You Can't Silence Us

Answers

From la Repubblica, a story of the deceased divers from the Maldives. A Finnish team managed to recover the final two deceased divers yesterday. All four of the remaining divers were located in the same chamber, more than 200 feet below the surface, and more than 300 linear feet inside the cave. The rescue team has given some insight into what happened to the missing divers. To understand what happened, a map of the underwater cave.

This is a diagram of the cave system, as seen from above, looking down. The divers entered the cave from the right, off of the frame.

The divers entered the cave system at a depth of 180 feet. The cave begins with a first large, very bright cavern with a sandy bottom. It would seem enticing to go further, as this looks very inviting.

They swam through a connecting tunnel from the first chamber to the second. This connecting tunnel is almost 100 feet long, ten feet across, and just three feet tall. It led to the second chamber of the cave, which is a large, round space with no natural light. This second chamber had a depth of over 200 feet. The interior of this chamber would be completely cut off from daylight, and the only visibility would be provided by any handheld lights that the divers had brought with them. The inside of such a chamber is a confusing jumble of rocks, with one rock looking much like any other rock. Even though the water in here was clear, it was a dark, confusing maze of rocks and sand.

At some point, they entered the third chamber (which was a dead end with no way out) through another tunnel whose entrance was right next to the connecting tunnel leading back to the first chamber and the exit. The Finnish team notes that the exit tunnel’s opening was partially obscured from view from the vantage point of a diver in the second chamber by a large pile of sand. It is easy to get over the sandbank into the second chamber, but when you turn around to leave again the bank almost looks like a wall, hiding the corridor from view. The team believes that the divers mistook the tunnel leading to the dead end and their literal death for the tunnel that would lead them to safety.

The divers were only equipped with 80 cubic feet of breathing air. At 200 feet, they would breathe through that supply at 7 times the rate of the surface. By the time they had penetrated the cave to that point, they likely had a minute or two of air left before they all drowned from lack of air.

This reinforces my opinion of what I think happened. These divers were diving beyond their training, experience, and equipment. Had they been properly equipped and trained, they would have stretched a guideline as they went and wouldn’t have gotten lost. They would have had more than just 80 cubic feet of breathing gas, and they wouldn’t be dead.

This was diver error, plain and simple. As I said before, the ocean is an outright jealous bitch, and she shows no mercy to those who do not give her the respect she deserves.

EDITED TO ADD

One of the things that gets me, although it shouldn’t at this point, are the social media experts who are claiming this team had tons of training and experience, so something else must have happened. I have seen theories ranging from “they had bad air” to rogue currents (although how a current runs through a dead end cave, they don’t explain), and even one that claims they were drug there by a large squid to be used as food.

I am not the only experienced diver who actually knows better. It doesn’t take any special disaster to have made this happen- just a combination of inadequate training and experience combined with arrogance of Dunning Krueger and a dangerous environment with a very small margin of error, and that’s all you need.

People who have read this post: 62
By Divemedic, ago

Next Time

This man sued the police because he was arrested for posts celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk.

I agree. The police went about it the wrong way. If you disagree with what someone has to say, just label it as hate speech and kick the crap out of them. The First Amendment doesn’t apply to anything labeled as hate speech, and if they defend themselves you can claim he started it with his hateful rhetoric and isn’t permitted to defend himself.

People who have read this post: 172
By Divemedic, ago

Entertainment

A couple was arrested for leaving an unsecured bicycle in their yard then using a bat to beat thieves who tried to steal it.

The best part of the story is how wven though they were arrested, no charges were filed. The real purpose of police is to ensure a fair trial for those accused of crimes. Once they stop ensuring that and criminals run wild, their victims take matters into their own hands.

People who have read this post: 232
By Divemedic, ago

That’s My Policy

Oregon police say that grown men exposing themselves isn’t a crime unless they can establish that the man exposing himself is doing it for sexual gratification. The leftists there agree with him because a 2 year old won’t remember it, so no harm, no foul.

Here is my answer:

When the cops arrive on scene and there is a dead naked guy in my yard next to my child, and I am standing there saying he was trying to sexually molest my child, who are they to say I am wrong?

People who have read this post: 243
By Divemedic, ago

Another Killer Tranny

Hey, at least they are out there killing the Muslims who would gladly toss them from a roof. I will allow it. Penalties offset. Replay the down.

The fact that they were not MAGA, but instead were trannies explains why this dropped from the news cycle so quickly.

People who have read this post: 343
By Divemedic, ago

Men and Women

We have been having a lively conversation about child support and paternity. A comment here made me want to write a complete post as a story and possible warning from my own past:

The one thing that I have always been poor at, is in romantic relationships with women. I did have a girlfriend once who told me that it was because I am a professional rescuer in every sense of the word, and she told me that because I feel the need to rescue everyone, some women will take advantage of that. I’m not sure if she is right, but a string of failed relationships does tell a compelling story.

One of those relationships was as big of a mess as you could ever imagine. This one was the one and only time that I dated a woman who had children. She had two of them, and about 3 months after we began dating, I let her move in with me because she and her two kids had nowhere else to go. I helped her out in a lot of ways. I let her use my second car, I provided her with a cell phone on my account, and treated her children properly. A few months later, we broke up, but she kept my car and my cell phone. Then she sued me for child support.

So it turns out that we had dated for a year and a couple of days before breaking up, and there is a law that says if a man acts like a father to children that aren’t his for a year or more, but that man is the only father figure these children know, the court can consider what is in the best interests of the children and can compel him to visit, spend time with, and pay child support for the children. The theory is called parentage by estoppel. Under the doctrine of parentage by estoppel, a court can order a non-biological man to pay child support if:

  • He knew he was not the biological father.
  • He held himself out or acted as if her were the child’s father
  • The child relied on that representation, forming a parental bond and treating him as a father.

This is applied in narrow circumstances, often in stepparent or long-term partner situations. A year or more of acting as the only father figure can support such a finding. Once established as a legal or equitable parent, support obligations can follow even after separation. So that’s what she tried to do.

In my case, she told the court I was abusing her, so she wanted child support and also a domestic violence injunction. That way, I wouldn’t get other parental rights like visitation or joint custody, but I would still have to pay child support. It took me a year to get out of that mess. You can read about much of the case here. I resolved to never again date a woman who had a child.

I made the mistake of telling the story to another girlfriend, and she tried doing the same thing, just minus the child support. It was also a mess. The only good thing with this one is that she was stupid and I only had to deal with it for about a month. I can certainly understand the idea of men not wanting anything to do with women. Thanks to our court system, relationships with women are something that is fraught with danger.

People who have read this post: 359
By Divemedic, ago

Rich and Poor

Kevin O’Leary tells people not to waste $28 a day on lunch.

He is immediately scorned because, the people who are struggling complain, then produce excuses as to why they need those $28 lunches. Do the math:

If you go out to lunch at $28 a day every workday, that works out to $560 per month in lunches. What if you had brown bagged it every day instead? That could easily free up $350 per month that could be invested. In an index fund at 9% per year, that adds up.

  • In 10 years, it would be worth $67,000
  • 20 years, $233,000
  • 30 years, $640,000
  • and at 35 years, you would break a million

Or you can keep going out and spending $28 a day on lunch, $5 on a Starbucks every morning, and complaining about how you are still broke and blaming “boomers” for the fact that you can’t afford to buy a house.

People who have read this post: 323
By Divemedic, ago

The Next Chapter

The SCUBA tragedy in the Maldives has another interesting turn, and one that actually supports my belief that the divers were diving far beyond their training, equipment and experience. The bodies of the four missing divers have been recovered, and they were located in the third chamber of the cave at a depth of 200 feet.

The Italian tour operator that manages the Maldives diving trip denied authorizing or knowing about the deep dive that violated local limits, its lawyer told Italian daily Corriere della Sera on Saturday, according to an AP report.

Orietta Stella, representing Albatros Top Boat, said the operator “did not know” the group planned to descend beyond 30 meters. Crossing that threshold requires special permission from Maldivian maritime authorities and the tour operator “would have never allowed it,” she said.

I want you to look at this short video of the equipment that the dive team is using to recover the bodies.

This setup is called a rebreather. It works by having the diver rebreathe the air in his lungs over and over again. The device removes CO2 from the exhaled air and adds oxygen as needed to maintain a safe mixture. These devices are the gold standard for diving at the edge of human physiology. This is closed circuit diving, and rebreathers are specialized equipment, costing tens of thousands of dollars for each.

Now consider what the divers who died were equipped with:

The Italian divers were experienced, but the equipment used appeared to be standard recreational gear rather than technical equipment suited for deep-cave diving, she said.

This is the part that I can’t confirm, but this is reportedly the cave where the group was diving. Even if it isn’t the exact same cave, this is what it would look like. These caves are covered in fine silt, and one wrong move, one errant fin kick sends that silt up into the water of the cave, reducing visibility to zero.

One of the things you do in an area where visibility is potentially poor is use guidelines. A guideline is a rope that leads you back to the exit. Firefighters, rescue personnel, and cave divers are all familiar with this. The line has markers on it to indicate direction so you don’t accidentally follow the line in the wrong direction. It looks like this:

The round markers are called cookies, and the arrows are called, well, arrows. These shapes are easy to identify by feel in cases where there is no visibility. The arrow is placed on the line so it points to the exit. Unlike arrows, which explicitly point toward the nearest exit, cookies are round and do not point anywhere. They are used to mark other things. For example, if a cave branches off in different directions, the guideline will as well. So you use a cookie to mark which of the guidelines the team followed to go deeper into the cave.

In this case, it is evident that the divers didn’t use guidelines. They weren’t equipped for deep or decompression diving, and none of the divers involved were trained for this.

When that visibility is zero, you are weightless, it’s very disorienting. If you don’t know what you are doing in a cave, this is a death sentence. You have about 3 minutes to figure it out, or you and everyone with you in this cave is dead. That’s how 5 divers can die all at once. My guess is that this is what happened, and one of the divers managed to make it as far as the cave entrance before his air ran out. This has been my belief all along, and nothing I have seen to date contradicts my belief.

Now that the bodies have been located, the plan is to recover two of them tomorrow, and the final two on Wednesday.

People who have read this post: 469
By Divemedic, ago

Twenty Years

The community note on this tweet is wrong.

Let me explain. Child support is based upon the sum of the incomes of both parents. There is a chart and a formula. So let’s say that the father has two jobs. One where he works for the fire department, and a second job where he works as a janitor at a theme park. The mother claims to be working 20 hours per week as a bartender making $6 per hour. The child support is calculated and they take 70% of the father’s income for the couple’s two kids, but aren’t taking any of the income from his second job. The amount being taken is still less than 60% of dad’s total income, so they are below the Federal limit.

I would guess that’s what is happening here. The $163 the man is left with is the income from his first job, and he also has income from a second job. The example I used above wasn’t bullshit- that’s what happened to me when I was paying child support. It’s what actually made me homeless. The judge didn’t care. When I told him the money they were leaving me wasn’t enough to survive on because it wasn’t even enough to pay rent, the judge said “Get a second job.” When I pointed out that I already had two jobs, his reply was, “Well, get a third job, then.”

So you do that, and guess what? Now you are making more money, meaning that your child support increases again. It was impossible to get ahead. When I had one job, I was paying $700 per month in child support. I was forced to live on $700 per month. I got a second (part time) job, the wife went back to the judge, and my support went up to $900 per month. But hey, now I had $900 per month to live on.

How was my wife making it? She didn’t have a job. She had $700 per month in child support, $400 worth of food stamps, $300 in earned income credit, $200 per month in WIC, and $300 worth of welfare, plus she was getting $750 a month babysitting two children while their parents were at work. She netted a total of $2650 a month. Yeah, she got half of whatever I was making, plus she got to keep all of her money AND collected all kinds of government assistance money.  That is the equivalent of grossing over $40,000 a year. Meanwhile, I was living below the poverty level on what was left. It is easy to see why many men become “deadbeats.” The child support system is fundamentally unfair, and there is no mechanism in place to ensure that the money actually supports the child.

They take the money right out of your paycheck before you get it. Some men work under the table or drift from job to job to avoid paying. That doesn’t really work. If you try that, they take your professional licenses away. Good luck making a living at anything other than minimum wage without a license. Still, some men work at their own business or have help working under the table. Those men get their passports and driver’s licenses taken. The debt accrues and never goes away, not even in bankruptcy. Eventually, they will toss you in prison if you aren’t paying.

I always knew that my ‘child support’ was going to support their mother, not the kids. That is why things like this always make me angry, when I think about how women use their children to ride the gravy train, while their fathers get accused of being ‘deadbeat dads’ because they can’t afford to pay.

As soon as the kids turned 16, she threw them out of the house and had them live with me. First my son, and a year later, my daughter. As soon as it was no longer profitable, they were unceremoniously thrown out.

She still plays the game to get your tax dollars. Right after the first kid was thrown out, she got a job at WalMart as a cashier, and ‘injured’ her back soon thereafter. She now collects Social Security Disability and collects survivor benefits because the man she married after me passed away. To this day as far as I know, my ex-wife has never had a job her entire adult life other than that one year working at Wal Mart. Now that all three of her kids (2 from me, 1 from the dead guy who came next) are grown and out of the house, she lives in a doublewide trailer near Gainesville with her now elderly mother. Between them, they collect more than $5500 per month in SS benefits.

It’s been twenty years since I last paid child support. It still pisses me off. America’s new class of entrepreneurs are young women having children out of wedlock, or they marry a guy, have a kid, then divorce him, and collect. It may or may not even be his kid. Most people who work for a living actually make far less money than America’s new entrepreneurs. Forget college, the average college graduate only makes $44,000 a year upon graduation after 4 or more years of college. By the age of 20, a young woman can be making more than that with almost no effort, all she has to do is get pregnant a few times.

People who have read this post: 362
By Divemedic, ago