Gone Fishin'
Titanic Sub
Once in awhile a story comes along that galvanizes people from all walks of life - this week, that story is the Titanic sub. What is the Titanic sub? It’s the product of a company called OceanGate, named Titan (!) and built for Titanic enthusiasts called Titaniacs (really).
Late last year, a CBS News reporter went on a dive in the Titan and in the most heavy-handed foreshadowing imaginable, got lost for a couple hours. One of the first customers described the experience as a ‘kamikaze operation’ featuring a 2.5 hour descent in darkness lit by a glow stick and repeated structural problems requiring repair that stretched his dive to over ten hours.
Despite that, and the terrifying nature of riding inside an expensive tin can a couple miles below the ocean surface, OceanGate has convinced at least 46 people to shell out $250 thousand dollars for a seat.
I’m not exaggerating when I call it a tin can, because according to OceanGate’s own website, the Titan is not ‘classed’ as a seagoing vessel of any kind:
While classing agencies are willing to pursue the certification of new and innovative designs and ideas, they often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards, especially, for example, in the case of many of OceanGate’s innovations, such as carbon fiber pressure vessels and a real-time (RTM) hull health monitoring system. Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.
Right. If OceanGate had to wait for the slow-churning wheels of bureaucracy to verify its sub was safe to operate thousands of meters below surface, it would hinder uh, rapid innovation.
Surely the company doesn’t have a documented history of cutting corners:
The concerns [David] Lochridge voiced came to light as part of a breach of contract case related to Lochridge refusing to greenlight manned tests of the early models of the submersible over safety concerns. Lochridge was fired, and then OceanGate sued him for disclosing confidential information about the Titan submersible. In response, Lochridge filed a compulsory counterclaim where he alleged wrongful termination over being a whistleblower about the quality and safety of the submersible.
Isn’t it curious how the most libertarian, free-market entrepreneurs are also the most litigious? Anyhow:
At the meeting Lochridge discovered why he had been denied access to the viewport information from the Engineering department—the viewport at the forward of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers down to depths of 4,000 meters. Lochridge learned that the viewport manufacturer would only certify to a depth of 1,300 meters due to experimental design of the viewport supplied by OceanGate, which was out of the Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (“PVHO”) standards. OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the required depth of 4,000 meters.
The wreck of the Titanic sits at just shy of 4,000 meters below the surface. OceanGate was knowingly operating a sub (via video game controller) with a front window not rated for the correct depth. Not ideal.
Lochridge wasn’t alone, the aptly named Marine Technology Society sent a warning letter to OceanGate in 2018, which the company ignored. Indicative of their approach to certification and regulation, OceanGate evaded US laws on submersibles by loading the Titan onto a Canadian boat and dropping it in international waters, as you do when you’re running a legit operation.
One of the passengers on this week’s fateful trip is a British billionaire (whose stepson doesn’t appear particularly worried about his wellbeing) and I am having a good time imagining the conversation between him and his team of minders:
LAWYER: You’re going on a sub to visit the Titanic?
BILLIONAIRE: Not technically a sub. A small capsule with three other rich people and a captain.
LAWYER: Have they done this before, safely?
BILLIONAIRE: Like ten times. It’s been on CBS. Totally safe.
LAWYER: The waiver says it’s an ‘experimental vessel’ that has ‘not been approved or certified by any regulatory body’…
BILLIONAIRE: Totally safe.
STEPSON (to lawyer): His will is updated, right?
There are two possible outcomes here. One is that various governments spend a small fortune tracking down the Titan because OceanGate can’t do it themselves, and rescue the Titaniacs before their air runs out - did I mention the sub can’t be opened from the inside? - and they live out their days the objects of mild public ridicule. The other is governments spend millions of dollars and don’t rescue them, or find the Titan’s wreckage at all. Either way, it’s probably worth examining how a company like OceanGate was allowed to send wealthy tourists to the bottom of an ocean in an uncertified death trap, and why it’s somehow our responsibility to clean up mess they created.
Elsewhere, the government of Greece is under fire for failing to act quickly enough to save hundreds of lives when a stranded boat carrying migrants sank off its coast. While many news orgs have provided 24-hour coverage of a few rich idiots in an illegal sub, other unsafe ships crammed with desperate people fleeing poverty and violence are more of an afterthought.
Note: as I’m writing this (Thursday) the Coast Guard is saying they’ve found debris consistent with the Titan rapidly depressurizing. Seems like Option #2 is the likely winner.
Reddit, the Internet’s most popular message board, has been rocked by protests over a plan to charge for access to its API, endangering some apps popular with Redditors. In response to the protests, the CEO gave interviews insulting the site’s users and volunteer moderators, praised Elon Musk’s approach to running a tech company, and suspended dissenting mods. How the hell did Reddit melt down in a few short weeks?
The first thing worth noting is that Reddit is preparing for an IPO later this year. The company - once valued around $10 billion - is not profitable, and with financial markets focusing on profits for the first time in recent memory, the site’s CEO devised a plan to juice revenues by charging for API access, a card out of the Musk playbook (which is working well for Twitter, obviously).
Reddit’s website is notoriously difficult to navigate, and for years the company resisted building an app to make the mobile experience more bearable. Independent developers like Apollo filled the void and helped improve the user experience. Now Reddit wants to charge those developers to run their apps, which would in some cases cost more than they take in from paying users, putting them in a precarious financial situation.
Redditors revolted over the announced changes - thousands of popular subs joined together in a 48-hour protest, going private or restricting new posting (the switch to private broke the site for awhile). Huffman’s response - trashing his site’s users in the press - exacerbated the situation, and some of the subs are still ‘dark’ over a week later.
The problem with Reddit the company is the problem with Twitter the company - both sites rely on their users to generate the content they sell ads against. In Twitter’s case, brands fled from the platform once Musk gutted moderation and opened things up to his white nationalist pals. In Reddit’s case, rather than relying on teams of engineers, moderation is (mostly) done by passionate volunteers. Musk could fire the people keeping Twitter from turning into a radioactive waste storage facility, but Reddit has no one to lay off. Its CEO can call them ‘landed gentry’ all he wants, but without moderators his site loses much of its value.
There is a certain paranoid, spiteful groupthink among tech CEOs. They share an unwavering belief they’re entitled to profit from the free labor of users, and those users should be grateful for the opportunity to make a small club of faceless tech dorks impossibly wealthy. Popular social media and message sites function by network effect - Reddit became the go-to place to read and post about popular and niche interests because everyone else was already there, posting. Steve Huffman seems to believe no one will flee Reddit for another site because Reddit is Reddit, whether or not it’s run by a bunch of incompetents openly hostile towards their user base. At least they’ve got a sweet NFT marketplace to show for the $1.8 billion dollars they’ve raised.
In what’s surely a first, a ransomware group claiming to have 80 gigabytes’ worth of user data has made API changes one of its core demands to return the data to Reddit. When you’ve messed up badly enough that hackers step up to defend the community, some self-reflection may be warranted.
Hacking
Speaking of data breaches - last week the US announced several government agencies had been hit by Russian cybercriminals:
CISA’s response comes as Progress Software, the US firm that makes the software exploited by the hackers, said it had discovered a second vulnerability in the code that the company was working to fix.
Unfortunately, companies using MOVEit software have been opened up to breaches, which includes private companies and a bunch of state governments. Louisiana’s DMV - one of two known to have been hit - is suggesting its residents freeze their credit reports and change all their passwords.
The fact the Titanic sub is more of a news item than one of the biggest data breaches in US government history across multiple agencies including the Dept of Energy (the people in charge of the country’s nuclear arsenal!) goes to show how inured we’ve become to our personal data being stolen.
The reality is, as long as websites and systems continue to be built by humans, they will be vulnerable to hacking and theft. Private companies will pay fines as a cost of doing business each time their data is spilt, paid for in part by cybersecurity insurance, and people will have their identities stolen or sold on dark web marketplaces to do unemployment scams, credit card scams, etc.
Sad as it is, the Louisiana DMV’s suggestions are pretty much the only effective ways to protect oneself online - freeze your credit reports, change passwords (and use a password manager for more secure passwords), and keep an eye out for any weird stuff on your credit card bills, bank statements, or tax returns.
We’ve talked before about shadow work, companies expecting us to bag our own groceries or deposit our own paychecks. The shadow work of existing in a modern digital society is acting as your own police force and detective agency, protecting what your identity, creditworthiness, and all the other personal attributes hackers are all to eager to profit from.
Fishing
The last time we talked about fishing it was private equity’s takeover of the New England coastline. Before that, it was cheating in fishing tournaments. Competitive sportfishing, as it turns out, has a lot of rules and quirks. I wrote:
I was today years old when I learned they give polygraph tests after fishing tournaments.
One way fishermen can cheat is by putting weights in fish. Another is smuggling store-bought fish into a tournament. Both of these can land you in jail. Rather than dismembering all the fish in a tournament - many donate the fish to local food banks - judges depend instead on polygraphs to catch the cheaters. It all feels very…subjective, given the amounts of money on offer.
Sometimes in competitive fishing a tournament will require that a fish must be undamaged to count towards a win. Which is unfortunate, because a crew caught what would have been a record-breaking blue marlin in North Carolina only to have the win and a few million dollars snatched away:
Photos of the marlin show it had a significant chunk missing on its underside and near its tail. The tournament consulted with its rules and experts and ultimately disqualified the marlin due to “mutilation” caused by a shark or other marine animal, according to a statement.
I have never been deep sea fishing, or caught a big fish, but this sounds like a lot of work:
The fight lasted hours as the marlin strained to free itself. After about two and a half hours, the marlin went down about 1,000 feet, a sign that the marlin’s heart had given out, they said. Over the next few hours, they struggled “inch by inch, minute by minute” to reel it all the way back in, McCoy said.
Struggling with the fish till its heart gave out was only half the battle, apparently. The rest involved lugging a quarter-ton slab of dead seafood aboard the boat. The basis for disqualification is that if you’re reeling in an injured fish it’s easier than a fish at full fitness, so it doesn’t count.
The fish was more than a hundred pounds bigger than second place, and arguably record-breaking despite missing a chunk of its nether bits. Come on! Also kind of wild that a marlin tournament had a first place haul of $2.7mil with a $700k sweetener for a fish over 500 pounds, had the winning team actually won. The captain and crew have filed a lawsuit and are seeking mediation to resolve the issue, claiming event judges are unevenly applying the rules.
Judicial Watch
Supreme Court justices accepting lavish vacations they fail to report is becoming a weekly occurrence and therefore doesn’t warrant much space in these pages but the permanently aggrieved Sam Alito took to WSJ editorial page to pre-but a ProPublica scoop that he’d taken private jets and luxury fishing trips with billionaire Paul Singer, organized by Leonard Leo. Some have joked that when a conservative gets appointed to the Court, Leo connects them with a rich benefactor like a foster care service. Which, I guess it is? The country’s unelected cadre of elite judges must feel they’re entitled to perks commensurate with their unchecked power.
One of Alito’s arguments for why he didn’t declare the trip was that if he didn’t, the seat on the peejay would have been empty, and therefore it had no value?
“He allowed me to occupy what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat on a private flight to Alaska,” Justice Alito wrote.
It’s difficult to imagine inhabiting the brain of a person who feels comfortable making these arguments in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, but rest assured he’ll soon be back at his day job stripping away regulatory rules and civil rights from our fellow Americans until the next luxury vacation.
Short Cons
WSJ - “As the Supreme Court prepares a decision that could curtail a half-century of race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions, the man who drove the case sits in his home office in Maine searching for the next lawsuit.”
Rolling Stone - “Even following his latest indictment, the former president does not clear his media appearances with his attorneys, according to a source familiar with the matter and another person briefed on it, leaving Trump to wage his communications war in the court of public opinion — even if it means handing federal prosecutors “an enormous gift.””
WaPo - “After taking office in January 2019, DeSantis appointed three new justices in two weeks, flipping the court from what he described as a 4-3 liberal majority to a 6-1 conservative advantage.”
Guardian - “Workers at Bohemian Grove, one of the most elite and secretive clubs in the US, have filed a lawsuit alleging numerous unfair labor practices, including 16-hour workdays without breaks, and a failure to pay overtime and minimum wages to the workers.”
Rolling Stone - “The NYPD’s presence at Electric Zoo in 2022 has proven to be controversial beyond Dume’s allegations. Three Manhattan Narcotics North detectives were indicted on grand larceny charges after allegedly breaking into VIP and stealing $3000 worth of Jay-Z’s champagne brand Ace of Spades.”
ProPublica - “A year after persuading Texas lawmakers to buy millions of child identification kits that had no proven record of success, a businessman with a troubled history found an in with the state's attorney general.”
Puck News - “Last time I checked, if a company has more than 12 creditors—as Twitter does—then any three of them can join together to put a company into an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding. And Elon is in danger here. At some point, the creditors he is mindlessly stiffing on a regular basis are going to get sufficiently pissed to throw Twitter into bankruptcy.”
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