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Comment by AH4oFVbPT4f8 | Hacker News Reader

I hope the other souls onboard fully understood the risk of death, otherwise that isn't fair to them.

To relate it to flying in an airplane, “If you take one flight a day, you would on average need to fly every day for 55,000 years before being involved in a fatal crash.”

I'll take those odds.

Take a deep dive in an experimental vessel with public safety concerns expressed over years, nope I'm out.

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It also looked so terribly janky. I feel like all the lights were flashing red for this craft, but maybe people were swayed by assurances from people who were a bit too enthusiastic about their product.

Billionaires get to the money by the art of charisma and bullshitting so it is entirely possible they got bullshitted all the way to the bottom on that too

They all had to sign multi-page waivers that mention "death" no less than three times on the first page.

> They all had to sign multi-page waivers that mention "death" no less than three times on the first page.

You sign similar waivers for all kinds of benign things - including amusement park tickets, concerts, skateboard parks, etc.

I have a feeling the safety of this contraption was grossly oversold to the passengers...

It's one of the best arguments over that whole 'this product is known to the state of California to cause cancer' warnings.

When you have to start putting that on coffee cups, it loses all meaning.

Easily dismissed by "the lawyers made us do it" for people who were drawn to the "adventure" of the trip or the allure of the Titanic.

People have to sign those waivers very often for significantly less risky activities like going ziplining, so let's not pretend signing a waiver is the same as actual informed consent.

That is simply wild, is the multi-page waiver available to read?

I haven't seen the full waiver anywhere. The death being mentioned three times comes from someone who took an earlier Titan dive. However, it is mentioned in David Pogue's story about OceanGate: https://youtu.be/29co_Hksk6o?t=160

It also occurs to me that there should be no more sophisticated consumer than a billionaire. If one really wanted, I'd imagine they could build their own submersible to their own safety specifications.

Common misconception, don't need to be intelligent or sophisticated to be one, social skills and utter ruthlessness seem to be way more indicative.

Many billionaires, including the one on board, frequently demonstrate how wholly unsophisticated and arrogant they are. Extreme hubris was on display by everyone involved.

I would reserve judgment on that, there was a teenager involved and I highly doubt they were of an age which allowed them to absorb the knowledge to properly evaluate the risks. There also was his dad and the CEO of the company on board which may have given him an extra degree of feeling that the risks were acceptable.

Yes. I feel bad for that guy the most. So young, and of course he probably didn’t had the resources to independently verify the safety of the sub. Unlike the millionaire passengers could have just thrown tenth of the ticket price at any marine engineer who would have been able to explain to them how dangerous the whole thing is.

Ok. Extreme hubris was on display by everyone involved except maybe one of them, the adult son.

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