Finally got around to reading it. That’s some WSJ level dark, dry humor right there. The lack of attention to materials science 101 just boggles the mind.Fibres do not regenerate between dives.
I HAVE THOUGHTS So "move fast and break things" has been the mantra for innovation for twenty fucking years. Twenty fucking years of trust fundies parading their societal abberance as virtue, twenty fucking years of rich twitchfucks being praised and rewarded for assuming the rules don't apply to them and being proven right. A partial list of "visionary" companies that were entirely fucking illegal yet are worth more than a billion dollars because they accumulated too much cash to shut down: - Paypal - Facebook - Amazon - Theranos - WeWork - Uber These are companies that knew what they were doing was illegal, but also knew that if it was useful enough (and they were lawyered up enough) they could push through any jurisdiction that questioned their right to operate a taxi without a taxi license, their right to flaunt banking laws, their right to sublease without sublease approval. "Move fast and break things" meant "beat the law to the high ground." Because ultimately, rich people don't go to jail. They just make enough less-rich people richer to rich their way to riches. "His maternal grandfather was an oil-and-shipping tycoon" is shorthand for "Stockton Rush has never been a part of a household where anyone works for a living." How does "a teen-ager" become "an accomplished commercial jet pilot" considering you have to be 17 before you can even get a multi-engine rating? I'll bet it helps if Daddy has a Gulfstream and a pair of pilots who will let you hold the yoke. These are people who have never encountered an actual, physical boundary. They're people who can buy their way out of anything and "rules" are things like "you have to wait in line" not things like, oh, acrylic. According to the rules, Uber wasn't allowed either. And yet. I think OceanGate, Theranos and - wait for it - exemplify "startups" where rich trust fund dipshits discover that "the ocean" does not deal with rule-breakers the same way the Cleveland City Council does. And I hope more of them spend their billions to disprove the laws of physics.Stockton Rush was named for two of his ancestors who signed the Declaration of Independence: Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush. His maternal grandfather was an oil-and-shipping tycoon. As a teen-ager, Rush became an accomplished commercial jet pilot, and he studied aerospace engineering at Princeton, where he graduated in 1984.
The Titan’s viewport was made of acrylic and seven inches thick. “That’s another thing where I broke the rules,” Rush said to Pogue, the CBS News journalist. He went on to refer to a “very well-known” acrylic expert, Jerry D. Stachiw, who wrote an eleven-hundred-page manual called “Handbook of Acrylics for Submersibles, Hyperbaric Chambers, and Aquaria.” “It has safety factors that—they were so high, he didn’t call ’em safety factors. He called ’em conversion factors,” Rush said. “According to the rules,” he added, his viewport was “not allowed.”