So your saying that this is a good thing????
Yes, without reservation. Back in the age of diving dinosaurs accident rates were high, gear was crap, some of it made from used bicycle parts and even (and this is a true story) stolen traffic signs (ask Tom about that when you see him) and old Clorox bottles. Diving wasn't only seen as dangerous, it WAS dangerous. Training was unstructured and ranged from cursory to unnecessarily difficult in part because the trainers, although some certainly had good intentions were ignorant to the applicable educational theory and had no support or training given to them about how to teach.
PADI changed all that. They changed the entire paradigm. Training became structured, affordable, accessible, educationally sound and efficient. The bar for entry to the sport was lowered which created the conditions necessary for equipment manufacturers to invest in R&D so gear would become safer, so that diving would become safer. And it did. They created a pass time for millions of people, laid the foundations necessary for tourist oriented diving holidays. It opened up an entire world of "recreational diving" on many levels from casual and low complexity to wreck exploration, to amateur underwater archaeology, to cave diving. In some ways, you can even credit PADI for creating GUE because without PADI JJ, like many of his generation, probably would never have learned how to dive.
So yes. Unequivocally, yes. I am a product of that evolution. Everyone I know in diving circles is a product of that evolution. I don't *blame* them for making it possible for me to become a diver, I thank them.
But that's ok, Wayne. You can go on blaming them, hating them, thinking that they're sinister and out to get everyone and wishing that people like me, my friends and every single person on scubaboard was never trained. But you're the only one who wishes that the days of the dinosaurs would come back. But they won't. AFter having a good safety record over the last 20 years or so, we can't go back to the way it was. People would never accept the kind of dumbing down that would be required to go back to your "good old days".
Along with this, has been an enhanced money grab
You remind me of someone I knew once when I was going to university who would passionately argue that if a business made a profit then it was fundamentally destructive. He (obviously) was a communist.... and look how well that worked out.
I've never seen anything to make me think that PADI or anyone in the diving industry, really, is on an "enhanced money grab". An enhanced money grab is what City Bank did, paying 5 billion dollars in bonuses to the same managers who only months before that had vaporized more than $300 billion dollars of money that people--normal people--trusted them with.
That's a money grab. That's greed. That's unacceptable.
This is reflected in the quality of the air we breathe, the diminishing global water supplies, global warming and the large island of plastic floating in the Pacific (which has been estimated to cover between 1/4 million and almost 7 million square miles).
You can't seriously be blaming PADI for these things now, can you? Of course you'll deny that this is what you meant to suggest now that I called you on it, but you did mean to suggest that PADI is "just as bad" as all that.
To me it looks like your hatred of PADI knows no depth or bound. It makes me feel for you. It really does, because carrying around that much animosity in you doesn't make PADI seem that bad to anyone else.... All you'll get from this are scars on the inside of your skull.
R..
---------- Post added January 17th, 2013 at 09:28 PM ----------
Minor tangent to this thread. It was pointed out PADI had a major impact on growing the scuba industry in the U.S., but not in a number of European countries, where another agencies (e.g.: CMAS, BSAC) filled this role to some extent. PADI is credited with greater numbers of hobbyist divers and availability of more advanced gear. This raises 2 associated questions:
1.) Is the prevalence of the scuba hobby equal, greater or less in, say, France, Britain, Spain, etc...vs. in the U.S.?
2.) How centered is the dive gear industry on the U.S., in terms of company location & design? I'm not talking about the hands-on manufacturers (e.g.: Apple is a U.S. company with U.S. designing heavily relying on Chinese manufacturing, I believe), but the companies and where the advances are coming from.
In other words, are a lot of dive gear products designed in European countries by European companies, or do they mainly import stuff made via U.S. companies?
Richard.
P.S.: This is relevant to the thread because the benefits of PADI are used to justify the approach of PADI, to a point.
The guy is right. CMAS is (or was) a major force in Europe. The CMAS system had a very different approach to the PADI system to begin with but they have converged to a great extent now, not in small part due to European legislation that forces all diving agencies to more or less converge on the PADI model.
BSAC is a different beast, I think. They had a major falling out with CMAS at some point in the past and I think BSAC is on it's own path now. As far as I can tell, their system is a hybrid mix of old CMAS concepts, a NAUI type approach to instructor input and PADI modularity. From what I've seen there is no one BSAC. Every club seems to be inventing their own wheel but apparently since wheels are all round they can issue the same card.
As for gear, the major purely European manufacturers at the moment are probably Suunto and Mares. Suunto's record speaks for itself. Mares is a follower, not a leader although being Italian they do occasionally produce something pretty cool looking.... Mares is also better off as a follower because every time they try to shock the market with some innovation the only shock is that they thought people would actually dive with it (think HUB, for example).
Apeks (was British) had the best regulator design at their peak but have now fused with Aqualung and from a European perspective it mostly looks like Aqualung has pole position on gear design and R&D in the mainstream. There are several niche players around the the world with cool stuff and one or two manufacturers who can play in the same league as Aqualung but most companies have been in "monkey see monkey do" mode for a while and are mostly following trends set by the big US players.
R..