Posts by Samuel_Fox

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

Ripping away the security blanket of censorship on Twitter is going to haunt you for the rest of your life. It is to laugh.

Missing Titan sub likely destroyed in implosion, no survivors

Breathtaking hubris

Just add five more names to the butcher's bill for The White Star Line. Nobody would ever dive here without the existing monument to human folly, which is now a bit larger. Has anyone else died looking for the wreck? It's 15 minutes to quitting time, the web is packed with just this right now, and I can't be bothered. The deep sea is technically harder than The Moon, just with other barriers to entry an order of magnitude lower so any idiot can build a can and drop it off the side of a ship.

As someone who's spent half their career in industrial safety, the plan is to never do this but we always do anyway. But shuffling that bad risk assessment into the folder and hoping it never happens because the controls are too expensive isn't quite the same as openly bragging about throwing safety out the window. Just like the ship, that kind of arrogance is tempting the gods. And we know this. The ancient Greeks knew it very well, filling their pantheon with capricious gods who simply adored to punish anyone who thought they were their equal. Yes, that's mythology but it was a great way for a bronze age people to teach their stupid kids about the value of thinking first. Still haven't learned it quite yet.

And of course it wasn't the start by any means but 1912 really does feel like the ball was really getting rolling on the fuckups to come. Two years later and even more colossal hubris saw the great powers stumble blindly into a 31 year war--with a pause to develop and rearm--that ground the world to dust and we're still dealing with.