Exactly. The concept is called “self-insurance”, and it makes good sense for anyone who has the means to afford the unlikely cost of a catastrophic event. Insurance is all about probabilities, and the probability is that the self-insurer is going to get the financial benefits instead of the insurance company. The catch for most of us is that we can’t afford the cost of, say, a million-dollar liability claim. If everyone routinely got more out of their insurance than they pay in, insurance wouldn’t be much of a business!
Titanic tourist submarine missing 6-19-2023 (Debris field found, passengers presumed dead. 06-22-23)
We know now.
The aspect of the controller that horrified me wasn’t that it was off the shelf, it’s that it was bluetooth.
shudder
Although, after reading all of this excellent discussion, it seems that a variety of system failures would be manageable with non-technological or automatic surfacing procedures. Catastrophic hull failure (the only kind you get that deep) is the only thing that was truly a risk to life.
Reminded me of that Calvin and Hobbes strip wherein Calvin asks his dad how the weight limit on bridges is determined.
In the US, large estates are taxed, and life insurance payouts aren’t. So life insurance is commonly used by the moderately wealthy to shield assets from estate taxes. That being said, billionaires have lots of other options to avoid taxes (like starting businesses) and naw, the billionaires aboard probably didn’t have life insurance. But they weren’t all billionaires, i thought. Like, want one of them a scientist or something? If he had family, he might have had life insurance.
“Traveling in an untested submersible” is unlikely to be an exclusion, because it’s unlikely the insurance company thought to exclude it.
While the issue of the game controller has been mostly settled, I’ll add that it is a simple device that is commonly used for basic robotics control. Before I retired I worked at a company developing endoluminal endoscopic robotics for pulmonary surgery. We used the same controller to drive the endoscope into and through the human lung. In engineering we used lung models while the clinical validation team used cadaver lungs.
As Dr.Strangelove and others have made clear, it is merely an input device. And many companies use them, and not just for games.
The clinical setup has:
◆ Game controller (green circle)
◆ Endoscope (score tip is the yellow circle; mount is the blue circle; scope is the 2 red lines)
◆ Scope control driver (gold circle, at the end of the robotic arm)
◆ Lung model (black circle)
We were a startup, quite literally in a garage for the test lab.
It was a fascinating place to work, and interesting to drive the scope through the dummy body and lung.
So will they keep looking for the remains of the sub? And I second the irritation that so much money and time were poured into this hopeless rescue.
Are they going to try to bring any debris to the surface? Can they, with the equipment available? Did Titan have anything like a flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder that might conceivably have survived the implosion?
I don’t expect personal devices like cell phones, on which the passengers might have left messages or notes, could have survived with useful info about what happened, could they?
Not really, the listening devices are an open secret and have been for decades.
You’d be surprised! Have you ever read those things? Perfect for insomniacs. 50 pages of tissue paper, small font legalese.
I’m a P&C actuary, not a Life actuary. So in order to get my credentials, I had to read and learn a lot of the details about how auto, homeowners, commercial general liability, workers’ compensation, and several other typical policy forms. But I didn’t have to know the details of life insurance policy forms. That being said, I do know more than my fair share about insurance law. And life insurance is a broad form, not a specific form, so if it’s not explicitly excluded, it’s covered. And regulators frown on overly broad exclusions. But maybe the scientist worked for the company, and was supposed to warn his insurer of any unusual occupational hazards.
Speaking of which, if the company carries worker’s comp, the families of the employees are due a payout for occupational death. I suspect it wasn’t a US chartered company, but don’t care enough to try to find out.
One of my gf’s aunts died recently. She wasn’t a billionaire, but she was worth a few million dollars. She had multiple life insurance policies and I wondered the same thing. There were perceived tax advantages to her and her family according to my MIL.
This was all based on her own reading. She also was big on annuities, which I don’t even have a clue about.
I seem to recall that a loss at sea would be covered by the Jones Act instead and would sue for negligence? ( some googling does suggest maybe so)
When you are worth billions, you are the insurance company.
When I used to travel to Boston for work one of the stories that was told to me was that when the insurance company John Hancock build their tall glass covered skyscaper of an office building downtown the windows started falling out and crashing into the street below. Luckily the had were insured, by the John Hancock company. They of course had to pay themselves. 
There comes a point where you get so rich that no one else will insure you for major things, like your life for hundreds of millions. And a measly few million just isn’t worth it, the premiums would be too high verses the return on you investment.
Depends on which “they” we’re talking about.
If the Navy has a son-of-SOSUS system and has zero concerns for secrecy, they can deliver 100% of the raw data and 100% of their analysis to the rescue forces immediately. Like within a few minutes of detection. With any / all caveats about how the data is consistent with an implosion here at time Z (+/- X miles radius and +/- Y minutes), but does not prove an implosion took place, nor that it was their submersible making the noise.
What the rescue forces do with that data info up to them. Which is probably to continue the search (and hoped-for rescue) until debris is found or their onboard supplies are certain to have timed out. So two different "they"s with two different reactions.
Now consider the alternative scenario where the Navy has the same systems and same near-real time analysis capability but is very concerned about not revealing their capabilities. And especially when their data suggests to them that the reveal is pointless to the SAR effort because they’re highly confident of the implosion where there’s nobody to rescue and therefore no urgency to locating the debris field.
So they wait awhile, to disguise the speed at which they can process and analayse and conclude. Then they tell the rescue forces “We heard what might be an implosion somewhere within a couple hundred miles of your location somewhere in the last 24 hours. But don’t tell the public yet.” Then awhile later, once the debris has been found, the Navy issues a terse press release: “We detected the implosion and informed the rescue forces of same”. The intent being to tell the enemy that something that small did not escape our notice, but provide them no further useful details.
Those are the kinds of trade-offs that are done with releasing secret stuff. They’ve probably got a protocol manual for when / how / whether to do that, with actual release authority way up at CNO or even SecDef level.
I’m no billionaire. But I’m part of the so-called mass affluent, a guy who had a good job most of his life and avoided catastrophic investments and expenses.
Compared to a low-end billionaire, that fare would be like me paying $50 to $100 for that ride. Ordinary tourists pay those kinds of fares now for mini-sub rides to 20 or 50 feet depth over pretty coral reefs in lots of Caribbean destinations. For a high end billionaire, we’re talking the equivalent of you or I paying $5 or $10. Or maybe $0.05 to $0.10.
Like the literary quote that “however big you think space is, it’s bigger than that”, the same thing applies to billionaires’ wealth. Their wealth is so vast compared to ours that expenditures you or I think of as utterly unattainable are pocket change to them.
Whether the world ought to be organized that way is a separate issue. But it is organized that way now.
As to what you can see:
Absent headlights, you’d see exactly nothing as you say. With headlights there’d be ghostly views of the prow, with the rest of the ship fading into the blackness. They could drive around and see various other interesting aspects that are already known to the tour guide. Maybe a field of boots, or part of a cabin & associated artifacts that got ejected. Whatever.
Seriously creepy and not my thing even a little bit. But for somebody excited about the Titanic story, and/or excited about having very rare experiences few people ever can, that would certainly be one of the items on the punch list. Remember that one of these passengers had also spent a hell of a lot more that $250K buying a ride into orbit for a few days.
Yeah. Composites are difficult to engineer well. They are extremely sensitive to small defects in manufacture, and even on production lines like for airplanes or tennis rackets, there’s significant variation in build quality that has to be inspected thoroughly and results in poor yields and rejected brand new parts being sent to scrappers. So large safety factors are required to deal with undetectable defects, and to ensure you get manufacturing yields up enough.
In-service damage is another area where composites struggle. An impact that would dent an aluminum skin in a highly predictable fashion might introduce delaminations into a composite structure which spread badly and create significant weakness. It’s tough to inspect and repair these things. Again the solution is to over-build those areas so expected in-service damage won’t grow to a significant level of weakness.
The good news is composites are so much lighter than metals that even waaaay overdesigned to account for the unknowns, they’re still lighter than the corresponding metal part.
All that takes lots of test articles and lots of in-service experience to get right. These folks didn’t have that. Not even close. Worse, it seems they weren’t even trying.
The folks out there have already said yes to the first. They’ll try to bring up what they can. Might take a while, though. There aren’t many craft that can even get down there, much less bring back anything of size.
Maybe to the latter? But it doesn’t really matter a lot. The debris isn’t going anywhere for a while. Additional equipment can and will be brought on site.
Nope. That data is gone, if they even took any devices down there.
And even if any significant pieces somehow survived, finding them would be miraculous. Literally finding a single needle in a haystack might be easier. Think “groping on your hands and knees only able to see a couple feet in front of you searching an empty lot for a contact lens”.
The pieces of debris they’ve identified so far are all rather sizable.
Yes, insurance is for covering catastrophic losses that would cause . . problems that I can’t cover. I don’t insure the coffee pot, I am “self insured” for that. I carry homeowners because if my house burns down, that will put the hurt on me.
Yeah the question that came to me isn’t whether a millionaire or billionaire needs life insurance, but whether policies should or would pay out.
My point was an insurance company would be stupid to cover experimental, highly risky activities like diving down in the ocean 12,000 feet in an uncertified tube. I’m not an agent, but it’s all about risk pooling, actuarial stats, and “No, that’s not covered”.
Oh, right. All the laws are different at sea. Duh.
I know I’ve asked this before following certain events, but do you consider this “tragic” and, if so, why?
Just this morning my wife described this as a “tragedy,” and I asked her why she thought so. She said she considered any loss of life tragic. Well, that statement strikes me as at least somewhat overbroad. I’m sure each of us could come up with at least 1 or 2 despicable folk whose demise we would not consider tragic.
In this instance, a bunch of wealthy folk dying as they voluntarily engaged in risky and unnecessary behavior does not strike me as rising to the level of what I consider tragedy. Maybe unfortunate, but I’m sure 100s - maybe 1000s - of folk die every day whose passing I would consider more tragic (or even more unfortunate). (Yes, I understand that the existence of 1 tragedy does not necessarily mean another event is not tragic.) I imagine some of the dead may have survivors who will mourn the deaths, but the bottomline is that these folk experienced foreseeable result of their voluntary undertaking.
Is the tragedy that some people are so wealthy that they can afford to do such crazy stuff? And that the rest of us are so lacking in meaningful interests that we want endless details about an unusual tragedy?
And, of course, there is the evergreen topic of the costs associated with the search efforts…
Personally, I woulda been fine with a brief news blurb saying, “5 people die doing something stupid.”