Dave Lease. I got this image from some psycho Russian on twitter calling him a p-do because he talked about how the Russians always cheat.

There's three kinds of people who watch figure skating: catty women, catty gays, and me. Dave Lease is in the second category. He has a Youtube channel The Skating Lesson where he discusses the sport and interviews top figure skaters. The easily-butthurt redditors of /r/figureskating are not thrilled with him lately and made a seethepost about it. He's being denounced for:

• Alleged bias against certain skaters like Bradie Tennell.

• Alleged bias against the Russians.

• Making too many catty comments about womens' appearance.

• Wanting attention too much. (I'm sure none of us would do that.)

• Generally being an annoying butthole.

• Making a joke about how US Figure Skating should force ice dancer Alexa Knierim to have a surrogate deliver her baby so that she can keep skating.

Alleged under-rotater Bradie Tennell.

Some highlights:

There are plenty of even keeled journ*lists like those from NBC, Jackie Wong, etc, but they tend to not provide commentary on the dark side of the sport.

His comments about Tanith [White] really pissed me off. He despises Charlie [White] and thinks Tanith is not in “glam” because she wants to make sure Charlie is in the spotlight. Tanith is gorgeous.

Allegedly not-glam Tanith.

I do think he is trying to be funny/sarcastic, but his comments are misogynistic. He is ALWAYS commenting on women’s looks.

He's not just borderline racist. He's been explicitly racist for the past decade+. He started toning it down when it became less in vogue culturally but he says lots of coded stuff and is privately still racist all the time

This guy sounds like rdrama material.

...an American progressive is like right winger where I’m from...

I hate eurotrash redditors more than you'll ever know.

Alexa has been known to call out Dave if she dislikes something he says about her (which he’s been doing for 10 years now). They’re friends and I feel like you’re projecting some Nonsense. It’s a joke. How do you people operate in the real world?

Reddit makes a lot more sense when you realize most of the users don't actually operate in the real world.

Aside from the chip on his shoulder about Bradie, Charlie White, and the pairs in general, I was also super skeeved out by his repeated comments about how USFS shouldn't "let" Alexa retire/she should get a surrogate and keep competing. Incredibly gross and inappropriate to be talking about someone's reproductive choices like that, especially these days.

Nooooooo it's the #MeToo era so gay men can't be allowed to make jokes anymore.

Chris and Alexa Knierim, who should get Dave Lease's permission before having a baby.

It’s hysterical that people think Dave LITERALLY meant that the USFS should pay for a surrogate. FFS, can people not joke anymore?

Sorry, but right now is the Autism Awareness decade.

His comments about USFS "getting" Alexa a surrogate and his comments on why USFS "allowed" teams to retire were beyond unhinged and creepy, as truly does not view the skaters as actual humans, it's all entertainment for him.

Beniot is a little eccentric, but we have not had any claims of him being inappropriate with skaters. Dave just wants to stir up drama.

Ice skating has always been a moneyed bougie sport.

Oh Jesus Fricking Christ, can we have one reddit thread without tankie zoomers?

The redditors get so salty that one even takes on OP for making a joke in his post:

Did he recently get dumped? Is he mad for some reason?

This post is weird just say you dont like him why the probing into his personal life.

AUSTRALIAN WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY

Also known as Down Under, Australia is the smallest continent, and it consists of three countries, namely: Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and Australia. Today, we will discuss three Australian women who were naughty and brought shame to themselves. Before we dive in, I think it would be necessary to give a little background regarding the Australian continent.

Papua New Guinea

When the continent is discussed, Papua New Guinea is often neglected, so it would be wise to discuss this interesting country briefly. The islands of Papua and New Guinea were discovered by the Western world in the sixteenth century by Portuguese and Spanish explorers. In 1884, Germany took control of about a quarter of the islands, calling it German New Guinea, and plantations were established. In the same year, Britain claimed control of the Southern coast of New Guinea and called it British New Guinea. It was established as a protectorate, though ownership of this protectorate would be passed to the Australian Commonwealth in 1902.

Australia forcibly seized German New Guinea during World War 1, and during the Pacific War, the Allies defended the territory from Japanese invasion until Japan surrendered in 1945. Following this, Papua and New Guinea would be merged to form what was known as The Territory of Papua and New Guinea. While it operated as a single body, it was still under the control of the Australian government. In 1975, the territory freed itself from Western control and became an independent State.

New Zealand

New Zealand is an island country consisting primarily of the North Island and the South Island, as well as over 700 smaller islands. It is regarded as one of the last land masses that humans settled on.

It is believed that it was found by Kope, a Polynesian explorer, in the 14th century. The Polynesians settled here, eventually forming what would become the Maori tribe. The Maori's way of life was disrupted when European colonialism began. In the 17th century, Abel Tasman the British explorer discovered New Zealand, and not long after it was fully mapped by James Cook in the 18th century. Conflict arose, resulting in large swaths of Maori land being seized by British colonizers.

Today, New Zealand is part of the Commonwealth, and large strides have been taken to restore the dignity and wealth of the Maori. The country is also noted for being one of the first in the world to give women the right to vote.

Australia

Today, of course, we'll be discussing Australia. Its colonial history is a long and brutal one with effects that permeate into the modern day. With the arrival of the First Fleet on the island in 1788, Europeans were confronted with a strange land that they often did not understand or appreciate.

Europeans viewed the Australian land and people as ancient, primitive, and endemically resistant to progress. Such judgments reflected the Europeans' confused and defensive reaction to ecology and a way of living in a land very different from their own. This reaction allowed the Europeans to legitimize their colonization by casting themselves as superior to the ‘savage' Aborigines.

Their failure to appreciate the Aborigines' knowledge is evident in the Europeans' responses to fire. Although many early observers recognized that the Aborigines set fire to the land, they were at a loss to understand why and certainly did not see it as a crucial land management practice. Such an unthinking dismissal of an ancient practice is characteristic of the Europeans' views of the Aborigines as uncivilized and backward.

With the contextualization out of the way, we can begin our discussion on the three women. We'll be looking at what they did, what the public reaction was, and how the women reacted to the consequences of their actions. The three women are:

• Mel Greig

• Belle Gibson

• Raina Thaiday

Without further ado, let's begin.

Mel Greig

Born in 1982, Mel Greig is no stranger to the media. In 2011, she participated in the Australian version of The Amazing Race, and she has also written for publications such as Yahoo Be.

In 2012, she began co-hosting the Hot30 Countdown on 2Day FM with Matty Acton, and then Mike Christian. This job wouldn't last for long. In December of the same year, she and her co-hosts decided to pull a prank. You see, at the time, Catherine Middleton, Princess of Wales, was in hospital in London. This was big news, and plenty of New Zealanders were sending their best wishes to the princess.

Mel and Mike pretended to be the king and queen, and they phoned the hospital, asking about Catherine. The phone was picked up by Jacintha Saldanha, a nurse at King Edward VII Hospital. Jacintha fell for the joke and even proceeded to forward them to the nurse who was taking care of Catherine. You can listen to the whole thing here:

Personally, I can't see how not one but two women fell for that. Jacintha was mortified when she discovered she had been bamboozled. Unable to face the humiliation, she committed suicide and left a note stating that the prank was the reason she did it.

The suicide caused a great backlash, and advertisers began boycotting the radio station. Mel was subjected to online bullying and hate mail which, in a strange turn of events, made her suicidal. Mel has taken responsibility for her role in the prank, and she has publicly expressed her regret at ever doing it.

I think she is an otherwise good person, and it was just an unlucky string of events that led to her being named in a suicide letter.

Belle Gibson

Belle Gibson was born in 1991, and by all accounts, she had a normal childhood. In her teen years, she picked up skateboarding, but that didn't last long. It is believed she dropped out of school in Year 10.

In 2013, Belle publicly claimed to have cancer. Not just cancer, but multiple cancers, including brain cancer and blood, spleen, uterine, liver, and kidney cancer. Shocking many, she claimed that she was shunning conventional medicine and treating herself through healthy eating.

Encouraging others to take the same route, she released an app called The Whole Pantry which outlined healthy eating for people with cancer. She also released a cookbook of the same name. Forever generous, Belle Gibson also claimed that a percentage of the proceeds would be going to charity. Her health claims continued, and she stated that she has had multiple heart surgeries and that she once suffered a stroke.

Of course, this couldn't continue indefinitely. Eventually, journ*lists began sniffing around and realized that Belle was lying a lot. Eventually, it was unearthed that she had never had cancer. She bamboozled people with a sob story to get them to buy her book. She also gave false hope to cancer patients and quite possibly turned them off conventional medicine.

Since the uncovering of her lie, Belle has been publicly shamed, and she received a hefty fine for making false claims about donating to charity. She has not paid these fines, which has led to her house being raided at least twice. She now claims that she is part of the Omoro tribe, though the tribe has denied this.

I think she's cute, and she should be forgiven.

Raina Thaiday

Despite the extent of this tragedy, there is very little information available on it. Raina Thaiday was a woman known to have schizophrenia. Despite this, she had at least nine children, and she lived with them, along with her neice and her child, in a single home. Her first child she gave birth to when she was 14.

Her oldest daughter, Norena Warrena, has described Raina as a very loving mother who was close to all her children. She was also a chronic marijuana user, which did not do favors for her mental health.

In December 2014, she had a schizophrenic episode that started with her killing the family duck and cleaning the house obsessively for a week to rid it of evil. A dove told her to kill her children, which she did. She killed 7 of them and a niece. The youngest victim was 2 and the oldest was 14. Her weapon of choice? A knife which she used to slash all the children in the home before she turned it on herself and stabbed herself 35 times.

She did not die, and after hospitalization, made a full recovery. She was put on trial for the murders, but it was found that she was not of sound mind when the murders occurred. Hence, she was taken to a mental healthcare facility instead, where she resides to this day.

CONCLUSION

Thanks for reading. Writing these is a nice distraction from the horrors of life as a poor incel. Sometimes I get so lonely it physically hurts. Tune in next time when we discuss the best Oprah episodes.

I just found out about this submarine like an hour ago. I feel really bad for the people trapped inside, especially the kid, but they kinda deserve it for even getting on this thing. Everyone's laughing at the CEO for his dumbass DEI policies, but this is just surface level stuff (lol). No one's actually explained the depths of how r-slurred this guy and his company are, so I thought I'd take some time out of my actual engineering job while I'm sitting in a boring butt zoom meeting to properly call this guy a fricking r-slur, so you can all find this just as funny as I do. I thought you all might appreciate it a little more than just some sporadic tweets about the DEI shit he did. This is going to be like a Challenger-style breakdown and what exactly went wrong so you can appreciate this frick-up.

There's gonna be a lot of naval puns in this so bear with me here. A lot of this is coming from my friend, also an engineer, who's done more research into this than I have.

In the Boatginning

Dramatards, I'd like to introduce you to Stockton Rush. Owner of the the most startup founder-ish name in history, this guy has been making janky submarines his entire life. He got his start in the aerospace industry, as a test engineer on the F-15 with McDonnell-Douglass. Anyone familiar with the industry will note that experience with McDonnell-Douglass is not necessarily a good thing on your resume.

https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/maker-of-the-lost-titanic-sub-once-told-a-reporter-that-at-some-point-safety-is-just-pure-waste/amp_articleshow/101143398.cms

He's made a career out of building submarines that are cheaper and more accessible to the general population, and his company, OceanGate, has had a few successful designs. What's notable about his history, however, is that he's made them cheaper largely by bypassing safety standards. His first submarine that they operated was called Antipodes, was a refit sub built by a different company. Originally intended for research purposes, they used it instead for tourist dives.

The first actual submarine they built was the Cyclops 1, a carbon-fiber (we'll come back to this part) submarine controlled using a PlayStation controller, with an operational depth of 500m. The submarine is deployed/recovered from some weird floating drydock concept, which crucially allows them to not use human rated cranes to recover the submarine.

After seeing some moderate success, he's gone and built the submarine in question, the Titan, which is built from a composite carbon-fiber and titanium. They bought the hull from a company called Spencer Composites, who intended it to be SINGLE USE. The submarine was built to a factor-of-safety (multiple of how much of the expected load you can withstand before it breaks) of 2.25 (which is frick-all, especially for a submarine - should be at least 6, probably more like 10). . A lot of journ*lists who went on board the thing noted that most of the parts on the interior were sourced from local hardware stores, as were the ballast tanks. They were not, as you could imagine, comfortable about being on board once they realized this.

DEI-ing At Sea

https://twitter.com/CatchUpFeed/status/1671372796876984320?s=20

This guy's team is a bunch of young, impressionable diversity hires. He's explicitly avoided anyone with experience because they are old and white and men. They're not very inspirational, and so they don't have a place on Rush's team.

Anyone who has worked on an engineering project before knows that any engineer with less than 2 years of practical experience is a massive drain on the project and need to be babysat constantly, ESPECIALLY if they might kill someone. They're usually worth investing in because they'll give you a great return in the long run, but boy are those first couple of years hard.

I didn’t hire experienced people because I’m a racist

oh no my boat sank, how could this have possibly happened

This is going to go a long way to explain why what happened did happen, so buckle up.

Frick-up #1: Carboat-Fiber

Let's talk materials for a second. Carbon-fiber is what's called a composite material, because it's made from a couple of different types of material. You have the carbon fibers themselves, which are really resistant to being stretched in-plane (like pulling apart a sheet of paper), but have very little strength out of plane (like poking a hole in paper) or off-axis (they're woven into almost a cloth, if you pull at a 60 degree angle to that weave, they lose 80% of their strength).

Carbon fibers are usually set in place with solidified plastics, like epoxy. It solves a lot of problems as far as directional strength goes, but you still need to be careful with it. In a specific configuration, it has similar material properties to a common aerospace aluminium alloy (T-6061), while being a fraction of the weight. Great for airplanes and race cars, where mass is a factor.

Steel is the best material, and the only reason you use anything else is either because you don't want it to rust, or because you can't use steel. It's cheap, strong, and (crucially) it can be stressed over and over again without building up stress fractures. If you keep it under a certain limit, it will never break. NO OTHER MATERIAL DOES THIS.

This makes ideal for something that you're going to put under pressure, and then remove it from that pressure, over and over and over again, in a scenario where weight isn't a factor. Like, say, a submarine.

Stockton Rush, however, is way too cool for steel . He has instead decided to build his submarine out of the super cool airplane material, without understanding why its there in the first place. Composite materials are generally vulnerable to snapping if they're loaded repeatedly, which is why the company that built this refused to endorse it after finding out it was going to be used like it was.

It's never been used on submarines before, and with really good reason. It's not just not an optimal choice, it's literally the worst one possible. From the Business Insider article:

The Titan sub was never checked to see if it was up to standard because of its "innovation," OceanGate said in 2019. The sub features a carbon fiber hull that had never been used on submersibles before, according to the "Unsung Science" podcast.

Rush managed to bypass safety standards yet again by using completely different materials and then claiming that the standards aren't relevant. They make you sign a massive waiver when you sign up. No one has actually checked if this thing is safe. There's no standard it's being held to, there's no regulation, no third-party review. No matter how good you are, you can always frick up. Their cavalier attitude towards safety has now probably killed the CEO and four other people.

From their blog:

Maintaining high-level operational safety requires constant, committed effort and a focused corporate culture – two things that OceanGate takes very seriously and that are not assessed during classification.

But it's ok, because they have a corporate culture of safety.

Frick-up #2: Electronixed

So this is an interesting note that I found is that the submarine has no onboard navigational system,. Yes, you read that correctly. They operate it by having a different ship monitor its position, and then send it text messages telling it where it is.

Journ*list David Pogue, who rode in Titan to view the Titanic in 2022, noted that Titan was not equipped with an emergency locator beacon; during his expedition, the surface support vessel lost track of the Titan "for about five hours, and adding such a beacon was discussed. They could still send short texts to the sub, but did not know where it was. It was quiet and very tense, and they shut off the ship's internet to keep us from tweeting."

These people are all going to die

That's part of the reason they can't find it, is because the submarine doesn't know where it is, and can't tell anyone even if it did. It even failed before, and they still didn't fix it. That's not just stupid, it's criminally negligent.

The controls of this thing consist of a single button, and is piloted by a PlayStation controller. I'll point out that the idea of using a gamepad as a submarine helm control is not necessarily a bad one, and was actually implemented by USN submariners to great success. It's intuitive to zoomer helmsmen, really easy to teach, and was actually a way better control scheme than what they were using before. That being said, USN submarines are extremely well designed, very redundant, and extremely well-built. This stupid thing has none of that.

Because of the lack of navigation and emergency beacon, these people are very likely going to die, and it's going to be very unpleasant. It's really hard to find submarines even when they want to be found, and there's still no means of even rescuing these people even if they're found. They've got anti-submarine-warfare aircraft searching and everything, but still nothing.

Frick-up #3: Oxy-Constants

I can't think of a good pun for this. There's no real good source on this that I've seen because it's kind of an obscure problem, but they also fricked up the gas lines on the ship.

When maintaining an atmosphere for people to breathe, you have to be pretty careful with the gas composition. You need gas cyclers to remove CO2 buildup, and replace it with oxygen. Nitrogen doesn't need to be replaced because it's not consumed. This is standard on airplanes, submarines, spacecraft, anything sealed. Failure to do this was infamously the cause of the Apollo 1 disaster, where a pure, high-pressure oxygen atmosphere caused a dramatic fire when some nylon started to overheat.

Can you guess what OceanGate have done?

That's right, they've been injecting pure oxygen into the cabin, with untested electronics on board.

Jesus Christ, guys. You get so many startup CEOs bitching about safety standards, and every now and then when they push the limits, we all get a very public reminder of why they're there in the first place. And it usually costs the lives of people who were tricked into getting onto that stupid butt vehicle in the first place.

!effortposters