I'll take this opportunity to point out that Paul Allen is a strong supporter of research to save the ocean's coral reefs.
Last June he funded [1] a nearly $4 MM USD 5 yr project for researchers at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (HIMB) [2] and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) to study assisted evolution to increase the resilience of coral species.
edit: It looks as this comment is viewed by some as excusing the incident -- that's not the intent. I just wanted to point out that Mr. Allen was already helping to save reefs, not destroy them.
Donating to MADD doesn't get one out of obeying traffic laws. If anything, this shows that Allen was well aware of how sensitive reefs are and so should have made sure his boat wasn't part of the problem.
You do understand that while this is a nice head line it's not his "fault" in any other means than owning a yacht.
The yacht has a captain and a crew they are responsible for managing the ship and unless Paul Allen was yelling at them threatening to fire them if they do not plow into the coral reef it's just an unfortunate event that the media likes to blow up because hey it's another rich guy with a yacht.
Most of these yachts are rented out by their owners. I don't see anything in the article stating he was even on the ship. I'm not sure how you can hold him responsible if he wasn't even on the ship at the time this occurred.
>> ... a legal doctrine which states that, in many circumstances, an employer is responsible for the actions of employees performed within the course of their employment.
"When applied to physical torts, an employer-employee relationship must be established (meaning that no vicarious liability is established for work performed as an independent contractor) and the act must be committed within the scope of employment (i.e., substantially within time and geographical limits, job description and at least with partial intent to further employer's business)."
Don't think that it really falls under this legal doctrine.
I'm pretty sure he'll feel responsible non the less but doesn't it mean he's liable and it sure doesn't mean that it needs to be overblown in this manner.
Cargo ships do much more damage to the environment on a daily basis.
That said he most definitely owns the Yacht he owns several his biggest Yacht is often loaned to researchers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht)
The cause for the incident is probably more interesting as if the damage was done while mooring it begs a question why is there a mooring spot so close to a coral reserve in the first place.
The issue isn't who rented the boat. It's who paid the captain/crew. That is most likely some holding/management company in turn owned by Allen. Insurance is also at play. It's no different than if a bus driver crashes. The passengers on the bus aren't responsible, nor is the person who hired the bus. It is the bus owner.
If the owner is not held, then the only people left are the employees. They don't earn enough to ever pay fines associated with this sort of accident. So it's either the owners or nobody.
the crew followed officials’ instructions on where to place the vessel. Shifting winds reportedly changed the position, pushing the ship toward the reserve but it was relocated to avoid damage.
Follow all the instructions you want, captains are still responsible for the physical movement of their vessels. The captain probably should have recognized that safe mourning was impossible and moved the ship elsewhere. Captains, like doctors and lawyers, are not hired to simply follow orders.
The ship was safe. The water was deep enough. The anchorage presented no threats to the ship.
I think you are over-representing the responsibility of the captain of a ship.
It's entirely reasonable to say that they did the job the best they could, but that circumstances were such that the ship still caused damage to the coral, through no fault of the ship's captain.
Lots of things that a captain can't take responsibility for - particularly when it doesn't involve the safety of the ship and it's passengers.
Early studies suggest that not ripping up thousands of square feet of the coral reefs with your giant yacht correlates with increased health and survival of the coral reefs. As always, though, more research is needed. I can only assume that the recent incident is part of a randomized double-blind controlled trial to verify that hypothesis.
I don't really have a way to judge the scale. I'd guess the lion's share of the operating costs go to the crew (60!).
Moving that thing's fat ass around probably uses a ton of fuel. I'm sure marine diesel spews out its share of co2, but more than a jet? I thought boats were super efficient relative to air travel.
I guess if your point is, rich guys screwing around shouldn't produce CO2, then, yeah, anything over 0 is bad. That seems unrealistic. any idea how to get a handle on how bad it is? how many cars worth of pollution it makes?
Why does it matter? Yes he's got a douche-boat with a helipad and 60 staff. It's obviously an extravagance that he chooses to enjoy.
In no way does it negate his good work, and in no way does his good work negate his douchery. Trying to scientifically measure the impact of the yacht is a pointless distraction. I'm certainly not going to go around counting how many miles of gleefully fuel inefficient driving I do - which seems like a pre-requisite to judging other peoples environmental impact.
The only important question is: How do we make sure this never happens again, because it sure as hell wasn't intentional and lessons can be learned.
>>> Allen’s communication team shows the billionaire is not taking responsibility and implicated the Port Authority, saying the crew followed officials’ instructions on where to place the vessel.
Don't care. Captains are always 100% responsible for the movement of their ship. Though rare in practice, captains are expected to override anyone, including pilots, to ensure safe and lawful operation of their vessels. The captain works for the owner. The owner is financially responsible for mistakes of his employee. Allen should pay up.
The official who gave these instructions should also be fired. I find it interesting that the discussion centers around Allen. I'd argue that the official who supposedly gave the instructions is the person most responsible and yet I see less pitchforks for him/her than for Allen.
Doesn't mean Allen/the captain is innocent but it's odd how the focus of the debate is centered around them. Guess the "evil rich dude" narrative is more fun than the "incompetent official" one. I guess the headline "Incompetent official instructs ship to destroy reef." gets less clicks.
Do you think every captain has an onboard and up to date map of all the coral reefs in the area? cause I don't think they have those.
In fact, I think what a responsible captain should do is to ask the harbor master where the safest place to park their boat is, because he should know, it's his harbor.
It doesn't matter. It is the captain's job to not sink his ship. It is the captain's job to not damage the pier, the reefs, etc.
The same rules apply when flying a plane. It is the pilot's responsibility to not be in a collision -- no matter what else is happening, or what someone else is doing.
Always? Even when under controlled areas of water like a Canal?
Also, the issue was not the safety and lawful operation of the vessel - the ship was safe, and the captain was following the law by anchoring in the designated area.
Yes. Where a pilot has directed a ship into danger or illegality, it is the captain's responsibility to disobey. It's professional judgement. Obeying law A (mouring) doesn't grant any immunity from law B (not ripping up a reef). Responsibility comes in layers.
That coral reef was exactly in the same point since the last 800 years. It is supossed that a such expensive yacht would exit the factory including a decent updated map at least.
Or maybe with several complex electronic devices able to scan the sea bottom that are common in this century and can be found even in much smaller boats.
If not, maybe a quick look at google maps at least could have helped. Divers are optional.
The buck stops with the captain. Fairness has nothing to do with it. It is the captain's job to train his crew and keep his ship safe -- no matter what.
You don't park. You go elsewhere. You recognize that lawman is telling you to do something dangerous and ignore him, as you would ignore a cop directing traffic if obeying him will obviously cause a crash.
It's quite disturbing to see people latch on to this individual's wealth as some sort of automatic "reason" or "explanation" for the incident. You know, it's entirely plausible that this was a genuine accident that couldn't have been foreseen. It's not like rich people go around wanting to damage and destroy the world on purpose.
all good points that i understand & have once held
> it's entirely plausible that this was a genuine accident
100% agree
> that couldn't have been foreseen
the amount of traffic & large watercraft in close proximity to the reefs are bound to cause issues
> It's not like rich people go around wanting to damage and destroy the world on purpose.
the issue with wealth in today's global economy is the hoarders of wealth don't feel the consequence of their actions
if their wealth contributes to the destruction of the environment, human rights abuses, or the plethora of the consequences of their influence; then it does not matter whether they damage and destroy the world on purpose
Yes, to answer your question, Paul Allen did earn his wealth.
No different than if a middle class investor bought Las Vegas Sands at $1 in the great recession and rode it to $85, with that investor having fully earned their return too. Except Allen arguably deserves his return even more than said average investor because he was personally, hugely responsible for the formation and success of Microsoft.
Your premise is obviously that if you aren't shoveling snow for each dollar earned, then you didn't properly earn it. An arbitrary, agenda oriented, anti-wealth stance: there's no scenario under which any person can ever actually earn their wealth or income in your premise. Any amount of income or wealth can come under attack as having not been fully earned - and that's of course the whole idea.
He earned some wealth, but nobody earns billions. To get to that level of wealth one must leverage things far beyond the control of one person. For someone like Allen, that's probably IP law and the opportunity of being in the right place at the right time to dominate a specific market. It isn't like, had Allen not been around, that we wouldn’t have computers or that the market wouldn't be dominated by a particular OS. Those same billions would have gone to someone else. His niche would have been filled by any number of other people.
Other people, equally talented and equally hard working, are paid far far less. To say that Allen "earned" every dollar is to suggest that they have not, that luck is not a factor.
Our economic systems in the West may be far from ideal, and certainly create huge imbalances between the richest and the poorest that we would do well to address for many reasons. A significant part of that imbalance comes from our company structures, where the workers creating the value often receive relatively little compensation, while founders, investors and the most senior staff receive most of the benefit.
That said, I don't think your argument that no-one is worth a huge amount of money is inherently a strong one. My favourite example of this is JK Rowling, who is arguably the most successful author in history and reportedly worth around a billion dollars today. That money was earned primarily from the success of the Harry Potter books she wrote, which have sold almost half a billion copies worldwide. That's a lot of happiness she's created for a lot of people, and personally I don't begrudge her being heavily rewarded for doing more good than most of us ever will in our lifetimes.
The position is not as clear cut in the case of Paul Allen, since he didn't almost single-handedly write the software that generated the vast amount of value Microsoft has produced in the world over the years, and there is a much stronger element of the founder/investor/senior vs. employee argument I mentioned before in his case. But given how much value Microsoft has generated over the years, if you're going to criticise Allen's wealth I think you need more than just a blunt "no-one deserves to be that rich" argument to be convincing.
Luck is not a zero sum game. Yes, he was partially lucky and yes, he earned every dollar. There're so many lucky people in the world and so few Allens.
I also have experience anchoring in the Caribbean, among reefs as well (abeit in a much smaller yacht, like, kind of order of magnitude smaller :-)). And no, you can't predict where your anchor chain will go, especially if your common sense contradicts what "local authority" says. Sometimes they're right (most of the time, they were born there and spent the whole life) but sometimes they are just plain drunk and do not care. Island time.
bullshit. People get rich on the unpaid labor of others. If nothing else, he would have less money if microsoft didn't participate in the anti-poaching scandal. It's clearly not his fault, but he got money because his corporation didn't pay market wages.
edit
This is, perhaps, a little harsh. I don't think he's a villain. I've never met the man, but i'm sure he's a decent guy. But you have to admit, his net worth is not a perfect reckoning of the value he created in the world. He's rich. good for him. Some of that money came from him, as an owner, colluding to not pay fair wages. This is just the most recent example. There was the whole temp workers thing. Microsoft has a fairly shady history.
"bullshit" (c). You automatically assume that under other conditions these workers would have made more money. In many similar cases though, they would have stayed unemployed. So you have to prove the point that somebody made some actual wealth from underpaying these workers. Which is possible, but not automatically true.
Also, I was born and lived half of my life in Soviet Union. I know what you're talking about and experienced it first hand. I've also experienced big time what happens when it doesn't work (and so far there's no good example in the world of it working sustainably).
Microsoft, IBM, ebay, a bunch of other companies participated in the collusion scandal. Microsoft's case was dismissed due to the statute of limitations. [2]
Again, I don't think he's a villain, good for him for getting rich. I don't believe those billions are an accurate reckoning of the value he personally has created in the world.
I don't see how the airings of Paul Allen's yacht news is particularly relevant to Hacker News. It's gossip, at best. Even in the guise of having conversation around environmental responsibility.
I agree that it doesn't add much to HN when stories like this are voted up on to the front page, but the implied alternative where stories like this are purposefully blocked from being on the front page by some mechanism is so much worse. It's far better to accept a little irrelevant gossip at the cost of the community than to start censoring what we can vote on and destroy the integrity on HN altogether.
Right, I agree with that completely - I'm more suggesting we should be a bit ashamed of ourselves as a community for pushing the equivalent of tech tabloid news to the front page.
There are more appropriate mediums to argue in if we feel Paul Allen isn't responding well enough to "the incident".
Our interpretation of the events is very possibly limited - we as a community are hardly informed enough to be judges of Paul Allen's character. It's just poor content, that leads to a lot of silly trolling and adds very little to Hacker News.
"Any vessel that causes damage to local reefs can be fined. However, despite a number of incidents of reef damage over the last few years by both cruise ships and luxury yachts, the government has failed to collect on sanctions."
Can anybody demonstrate the "balance"? I always had an impression that yachts don't pay much to the average place where they anchor but only to the marinas?
If this had happened in the so called "marine park" then it usually means that the yacht paid the "mooring fee" for just the right to drop an anchor in the designated space. Designated by the "local authority", btw. And for megayachts these fees are quite high (hundreds or thousands of dollars).
That yacht hosts one of the SeaKeeper oceanographic monitoring systems for the SeaKeeper society, so for it to destroy a reef while (automatically) measuring sea health is a bit ironic
For me this doesn't seem to show up on the first page of Google results for "SeaKeeper". Instead there's a gyro roll-stabilizing device for yachts that goes by the same name. This made me question whether you had confused two devices on the yacht. But a more precise Googling did in fact find the society you mention.
It is terrifying and sad to see the world I grew up with slowly ground away through negligence. As an eleven year old I went snorkeling for the first time in the pristine Caymans. In my short life-time (I'm only mid-thirties) I have seen the great reefs I once explored demolished.
I can't even... I am just floored at how quickly we destroy things that took ages to grow.
While a shame, this sort of damage is not totally unnatural. Hurricanes have been decimating reefs for millions of years. A drifting tree trunk, at low tide in moderate surf, can do this much damage in a few minutes. The real manmade reef killers are chemical, not physical.
If you seen reefs at their pristine condition and see reef at most of the places nowadays, you'd be more indifferent to these news.
I saw a live reef several years back in Egypt and it was a astonishing, beautiful and alive. After this I've been few other places and while there were some fish, it was nothing like that. Everything I saw is like the 'destroyed' picture in the article. I think such damages don't do much impact on these reefs as they are effectively dead anyway.
Fer goodness sakes, it's not like he was insensitive to the delicate ecosystem - I mean the guy just brought his small yacht - the Tatoosh (303ft) - not the big one (the 400+ ft Octopus)!
The way you people are carrying on youd think we were dealing with a megalomaniac here.
This has been a recurring issue in the Caymans. Just a few months ago the reef was damaged by a cruise ship. There has been a long debate between the Cayman government and environmental groups over building a large pier to better handle cruise ships and yachts. Environmental groups have been fighting it because some of the reef would have to be relocated to build it.
Pedantic point of clarification: there's no such thing as "the West Bay Caymans". The damage happened off the coast of the West Bay district of Grand Cayman.
Good thing our loose regulations help those responsible individuals amass immense fortunes to be used to the benefit of mankind. Exactly like Paul Graham explained in his "thoughtful" essay.
Paul Allen has pledged to give the majority of his fortune away[1][2], and has already founded the Allen Institutes for Brain Science and Cell Science, among other charitable endeavours (not that he's under any obligation to do either). So he spent a tiny fraction of his wealth on a yacht (which also employs people for what it's worth). Should he be putting 100% of his savings toward the benefit of mankind instead of only 99%?
To me it seems obscene for an individual to own a 300ft yacht.
Well, OK, you're obviously entitled to your own opinion and principles. But where then do you draw the line between what is obscene and what is not?
If you've ever travelled to a foreign country on holiday, you've enjoyed more luxury in those few days than many people in the world ever will, and you might have spent more money on your holiday than it would take to build a well in Africa and save a whole village from multiple hours of walking every day just to access potable water.
If you've ever had major medical support paid for by some form of insurance or national healthcare provider, you've probably enjoyed better treatment than is accessible to most people in developing economies today.
If you've ever had a $5 drink in a coffee shop, the money you spent on that could have bought an entire meal for a homeless person in your own city who is going hungry instead.
There is always someone richer and always someone poorer. What we regard as obscene, in either direction, often seems to be more a subjective product of our own background and position on the scale than any objective measure.
Just a few decades ago it was obscene for some civil individual to express their opinion on the public world wide network without DoD permission and security clearance.
I bet that reef was in need of disrupting. And government managed, too, with the threat of fines! Classic rent-seeking behavior. I for one am glad cruise liners and yachts are moving in like this; it can only lead to the creation of value. In fact, the remaining reef got more valuable automatically due to decreased supply of reef!
Good thing indeed. Paul Allen's vast contributions to science funding alone are of immense benefit to mankind. Not that he needs to justify his existence or wealth; his wealth doesn't need to be in the service of mankind, it simply makes Allen that much greater that he routinely does good things with his wealth.
Last June he funded [1] a nearly $4 MM USD 5 yr project for researchers at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (HIMB) [2] and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) to study assisted evolution to increase the resilience of coral species.
[1] http://www.vulcan.com/news/articles/2015/coral-reef-research...
[2] http://www.hawaii.edu/news/2015/08/04/ruth-gates-research-to...
(disclaimer: my wife works at HIMB)
edit: It looks as this comment is viewed by some as excusing the incident -- that's not the intent. I just wanted to point out that Mr. Allen was already helping to save reefs, not destroy them.