And this is where you probably won't find agreement from most here, because many believe that if a corporation can't afford to spend enough on safety to at least follow expert recommendations and avoid such a disaster, they shouldn't be in operation to begin with. Actually, many (me included) would argue that there should be legal penalties for operating so unsafely in order to cut costs.
Ahah!
The the anti-corporation perspective arrives!
The issue of balancing safety vs cost vs performance
isn't about the form of ownership or governance.
In any system, resources always have limits.
Even your vaunted socialists faced this, eg, nuclear
power plant design. USSR skipped the spendy
containment systems used in the west, thereby
exacerbating the Chernobyl disaster.
You judge the decade & a half process of design,
testing, & successful operation of the Titan as being
irresponsibly unsafe. Yet you leap to this certainty
without having seen any engineering analysis.
....multiple indications (including from experts) point to gross negligence and major carelessness for the sake of cutting costs and accelerating the expedition.
Evidence for this claim?
If they couldn't afford to avoid that, they couldn't afford to be in business at all. They probably knew how dangerous it was, going by the fact that they made all passengers sign waivers prior to diving.
Much criticism was of the unconventional composite
construction of in the Titan. Yet such wavers are also
required of people descending in conventional
submersibles. That's not evidence...it's irrelevant bias
confirmation.
People who've never done engineering design (&
know only what the news media feed them) are ill
prepared to imagine work & decisions happen
behind the scenes.
Let's look at an simple overview of airliner safety....
Modern planes are very safe (per passenger mile)
compared to other forms of transportation. But
they could be made even safer by changing the
balance of design goals.
Possibilities...
- Making airframes stronger (& heavier).
- Carrying less payload.
- Adding more redundant flight control
systems.
- Prohibiting flying in adverse conditions,
eg, wind, rain, snow, cold weather.
- Eliminating service to airports that are
more difficult to negotiate.
- Retiring planes earlier in their life.
- Enlarging flight the crew.
Do those things, & flights would be more
expensive, less convenient, & more polluting.
Reasonable people can disagree about where
that balance should be made.
Thus disagreement alone doesn't mean that a
wrong choice was made when a plane crashes,
or service is expensive & inconvenient.
What matters is careful comprehensive analysis
of the Titan & chain of decisions in its history.
We don't have that yet.
