Super Dangerous Activities and Vast Resources
A lot of Twitter is junk, but this comment hit me a bit:
The death of any man diminishes me but, beyond a quick yet sincere Requiescat for them, my main question now is how many public tax dollars were spent trying to rescue the super-rich from their super-dangerous escapades.
Not that they asked for it.
And not that there isn't an effort to rescue any who are, in the words of the hymn, "in peril on the sea".
But there's just something existentially different about this.
Many will say that nobody has a right to tell other people what to do with their money, but that is in fact wrong, and we do it all the time. There are plenty of things that are illegal that people spend their money on, and we aren't inclined to make them legal on this basis.
To have cash to such a surplus level that $250,000 can be spent for a single instance of amusement, no matter how profound the experience, raises moral questions of all sorts, and not just for those who are that well funded, but also for the societies allowing this to occur.
And the Titanic is the site of a mass loss of human life. To spend that amount of money to dive on what is essentially a grave is problematic.
There's a public duty to try to rescue those imperiled, irrespective of their wealth or lack of it. An interesting thing here is that the effort was undertaken when those in the know, already knew these individuals were dead. The U.S. Navy knew at the instant it occurred. Those on location did as well. It sounds as if those on location distributed the news within thirty minutes of it occurring.
I'm not saying that "expend any effort" shouldn't be attempted. That was done, and no doubt that cost at least the United States and Canada millions.
I'm saying that this shouldn't have been allowed in the first place, and that in this era of vast wealth, something should be reassessed.
