quote:

Then, in a stage known as “degloving,” he began to flip the penis inside out through the hole he’d created at its base. Wearing the marbled interior flesh around his fingers, he trimmed the soft tissue and cauterized a series of superficial blood vessels, speckling the interior of the shaft with dark dots. For a few moments, a quivering red sphere popped up like a jellyfish surfacing at sea — an in­verted testicle, he explained.

Halloween Jack posted:

I hope that his Penuma made him say "uh."

quote:

The force of the implosion would have been so violent that everyone on board would have died before the water touched their bodies

lifg posted:

It’s a small comfort to know they didn’t suffer. I feel terrible for that kid though.

ultrafilter posted:

The Titan Submersible Was “an Accident Waiting to Happen”

A lot of the details have filtered out piecemeal but this has the full story. It's probably worse than you think it is.

quote:

Rush replied four days later, saying that he had “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market.” He understood that his approach “flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation,” he wrote. “We have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult.”

quote:

The primary task of a submersible is to not implode.

ultrafilter posted:

The Titan Submersible Was “an Accident Waiting to Happen”

A lot of the details have filtered out piecemeal but this has the full story. It's probably worse than you think it is.

quote:

A few weeks later, McDevitt contacted OceanGate, noting that he was looking into Lochridge’s firing as a whistle-blower-protection matter. OceanGate’s lawyer Thomas Gilman soon issued Lochridge a court summons: he had ten days to withdraw his osha claim and pay OceanGate almost ten thousand dollars in legal expenses. Otherwise, Gilman wrote, OceanGate would sue him, take measures to destroy his professional reputation, and accuse him of immigration fraud. Gilman also reported to osha that Lochridge had orchestrated his own firing because he “wanted to leave his job and maintain his ability to collect unemployment benefits.” (McDevitt, of osha, notified the Coast Guard of Lochridge’s complaint. There is no evidence that the Coast Guard ever followed up.)

Lochridge received the summons while he was at his father’s funeral. He and his wife hired a lawyer, but it quickly became clear that “he didn’t have the money to fight this guy,” Lahey told me. (Lochridge declined to be interviewed.) Lahey covered the rest of the expenses, but, after more than half a year of legal wrangling, and threats of deportation, Lochridge withdrew his whistle-blower claim with osha so that he could go on with his life. Lahey was crestfallen. “He didn’t consult me about that decision,” Lahey recalled. “It’s not that he had to—it was his fight, not mine. But I was underwriting the cost of it, because I believed in the idea that this inspection report, which he wouldn’t share with anybody, needed to see the light of day.”

Halloween Jack posted:

I thought I was too cynical to be surprised at this kind of poo poo, but this really struck me. What is the point of whistleblower protections, or even regulation period, if companies can just retaliate against whistleblowers like this and it's perfectly legal and aboveboard? He withdrew his complaint because the company threatened him, and apparently OSHA knows this, and nobody gave a poo poo.

Halloween Jack posted:

I thought I was too cynical to be surprised at this kind of poo poo, but this really struck me. What is the point of whistleblower protections, or even regulation period, if companies can just retaliate against whistleblowers like this and it's perfectly legal and aboveboard? He withdrew his complaint because the company threatened him, and apparently OSHA knows this, and nobody gave a poo poo.

quote:

Although it is illegal to transport passengers in an unclassed, experimental submersible, “under U.S. regulations, you can kill crew,” McCallum told me. “You do get in a little bit of trouble, in the eyes of the law. But, if you kill a passenger, you’re in big trouble. And so everyone was classified as a ‘mission specialist.’ There were no passengers—the word ‘passenger’ was never used.”

Halloween Jack posted:

I thought I was too cynical to be surprised at this kind of poo poo, but this really struck me. What is the point of whistleblower protections, or even regulation period, if companies can just retaliate against whistleblowers like this and it's perfectly legal and aboveboard? He withdrew his complaint because the company threatened him, and apparently OSHA knows this, and nobody gave a poo poo.

mycatscrimes posted:

Halloween Jack posted:

If I had that much money, I'd at least change my name to Broccolini.

Mister Olympus posted:

"They all have a 50-50 chance of inheriting a cruel genetic mutation — which means disappearing into dementia in middle age. This is the story of what it’s like to live with those odds."

eating only apples posted:

Is there a way around the paywall for this?

eating only apples posted:

Is there a way around the paywall for this?

ultrafilter posted:

Read This, Not That: The Hidden Cost of Nutrition Misinformation

nonathlon posted:

Unexpectedly interesting: a long and slightly rambling piece on legendary music engineer (and musician) Steve Albini, the music business and changing your mind:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/15/the-evolution-of-steve-albini-if-the-dumbest-person-is-on-your-side-youre-on-the-wrong-side