#siege engineer

I will not make any comments on any of the other four victims. However, I reserve the right to be fully derogatory to the CEO who died in the submersible, Stockton Rush, for his disgusting flippancy towards safety in such a dangerous environment as 4,000m below sea level, for disregarding multiple warnings against the project, and for subjecting other passengers to this. I intended to start with my favorite source on this, but it looks like I’m beginning with spite. I claim that in engineering, if safety disregards don’t immediately boil your blood, you have to turn in your card. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65998914 “Titan sub CEO dismissed safety warnings as 'baseless cries', emails show” Some people may have seen the quote “At some point, safety just is pure waste,” Stockton told journalist David Pogue in an interview last year. “I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything.” Stockton Rush has typed "We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often," he wrote. "I take this as a serious personal insult." *Frankly*, the response to this should very much not be personal insult, but a call to action. There is no reason to take this personally. “I have broken some rules to make this…The carbon fiber and titanium, there is a rule that you don’t do that. Well, I did.” 

“At some point safety just is pure waste…I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”

“[The sub industry is] obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations…But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”

This is gruesomely hilarious when you remember the CEO isn’t the actual person running the stress tests, manufacturing it, checking materials charts and costs, calculating max tolerances, or anything else. He’s the little funny man with the money and the reputation who tells people do what he wants anyways. He has no right to play maverick when he is hardly doing any of the work, and especially when it involves other innocent people. While he has a bachelor’s in aerospace engineering, a very commendable thing to get, that’s not what he does hands on as the CEO, and aerospace does not directly translate to submersible understanding. You do not get to be flippant with other peoples’ lives. These comments would be bad enough for anything on the surface, or even in the sky. But again, the ocean is a completely different beast, where it is much more difficult for emergency services to reach people.