Mark Zuckerberg's Yacht Refused to Help Ship in Distress
nymag.com
nymag.com
>According to the U.S. Coast Guard and the Marine Exchange of Alaska, which monitors ship traffic in Alaska, there was no distress call — just a general request for assistance.
As much as I wish bad things on Zuckerberg, this seems pretty clearly on the "rude but not illegal" side of things. Super-yachts are kinda by definition rude already, so this seems entirely expected.
Like this post. The "Ship in Distress" part of "Mark Zuckerberg's Yacht Refused to Help Ship in Distress" in the display text here is inaccurate, in a legally-significant way. (Was this the original headline text? I don't see any evidence of it, at least)
Or comments here, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49251495
The parent comment is just edgy pontification.
Yes, "it's expected" isn't always a defense, but your implication is wrong: More often than not, it is a defense (the most common format is "why are you surprised?"), and that applies here (otherwise, it makes no semantic sense in the parent's comment).
Regardless, why resort to petty insults? It hurts to see this on HN.
Now, you're trying to conveniently ignore the context of the post you replied to here [0].
> isn't always
> More often than not
I skimmed the rest and saw too many weasel words. Good luck.
Sure, of course the internet is chock-full of wrong articles or comments, either innocently or outright dishonestly.
If you are refuting those articles/comments, then reply to them (or at the very least mention them). You were commenting directly on an article that does not commit the specific sin you are lamenting. This is how shitposting begins.
This is like the classic internet fallacy: A story negatively painting X person/group appears (in this case, the story writer, rather than the story subject). Somebody says, "This is just another example of those people", and when confronted with the revelation that it is not an example of that, the reply is not "Whoops, sorry", but rather, "Well... they would do that, though."
It's how high-quality communities like HN erode.
Which is probably why it's now flagged off the front page.
You already provided the facts, and they want to pretend like there isn't a legal obligation to respond to a distress call and the Zuck hate clickbait was otherwise.
Honestly, Zuck haters should be the first ones to point this out so it doesn't distract from other criticism.
I only wanted to engage you with the idea that the "rude but not illegal" and "expected of yacht owners" lines are a common form of downplaying bad behavior (we see this all the time when people talk about the bad behavior of large businesses).
And to be clear, I'm not personally attacking Zuckerberg. I don't even know if what he did was actually rude! That's just the premise of your comment.
> “From my experience, I know that situations like this contain myriad details for the vessels involved, so the AIS (tracking) snippet you obtained only reveals one of those details,” he said by email. “I do know that Wilderness Legacy is an UnCruise vessel and is very familiar with Alaska waters, so that may have contributed to them rendering assistance quickly.”
Some rando skiff comes on with "hey we're out of gas in Randeaux Inlet" and the nearest vessel might not even be the best boat to render aid and might not even know the terrain well enough to provide real assistance without undue risk to themselves. Even with modern navionics, etc. The captain of the super yacht might go up to SE AK a couple of times... in their whole career? Maybe 10? Tops? Meanwhile the Wilderness Legacy is up there all the time - that's their bread and butter. While the captain of the super yacht is trying to find the skiff on the chart, the Wilderness Legacy might already know exactly where the skiff was and how to get there, if they could safely go there, etc.
Like, Zuck sucks, but... this isn't really his fault, Facebook's fault, or even the yacht crew's fault. Even if they heard the initial call for assistance, and even if the people crewing the yacht knew the area extremely well, there could be a whole host of other reasons why it would have been better for the Wilderness Legacy to respond.
The whole concept of this article is basically rage bait.
Are sailors as busy meowing at one another as those pilots on guard frequency 121.5?
"In general, any vessel equipped with a VHF marine radiotelephone (whether voluntarily or required to) must maintain a watch on channel 16 (156.800 MHz) whenever the radiotelephone is not being used to communicate."
The only exception is if in a Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) area, then must be monitoring the VTS channel.
(But even cheap handhelds VHFs will monitor two channels at once)
https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/radio-watchkeeping-regulations
Article says this was in Farragut Bay which is not a VTS area. So, yes, every boat around was required to be monitoring VHF channel 16.
As much as my gut instinct is "screw Zuck" the reality is "we don't really know the full picture, and the Wilderness Legacy knew what was up well enough to handle the problem so they did"
Personally I'm a bit bummed out about it because there's less that I want to read and the articles make the comment section... well, like the articles. I shouldn't complain though - someone took note of where the traffic was and it wasn't people like me. Also I still visit the site, it just seems like there's for me.