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Comment by keepamovin | Hacker News Reader

It’s amazing that the captain of such a large vehicle has through the results of their choices the capability to do so much harm

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Now consider all the people driving around in their cars everyday.

Right, but I think it would be quite the engineering challenge — or, ‘evil genius side quest’, whatever you wanna call it disturbingly — to cause $600 million worth of damage with a sedan car. Tho, YMMV, that’s just me.

But there are a million times more “sedan” cars than boats, traveling a million more miles.

An 18 and a 78 year old just killed two different sets of four people a couple weeks ago in SF and near Seattle. The 18 year old totaled his 3rd car in less than a year driving far above the speed limit.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-medi...

https://komonews.com/news/local/renton-deadly-multi-vehicle-...

Edit: to respond to below, it depends what you count as damage. Do you count all the deaths and injuries of all auto vehicles? There are 40k+ deaths and many more injuries per year in the US. How about the effect of car centric designs on kids not being able to roam around neighborhoods? Of course, it all gets abstract very quickly, since you also have to start comparing benefits, but there are very large systemic effects (and just the same with huge container ships of course).

That's a good point about relative frequencies, and it's the saddest of tragedies what occured in the stories you list. So tragic...

In the abstract, outside of the tragedy of these unfortunate events, it's true that there's more cars, however...think of it like, there's far more background radiation particles than neutron radiation particles. But the damage you can do with one, is far less than the other.

The highest third party auto insurance claim I've heard of was £34 million in 2001 (probably about $90 million today).

The driver (of a Land Rover towing a car on a trailer) fell asleep at the wheel and crashed onto train tracks. A passenger express train hit the car and was derailed into the path of an oncoming freight train. 10 people were killed.

Achievement unlocked I guess? A tragedy. But no you’re right, that is a Way to cause lots of damage with a car. Still involves Heavier vehicle tho

If a broke drunk driver knocks a packed school bus off a cliff, that could easily be 600 million dollars worth of medical bills, if all the kids survive but become permanently disabled. And nearly all of it would have to be covered in the end by the taxpayer.

No ‘side quest’ needed, just a few seconds worth of bad decision making.

Right, but conceivably rarer (thermodynamically, in terms of ratio of possible microstates/ensembles) than ships hittin bridges!

So, doesn't really compare. Yours is more of a hypothetical, mine's more of a reality. Haha! :)

The more disturbing part is, it would be less expensive if they all died.

How is that disturbing? It takes far fewer hours of labor to deal with a death than to provide lifelong healthcare.

Because it creates a potential financial incentive to make sure they die.

The same incentive is there even if money did not exist. Providing services to someone (who is likely to be unable provide equivalent value in return) is more costly than not providing them. That is simply reality/math?

I agree: we allow people to be in command of thousands of kilos of metal, moving at up to around 30m/s, with really quite minimal training.

(For anyone who is reading this, I think the parent is referencing driving cars)

I thought they meant ships

Right? and yet so much focus is put on the operators of US$60 million machines like an F-18 or even commercial aviation pilots… and yet, it seems like their capacity for harm — and, as an aside I’m not saying that it was any human error that caused this, — but the capacity for harm of these aviation operators is, to be honest — 9/11 notwithstanding OK OK bear with me — is, perhaps a little less than the operators of these pervasive ubiquitous Gigantus ships

Where was this his choice?

I, sir, am not saying it was. Yet pointing out how it could be, In some hypothetical past or future scenario, a reality worth considering

To be clear, I fully believe the official statements that this crash was accidental - putting that up front to avoid seeming like I believe any of the nonsense conspiracy theories that came out about the accident.

But if you were someone like Russia or Iran who wanted to financially hurt the US (or any other country - and, equally feasible for the CIA or Mossad or whomever to use it as tactic to financially harm any enemy country with a significant port; or a terrorist group wanting to kill people seems less likely but not impossible) - wouldn't you be having that same thought now?

Secret services of various countries surely wouldn't find it hard to plant agents in shipping companies who end up captaining huge container ships around the world if they wanted to, and there's probably enough low-security situations for the boat when docked that gaining physical access (through spies taking engineer jobs or through sneaking onboard at a quiet time) could maybe allow some sort of sabotage equivalent to partially cutting the break lines on a car, which could be planned to cause problems roughly the right number of minutes after a ship leaves port to have the highest chance of impact.

If your goal is hurting a country financially rather than murderously, and you want an illegal way to do it that's completely deniable and even looks accidental, I'm not sure how many better options there would be?

I hope I'm wrong and it wouldn't be as easy as I'm imagining for any major country to place someone they trust (but won't be linked to them / suspected) into a career leading to being a captain on these ships...

(It might not even be limited to state actors - it's not unprecedented for a business executive to be a psychopath willing to commit crimes to boost their business, what's to stop the CEO or owner of a port, or a toll bridge, or a construction company from bribing a ship's captain with $20M dollars to take a port or bridge out of action, even a brief closure could be worth enough money to alternative locations and/or companies hired to fix it to make such a huge amount more money that a huge bribe would still make it wildly profitable. Obviously most companies won't have people specialised in committing this type of crime, so it wouldn't be easy to find the right captain who'd accept a bribe for that, yet alone do it without getting caught, but the captain could maybe create a fake medical emergency to cover their "mistake", etc... hopefully it's such a big criminal risk, and hard enough to do, that there wont be any crossover between the hopefully low number of psychopaths in positions of major corporate power and people who could pull it off if they wanted to.)

No, I completely believe this was just some mechanical Newtonian inadequacy that was accidental. However, I’ve never considered the possibility of sabotage, but now that you mention it holy fuck yes that must be a possible threat vector.

Other than hearing and dismissing a few people online suggesting this incident was an act of terrorism, I hadn't really thought further about it until your comment which made me go "oh... yeah, that does sound like it might be extremely feasible for a future attack, fuck."

A lot of a society’s “wealth” and “quality of life” is due to being able to trust others to act with some minimum level of integrity.

Otherwise, the society ends up looking like Somalia or Congo.

Totes, man. It’s like slow moving rods from god kinetic weapons… next people will figure out how to weaponize glaciers

Most ports use harbour pilots, so you couldn't just drive a ship into a bridge or other structure and claim it's an accident, but it seems like an easy accident to create (oops, steering broke).

If the ship simply refuses to let the pilot board though, so the port authorities know something is wrong, once it's in port and on route, what do you do? Even if you get the military to blow it up you've got a massive sunk hulk blocking your port.

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