A new exhibit joins the Titanic

On the one hand, you want rescuers to be agnostic to the people who need rescuing, much like doctors are supposed to take care of all individuals regardless of behavior (lifelong smokers, diabetics who don't control their sugars, etc.) I can also see the argument that these people knowingly put themselves at extreme risk and don't deserve massive rescue efforts.

In both cases, there's a tremendous cost to society. I think the difference is that the latter scenario is putting other people in immediate harm's way, while the former scenario doesn't require caregivers to assume any additional risk/burden they otherwise don't assume when caring for patients who become ill without risky behaviors.

I do wonder about the magnitude of the effort. If it weren't for the massively wealthy, likely extremely well-connected individuals in the sub, would the rescue effort have been as extensive?

 

If they were all Black, would there have been a rescue attempt at all?

 

The Coast Guard routinely conducts multi-day searches for boaters (often commercial fishermen) who fall into the North Atlantic off New England in winter, when their life expectancy is like 15 minutes tops. It's what they do. The Coast Guard is there to try to rescue seagoers from danger, or at least to recover their bodies. There's a Coast Guard station not five miles from where I'm typing this. I and everybody else on Cape Cod are big fans.

 

New Zealand’s Coast Guard would have.

 

It’s sayonara in two micro-seconds?

 

Sorry, can't resist: Snap, crackle, poof.

 

Check the date.

 

A friend of mine is a Navy vet & biomechanical engineering PhD who studies underwater blasts and wrote a fascinating book about the sinking of the CSS Hunley that challenges the prevailing theories (that mostly came from Lost Cause types). She said basically the same thing and that carbon fiber was a really bad choice. Also said that implosion would be a far better way to die than asphyxiation.

 

So it was assassination.