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Comment by hawk_ | Hacker News Reader

I am curious how we (the society) justify the shared costs incurred in searching for people involved in such a reckless mission.

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Real-world training for the newbies, exercise for the journeymen, and teaching moments for the experts. That alone is worth my tax dollars for keeping a robust search and rescue force.

At least some of the CEO's estate should go to paying for it, but pay out to victims' families first.

> Real-world training for the newbies, exercise for the journeymen, and teaching moments for the experts. That alone is worth my tax dollars for keeping a robust search and rescue force.

This. When the shit hits the fan, and lives could be at stake, the participants in responsive operations seem to focus more intently, and the lessons learned seem to get imprinted more firmly, than when it's a drill.

(There was a reason that when Pearl Harbor was attacked, the emergency radio transmission that went out was, "Air raid Pearl Harbor X This is no drill." [0])

I suspect the psychology might be related somehow to Samuel Johnson's dictum that "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/12/0...

Yes I get the training aspect. My point was around charging them for this. There are other such rescue missions where our brave men and women risk their lives because of reckless behavior of some. We should at least have such reckless actors take a bigger burden where possible.

It's my understanding that in rescue missions where the targets don't pay with their lives, they end up paying monetarily afterwards.

Depends a great deal on who is doing the rescuing and whether the people rescued are considered negligent. Iceland's SAR team, for example, has gone back and forth on whether to charge people because when people believe they'll have to pay, they're less likely to call for help until the situation has gotten way worse and way more dangerous for the team.

The same would happen for the fire department. Can you imagine if an investigation blamed you for a house fire, then the fire department charged you for services? Many fewer people would call the fire department, and many more would die in house fires. People seem pretty casual here about wagging the finger. Just wait until they make an accidentally poor decision and need to be rescued.

In general, certainly at smaller scale (e.g. hikers who get lost/injured in winter), they're not charged in many places unless there was clear negligence. Which is mostly how you want it to be. You don't really want people to avoid search and rescue and just hope things work out because they're afraid of a big bill.

Exactly. Same reason that, even setting aside basic humanitarian ethics, it made sense for fire departments from all over America to send their crews to help out after 9/11 even though the victims didn't fund them; the experience is well worth the expense.

Which of the victims asked those planes to be sent their way?

I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

You're comparing a terrorist attack (9/11) to reckless malfeasance (this sub). The more apt comparison would be of 9/11 to the Andriana disaster. It's a bit ridiculous to champion the humanitarian benefits of sending a throng of people to look for a handful of people in a very unusual situation while ignoring the larger humanitarian disaster that is far more likely to happen again (ergo far more important to practice for).

And, yes, it's a zero sum game. People looking for the five rich guys are people that cannot look for the hundreds of children trapped on a sinking ship.

At this point, we don't know that there was reckless malfeasance at play. However, there is plenty of circumstantial data to indicate that may have been the case. There was certainly an explicit and willful disregard for expert advice or battle-tested opinions. However, we don't have enough information yet (and may never get it) to conclude that was the cause of the accident.

It could be that someone/something damaged the hull (oceans and boats are notoriously hostile environments) and that created a weak spot that failed under pressure, or that some other mechanical failure occurred. However, those are both every bit as speculative as what I'm cautioning against. They are provided for illustration, only.

Could be? The whistleblower found visual defects in the carbon fiber before they even started using the sub. That's why they fired him. They eventually found more damage and repaired the hull in 2020/21.

You're assuming these searchers would actually be able to get to the sinking ship with children in time. The Mediterranean Sea (near Greece specifically) is quite far from the Titanic site. Exactly how fast do you think ships can travel?

Besides any sort of altruism, there's also fame-seeking or marketing to consider; pulling off a high-profile rescue puts you and your company's name in the news, and makes people think of you as a business that can solve other difficult problems.

Agree with the sentiment, but 3+ of the victims had far more net worth than the CEO

The 5th passenger from the French, maybe not

Agreed. Hopefully, this will result in a requirement for "black boxes" or "flight recorders" for this type of recreational/tourist endeavour going forward. They aren't going to prevent the accident that just occurred, but they provide valuable data to prevent future accidents.

I think there is value in living in the kind of society where you know that if you are lost at sea there will be arguably irrational levels of resources thrown into trying to find you. And not just the rich either, no matter what Twitter would have you believe.

  I think there is value in living in the kind of society where you know that if
  you are lost at sea there will be arguably irrational levels of resources thrown
  into trying to find you.

Sure, if you're rich.

  And not just the rich either, no matter what Twitter would have you believe.

If you're poor you'll end up like the hundreds of children still stuck on the Andriana.

What about the insane amount of resources poured into saving that group of Thai teenagers trapped in a cave? That was a huge, extremely costly effort.

What about them? The warnings about the cave admonish people to not enter it between July and November, the group went in towards the end of June.

Oceangate had been warned by pretty much anyone with any knowledge of their efforts. They fired and sued their Director of Marine Ops who tried for stricter safety measures. They've already had to repair stress damage to the hull before the final dive. They were using parts not expected to hold up to 4000m dives, they were using flammable materials inside the sub.

The Thai team did something generally recognized as safe, and got caught up in a bad situation. The Oceangate folks did something that they'd been warned against repeatedly and consistently, something nobody thought was safe. Oceangate took every opportunity to do the wrong thing and try to profit off of it.

Insofar as wealth has anything to do with it, pedo guy happens to be pretty damn wealthy (ex financial broker). If those Thai kids hadn't caught a rich guy's attention their misadventure would've been a mere footnote.

> I think there is value in living in the kind of society where you know that if you are lost at sea there will be arguably irrational levels of resources thrown into trying to find you

I wouldn’t know, because i live in the kind of society where if you are lost at sea and you call for help but the call handler assumes that you have the wrong kind of passport they just tell you to call some other country and then hung up on you. [1]

But i would rather live in the kind of society where we spend our pooled resources to heal those who have fallen sick, than in one where we spend our pooled resources to rescue statistical anomalies. Everyone can become sick one day, not everyone will get suckered to buy a deluxe sea going group coffin by a conman.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/13/uk-coastguar...

Pretty disingenuous when those 'refugees' were simply planning on illegally entering the UK, and everyone involved knew it.

>The refugee said it was his fourth attempt to cross the Channel. During the previous three attempts French police had caught them on the beach and punctured their dinghies with knives.

Honestly didn't realize though refugees thought the benefits in the UK were better than France's.

And now they're dead, and every single person involved in in the execution of that process is a murderer.

Not disingenous at all. They were lost at sea and there were no irrational levels of resources thrown into trying to find them. There were not even rational level of resources thrown into trying to find them. There were not even half-assed-pretending-to-care level of resources thrown into trying to find them.

This is a simple observation of facts. If you don’t like some implication if it so bad for you. I don’t like it either, but I suspect we disagree in what way we don’t like the implications.

Absolutely irrelevant. When hundreds of peoples' lives are at risk, and you have the opportunity to save them, you do so. If they're doing something you fundamentally disagree with (like piloting an obviously-unsafe vessel to 4km underwater), you do your best to rescue them anyways.

Who gives a shit?! They were still human beings.

There's more to be said, but I'd say the training experience in a real-world situation alone is probably valuable. Helps identify actual stress points in the rescue process, for example.

The same way we justify the significant resources devoted to the attempted rescues of the Thai boys in the cave and the Chilean miners.

Effective Altruists would point out buying several castles with stolen crypto money is more effective than this search and rescue because the castle vibes improve their work on raising more money and growing the community.

As someone who isn't very reckless, if I'm ever in trouble I'd love if people would search for me without trying to debate exactly how reckless I was being.

Then recoup what you can from me or my estate if you determine I was reckless after the fact, when you have plenty of time to evaluate the facts.

Ah, in fact, search & rescue organizations are pretty outspoken in their view that compensation is never sought from the people they rescue. It's a heavily-discussed topic and they are really steadfast in this view. Our provincial organization BC Search & Rescue Association actually published a series of videos on this subject, where they go into quite some detail about the rationale behind different arguments and why they've settled on this stance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR6hxFphCSc (and more info and links to the other videos at https://bcsara.com/no-charge-for-sar/ )

When you need rescue in mountains, you pay. Full stop. If they deployed chopper, you pay full price of it too.

Obviously there is an insurance for mountain climbing. But search party is not free, just that insurance pays if you have it.

Not here in BC: https://www.nsnews.com/bc-news/bcsara-launch-video-series-to...

It is so in Europe in Alps and other national parks.

Is this for sure all paid with tax money?

Here in the alps, if you have an injury hiking and need a helicopter ride then you are required to pay for the ride (normally a few thousand euros). I assume it's the same if you're lost.

And I would assume it's the same on high sea...

yes, same in Canada afaik. seems quite plausible to me that some of these bills will be sent to OceanGate, we don't know. ofc their ability to pay is another question.

What's your definition of reckless? Were the boys stuck in the cave in Thailand reckless? Should we not have rescued them? Where is the line of who is deserving of our sympathy?

The grown ups involved in that who didn't pay heed to warnings would be reckless. We still rescue them but we can charge those who can pay for it.

And the 19 year old who didn't want to go on the submarine but wanted to spend time with his dad? Was he reckless? Was he worth searching for?

Do we know he did not want to go?

According to his aunt: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/titanic-submersible-shahw...

> We still rescue them

We still rescue them. I never argued against rescuing them.

The Thai boys got stuck when rains came too soon. They were in cave where they were allowed to be and followed usual seasonal rules. They were unlucky.

The owner of subversive bragged about safety being useless, punished employee warning about safety ossies, by all reports pushed the luck again and again and his missions had track record of failures and issues.

not the same

Not an expert, but I would expect that these sorts of events are used as training.

Easy - if it was us down there, or someone we cared about, we’d want the search to happen

Of course we'd want that. But here's a rich CEO who fired safety whistleblower. Why take all that burden? A bunch of rich people who were lost at sea - we could charge all of their estates for this.

That’s not a sound argument. I would like the government to give me a billion dollars. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’d like the government to give a randomly selected person a billion dollars.

Well, the army needs training in order to become operative.

If training is not real, they create it. They spend billions every year simulating events.

But anyway, I expect them passing at least part of the bill to the company, that will go bankrupt.

Maybe it makes sense to think of it as something similar to insurance. We pay into it (through taxes), hope we don't need it, and really appreciate it when we _do_ need it.

Even if it doesn't balance out or make sense financially, I'm much happier living in a world where we care about each other rather than one where we're weighing the value of saving a life.

I had this same thought when watching The Martian. If you're unfamiliar, an astronaut is accidentally left on Mars. The story is about how he survives and the immense measures those at NASA and the CNSA go to just to save one life. It's an inspiring thought.

Does the search team/agency simply eat the cost or does the cost get passed back to the insurance for the company, the company itself, or the CEO personally since he has the means to pay. Further, everyone on board has the means to pay for a recovery, should they too share some of the cost?

I believe almost all Search and Rescue is free because S&R organizations don’t want people to hesitate to call 911 (or equivalent) because of cost concerns, and have the situation deteriorate while they delay calling.

As to who should share in the cost… my take is that it’s time to discuss whether some expeditions (e.g. risky commercial tourist rides) should sign a Do Not Rescue pledge before they head out and/or self-fund a commercial rescue operation.

This is pretty much the poster child for insurance policies. One of the first major uses of insurance was for maritime activities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_of_London

Yeah this question gets asked somewhat frequently in the mountain(ish) town where I live after someone does something dumb and requires extraction.

It's just better that they call right away rather than wait too long and die.

If you search around on the internet, you can find people writing this up in much more detail and more eloquently.

From anecdotal evidence, the few search and rescue units I've been involved with (all non-technical volunteer units) have been overwhelming against charging subjects, at least as a general rule.

But the considerations for something like this are pretty much entirely different, risk to non-technical rescuers is pretty minimal and the costs are just gas and the time spent on what is essentially just an unplanned hike with some extra gear.

There has been at least one case in the White Mountains where the leader of a search and rescue team recommended charging the person they rescued, because that person acted with negligence and put the lives of the search and rescue team in unnecessary danger.

I'm sure this is rare though.

There are some places where that outcome is explicitly listed on the warning signs. Less dramatically, places like Sleeping Bear Dunes list the cost for a rescue at the top to warn people that otherwise might make bad decisions;

https://npca.s3.amazonaws.com/images/11275/93882d38-5217-4aa...

https://preview.redd.it/mx98brhdszg71.jpg?width=960&crop=sma...

Mountain climbers and tourists in Europe who need help have to pay for rescue. Unless they have insurance in which case insurance pays. (It is affordable).

> The mission of the United States Coast Guard is to ensure our Nation's maritime safety, security and stewardship

> We will serve our Nation through the selfless performance of our missions.

> We will honor our duty to protect those we serve and those who serve with us. [1]

In answer to your question: No. That's what taxes are for.

There could be other legal penalties if the SAR mission is prompted by negligence or illegal activity but the Coast Guard doesn't chase anyone down for operating costs.

[1] https://www.history.uscg.mil/Home/Missions/

The Navy gets to learn, perhaps make good use of the information learned in the future. They occasionally need to conduct rescue and other times recovery missions and this could help inform those missions in the future.

I guess it's great practice for the coast guard / navy which they need to do anyways.

Impromptu rescue sessions like this provide tremendous training opportunities. The US Navy was going to be out there sailing around anyway.

Solving an unknown problem with whoever is available on hand at that moment. Coordinating between that ad hoc group and analyzing the results afterward is a real world activity that can't truly be simulated.

they don’t have time to judge whether someone is worth rescuing

If the resources involved would have been doing scheduled training anyways, this doesn't really cost society anything.

The better question is 'Who do we refuse to help?'

The will of the people. I'm sure most of the taxpayers who will end up footing the bill would want the rescue attempt here.

> how we (the society) justify the shared costs incurred in searching for people involved in such a reckless mission

Nobody asked me if I want to pay for it or not. So i don’t feel that the “we” is justified. But if they would have asked me i would have voted to not move a finger unless some private entity (the company or the families, or literally anyone who wants to) pays for it.

They went out of their way to do something knowingly recklesly dangerous, and the cost of any rescue attempt is enermous.

Yes well you're paying through your taxes at least (assuming you are a tax resident in the jurisdictions involved)

I understand. I’m not doubting that. What I’m saying is that I don’t need to justify anything. The people who have control over spending the money or not need to justify it. And since that is a very small set of people I don’t feel it is fair to ask how “we “ justify it.

But even in a hypothetical where the government sent out a snap poll saying “Sup citizen. 5 fellas lost in a sub. Need $140m for rescue attempt. Send yay or nay.” I would have responded with “nay”. So even in that hypothetical I wouldn’t feel I need to justify why we should spend money to rescue these people. (By the by, this hypothetical sounds crazy, but we could totally have this kind of direct say in matters. We have the tech for it.)

So who gets to arbitrate whether some activity is "unnecessarily" dangerous? I'm sure I do things that some people who mostly stick to good weather urban activities would consider unreasonably dangerous.

"privatise the profits, socialise the losses"

You now get to have a say in how someone else lives their life because you are held financially responsible for the consequences of their own actions. Aren’t government services wonderful?

Forgiveness. We frequently forgive stupid a5es, and adopt regulations to prevent other a5es causing too much damage. It was Jesus' message, after all.

You can easily find 10 people in any metropolis who are down on their luck. Spending the equivalent amount of resources on those 10 people you could achieve a lasting positive impact on their lives. Why not spend the money on those 10 people? Did Jesus teach us that a5es in submarines are more valuable than a5es in an ER or sleeping in an underpass?

You can make this argument for literally anything. It's cheaper to feed 100 kids in Africa for a month than to give someone treatment after a car accident. It's cheaper to give mosquito nets to African villages to fight malaria than to put out a house fire started by someone that ignored warnings of grease fires.

Basically everyone in this thread is in the top 1% of global wealth (not just industrialized or western wealth) and does stupid things all the time and get treatment or are rescued. Happens every day. So, the argument is really weak.

> Did Jesus teach us that a5es in submarines are more valuable than a5es in an ER or sleeping in an underpass?

No, and that's not what I am saying. The poor people you mention deserve help or assistance, not forgiveness, they did nothing wrong. You're making a categorical error, I think. Forgiveness is a separate deal from charity or inclusion or equality. We forgive actions, not living conditions.

Because it was interesting to hear about. Literally tens of millions of people thought that this was interesting to hear about.

Compassion and curiousity

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