty sure I do remember him apologising and being kind on rare occassions here too.
Tu quoque. IPCC reports say we need more nuclear power. A large majority of climate scientists do as well. Typically only special interest groups who are probably funded by fossil fuel money say we don’t. You’re the one living in a delusioanl netherworld, and as Dr James Hansen and some other climate scientists say, you are the biggest obstacle to fixing the climate, worse than climate change deniers.
@GerrardOfTitanServer:
So in my experience, John Morales is kind of a lame poster who often posts trivial observations pretending to be deep but that’s fine, I just find it boring to engage with because it’s tedious to engage short-sighted people. However, if that makes you angry enough to write “kill yourself” type response, I’m sorry but then you have lost.
@tethys:
Can you point to an honest business venture that earns you a billion dollars in the current world, i.e., show me a billionaire who has made their money in an honest and moral way. In other words, the claim that people like me are making is that in the current economic system, there is no moral and honest way of earning a billion dollars. If you accept this, then it follows that all billionaires are evil. We do not start with the premise that “all billionaires are evil”, we start with an observation and follow it up with its logical conclusion. And again, the billion dollar is an arbitrary amount (cue in JM’s trivial arguments for a threshold; the statement is a systemic criticism and not a way to find the threshold of evil based on wealth; this is so fucking boring to explain, please have some intelligence) and it also does not mean that earning less money than a billion dollar indicates that it’s been done morally (another boring comment written somewhere up there). Again, this is a systemic criticism and of course we know it is mathematically possible to be a moral person and end up with a billion dollars.
Heh heh heh.
“pretending to be deep”!
Gotta love it.
Right.
List of Evil People: https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
[can’t resist]
Oprah, well… evil. I thought she was merely a woomeister and a grifter, but no. I’m told that some hold otherwise.
Evil! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEvil! Malevolent. Wicked!
Oh my!
($2.5B)
[forbes]
I can hardly think of anyone more evil than rithanna, whoever that is.
Ah, I see Elton John is not evil; a mere $500m or so atm.
Oh, wait.
No. Ah well, evil. EEeeviiiil!
This is just embarrassing. Would you believe there was once a time, back in the day, when Morales was considered quite good at crafting a rational argument?
Sad to see the degeneration before one’s eyes. :-(
heh.
Bob, embarrass yourself all you want.
Which is why I got OM, now deprecated, back in the day.
Hey, want to know about more EEEEEEEEEEEEvilllllllll people?
(Big list, and according to some, all deserve to die to make the world a better place, that being the proper moral stance and a criticism of the global economic order)
[nostalgia]
Ah. truth machine (my adopted sifu). SGBM. Caine. SC. Owlmirror. Ksenya. Smoggy. ‘Tis Himself (doomed by Slymepit!).
The list goes on.
I remember.
You know, it was Caine and SC who, in my estimation (and I was posting here before PZ moved to SB) set the tone for this place.
Rather early in the piece, they noted stuff (e.g. gender mismatches, gendered language, etc) that is now part of the fabric of this place. It is becoming slightly these days, but it was foundational and has outlived PZ’s original intent of science outreach.
All good.
(obs, there were many others. Jadehawk, for example. But those two are the best two. And I suppose Sastra merits a mention, though now she’s at Ophelia’s)
While I’m at it: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Marjanovic-2
John Morales, bro, you are trying too hard and it’s all so boring. Expect no other replies from me unless you can move the discussion to a more interesting point.
Look at grandpa getting all weepy.
All you’re describing is the evolution of social mores. Pharyngula didn’t invent feminism you nong. It was at a time and place where a rift erupted between feminists and sexual harassers.
Today that same consciousness has evolved into “woke”.
And Ophelia’s is an utter cesspit of bigotry these days, almost unbelievable how far right she’s gone. Anyone who’s accompanied her was never much of an SJW to begin with.
O! Woe is me!
—
Heh heh heh.
heh.
I was there, you know. That’s the very point.
I was there too, you know.
Anyway, I was talking about Sastra (whose actual name I do know) who actually had guest posts on this very blog, because she was respected by PZ too.
Goes to show, because I thought her very wise. Cluey, even.
And, hey, I’m not getting weepy, I’m waxing nostalgic, as I noted. So many more names! And it was you who brought up “back in the day”.
Brownian. Wowbagger. NigelTheBold.
(Your name, alas, is not on that list)
Also, with all respect to our esteemed poopyhead, Pharyngula was a creepy fucking cult in those days. It had it’s own fucking wiki! Can you imagine a fucking blog taking itself so seriously it starts a fucking wiki?!
I glad PZ did away with all that culty bullshit and now has normal interests like…
um…
*ahem*
…feeding flies to spiders.
*shudder*
That fucking wiki being this one here that I somehow didn’t link to properly because I’m an idiot:
https://pharyngula.fandom.com/wiki/Pharyngula
ChattyChap:
Well, yes, I can.
But, in this case, it was entirely independent of the blog, it was done by the fandom, not by the blog.
PZ vaguely acknowledged it at the time, but it was most certainly not official in any sense. He had zero to do with it.
(Alas, you’ve always been on the outer, trying to fit in with the actual players)
[oops. Shoulda included Crip Dyke, who was there from the start, and was (of course!) most meritorious. She has less time these days, but she does have a blog here]
OK, going to bed, so one last thing.
Silentbob, you’ve made this sort of insinuation before, not too long ago, and I responded then.
Perhaps you’ve forgotten?
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2023/05/28/i-guess-these-are-the-kinds-of-people-who-run-the-country-now/#comment-2180243
You:
Speaking of whoosh, is there a reason you’re linking to an archive of a 15 year old post from the creepy days when Pharyngula was like a weird cult that gave itself awards other than to have people ask why you’re linking to an archive of a 15 year old post from the creepy days when Pharyngula was like a weird cult that gave itself awards?
In case you forgot, here’s the response you got from me:
“You had to be there to, as StevoR pithily put it, grok it.
And, of course, the Mollies are currently canonically deprecated.
(But sure, nothing more cultish than the acclamation of one’s peers.
“Best and fairest” at the local sporting club? Weird cult vibes, right there!)”
—
But, hey, beat on that drum all you want. It is meet.
I came across Jadehawk the other day BTW Morales, on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/IamJadehawk
Still fighting the good fight. Hasn’t crossed to the dark side like so many of your old buddies from ye olden dayes.
Let me clarify: the Pharyngula wiki has nothing to do with me, and I have nothing to do with it. It’s something somebody cobbled up because the site has a long history of obscure referents that only long-time insiders remember.
For example, the Order of the Molly. That was an attempt to encourage positive, constructive comments, rather than the kind of nitpicking pedantry that went on and on with commenters sniping at one another, like we’re seeing in action right here in this thread.
It was discontinued because it was encouraging the idea that there was a hierarchy of commenters, some getting special attention. It undercut the egalitarian nature of the conversation. And new commenters had no idea what was going on.
If this is a cult, I am very disappointed that none of you are tithing, or have left your families to come work in my compound.
No, it doesn’t. Very few people (lotharloo is of course an exception) are moral and honest in everything they do. But most of us (lotharloo is of course an exception, presumably because they are morally spotless) would reserve the epithet “evil” for those who deliberately set out to cause suffering and destruction. Did Rihanna (to take John Morales’ example) do that?
@KG:
The standard mode of operation in the current economic system is unfair and exploitative and since this is the norm and the standard, it gets no mention or news coverage. In other words, you wouldn’t hear a beep on whether Oprah or Rihanna are exploitative or not. And so, the default assumption and the null hypothesis is that a billionaire is exploitative who got there by underpaying others and overpaying themselves as well as other exploitative practices. So, if want to claim that Rihanna got there fair and square, you got to show evidence for it buddy.
I haven’t been on 4chan in over 15 years, but this is sage advice when dealing with a troll on an unmoderated (or undermoderated) forum. Let me get that greasemonkey script to just block him.
You have a compound? Oh those poor, poor grad students.
/s