You know, if I were ever to go down to the depth of the ocean with my friends and family on board to see the Titanic, I would make sure that the vehicle I’m riding in is overbuilt for safety and that everything that could go wrong is considered beforehand.
Why take any risk at all? With the amount of money that they had they could have hired an entire crew of an actual submarine for a day or two.
I am going to go the opposite way from one of your other replies. I think they did not understand the risks due to their backgrounds at least the customers.
Being rich it’s probably been a long time since they have been exposed to consequences of their actions. Or at least serious consequences. Especially the 19 y.o.
Logically an action that is risky because it is inherently dangerous is different than one where the danger is punishment but people are not 100% rational beings. After all lots of people (not just rich ones) do stupid thing like overspeeding, dui etc and do not actually believe themselves to be in danger.
Finally they might believe regulations to be useless because most of the time they are limiting them (their businesses) to protect other people.
Most submarines/submersibles can’t actually get that deep, and of the few that can, some are government run and others are already on other projects.
What made OceanGate’s Titan unique is that they were selling expeditions to the Titanic.
Now with all that said, if I had the disposable income to take on such an expedition, $250k sounds way too cheap/good to be true. Unfortunately in this case it was indeed too good to be true.
OceanGate was skirting safety protocols with the Titan.
Yes I think that’s a very agreeable statement.
Well lets agree to agree then.
I agree with agreeing to agree here.
“WERE ALL NAMED ANGUS!”
“YES! WE’RE ALL DIFFERENT!!” … i’m not
They understood the risks; there is no question in my mind that they didn’t. I think they were bored with what life could offer them with that much money. At a certain point you really can basically experience it all. Instead of going on a tested rocket ship; they gambled the ultimate wager. Their life or bragging rights. Image the tale you could tell coming back from the journey in such a rigged tube; or the publicity of your fatal demise and making a “historical” moment regarding it. The world was watching. Darkly their death reads better than any final service of passing or headstone does.
There’s something inherently dangerous about rare, exclusive experiences. When millions of people do something, like fly commercial, you know it’s going to be pretty safe. When you find yourself going for an experience that only 6 people have ever had, ever, your danger warnings should be going off.
Do you feel you could make those determinations? I couldn’t. Have you done so for your car? I haven’t. It’s all too common for us to trust that other people know what they’re doing. You can’t always check everything.
Why take any risk at all? With the amount of money that they had they could have hired an entire crew of an actual submarine for a day or two.
I can’t tell you what their motivations were, but I think there were 2 types of people doing this.
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Type 1: the “captain” and many/most of the passengers were adrenaline junkies who wanted to push the limits of what could be done. Kind of like the first people to travel to the north and south poles. They are “adventurers” and they understood that they were taking considerable risks with their lives.
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Type 2: people who were trying to purchase a great “cocktail party story” with their $$$. The same way that wealthy people today pay $$ to have sherpas lug their stuff up and down Mt Everest so they can take a selfie. The ability to drop a quarter-of-a-million $$ on this stunt already excludes most of the world’s population from even trying it. Then they can brag at their cocktail parties and make the Mt. Everest climbers look like wimps by comparison. I suspect (not sure) that the Pakistani business man falls into this category. The fact that he took his 19 year old son makes me think he completely discounted the risk and was just doing it for personal vanity.
I’m speculating on all of this and I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the Pakistani guy and his son. For all I know, my analysis could be all wrong.
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Hundreds of refugees died on a ship this week and we can’t stop talking about some random billionaires who died doing something not very bright.
Am curious how long this has been there and whether perhaps the “banging” was not related whatsoever.
the debris sites indicate the implosion happened relatively soon after descent because the debris had drifted very far away from the Titanic. If they had descended deeper, the implosion would have been closer.
I really hope that the sub imploded during the descent, and they’ve been dead all this time. Rather than the hull giving out after they sat on the ocean floor for days.
I’m feeling the same way, that would be a much better way to go.
Much better since your brain wont realize the implosion is happening before you’re dead. Although, for some reason the idea that my body is forever in the deep ocean is not a favorable one
the idea that my body is forever in the deep ocean is not a favorable one
It won’t be. Circle of life, man.
Give or take a couple millions of years and the sea might become a plain or something.
Weirdly, I’d feel better about “parts of my body floating around” than “my body curled up in a capsule on the ocean floor”.
I heard the banging sound happened at 30 minute intervals for a while, but also the banging sounds could’ve been from one of the many search boats that were searching near the acoustic bouy
I believe they confirmed in the press conference the bangs were not related due to where the debris was found.
They did.
The underwater banging noises that were picked up by the authorities earlier this week do not appear to have had any relation to the site of the submersible’s wreckage. “There doesn’t appear to be any connection between the noises and the location on the sea floor” where the debris was found, Mauger said. Previously, the Coast Guard had said that they repositioned their search efforts around where those noises were detected.
Before wreckage found: We hear banging every 30 minutes
After wreckage found: We heard a big pop on Sunday
This is actually quite normal, and similar situations have occurred during search and rescues for missing submarines. The ocean carries sound quite well, and hydrophones will inevitably pick up noises of from all sorts of of things if observed for long enough. Add into that the extra noises of the all the search and rescue assets in the vicinity and the natural biases of the human operators to want to decipher patterns from the background noise; false positives are quite typical.
A similar situation happened with the sinking of the USS Thresher. https://www.forces.net/usa/banging-sounds-heard-during-search-sunken-us-submarine-uss-thresher
So, I understand that because water is not compressible, animals without air in their bodies are safe at such high pressures in the deep sea, but what I’m wondering is what would it look like if a human in the deep sea was suddenly exposed to those pressures, as would happen if a submarine rapidly pressurizes? I know the lungs would collapse and whatnot because the air would be pressurized into I’m guessing a liquid, like how propane sloshes when under pressure in a tank, but what else? What causes the instant death? Maybe the water shoots into nose/mouth so fast it acts like a bullet and applies a bunch of force to the walls internally?
If it was truly a rapid implosion as described by the Navy, then the whole thing will have crumpled like a steam implosion in which case, everyone inside is likely immediately dead from blunt force trauma.
These are styrofoam cups that’ve been crushed by the pressure at the bottom of the ocean. The water isn’t looking for your nose, it’d just crush your outsides into your insides until you hit a relative density, like the cup, but not as pretty. The air in your lungs would instantly compress and heat to several thousand degrees C, turning your insides back into your outsides. I think.
I wonder if this is truly correct. By default human body is mostly water and made of things deniser than water. If water rapidly flows into the submersible, that might compress the air inside and cause the lungs to explode basically from the pressure differential in the chest cavity? Styrofoam in contrast is less dense and compressible.
You can take this with a pinch of salt, but I believe that, based on your mention that the human body is mostly water, our bodies, down to our last cells, also have this internal pressure from the water in our bodies. The water is not compressible, but tissue is. And that would mean that not only our lungs will explode, but our entire cellular structures. It would be like squeezing oranges or lemons
Holy shit and all of that happens within 2 nanoseconds I think? So that’s why the victims in that submarine wouldn’t even know it already happened because our brain takes 4 nanoseconds before we could process that pain.
Ah okay that makes sense.
Do take what I say with a grain of salt, but my late night napkin math says that (assuming a now rectangular human that’s 16 inches wide and 72 inches tall) a person should have a frontal surface area of 1100 inches, under 6000psi, that’d be about 6,800,000 pounds of pressure on them - instant death.
During the implosion you’ll have to contend with the walls of the sub and the water rushing it at a high percentage of mach 1 if not at supersonic speeds. That includes shards of carbon fibre and the big heavy titanium end plates. The air bubble inside will also be compressed to well above 400 atmospheres as the inertia of the incoming water causes an over pressure scenario. This compression heats up that air bubble to temperatures were a plasma is formed and for a brief moment the imploding sub would be the only visible light source down there. Basically anyone in there at the time is converted to a red mist. Think A-train running through that chick at the start of the boys, or that kid flying through that sheriff in brightburn for an idea of the result.
what I’m wondering is what would it look like if a human in the deep sea was suddenly exposed to those pressures, as would happen if a submarine rapidly pressurizes?
Kinda depends on how fast ‘rapid’ is. Consider that the pressure difference between the outside and the inside volume of the sub represents a potential energy. At a depth of 4km for a sub that size you’re talking about the energy equivalent of about 50 kilos of TNT (thanks to Scott Manley’s live stream for the estimate ).
That’s a lot of energy even if the release is relatively slow, which means that the forces pushing things around as everything comes to equilibrium are quite large. There might be a rate at which the forces are low enough to not significantly damage a human body, but also fast enough that the people won’t drown before the target pressure has been reached. As a guess, an average untrained person under normal conditions could probably last at most 2 to 3 minutes before beginning to drown (an extremely well-prepared person can last 24 minutes 37.36 seconds, the current underwater breath hold record), so that’s like 22 psi per second (equivalent to a descent rate of about 45 feet per second or 30 mph, pretty damn fast).
I’m skeptical that this would be survivable, and at a minimum it would be extremely painful. As the pressure increases the air in the lungs would compress collapsing the lungs. That alone isn’t a huge problem, breath-holding free divers experience that. However, as the air is compressed the volumes in the skull (nasal sinuses and inner ears) could no longer be pressure-equalized by forcing air into them, so the surrounding tissues would be pressed into them. As anyone who’s flown while congested can tell you even a few pounds of pressure is extraordinarily painful. At 22 psi per second I suspect the forces would at least tear nasal sinus and inner ear tissues, and possibly crack skull bone.
I just can’t understand why ANYONE with that much money wouldn’t be a little more careful about where they choose to take risk. A little investigation on their part would have turned up the previous safety concerns.
After a certain point, you consider the risks and have to make a decision weighing the pros and cons of the voyage. Yes, there’s a very real chance of death if things go wrong, but there’s also a chance for a life changing experience if things go right. For some people, the risk and adventure of it all is entirely the point of life.
As for the money, the $250K is a rounding error to a billionaire. Someone with a net worth of $1B spending $250K is similar to someone with a net worth of $10K spending $2.50 (e.g. about the same as a bottle of soda from a gas station).
I think a lot of people on here would be willing to take a trip to Mars if it came with a 1% chance of death and a 99% chance of the most memorable experience of your life. You’d probably get a lot of people willing to do the same if the chance of death were increased to 10% too, though obviously, many would view the 10% as too risky. If you increased the chance of death to 50% or higher, most people would decline, but there are a number of thrill seeker / adventurer type of personalities out there that would jump on the offer in a heartbeat. It all comes down to your personal risk/reward tradeoff.
deleted by creator
I think CEO of the company being on the board made people think all those regulations were just unnecessary red tape. In fact that was what the CEO thinks.
BTW: kind of unrelated, but I find it crazy that CEO’s wife lost her parents to Titanic, and now she also lost her husband to it.
Well not her parents, her great, great grandparents
AFAIK they had already been down to the titanic multiple times, so I can see people thinking it was safe regardless.
I assume they got more arrogant the richer they are. A lot of things that requires thinking and effort were done for them by throwing money around, so why not this dodgy sub?
One thing you can’t buy with money is intelligence.
Except that you can: you hire intelligence. He paid people to build it and fired them when they weren’t comfortable with the design and had safety concerns. Lol
I don’t know anything about this guy, so take my pet theories with a pinch of salt, but…
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In my experience, people who think of themselves as entrepreneurs are often simply bad at perceiving risk. They start out with a certain hubris that is a product of this deficiency in assessing risk. Many of them will be taken down by this, but others will get lucky.
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When they get lucky, these people tend not to notice the element of luck but ascribe their success wholly to their smarts and hard work. This can lead to an inflated sense of how good one’s judgement is.
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It can also lead to a lack of humility. It takes both good judgement and humility to know when to defer to someone else’s judgement. These people had hubris to start with, and their success can compound this to the point where they consider themselves the best judge of everything. Then they stop listening to people who may know better than them.
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They also have the power to surround themselves with yes-men, so they are challenged less and less as time goes on.
Maybe this guy wasn’t like that, but his comments about safety measures being a waste, his disregard for safety standards in constructing this submarine, and the way he fired the employee who complained that the sub was unsafe, suggest he may have been in this mold.
Regarding your first point, I think that the toxic culture around start-ups and such even incentivises people to be bad at gauging risk. Each funding round means making more outlandish promises, as investors keep expecting you to grow how fast you’re growing; do more, with less.
I have a few disabilities that mean that I’m often unable to do all the basic things a person needs. I’ve got very good at gauging risk and balancing my resources accordingly, but there have been times where things are just too stacked up against me and there’s little chance of a win outcome, but also no space for losing. I’m talking situations like being miserable from being bed bound for a day or so and needing to make it over to my computer to hang out with friends, somehow obtaining food and water en route. In a weird way, I sympathise with the CEO, because I know how desperation distorts perspective.
The worst decisions are made when I have decided to try to do the big difficult thing (food, then computer), but I realise part way through that I don’t have the capacity to do it all. The smart thing would be to adjust my goals and get food and medication, and retreat to bed. However, that outcome doesn’t feel worth the painful ordeal of leaving bed in the first place. Had I known it would’ve ended like this, I wouldn’t have attempted it, but I was rolling the dice.
Usually, my original decision to leave bed is good; I understand relative risk levels and I’m aware of the chance of failure and how to mitigate the fallout. The point of failure isn’t actually the point where the submarine explodes, or the sad cripple who pushed herself too far has to sleep on the floor because she can’t make it to her computer or her desk. The failure point is when you know that unless you alter your goal, you’re fucked.
If this CEO had made the right choices, his company probably would’ve died. He made negligent choices in building the submarine because he couldn’t afford to do it properly (and thus shouldn’t have even attempted this silly ordeal), but he had already spent millions of other people’s money, trying to fulfill impossible promises. I wonder at what point he realised his stated goals were impossible, and that he was just desperately stringing along investors hoping for a hail Mary stunt that could buy him more time. I wonder if it was always the plan for him to go on the sub, or whether his presence there was an attempt to assuage anxious ticketholders. I wonder if he had any sense to fear for his life or if his only fears were for his company.
Absolutely fuck this guy. His pointless folly has killed people. The people who bought tickets were perhaps fools too, just in a different way, but I also believe they were at least partly scammed by the CEO guy making impossible promises. Fucking rich people and their vanity projects. And yet, I feel like he was also a victim of the toxic system that made him, in a way. Ugh, I have a lot of complex feelings about this whole thing.
In my experience, people who think of themselves as entrepreneurs are often simply bad at perceiving risk. They start out with a certain hubris that is a product of this deficiency in assessing risk. Many of them will be taken down by this, but others will get lucky.
specifically, you don’t hear much about those unlucky
Survivor bias at its finest.
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same reason why people will climb mount Everrest.
Those people are idiots too
I guess the CEO of OceanGate joining them for the dive would have given them a false sense of comfort.
Interestingly, that same CEO mentioned that the Titan submersible was already showing signs of cyclical fatigue back in 2020:
It would be fascinating if we could get an aircraft disaster style analysis but I don’t know if they would do so for marine accidents.
I wonder if they have a blackbox built in. doubt they have since they’ve skip so many standard.
They didn’t even have a locator beacon, and the sub ran Windows for some insane reason.
I would be amazed if they had a black box.
The 19-year-old reportedly told family he was terrified. It was Father’s Day and his father is very interested in the Titanic, so he went anyway. He was just trying to impress and relate to his father.
The 19 year old is the one I kind of feel sorry for, but he still made the decision to go down there and it’s a decision I really don’t think I would’ve made myself. But who knows 🤷
I know a lot of people (not here necessarily) have been commenting on how these were rich people, but regardless of their financial situation they were just people first. I don’t know anything about them and that being the case I’m going with this being a tragedy. I feel for the families that were left behind.
TBH what gets me angry is the fact literally less than a week before the single biggest sea faring tragedy that hit the Mediterranean sea, and easily one of the top 20 straight up sea tragedy in recent memory happened and literally nobody gave nor is giving a shit.
A boat full of migrants sunk between Greece and Italy, 80 have been confirmed dead, more than 500 are missing, and the worst is, the boat was being surveilled the entire time by Frontex and the Greek coast guard who straight up lied (or chose not to see) the distress the ship was in.
I can understand people lashing out at the death of rich people driven largely by their hubris and trusting a downright irresponsible psycho. In some way its a shadenfreude-like feeling over the overt and indirect violence that average people experience compared to that of the rich. It’s distasteful to be sure, but it is what it is. In an unjust society both the exploitor and the exploited are pushed to brutish, revengeful, detached feelings towards one another and broader ressentiment. The solution is the end of exploitation.
As a rule, I don’t compare tragedies by the number of bodies, but I agree with you. It’s distasteful, but it is what it is.
It reminds me of the devastating floods in Pakistan that got some attention for sure, but nothing compared to the billions of dollars that was donated within hours of the Notre Dame fire.
You’re correct. I feel far worse for the refugees than the billionaires in the sub. But that being said i feel awful for the 19 year old on that ship. I know i would have said yes too because how many people can say “im going on holiday to the titanic” sounds great in concept. He may have been a rich kid but still a kid.
He is 19, he should be old enough to come to a reasonable conclusion that his family if profiting off of the suffering of the Pakistani people. He lived overseas, far away from the problem and I bet if you find his social media pages they are full of expensive things that you would never be able to get in Pakistan.
So it’s not ok to care that a kid died because of some nebulous idea about stuff his dad has done? I’m sure there’s at least a grain of truth in what you’ve said but that’s still a pretty toxic worldview in my opinion.
I’m out of the loop, can you explain what you mean when you specify Pakistani people? I’ve read very little about this incident as I think many have, only learning about it incidentally when happening across posts like this.
The 19 year old everyone is so sad about, his father is very high up in the leadership of the largest company in Pakistan. Most people here seem to have no clue about how impoverish countries work, but for one person/family to accumulate so much wealth when the people of that country are very poor mean they are exploiting the people and the resources of the country for their own gain.
I don’t think people would be so upset about the young adult if this was a child from the Sachmans, or the Waltons.
I see, thank you for explaining further. Agreed with the Sachman and Walton sentiment. 19 is certainly old enough to know what your father does, and with his wealth and no doubt stellar education he could start his own cushy life without using his dad’s exploitation money.
Exactly! There are so many 19 year olds who are inspirational to the people around him, and he could have chosen to be one of them. But instead he was living the fancy life he wanted.
If we’re gonna gatekeep the rationale of feeling conflicted over a young person’s death because they’ve crossed a benchmark where they’re supposed to be aware that the environment they’re a product of is exploitative and reject that, I think that benchmark should be older than 19. When I was 19 I was a fucking idiot
Once you are 18, you are expected to be able to take care of yourself to some degree and think for yourself. And as he comes from a very rich family, I find it hard to believe that he isn’t educated in a good school (non secondary). Should we also raise the voting age everywhere as well if all 19 year old are fucking idiots?
He is 19, he should be old enough to come to a reasonable conclusion that his family if profiting off of the suffering of the Pakistani people.
No, he shouldn’t be. You really have no idea what you’re talking about.
And you know so much more than be because?
Because your mom, bro
The main difference here is their families had the money to fund the publicity and search efforts. The Refugees on that boat that sunk didn’t have anyone rich that cared about them.
Much better way to go right. Better than having sit in there for days.
Glad they found something, and that they probably didn’t suffer.
Congratulations the the 5 latest Darwin Award winners.
Not sure how this would count as Darwin.
- I also going off only known I g that they went on an adventure trip.
An adventure trip in a bespoke unregistered submarine with a CEO who had recently complained that there are too many safety regulations…
Better to die in an instant than the alternative.
I really didn’t care too much about what was going on until last night when I realized the horror of sitting in a metal tube, knowing you probably won’t be rescued with a ticking timer of when your resources would run out. It seems like the perfect horror movie but irl. I hope implosion was the cause because the alternative has cause my brain to go into a full panic / existential mode and I am just an observer.
one of them had secret connections that allowed them to obtain immortality. They are now permanently trapped down there.
Especially considering that one of the alternatives was, because the sub is bolted in from the outside, they could have been bobbing on the surface, suphocating.
Thankfully, if the water pressure is enough to crush the steel hull of a submarine, then you’d be obliterated before you could even think about it. That’s probably the best way to go in such a situation…
Surprisingly, the hull was primarily carbon fiber with some titanium.
There was enough pressure to crush an atomic submarine at 1/5 the depth
So they willingly went so far down into a no go depth that guarantees death just to see the Titanic? I don’t get it.
Titanic is a piece of history, and while I’m not willing to risk my life to see it with my own eyes, some are willing to.
There was a porthole, it was one of the big safety concerns surrounding the submersible.
Anyway, what did everybody have for lunch today?
Black bean wrap with lettuce, cheddar cheese, mushrooms, onions, and chipotle mayo.
Yummy!
Sounds healthy!
Certainly not wildly unhealthy!
What about yourself?
I had a steak breakfast burrito from a very sketchy Mexican restaurant. It’s delicious.
Nice! I love small Mexican joints.
Subway?
Ur mom
Black bean tacos!
Soft shell tacos.
Spanish rice with black beans. Tasty, filling, cheap.
Have any good Spanish rice recipes?
I recommend using a BIG pan for this to toast the rice, as you’re going to be adding ~4.5-5 cups of liquid to the rice.
Also, careful when adding the tomato-chicken stock mixture to the toasted rice, as the mixing of liquid and oil tends to get kinda splattery. I generally dump it as quick as possible then throw the lid on right away.
INGREDIENTS
- 1 (14oz) can of tomatoes (diced, whole, whatever you prefer)
- 1 medium onion, peeled and coarsely hopped
- 2 cups low-sodium chicken broth
- 1 (19oz) can of black beans, drained
- 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1/3 cup neutral cooking oil, such as canola or safflower (or rendered lard)
- 2 cups long-grain white rice
- 1 to 2 jalapeño or serrano chile peppers, seeded and minced (if desired)
- 4 to 5 cloves garlic, finely chopped
INSTRUCTIONS
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Place the tomatoes and their juices and onion in a blender or food processor and purée until smooth. Transfer the tomato mixture to a medium saucepan. Stir in the chicken broth, drained black beans, salt, and cumin and bring to a boil over medium heat. Meanwhile, toast the rice.
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Heat the oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat until shimmering. Add the rice and sauté, stirring frequently, until lightly toasted and golden, about 5 minutes. Add the jalapeños and cook until softened, about 2 minutes, lowering the heat as needed. Add the garlic and cook for 20-30 seconds more.
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Pour the boiling tomato mixture over the rice and stir to combine. Reduce the heat to low. Cover and cook until the liquid is absorbed and the rice is tender about 15 minutes. Remove from the heat and gently fluff the rice with the fork. Cover again and set aside to steam for 10 minutes. Add cilantro and lime juice to taste and fluff again to combine.
Its great as a dish on its own, or served with chicken, or as a filling for meatless burritos (i wouldnt call it “vegitarian” because of the chicken stock).
It’s not as complicated as I thought it would be, thank you so much!
One of the best decisions I have ever made was getting a rice cooker.
It makes creating delicious meals so absurdly simple that the rice cooker has paid for itself many times over by replacing almost all of my takeout ordering.
Pizza rolls! Or logs. Whatever, same thing.
Well I had a nice Pepperoni Lyoner Sandwich
Can’t wait for the Internet Historian video in a few years.
I think he would be more interested in covering the Reddit story - he is the internet historian after all.
With the current news surfacing about neglect and dismissal of safety concerns by the owner, that lawsuit is potentially going to be massive.
This is, admittedly, news to me. As someone who served on a submarine in the Navy I know first hand how serious neglect is. It can, and has in this case, kill everyone. It’s not slow either. If you are negligent about anything for even a second everyone is dead. It’s just a shame the person/people responsible also took innocent life. Preventable and inexcusable.
Oceangate is broke with no assets. There’s nothing to sue.
And there’s nobody to pierce the veil on and sue directly because the captain went down with the ship too.
They’re quite literally broke, their asset is anyway
quick and painless, probably better than they deserved.
Bruh wat
