Titanic Horror! Tourist Submersible Goes Missing While Attempting to View Wreckage of Titanic.

[Jaxom 1974]

On 6/26/2023 at 8:26 PM, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Pigeon Forge, TN

Went to the Titanic museum there in Pigeon Forge last summer. Actually, as touristy-trap style museums go, this one is actually pretty well done. There's quite a lot of info about ship building and how things were back when they made Titanic. My son is actually kinda into reading and watching histories and conspiracies about Titanic. So we went. 

Mind you, I'm convinced that was likely where 11 of the 16 members of my family caught Covid, but I digress...

[Varysblackfyre321]

16 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Of course. I'm only acknowledging that it's easier not to give in to hatred from a position of comfort.

I don’t know about that honestly.

16 hours ago, Rippounet said:

I don't know about that.

It would come on, the vast majority of humanity aren’t so ideologically driven they’d say no to that level of resources—that’s not a dig at them. 
 

Money offers a degree of security and comfort which human beings are primed to maximize.

16 hours ago, Rippounet said:

It's not like it's that hard to come up with ways to do good when you're rich.

Sure, and anything substantive would likely make you less rich.

16 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Also, it's useful to understand how much "a billion or two" is. I could easily use a million or two. With a bit of imagination I can figure out what to do with ten or twenty. More than that and it becomes difficult to do much without hiring people to work for me and losing track of what impact the money will have, and I just can't see how I, or anyone, could deserve more money than they can manage on their own.

I think most people would get swamped at a couple millions at least.

16 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Probably not the place for this discussion, but rich people having so much money and minions that they can spend a lot of time indulging in new forms of tourism is visibly a problem in itself; this accident also sheds some light on the level of privilege some people have.

See can’t we focus on the company for actively lying to potential customers about the safety of their products rather than the virtue of the victims?

[Varysblackfyre321]

20 hours ago, Theda Baratheon said:

Uhhhh… yeah, I’m not sure the majority of Billionaires are such because of a rich uncle. If so, my next question would be -  How did that rich uncle become a billionaire / millionaire? 
 

 

You know what that’d a fair point, I was trying to dance around it but truthfully most billionaires inherit the majority of their wealth from their parents who inherited from their parents who etc and down the line someone did something really evil to advance in their lot in life.

 

[Ran]

27 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

I was trying to dance around it but truthfully most billionaires inherit the majority of their wealth from their parents

Not true. Per Statista, of 3,311 billionaries, over 2,000 earned their wealth themselves. "Only" 338 billionaries inherited their billions.

If you look at the top 10 wealthiest people, some may have come from privileged backgrounds, but they have massively greater wealth than what their family had. Bernard Arnault may be the closest to having started with generational wealth, working in and then becoming president of his father's civil engineering company... but its pivot to real estate, and then to luxury goods to create the LVMH empire, were all things Arnault had been instrumental in, growing a company worth millions into one worth billions. 

 

Edited June 28, 2023 by Ran

[Gaston de Foix]

4 minutes ago, Ran said:

Not true. Per Statista, of 3,311 billionaries, over 2,000 earned their wealth themselves. "Only" 338 billionaries inherited their billions.

 

I believe that but is it measuring the marginal billionth dollar or the entirety of their fortune or something in between? 

[Ran]

8 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

I believe that but is it measuring the marginal billionth dollar or the entirety of their fortune or something in between? 

I would assume they're looking at the entirety of their fortune when determining whether they inherited "most" of their wealth. 

Here is the source, a yearly survey of billionaries (and here is a PDF that doesn't require the sign up). There's a chart on page 23 with a breakdown across five industries, with three categories: inherited wealth, a mix of inherited and self-made, and self-made. Tech, unsurprisingly, has the most self-made billionaries -- 92.8%, vs. 1.9% having inherited their wealth.  Industrial conglomerates has the least, at just 42.9%, with nearly half having had some significant inherited wealth that they turned into larger fortunes.

[Larry of the Lawn]

From a moral standpoint you're probably better inheriting it than "earning" it, since it's the earning part that relies on extracting an insane amount of wealth from the labor of others.  No one needs that much money.  It's obscene and we should consider our society sick because of it.  I think the Culture quote is something like "money is a sign of poverty"?

[maarsen]

Starting with family money, say a million or two, and becoming a billionaire is a thousand fold increase. Starting with nothing or debts from education loans and becoming moderately successful as in maybe a half million in assets and no debts is a much more significant achievement as you have increased by 5 hundred thousand fold. Don't cry for any billionaires.

[Varysblackfyre321]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

Not true. Per Statista,

I’m under the impression that’s not a reliable site to gather data from.

[Ran]

Just now, Varysblackfyre321 said:

I’m under the impression that’s not a reliable site to gather data from.

When they provide sources that you can vet, it's not a problem.

[Rippounet]

4 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

See can’t we focus on the company for actively lying to potential customers about the safety of their products rather than the virtue of the victims?

I don't see why it's impossible to do both. I've read quite a few articles about the new forms of tourism for the rich, and each and every one of them is an ecological disaster.
Just because this company happened to be unsafe on top of that doesn't make it ok if it had been safe. As Zorral pointed out, this was adventure tourism for the vastly wealthy, and there was an inherent danger to the activity even without Rush's arrogance.

4 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

It would come on, the vast majority of humanity aren’t so ideologically driven they’d say no to that level of resources—that’s not a dig at them.

Money offers a degree of security and comfort which human beings are primed to maximize.

Sure, and anything substantive would likely make you less rich.

There's a survivor bias hidden here. In actuality, lots (and lots) of people do choose to share their wealth with others (family, friends, community), even if it makes them less rich. In fact, even among the super-rich, there are lots of social rules whereby you should always help family and friends - members of the club.
The people who do become billionaires are quite often the ones who really want to, even if it means setting morality aside.

It's the supreme irony: wealthy folks often find that people dedicating their life to become exponentially richer (à-la-Bernard Arnault) are really power-hungry and vulgar. The ones who do admire them are the peasants who've drunk the ideological koolaid.

3 hours ago, Ran said:

I would assume they're looking at the entirety of their fortune when determining whether they inherited "most" of their wealth.

I would assume the very opposite, but then it depends how one defines "wealthy" to begin with, and there are huge disparities from country to country.
For instance, in France 80% of billionaires inherited their wealth (a number that led to an intense debate on wealth back in 2021). But in developing countries it's the other way around and a huge majority of bilionnaires are often upper-class men who found a way to "game" the system by concentrating activities within a specific industry - quite often thanks to political connections.
The worst problem may not even be the creation of such wealth, but the fact that it is self-perpetuating due to weak tax laws, so once established, such fortunes keep siphoning ressources, weakening the competition in key sectors and making everyone poorer. It's no secret by now that the ongoing concentration of wealth is bad for the economy. It's why the existence of billionaires has become a practical issue as much as a moral one.

 

[Varysblackfyre321]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

When they provide sources that you can vet, it's not a problem.

I don’t want to have register to another site to get citations. 
I’ve sighted up for way too many things I forgot about 

[Raja]

22 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

I don’t want to have register to another site to get citations. 
 

Had no idea this was a thing until I clicked through. What a joke.

[Ran]

3 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

I don’t want to have register to another site to get citations. 
I’ve sighted up for way too many things I forgot about 

That's why I signed up and provided the source, so others did not have to!

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

 

[Theda Baratheon]

Inside the Titan & how the pre-visit worked. 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Imagine having to clean the Titan and remove organic matter. Probably one of the less enjoyable jobs in the world right now.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

3 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Imagine having to clean the Titan and remove organic matter. Probably one of the less enjoyable jobs in the world right now.

I can’t imagine there’s much. Most of it would have been scattered across the North Atlantic The bodies may have been ejected when the sub imploded, 

[Zorral]

I wish ... Alan Tate had been on that submersible.  Alone.

[Rippounet]

37 minutes ago, Larry of the Lake said:

What I'm saying is you just don't get the art of it all, the pursuit of the unknown, you look at us making fun of dead billioanaires and you see transgression, some faux pas, some kind of breach in my etiquette's hull.

I do wonder about the reverence and mythos that surrounds billionaires, as if it was not just natural to amass vast fortunes that one couldn't reasonably spend in a lifetime, but worthy of praise and admiration.
It is hard not to see Gramsci's hegemony in practice, but perhaps also a form of moral decadence whereby greed is good. It's almost difficult to believe that Mandeville's Fable of the Bees was scandalous and criticized as anti-christian back then. Way too many people seem to implicitly adhere to Mandeville's ideas today, despite them having been thoroughly debunked in the 18th century.