Until that comment I didn’t pick up that the strip started with making you think they were talking about playing Civ online, with the kicker panel being that he actually was a time traveler.
TBF that’s if you’re traveling coach. In the Northeast Corridor that’s a doddle but two or three nights from Chicago to the west coast in coach is not for everybody, and a sleeper can* run you $600 a night.
*Amtrak pricing is like airline pricing used to be. The amount shelled out over the same route can vary a lot depending mostly on the calendar.
The price comparison is complicated. The $600 would presumably otherwise be spent on a hotel room for one or two nights. Further (partial) comparison is that it includes meals and a small table for taking thoughtful notes for your hobby or upcoming meeting. Get up and walk around, and look out the big windows. Like it or not, see how America really is, not from kilo-feet away. No airport hassles.
Is this a dig at Starliner?
No, it’s a reference to the Challenger explosion.
And Titanic, Tacoma Narrows, Hindenburg, Chernobyl…
If this is about engineering disasters in general, I’m not sure the examples all count. The Titanic sank due to a perfect storm of unlucky circumstances. The risks of hydrogen in dirigibles was well-known and the engineers were confident that their safety measures were adequate. And I’m unaware that the design of Tacoma Narrows had any faults that were glaringly obvious beforehand.
I think that’s the joke. You don’t really know all the failure modes beforehand.
Another possible POV of the joke was that the engineers understood the nature of seemingly additive hazards actually multiplying risk. At least in the sense of potential severity if not always in potential likelihood. Meanwhile clueless management thought: “The ship is safe, the blimp is safe, the reactor is safe and the bridge is safe. So therefore all together they’re even safer. Full speed ahead!”
Safety doesn’t accumulate; risk does.
And possibly Calvin and Hobbes:
Ah, I get it now- the joke is piling all those risky things together. Sort of like how probabilities multiply: the chance of something happening is the inverse of the product of all the chances that it won’t; and since the chances it won’t are less than one, that product can get worryingly small.
Some of the circumstances were unlucky, but some were just bad decisions. Like not including enough lifeboat capacity. Or not keeping an adequate watch for icebergs, and then responding to that watch.
Wasn’t the Titanic built with steel that went brittle in extremely low temps? or is that a myth?
It seems it was the rivets that were substandard and prone to breaking in the cold North Atlantic water. IIRC the steel plates of the ship were, for the time, very good steel.
I think the watch was there and normal for the ship and the crew responded reasonably quickly once the warning was sounded.
I think the issue was a moonless night and the sea was unusually calm. It being very dark and the calm sea meant waves were not breaking on the iceberg which meant spotting it was more difficult.
Add in 50,000+ tons of ship moving around 20 mph and that delay in spotting the iceberg was enough. The ship simply can’t turn that fast.
Farmer Brown made me think of a family in the neighborhood I grew up in: one of the sons was killed by lightning in their driveway and about 25 years later their house was hit by a tornado.
Another problem with the watch on the Titanic is that the crow’s nest didn’t have binoculars.
My wife took Amtrak once for a business trip from New Haven to Baltimore. It cost twice as much as a plane ticket would have cost, took hours longer to get there, and she had no seat or a place to put her luggage—nor did she get any assistance from the conductor or anyone else.
In Amtrak’s defense it would have helped if she had been more able-bodied and had less luggage. In any event, the experience was negative enough that she vowed to never take Amtrak again.
::resisting urge to quote Dorothy re: Kansas::