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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33383 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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It's easy in hindsight to see the current crisis and say it was a stupid decision, but I have previously read comments from people on The Motte lamenting that modern people are too afraid of their mortality and unwilling to take risks.

Both can be true. For an experimental exploration vessel, maybe "damn the redundancy, full speed ahead" was the right answer, even given the risks. For a tourist vessel it just seems dumb. It's the difference between the Wrights flying the Wright Flyer and trying to use the thing in regular passenger service.

The Wrights were looking to sell Wright Flyers. They sold training as well.

Some people also died on Wright Flyers, including one man who was a passenger on a flight piloted by Orville, Thomas Selfridge. He was an Army officer being trained to fly, and was the first ever airplane fatality. That didn't kill the company, but it did prompt the Army to put its training program on hold, and prompted the Wrights to put greater focus on safety.

For a tourist vessel ... the Wrights flying the Wright Flyer

Funny enough, the Wright brothers almost did kill Teddy Roosevelt in 1908 when they crashed their plane in a public demonstration. Roosevelt was scheduled to be the passenger but due to last minute scheduling conflict was replaced by an Army Lieutenant who was killed in the crash.

It was the first fatal plane crash, and the first "I was almost on that plane" story as well.

https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2014/02/02/the-worlds-first-fatal-plane-crash-could-have-killed-the-president-1908/

This is the nature of taking risks, no? You can always say in hindsight that it was a bad idea, but when you succeed it's a triumph. They can seem more or less sensible in the prior analysis, but you're only really going to know if your assumptions are correct once you try it.

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