you know it really isnt immoral, if you do it right, to raise cows and sheep for meat. so. well. i think there should be a story about, vampires who have a town of humans that they keep well-maintained, so long as the humans donate their blood once a month, like vampire blood farm stuff
but instead of antagonistic everyone’s like. no he’s a nice man you leave the count alone. he keeps us safe and cared for and he just needs a lil snack now and then, it dont hurt anyone. like a cow that loves the farmer and the farmer that loves the cow, even with both knowing one will end up on the other’s table. because its like. its like. cows just have such pretty eyes, you know? they love you so much. i think it should be like that
literallyyyyyy
i want to be part of a vampire’s herd. and i want him to pet me like a cow
A.FUCKI G.REAL LIFE LWJ. A fkn modern wangxian au this is crazy
PLEASE GO ON REDDIT AND CHECK THE UPDATES!!!!
THERE’S MOOOORE
This is a hell of a ride but this is the Queer romance of arranged Marraige actually turning romance and ahhh i love it so much
GOOD FOR THEM!
this is adorable but i’m still just stuck on ‘he keeps crawling into my lap and cuddling and nuzzling me, but i can’t tell if he LIKES ME-likes me, please help’
dude
if you read romances and think “no one is that oblivious in real life” i have some news for you my friend
alright. in my tepidly professional opinion* here are the actual major red flags with the titanic submersible
first, stuff that people are clowning on that isn’t actually a red flag at all
using starlink satcoms for their overall [surface] communications
i know it’s fun to clown on elon musk but starlinks are like. Fine. they work fine as satcoms. this is not the issue. none of these problems would have been solved if they’d been using KVH or somebody else instead
also these have fuck all to do with the tiny sub, since radio waves physically do not penetrate water enough to be useful for communications lol
the stupid game controller to steer
it’s actually super common to use COTS (commercial off the shelf) parts like that instead of some bespoke steering system.
they’re easily replaceable if they break, they’re designed to be integrated into larger systems, and you don’t have to do a huge amount of design work before you can even steer your thing
that being said. here is the fucked up design stuff that i notice
Where The Fuck Are The Chairs
if you don’t have seats inside your vessel, you don’t actually have a way of securing passengers during rough movement. i suspect that this makes it very dangerous or difficult to ascend quickly in an emergency.
i presume that they mean “messages in the form of text, sent via an acoustic signal”, not “they are literally using cell phones to text each other” because obvs cell phones (and most radio) would not work
it’s actually extremely unclear to me what system the sub and the mothership are using to communicate. idk if this is a “technology reporting hard” issue or if these people are being deliberately cagey. anyway they’re probably using some form of underwater acoustic communications, but what specific form it takes idk
regardless, the fact that they’ve had problems with this system in the past is a red flag
and the fact that their sub has apparently no internal navigation system is also a red flag. “not having GPS” isn’t really, since GPS doesn’t really work underwater (you need radio 😔), but they should have some kind of internal navigation– at the very least “here is my speed and heading and based on that my expected position is here on a map”
in a power failure situation, they would have been SOL
while it is “normal” for structures that are exposed to regular massive changes in pressure to have fatigue (imagine bending a piece of metal in and out over and over, eventually it will break– you want to catch and replace that before it happens), it’s weird to me that
the vessel’s depth rating was downgraded
without any public statement about what repairs were done, it nevertheless went back to the 4000ft depth less than a year later (in 2021)
they obviously have no “black box” system or any way to locate a missing vessel
most boats are required to have this! because most boats are required to be registered with and inspected by various authorities!
these guys deliberately skirted that rule by launching off a boat rather than from a port and therefore avoiding the need to get registered or inspected. lmao!
not that it likely would have helped to save these people if they had been alerted earlier, but it shows a desire to cover up mistakes
and like. obviously. you should get your shit inspected. nobody taking paying passengers anywhere should be allowed to be their own safety inspection authority.
the original sinking of the titanic was what led to SOLAS (safety of life at sea) rules being instituted. they’ve been updated several times since then, but they don’t yet cover submersibles like this, since they are relatively new. it’s likely that this incident will cause a new interest in updating the rules. as they say: every regulation is written in blood
*i’m a mechanical engineer who works in the maritime industry, but not like, a particularly related section of the industry– i do shit with cargo containers mainly. no further info on my credentials will be given since i have no desire to doxx myself on tumblr dot edu. i’ve tried not to say anything too wrong or out of my depth in this post but my opinion is “guy with an engineering degree who reads news articles” level of informed. so take your maximum grains of salt
On the subject of the Titanic ‘submersible’ that was lost in the deep with all its wealthy tourists— it’s so insane/eerie in hindsight to read this article from the Smithsonian that interviews the CEO Stockton Rush long before the disaster.
Despite the Smithsonian supposedly being an organization that cares about science and truth, and the fact that there were SO MANY obvious red flags from the beginning and so many people criticizing the company…..the article is a puff piece uncritically glorifying the CEO’s obviously terrible submersible project. It compares him in glowing terms to Elon Musk. It is an article about how private ventures like those of Stockton Rush and Elon Musk can and should be the future of the world.
We’ve obviously learned now that there were whistleblowers at the company who were warning for a long time that Stockton Rush’s submersible was unsafe— only to be fired and then sued. It makes sense the submersible was so unsafe, because the CEO in this interview is open about how he has no background in underwater engineering and is annoyed by quote “regulations that needlessly prioritize passenger safety.”
Soon after, the private [submersible] market died too, Rush found, for two reasons that were “understandable but illogical.” First, subs gained a reputation for danger. Working on offshore rigs in harsh locations like the North Sea, saturation divers, who breathe gas mixtures to avoid diving sicknesses, would be taken in subs to work at great depths. It was the world’s most perilous job, with frequent fatalities. (“It wasn’t the sub’s fault,” says Rush.) To save lives, the industries moved toward using underwater robots to perform the same work.
Second, tourist subs, which could once be skippered by anyone with a U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license, were regulated by the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection requirements and prohibited dives below 150 feet. The law was well-meaning, Rush says, but he believes it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation (a position a less adventurous submariner might find open to debate). “There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”
The fact that Stockton Rush (who was piloting the submarine when the disaster happened) is on record complaining about the evils of regulations that prioritize people’s safety, and the Smithsonian uncritically regurgitated that rhetoric in their glowing puff piece about how rich tycoons like Elon Musk and Stockton Rush are going to save the world is just…..in hindsight of how everything ended it’s just so much horrible black comedy? It’s like a satire about the dangers of uncritically worshipping the rich.
It is mentioned in the article that Rush chose to make his submersible in a different shape, and with a different (cheaper) material than is usually used for submersibles. The article frames this as a result of daring innovation, and not of negligence/ignorance. This passage in particular, which in context is supposed to portray Rush’s critics as joyless naysayers who were proven wrong by the noble tycoon, is pretty foreboding in hindsight:
Rush planned to pilot the sub himself, which critics said was an unnecessary risk: Under pressure, the experimental carbon fiber hull might, in the jargon of the sub world, “collapse catastrophically.”
And then!!
The exact problem that happened to Titan this weekend, happened on Titan’s very first test voyage to the Titanic! The experimental carbon fiber hull had an issue and it caused communications to break down!
The dive was going according to plan until about 10,000 feet, when the descent unexpectedly halted, possibly, Rush says, because the density of the salt water added extra buoyancy to the carbon fiber hull. He now used thrusters to drive Titan deeper, which interfered with the communications system, and he lost contact with the support crew. He recalls the next hour in hallucinogenic terms. “It was like being on the Starship Enterprise,” he says. “There were these particles going by, like stars. Every so often a jellyfish would go whipping by. It was the childhood dream.”
Both Rush and the article writer treat this as a fun quirky story, instead of a serious safety failure and red flag with his experimental macgyvered regulation-flaunting submersible.
Other highlights from the article include:
Stockton rush saying that if ¾ of the planet is water, why haven’t we monetized it?
Stockton saying we will “colonize the ocean long before we colonize space”
Lots of weird pro colonialism stuff in general??? This article loves colonialism and thinks it’s cool
Rush saying he plans for this to eventually help find more underwater resources for the US to exploit and profit from
Elon musk comparisons. The article writer does not mention that Elon Musk’s rockets explode and therefore it would be a bad idea to get in one of them, because that would imply it’s a bad idea to get into the submersible
Stockton rush seeing himself as Captain Kirk
The article writer comparing the tourists who plan to join Rush to Englishmen who went on colonialist journeys to Africa as if that’s like, a good thing. So much pro colonialism stuff in this article
So many sentences about Stockton Rush being handsome when he literally just looks like some guy
The article beginning with an editor’s note from years later disclaiming that the extraordinary submersible they’re advertising in this article is uh. It’s now uhhhh
But yeah it really does just bring home how so many organizations that supposedly care about scientific truth or journalistic integrity are willing to uncritically platform propaganda for wealthy CEOS. It’s frustrating how easily people fall for the fake myths that careless wealthy people invent for themselves, and even more frustrating that supposedly respectable institutions will platform irresponsible lies that end up getting people killed.
Rush is such an obvious and simple example of this, and his negligence is “only” killing five people including himself. But to me it feels like a cautionary tale to bear in mind when it comes to uncritical puff piece media coverage of similar “daring tycoon innovations” by people like Bezos or Musk.
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