The US Navy has literally has experience detecting underwater explosions (see project Azorian). It's not guaranteed of course, but any loud sound near the point of contact loss seems pretty open shut.
Imo, it made a more interesting story in a slow news cycle. How many people died in car accidents the last few days? Has to be more than 5.
barf.
There can be 2 problems at the same time.
Whatever people focus on shouldn't be a topic.
Edit: That seems far more callous than it was meant. You're right, people are forced to travel the sea almost daily, desperate people will do anything.
This IS different. And hits different because it was a choice, with a real discussion about "Hey, it's really possible you can die, and you already have a rich life"
The fact it's rich people should show that it's a completely different scenario.
As for media coverage. I would agree.
It's different because 'we' would never think to jump on an overflowing boat. 'We' could imagine taking an 'adventure' in a submarine.
So it relates to 'us'.
This isn't a dig or insult. But context matters.
>Whatever people focus on shouldn't be a topic.
On the contrary, I think what people focus on is irrelevant topic for reflection and more importantly introspection. It's important to know what Yanks your emotional chains and who is yanking them.
Looking at what drives public attention lets you know what people really care about, not what they might say they care about. You can learn some hard truth about reality by observing the actions of others.
That is to say, it's not a bad time to talk about these things unless you are speaking with friends and family of The Departed. However, if people want to have a real conversation exploring what drives public attention, they need to treat it as a real conversation. This means engaging the person that you're talking with good faith, respect, and an open mind.
In the case of the refugee boat—but not so much the submarine—it occured because of a policy choice of the leaders of many news observers. These leaders have the power to prevents disasters like these. And media coverage has been shown in the past to be able to influence leaders in making some policy changes.
So I stand with my previous argument of
"People don't change their life or opinion because of either of them."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_migrant_vessel_inciden...
On the one hand we have people who fear they will come and increasingly vote right wing and succesfully pressured sea rescue organisations in not operating in the mediterran sea anymore and on the other hand we have people donating lots of money to private sea rescue organisations that do operate there and also rescue refugees.
Not in the direction the poster thought they would/should change.
I would argue voters are aware of what's going on, and approve of the situation. In at least some of the countries directly involved (UK, France, Italy), the majority is calling for more restrictive immigration policies.
Note that most (almost all) of this negative media coverage has no basis in reality. The only connection between refugees and terrorism is the fact that many of them are fleeing real terrorist threats, there is no correlation between crime and refugees which cannot be explained better by poverty, increased immigration has been shown to have positive effects on the job market, etc.
Despite this, the media keeps churning out the negative coverage, and the policy choices by European leaders reflect that. The lack of media coverage of the human tragedy of the Andriana is therefor pretty consistent. In the media refugees are a burden, not humans lives which deserve empathy. The coverage reflects this, so does public opinion, and ultimately, so does policy.
This is overall a really sad situation in Europe.
"These leaders have the power to prevents disasters like these"
Like if the media coverage was empathetic to the lives lost in this tragedy, and if it had been so in the past, the public opinion towards refugees and the policy made by our leaders would perhaps be different, and this whole disaster would have been avoided. But that’s not the world we live in. European border and refugee policy reflects the media’s attitude of billionaires dying in a submarine disaster is worth the coverage, but not potentially the top 50 worst maritime disaster in history.
Anyhow, I seriously don’t mean to build a straw man, I just cannot see some simple pushbutton policy fix for “nations that are a bad place to live will generate a flow of refugees to better places exceeding the capacity those nations will have to absorb them.” Good luck though, if you come up with a grand solution that provably works, which you can convince a democratic majority to support, I’ll be happy for you.
Create a legal avenue for applying for asylum.
Yes, I believe this simple policy change would have prevented this disaster, and so many more tragedies. It could be as simple as having a request form present at the border crossing, where asylum seekers are than directed to a temporary facility.
I believe we are in this mess because refugees are literally forced to illegally cross into a potential host country before applying for asylum. This policy is nuts. And as we know thousands of people still do this. Seeking asylum is not illegal, but there are no legal ways to do it, which results in thousands of people attempting illegal border crossing and a blooming business for human smugglers.
My only point: It’s a complex problem with zero happy outcomes, and people shouldn’t act like a quick, cheap fix will solve it. It just moves the problem somewhere else. Actually solving it would take trillions of dollars that most taxpayers don’t want to spend.
Criminalizing border crossing does not stop border crossing, it only stops legal border crossing, and as we see, people attempt illegal border crossings all the time. This leads to a deadly industry of human trafficking which is causing more deaths in Europe than terrorism (excluding Russian state terrorism in a war zone).
As of now there is nothing stopping the whole country of Somalia, El Salvador, etc. from arriving legally at a border crossing in Europe, Mexico, etc. If border crossings were legalized this wouldn’t change. Sure more people might attempt to seek asylum, but the consequences of failing would be far less severe as currently. And I think any prediction that western systems would fall apart at the prospects are fear mongering. There are no evidence any of that would happen. And any arguments in favor of such failures are ultimately based on vibes.
> The West doesn’t have enough decent “temporary facilities” to warehouse the whole population of Somalia, El Salvador, etc.
> Actually solving it would take trillions of dollars that most taxpayers don’t want to spend.
So spend the trillions, build those facilities. But I doubt this is the issue. We certainly had the facilities when the covid pandemic stopped the tourism industry, yet we didn’t use them. And I don’t think this will cost trillions of dollars.
Europe actually has experience with open borders, and the experience is a resounding success. There are no negatives, and there are a bunch of positives. And no, the whole country of Romania does not migrate to Norway as a result. But I’m not even calling for open borders here (even though I want them open). The humanitarian disaster at the European borders calls for immediate action and we don’t have time for a complicated policy change.
If temporary facilities for asylum seekers are too expensive for your liking, than don’t offer them. Mandate that asylum seekers provide their own accommodation (effectively offload it to charities) during the asylum application process. If you do that than just expect the homeless population to skyrocket. Personally I would favor the state offering temporary facilities (added benefit is you create a bunch of new jobs for your now bigger labor pool).
If you think that, I'd disagree with you.
"It's hard to imagine anything more vain than thinking immigration politics don't affect societies "
"Apples are vain."
The poster wrote thinking that immigration politics doesn't affect societies is vain.
"Oranges are vain."
"Because you wrote it?"
You (?) "Apples and Oranges are the same"
>despite Myhrvold’s enthusiasm, the Photonic Fence hasn’t been all that easy to actually build
>...laser is not safe for your eyes
>...no one has yet worked out how to make the device cheap enough
The new vaccine may do better https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62797776
As for being safe for eyes, I thought part of the idea was to make sure there was nothing in between the mosquito and the laser before firing, though I'm not sure exactly what the plan there was.
Unless of course in your point of view anyone that seeks a better future to avoid problems in their own country is a refugee, which could be a point of view but not one I (or dictionaries) agree with.
How are they not refugees?
UNHCR:
Refugees are people who have been forced to flee their homes and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan declared Monday a day of mourning for Pakistanis who died after a fishing boat
Um that's literally the definition of a refugee. Or perhaps your definition of "problems" needs clarifying?
Forced to flee
Other definitions range from :
a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.
A refugee, conventionally speaking, is a person who has lost the protection of his or her country of origin and who cannot or is unwilling to return there due to well-founded fear of persecution.Pakistan is certainly a place some people would want to flee from, Malala Yousafzai being the most obvious example of the terrors that have happened there.
Car accidents (not involving anyone of note) sadly aren’t novel or newsworthy anymore. A submarine, with people potentially trapped onboard, with limited oxygen, as rescue teams race to the dive site, unfolding in real-time, isn’t exactly something that happens that often.
Not everything has to be a conspiracy.
In contrast, in a traffic accident you almost always know right from the start what happened.
So most developed societies, for instance, are OK with people dying in mangled steel cages on roads because most people in those places think car-based societies are worth the cost in lives.
US society in particular is OK with people dying in mass shootings, because American people think having access to guns is so important.
But if a bunch of people die in an aircraft crash due to negligence, suddenly it's different because that's not an acceptable loss: it was preventable. Mass shootings aren't preventable in the US because most people there value "gun rights" over these deaths, just like the US and many other places value car culture over the deaths caused by cars.
[0] https://www.texastribune.org/series/uvalde-texas-school-shoo...
Or maybe is it that you’re just classist to avoid any inward criticism?
I actually agree with the facts behind this attitude on Reddit, those groups are totally culpable for exactly what they are accused of. Those responsible should be held accountable, and those of us that care should try to do something to reverse the damage that has occurred, even if we have limited ability to, and those responsible will not.
The situation on Reddit is a case of toxic victimhood, despite the fact that the victimhood itself is real. These people are so focused on hating some specific outgroup, it has become an entire personal identity for many, and they spend much of their free time talking about it online. They use it as an excuse for not making any effort to make the world or their own lives better, and instead wallow in self pity with others online. This makes them also complicit in exactly what they are upset about- they also possess some amount of time, power, and energy they could use to make the world a better place by taking action towards specific problems they claim to care about deeply, but are choosing to do otherwise.
These people are hypocrites. They are largely middle class American millennials, in the top 1% of incomes globally. From a global perspective, they are exactly what they hate: a wealthy leisure class that carelessly lives a life of comfort while outsourcing the negative consequences to others, while having the means to make a huge positive difference yet choosing not to.
I love to bemoan about the media just like the next person, but sadly this is just human nature.
But I think most of us would agree that it is sad that humans cannot allocate public resources in a more utilitarian way to save lives or maximalize happiness.[0]
And I think the reason of that is human nature. Our empathy doesn't care about scales of a tragedies. An individual sad tale can make us feel exactly the same as a war where millions are affected.
[0] Planet Money had an insightful episode on this: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843
Do you think that gang violence and what we traditionally call “mass shootings” have the same underlying causes and represent a similar level of risk to the public?
In all honesty, both types of shootings pose relatively small risks to the American public compared to, say, traffic violence, but that’s no reason to ignore a problem that has largely been solved in other developed countries.
Hold on a second here. The FBI definition of mass shooting has always been the same, and gang violence meeting that standard (four or more casualties) has always been considered a mass shooting. Years of media only ever using the term “mass shooting” when it involves a school ambush scenario has distorted, in your mind (and many other people, frankly) what the term actually represents. The problem with this is that people draw a false association when they hear statistics about how there’s “x00 mass shootings” every year —- your mind instantly thinks that there’s x00 Columbine-level assaults on schools every year when in fact it’s more like 10 school shootings and the rest of the several hundred are the kinds of shootings that happen in Chicago and other places every other week.
> have the same underlying causes
The popular opinion is that easy access to guns is the only reason, so yeah apparently.
> and represent a similar level of risk to the public?
Again, see the earlier point about how people hear “mass shooting” and can’t conceive of any way in which a “mass shooting” doesn’t involve someone randomly shooting up a school or workplace. There are indeed a lot of mass shootings every year, but the majority of them _don’t_ involve the sort of crazy lone-gunman-shooting-up-a-school scenario that people _think_ are the majority of mass shootings. The majority of them are in fact gang violence. As far as threat to the public? Depends how likely you are to be somewhere that gang violence might occur —- and those areas aren’t as isolated as people like to think.
>> when in fact it’s more like 10 school shootings
This year, guns have been discharged in schools only 66 times. So on track for about 130 this year. Down from 177 last year.
Not all discharges in deaths. Only 57 last year and 26 this year (so far).
And yes, presumably some of those discharges are gang related. Still, in school though.
Is this blood sacrifice of young children simply the price we pay for the 2nd ammendment? Is calling it a "blood sacrifice" excessively colorful language?
Is 50 kids a year too many?
[1] https://everytownresearch.org/maps/gunfire-on-school-grounds...
A huge proportion of the victims of violent crime in the US (these victims are dramatically more likely to be black) are not in gangs, and mostly just live in poor neighborhoods and get caught up or accidentally shot. See the book "Ghettoside" for details in this.
Actually for many years the idea that "murder victims in the inner city are just gang members" was used to deprioritize investigations there, which has led to the current high crime in those areas - i.e. very low clearance rate, people rationally feeling that the police won't protect them, so they have to protect themselves.
Allowing lawlessness there (by not counting them as regular people and regular victims would be counted) has just resulted in a chaotic and unsafe environment for people there, which perpetuates the problem.
Take a look at this list of recent killings in LA. https://homicide.latimes.com/ by the author of Ghettoside. Far from a SJW/"Racism is the cause" it's a very reasonable, infrastructure-based understanding of why the problem exists and persists, from the left, with empathy.
It’s like calling it a mass shooting when police shoot bank robbers brandishing firearms and kill just one of them.
Hysterics designed to juice stats for a political cause.
I've been in lots of discussions about gun violence, but I've never seen someone argue for reducing gang crime, even though they cause a majority of the gun deaths.
People often use gang violence in stats they use to argue for increasing gun control. Bringing gang violence into the conversation makes no sense, since gangs historically get guns no matter how many laws prohibit it. Doubly so since often gangs are in cities and urban areas: the places in America that already have the most strict gun laws.
Acting like armed groups of criminals breaking the law to fight each other fall in the same category as a mentally unwell individual shooting innocent civilians are in the same category, and using the same term to refer to them both, helps nobody and just muddies the conversation.
From Wikipedia: > A mass casualty incident (often shortened to MCI) describes an incident in which emergency medical services resources, such as personnel and equipment, are overwhelmed by the number and severity of casualties.[1] For example, an incident where a two-person crew is responding to a motor vehicle collision with three severely injured people could be considered a mass casualty incident. The general public more commonly recognizes events such as building collapses, train and bus collisions, plane crashes, earthquakes and other large-scale emergencies as mass casualty incidents.
It then goes on to discuss the other type of "MCI":
> A multiple casualty incident is one in which there are multiple casualties. The key difference from a mass casualty incident is that in a multiple casualty incident the resources available are sufficient to manage the needs of the victims. The issue of resource availability is therefore critical to the understanding of these concepts. One crosses over from a multiple to a mass casualty incident when resources are exceeded and the systems are overwhelmed.
I'd like to believe it's just a natural dynamic of how humans learn information about something sudden and bad, but maybe it's to some extent, deliberate to squeeze as much out of the story as possible.
So, at 4000m you're looking at something between 4500 5500 psi. Thats a small truck worth of pressure every square inch in the hull. Once you breach the structure, think crushing a tin can in the middle, things collapse pretty fast.
As do bodies. If you figure your body is 2 foot by 6 foot, the pressure would be like parking 100 fully loaded 18 wheelers on a single body within a split second of each other.
Every book or encounter you read about submariners has a section talking about the creaking of the bulkheads and wondering how long it can hold because it's such a nature defying act to build something that can hold that pressure out in the first place.
One of the counterintuitive features of submarines is that they're not built to be waterproof at the surface. The various parts of the hull aren't welded shut and instead rely on the external pressure to press them shut at depth. Making them waterproof at the surface ends up making them less able to resist the pressure at depth.
I'm sure it will be a little more clear as all the parts get put together.
The pressure differential is large. As soon as the hull gives way it's essentially like a bomb explosion in reverse.
I suppose it's possible that some external piece of the sub might have exploded and left the sub itself stranded but intact on the ocean floor. However, it seems that's not what happened -- pieces of the sub's main body were part of the floating debris field.
It provides some level of comfort to know that the passenger's demise was likely instant as opposed to slow and terrifying.