

Insane "underwater" startup. - noonespecial
http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/13/smallbusiness/subprime_sub.fsb/index.htm

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mixmax
Either this is nothing special or I just hang around a weird crowd. I know a
some guys that made three submarines, and they go to 1500 feet. The biggest
one is the largest amateur submarine in the world. See pictures here:
<http://www.submarines.dk/>

They are currently working on commercial spaceflight: The goal is to make a
rocket that will get one person suborbital but weightless and back down. They
expect to do it within a couple of years. They just had their first public
motor test, you can see a clip here:
[http://ekstrabladet.dk/nationentv/klip/?clipid=17454&cli...](http://ekstrabladet.dk/nationentv/klip/?clipid=17454&clipfra=1)
. (links are in Danish)

And they're just a couple of guys with no money to speak off, but they are
crazy and they believe they can do it.

So do I.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I'm pretty sure you just hang around a weird crowd...

 _pages through Facebook to see if anyone's status is building submarine or
hobby rocket_

Yeah, just a weird crowd :-)

~~~
mixmax
Looking forward to a trip on top of their rocket though :-)

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sspencer
Is there a particular reason underwater is in quotes here? It IS an (insane)
underwater startup. The fact that it is underwater does not need to be quoted.
I think people have completely lost touch with what quotation marks mean.

Sorry to be nitpicky, but I am getting tired of seeing completely wrong uses
of quotation marks everywhere.

~~~
noonespecial
I used underwater in this case because it is often said that a startup is
underwater when they are in debt.

The quotes for the double meaning.

Apologies if I got it "wrong". :)

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sfphotoarts
I wonder just how much of the world would have been explored had Shackleton,
Columbus etc worried too much about if their boats were insured.

Antarctica...ummm, that's all very interesting sir, but tell me again how much
personal accident liability you have on The Discovery... :)

~~~
hugh
Interestingly, googling "Shackleton insurance" gives this New York Times
article from January 16, 1914:

[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A07E6DC1730E...](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A07E6DC1730E733A25755C1A9679C946596D6CF)

It's not clear to me from the article who actually took out the insurance
policy, though.

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bigthboy
I, like many of those who commented in the article, think the guy is pretty
smart. I mean he did build his own submarine from scratch and furthermore made
it profitable. However, I also agree that the bull headed and risky approach
he has with the whole thing is a bit... unnecessary. I would like to see him
approach it not thinking he's better than everyone and that he can simply get
around the law. For as many dumb laws there are there are at least half as
many good ones. Not allowing people to take other people to dangerous places
without being certified and having insurance is one of those good ones.

~~~
noonespecial
The point he made was that the certification would have cost him more than the
sub. He is barely profitable as it is.

There are a whole set of laws in the first world that create an absurdly high
barrier to entry for certain activities. Instead of making the activities
safer, as intended, they simply make them impossible/unprofitable/implausible.

A soup kitchen that fed the homeless near me was forced to close because they
could not afford to install a centralized halon fire extinguisher system to
meet commercial kitchen code. Instead of making the volunteers and the
homeless marginally safer, the volunteers went home to watch TV and the
homeless were SOL. Law->Fail.

Different cultures experience risk/reward in different ways. Safety _above ALL
else_ is a distinctly first-world/western notion.

~~~
bigthboy
I'm not saying they all work out I'm saying that some are good. In your
example of the soup kitchen closed because it couldn't install some fancy-
pancy fire extinguisher system, yeah, that's a bad law and a bit of an
overkill. Telling someone that they can't legally take other people 700 feet
below the water in a sub that isn't certified is a bit of a different story.

He may have barely have been making a profit but the fact of the matter is it
would've cost him $100,000 to get papers/certified but he instead spent
$200,000 on a new sub. It just seems like the kind of thing that would
actually be considered an investment because it could make you more profitable
and definitely adds more credibility.

~~~
noonespecial
Eventually you end up with a choice. The older, smaller $100k sub with $100k
of permission seeking added on (and somewhat known risk) or the newer larger
$200k sub with somewhat unknown risk. In the first-world, that choice is made
for me (and likely results in no sub ride at all). I'm glad that there are
some places in the world where I can still choose for myself.

I'd take the sub ride.

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josefresco
Would you trust/encourage a guy who shoots a horse in the head just to see
something on the bottom of the sea floor eat it?

~~~
rudyfink
Yes, while I don't see it as something I would do, I can't find any fault with
it. I'd guess it's probably just the cheapest price point for meat available
to him. If he bought a pallet of horse meat from a butcher, it would seem far
more ordinary I think? That said I can't fault the logic of just going right
to the source and saving money.

~~~
noonespecial
Its the same cultural problem that some people have with eating dog. Its just
a different world. The meat in this case even walks to the place where its
needed! If it was a cow or a pig, it would probably seem less objectionable.
Horse seems to ring up as "pet" in my mind and so colors the issue for me.

If you think about it, he doesn't _need_ to shoot the horse first. Dropping it
to the bottom of the ocean with cinder blocks attached would do the trick
while possibly attracting more sharks. It be cheaper and cleaner boat-side as
well. He would probably find it morally objectionable to do so though.

If more people had to kill their own meat, there'd be a ton more vegetarians.

~~~
reeses
> If more people had to kill their own meat, there'd be a ton more
> vegetarians.

For about a week until we got over the social conditioning. Then we'd start
wondering what else we've been missing all these years, and start killing and
eating koala bears, kittens, and people.

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wastedbrains
I saw ads for this when I was scuba diving and Honduras, kind of funny to see
this story on CNN about a year later.

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sireat
This sounds like a lot of fun, till someone gets hurt. Even in Honduras that
would spell trouble.

I would probably take the risk though.

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Allocator2008
I am not an economist, but I think this is a lesson in the area of
risk/reward. Sure, as a tourist I might have qualms about taking a ride in an
unlicensed sub. However as a human being who loves knowledge, I would be
intrigued by the chance to see a 14-foot shark close-up. The risk involved is
offset by the chance for knowledge. Evolution hard-wires self-preservation
into us. But perhaps it also hard-wires a certain risk-tolerance for the sake
of a greater good. Put it another way: it is better for the gene to lose a few
gene-carriers along the way to aquiring a big new advantage, than to not lose
those handful of gene-carriers but also not aquire the big new advantage. So
businesses like this that understand the hard-wired tolerance we have for risk
when others don't understand that, have a competitive advantage - they can get
to work while their competitors are still worrying about paper work. In a
word, the selfish gene should be proud of this guy! :-)

~~~
seano
You could get the same knowledge from watching a video.

~~~
dmv
Knowledge, perhaps, but by no means the same experience (which is what the
commenter probably meant). There is no question that I appreciate how a shark
moves through the water far more from my experiences as a diver than as a
Shark Week viewer or aquarium visitor.

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markm
Now that's a maverick.

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mtw
killing the horse just to get tourists see sharks and other sea predators is
imo stupid and unelegant

