Individual Rights, and other Myths

[DaleC]

No, I am not talking about Jarrod Jablonski. GUE works hard to mitigate known risks and to provide for unknown risks.

Yes, some "record setting" is different than others. The book "On the Origin of Species" goes into this in more detail.

No, I don't mind paying into an insurance plan which spreads risk and cost over a large number of reasonably responsible people. I DO mind being forced to pay much higher health premiums to cover the unneccessary costs of willfully irresponsible people.

No, I don't think my payments will pay for the cost of my care if I get a very expensive disease. It's a big problem in the US.

No, I am not doing "everything possible" but I am doing most things (Don't smoke, eat healthy, drink little, exercise) and should do more (lose weight, eat less meat/salt/fat).

I agree with most of your second paragraph, especially if you are referring to government leaders and Wall Street bankers.

Hypocrisy is so tedious. Hopefully you will not succumb to a disease or injury of your own making and hopefully your care team will not assume you can't hear and hopefully they will not talk amongst themselves about what a burden you are to the tax system (and complain about the stench of your bowel movements).

I may engage in the occasional risk taking activity but I generally try to temper my thinking with the humility of knowing I am, in reality, a wonderfully flawed machine. I dream, I try to manifest some of those dreams into reality and I occasionally make mistakes along the way. Knowing this, I try to extend the same consideration to others.

 

[captain]

Mike, what sense does the 60-foot limit make? Why not 50? Why not 70? If we really need a limit, pick one that has a history of actually working: 30 ft.

Once again you could use the Navy diving manual table 3.1 suitability of scuba for various conditions to find the probable source of the 60 ' recommendation.
It states 60 feet is the maximum depth that scuba is suitable for with dive run times up to 60 minutes which dovetails nicely with the NDL limits of the Navy dive tables of the time, 60' for 60 minutes. 60 seems to be the magic number.

 

[DevonDiver]

It also fits nicely with a 60' per minute max ascent rate - producing some reassurance to novice divers that their never more than 1 min from the surface.

 

[DCBC]

So you think doing dives in excess of 200 feet on single aluminum 80's is a perfectly safe practice ... and should be promoted on a recreational diving forum as something that "a lot of people are doing every day"?

Because a certain poster on ScubaBoard has created no less than four such threads in the past month ... with a handful of people who think it's a perfectly acceptable thing to do.

If you want to do those dives, go ahead. If you want to promote them on ScubaBoard, then I will express my freedom to disagree with the idea that it's a perfectly acceptable thing to do.

Please don't confuse regulation with expression ... and please don't demand freedoms you're not willing to allow to others who might disagree with you.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

I'm sorry Bob, you've lost me:

1. I'm unaware of the "certain poster" that you refer to.
2. What is "acceptable" relates to the diving conditions and hazards present and the personal safety envelope of the individual. One size does not fit all.
3. I have never promoted such dives, so I require you to elaborate on this comment.
4. I do not deny anyone the ability to disagree with me, but exactly what are you disagreeing with? Please quote my statements that you you feel are incorrect.
5. What freedoms am I not willing to allow others? You seem to be confused...

Regards,

Wayne

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I'm sorry Bob, you've lost me:

1. I'm unaware of the "certain poster" that you refer to.
2. What is "acceptable" relates to the diving conditions and hazards present and the personal safety envelope of the individual. One size does not fit all.
3. I have never promoted such dives, so I require you to elaborate on this comment.
4. I do not deny anyone the ability to disagree with me, but exactly what are you disagreeing with? Please quote my statements that you you feel are incorrect.
5. What freedoms am I not willing to allow others? You seem to be confused...

Regards,

Wayne

Context, Wayne ... I think you may have joined us in the middle of an ongoing conversation.

The statement I was responding to was ...

No one is promoting unsafe diving practices, or creating threads to promote short-cuts. Is that what you are suggesting is being done here?

Over the past few weeks there have been no fewer than four threads that were created and subsequently pulled promoting the notion that deep (in excess of 200 feet) bounce dives on air and single tanks was perfectly safe ... and that it's a common practice throughout the world. The people in favor of this notion ... VoodooGasMan, Halemano, and a couple others ... promoted it as something that people do, and that we should therefore be discussing how to do it "properly" on ScubaBoard. There was even some request of a forum dedicated to discussions about how to "properly" do deep, bounce dives.

This all started as a result of a couple of well-discussed accidents ... one in Cozumel that resulted in a fatality and a paralysis victim, and another in Louisiana that resulted in a fatality.

Most of those threads were pulled ... either because some participants couldn't behave like adults, or because the content got so outlandish that it represented what any reasonable person would consider a promotion of blatantly unsafe diving practices. The LA accident, for example, involved a young man who had been out fishing (and drinking) all day, had been advised by his doctor not to dive due to a sinus condition, who went diving at dusk to over 200 feet without a light, and on an AL80 that wasn't even full. He and his dive buddy were subsequently separated, and he was never seen again (last seen at about 225 FSW as I recall). His buddies wanted to justify how the dive plan wasn't the problem ... because he was a "great diver". OK ... I'll give them their freedom to promote that notion ... but I'll also demand my freedom to voice an opinion that his actions were not those of a sane diver ... much less a great one.

Frankly, I don't care if Hale, VDGM, yourself, or anyone else wants to do these dives. You guys are all well-experienced and are making your choices based on those experiences. I DO feel strongly that we should not promote this behavior as somehow "normal" or acceptable on this board ... to a predominantly recreational audience.

Hope that clarifies your confusion ... or mine, depending on how you look at it ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[TMHeimer]

Mike Boswell, didn't you start an epic thread some time back, suggesting that we should all be happy to allow the TSA to grope us and do an occasional body-cavity search in exchange for the warm fuzzy feeling of safety that we'd get in return? This is just a continuation of that thread, in many respects.

A good guiding principle comes from Milton Friedman: whenever an activity creates an externality, regulation is appropriate. Is that power plant dumping pollution into the environment, burdening people with health-care costs, and lending a competitive advantage to the polluter over the non-polluter? Then emissions controls are appropriate, because the free market cannot properly discount those costs.

You have to use a little bit of judgement, though. How much cost to our fellow citizens does driving without a seatbelt impose (a lot), and how much of an imposition is it to wear a seatbelt (not much). Then seat-belt laws are appropriate. How much cost to our fellow citizens does reckless diving impose? Practically none, I would posit. And the imposition? In my opinion, it is much greater than wearing a seatbelt. I would never skip a drive because I had to wear a seatbelt, but I would certainly skip dives where, say, depth limits were imposed, or solo diving wasn't allowed.

I agree with these points. Are you sure about the seatbelts? I know they prevent deaths, but dying generally is only a funeral cost to the family. Maybe they also prevent an injury from being a more serious one. But they also can cause less serious injuries (abdomen, etc.) themselves. I really don't know the financial costs to society, do you? Again, there are more and less socialized medicine countries to consider. I only dredge up this old discussion because perhaps(?) we have been led to believe they save society a lot of money. And there have been seatbelt laws now for 30 years, whereas a mere 10 years before that you had to pay to get them installed as an option. This situation may be similar to someone diving in a certain area for years, but now it is off limits due to an accident or 2. So we don't dive there for the next 30 years fully believing the government must be right that it is unsafe. As I said I have no statistics on seatbelts and the laws may save society a lot of money (in some countries). Whether they do or not is not my point. My point is almost everyone today (as opposed to 1981) pretty much blindly agrees that the laws are good and that taking away the freedom of choice here is justified. Is it?

 

[DCBC]

Frankly, I don't care if Hale, VDGM, yourself, or anyone else wants to do these dives. You guys are all well-experienced and are making your choices based on those experiences. I DO feel strongly that we should not promote this behavior as somehow "normal" or acceptable on this board ... to a predominantly recreational audience.

Hope that clarifies your confusion ... or mine, depending on how you look at it ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

Thanks for taking the time to explain matters to me. From your post I thought you were taking exception to something that I said.

As I was unaware of the other threads (I haven't been spending much time on SB in the past few months), but even when I do, I attempt to restrict my comments to the question being posed. Too often discussions come up about something that was said six-months ago (or longer) and it's difficult to keep in context.

For the record, I do not promote anyone doing any dive that's outside of their personal safety envelope. I regularly see divers engaging in risky activities for which they are trained, aren't trained and who have received inadequate training for the activity being undertaken. This extends to incompetent divers that should never have been certified in the first place (in my opinion). One certainly doesn't need to dive deep on-air, or enter an overhead environment to be outside a person's safety envelope.

All too often individuals jump on the deep-air bandwagon without understanding how it can be done safely. For me, the most important part of deep-air training is early recognition and appropriate action to keep a person safe. Like diving solo, or cave diving, it's not the activity that usually kills people but a failure to follow tried and true procedures. Deep-air has a long history and it can be done safely. That doesn't mean I promote new divers using deep-air anymore than I would suggest for them to penetrate an overhead environment without adequate experience and training.

 

[Mike Boswell]

Hypocrisy is so tedious. Hopefully you will not succumb to a disease or injury of your own making and hopefully your care team will not assume you can't hear and hopefully they will not talk amongst themselves about what a burden you are to the tax system (and complain about the stench of your bowel movements).

I may engage in the occasional risk taking activity but I generally try to temper my thinking with the humility of knowing I am, in reality, a wonderfully flawed machine. I dream, I try to manifest some of those dreams into reality and I occasionally make mistakes along the way. Knowing this, I try to extend the same consideration to others.

Hypocrisy? Why do you think I am hypocritical?

 

[Mike Boswell]

Mike Boswell, didn't you start an epic thread some time back, suggesting that we should all be happy to allow the TSA to grope us and do an occasional body-cavity search in exchange for the warm fuzzy feeling of safety that we'd get in return? This is just a continuation of that thread, in many respects.

A good guiding principle comes from Milton Friedman: whenever an activity creates an externality, regulation is appropriate. Is that power plant dumping pollution into the environment, burdening people with health-care costs, and lending a competitive advantage to the polluter over the non-polluter? Then emissions controls are appropriate, because the free market cannot properly discount those costs.

You have to use a little bit of judgement, though. How much cost to our fellow citizens does driving without a seatbelt impose (a lot), and how much of an imposition is it to wear a seatbelt (not much). Then seat-belt laws are appropriate. How much cost to our fellow citizens does reckless diving impose? Practically none, I would posit. And the imposition? In my opinion, it is much greater than wearing a seatbelt. I would never skip a drive because I had to wear a seatbelt, but I would certainly skip dives where, say, depth limits were imposed, or solo diving wasn't allowed.

If you are referring to the "TSA Got You Down?" thread, no, I did not start it. I did post on it, but your characterizations of my positions are, sadly, wide of the mark. I think if you carefully read this entire thread you may get a better understanding of what it's about.

 

[DeepSeaExplorer]

The problem with demanding that everyone act responsibly is in deciding who's definition of responsible you accept as the norm.

Exactly... who gets to decide the rules? Some dive agency that was established to make money by requiring classes for everything?

You then won't be able to dive off a boat unless you have the Boat Diver speciality, dive in a dry suit without certification, do a drift dive without a special class, dive a wreck with a Wreck Diver course, etc.

There are lots of dangerous hobbies with no regulation what so ever. Diving is regulated too much now, all in the name of making money. Most of the current dive rules are based upon keeping the lowest common denominator diver from killing themselves, which is a good thing. But, at some point, the 'deciders' should realize that their rules have limits.

You can't take rules designed for the worst possible diver and try to apply them to everyone. It's a contradiction, "You aren't capable of making those decisions for yourself so I will make them for you." "Oh, and don't allow another diver to make your decisions for you, that's called a trust me dive and it's a bad thing." Which is it? Do you make decisions for yourself as a diver or do you abdicate them to someone else? Who gets to make the decision when you transition from a trustme diver to an experienced diver? Is there going to be a class for that?! You Betcha!