South Pole Medevac (2016) | Hacker News Reader

South Pole Medevac (2016)

southpolestation.com

63 pointsJakobH21 comments

"That patient is seasonally employed through the Lockheed Martin Antarctic Support Contract, the prime contract for operations and research support contractor to NSF for the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). NSF is not releasing any further personal or medical information to preserve patient privacy."

That's a curious statement given that NSF has often heavily publicized medical issues researchers have had, including identifying the people involved and their condition, like the doctor(s) who have had to operate on themselves, or people who found out they had cancer while at the station, or the researcher who had a stroke. How did "patient privacy" not apply there? And HIPAA does not apply to anyone except "care providers."

Despite intense pressure, the NSF refused to medevac the stroke patient for two months. But some Lockheed employee gets "sick" and they get a very complex, expensive, dangerous rescue mission? Why?

There was extensive coverage of this medevac operation; NSF provided lots of media and statements, etc...but tightly controlled who was allowed to take photos. Why?

Why is the NSF hiding who the involved parties were, and the source of their injury or illness?

The other question: why did we foot the bill for this? LM had a multi-billion-dollar contract to supply services. If one of their employees needs to be medevac'd out, especially for reasons that won't withstand scrutiny, LM can pay for it themselves...

You likely know this, but for those like me that didn’t, the stroke medivac occurred after this - in early 2017.

https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=190954

If that contract is cost-plus and the medevac is a cost related to the project, well, we’re going to pay for it anyway. Which seems reasonable to me, to be honest, for anything remotely related to the reason we were paying for that employee-by-proxy to be there.

What is the point of a cost-plus contract? At that point why not do it in house, it's explicitly more expensive than that

Many times the government can’t hire employees they need (unable to pay them a competitive salary or otherwise attractive career prospects) so can’t bring it in house.

Then, cost-plus arises because a company has to cover overhead and leave a profit, otherwise why would they bother? (Cost plus makes sense when you’re not sure enough of the requirements to write a fixed-price contract and then get change-ordered to death.)

But aren't they explicitly paying the cost of those employees' competitive salaries?

Sure, but they may not be able or willing to commit to paying that much in the long term, or they might be unable to hire them because they're noncitizen or would fail security clearance, or they may want to hide them from FOIA for some reason, or...

Or campaign contributors expect a return on their "investment."

Yes, but not via the GS pay schedule: https://www.federalpay.org/gs/calculator

Obviously this isn't true but gosh I wish this were a larger-than-life example of the trope of the military conducting a secret investigation of a crashed alien spacecraft buried within Antarctica. This trope appears over and over again, including in The Thing, Alien vs Predator, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and lots of other fiction. My favorite instance of this trope is in the amazing final book of the trilogy The Perfect Run by Maxime J. Durand.

If I were writing a story about this, I would have the IceCube / IceTop / DeepCore neutrino observatory be a cover-up for drilling deep sampling tunnels into the submerged alien ship, through which robotic probes would be deployed into the wreck. https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/icecube/ Perhaps in the story, there's a still-active hostile AI inside the ship and robots that are brought back up have been reprogrammed to hurt the human staff and then sneak aboard the medivac aircraft to reach the mainland and physically infiltrate key data centers, or something like that.

I am sure you are familiar with the details since you are spot on. Look into it a little bit, definitely a lot of strange things going on surrounding IceCube.

Crashed spacecraft? Oh no no, they're covering up the Ice Wall!

I can see a legal situation where government employees must be identified but contractor individuals don't fall under the same regulations

Given that at least one other explicitly mentions witholding identity by request:

https://www.southpolestation.com/news/medevac2003/medevac200...

...maybe they just asked? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My favorite story related to the south pole medivacs is the russian scientist that had to be evacuated after he got stabbed by his colleague for supposedly spoiling the endings of books they had at the station:

https://www.latimes.com/books/la-et-jc-anarctica-stabbing-bo...

Not saying stabbing people is acceptable but as far as stabbings go this one is almost understandable. You're stuck on that station for god knows how long and someone is repeatedly ruining one of the only forms of entertainment you have.

While reading this I realized this is exactly the kind of form that makes up many of the YouTube videos I end up watching, with just a good narrator voice and any amount of editing this would be good content. I do also get the opposing point of many people liking written content a lot more though...

I'm thankful that this fun read was NOT a YouTube video - this way I don't have to sit through ads!

Adblocker. Nice simple solution and goodbye bullshit YouTube ads.

That's very much in question now. I can no longer watch YouTube videos when I have an ad blocker extension installed. Instead I just get a warning that I'm violating their ToS and need to disable my ad blocker.

YouTube has been rolling this anti-feature out slowly to more people for the past few months. It will presumably hit everyone sooner or later.

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