Suit filed in case of "Girl dead, boy injured at Glacier National Park
- Thread starter Jim Lapenta
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What agencies prohibit it? I don't know of one.
If you will notice, a big theme is the rapidly rising cost of insurance. Liability insurance is what makes independent tutoring a problem. If I take someone and tutor them, and then something happens to that person during the dive and I am sued, if I am an independent tutor teaching something under my own volition, it will be completely up to me to defend myself in the lawsuit. I will have to prove that what I did during that tutoring session was within accepted practices for scuba instruction. If I am teaching an agency approved class, then it will be up to the plaintiff to prove that my agency approved a class that was not within accepted practices for scuba instruction.
So my agency has no rules whatsoever preventing me from doing independent tutoring. It is my fear of a life-destroying lawsuit that stops me.
SlugLife
Contributor
Fair enough, I edited my post, I don't want to be spreading "fake news." I've mostly dealt with SSI.
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I do not have the inside information that Chris does. But a very few things are very clear to me.
There are a handful of huge players in the business that seem to have their fingers in the scuba pie and make a very good living from scuba. I am more than happy to share those names over beer and brats when we can look each other in the eye. By handful, I mean 5 or fewer people who control RSTC, DAN, DEMA, and consult to the training agencies, and they have a vested interest in the status quo.
They maintain this status quo by requiring all of us to:
1) have insurance
2) maintain a membership in an agency
3) maintain our training up to date.
Now, on the surface this all sounds like an awesome idea, and I’d never argue any of that, but scratching down even a little bit the story is a bit more sketchy. Insurance protects the assets of the dove instructor for sure, but in reality, most dive instructors don’t have assets worth protecting. But insurance absolutely protects the shop (providing the insurance in some cases), and certainly the agency. All on the backs of the individual instructor.
Membership is massively overpriced for the benefits provided. Membership allows me to buy more stuff to sell to my students. It allows me to attend a yearly update, so I can keep my knowledge of standards fresh, (a good thing), and it allows me access to a database to register and complete my classes. To compare, my Medic First Aid agency (I was Medic First Aid before PADI, and long after PADI) membership is $85 a year, and I get the exact same benefits. In contrast, I would pay PADI $340, SDI something similar, RAID is free, maybe because they are trying to recover from COVID….
If I service 5 brands of regulators, I have to renew training every 2 years for each brand, in person, wherever the class is held. When I lived in Key West, I traveled to Fort Lauderdale and spent the night in a hotel.
If I want to renew PSI inspector status, I almost have to attend DEMA.
My Captains license requires 5 weeks of renewal training every 5 years.
My captains license actually provides an ROI.
So while I contribute mightily to this industry to be a part of it, it returns no more that a BSAC instructor gets from his or her club for £57.50. Note, I can buy liability insurance (£10M) through BSAC as well.
So yes, there are some things I would change based on the US model. The whole Liability insurance requirement protects bad instructors.
There are better ways for folks to maintain skills (teaching, regulator repair, tank inspection) than paying a ton of money to an agency.
SlugLife
Contributor
That's how a lot of "captured industries" work. You start with a seemingly noble idea(s), often about something like quality control, but then over time it turns into an institution of power, which maintains it's own power.
The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (The DISC)
theportal.wiki
Often, it may not be intended to be a "nefarious conspiracy," but often results in a small number of players at the top who by the time they work their way up to the top have a vested interest in ensuring that power is maintained, and nobody can do much outside the institution.
Plus the $hundreds paid by each student for the online materials (which in my experience are very boring and insightful, and probably not worth the price). They also can (and do) inject their various marketing materials
As my scuba-classes always love to remind me "get all of your scuba-equipment serviced annually at your local certified scuba-repair shop" (and never, ever, ever, ever, ever attempt to do that yourself). Sure, a lot of people shouldn't be touching their own life-or-death scuba-equipment, but there are a number of basic maintenance tasks which can be taught in a minute or two and aren't that hard, like replacing hoses.
Sure, here is a pretty big clue of one idea I floated by DEMA and other groups (again non disclose agreements so no names) that got sunk because 3 of their board members made money directly from shark feeding ( Shark Feeding Debate Continues in Florida: Undercurrent 07/2001 ) and DEMA had to budget to make sure they could continue to lobby FOR shark feeding in Florida. I felt that industry lobby efforts in Florida could have a better impact and once established in one state pivot to the next and so forth including various Carib countries
Had this been done 15 years ago, the insurance situation in the North American market would be markedly different today. By different I mean affordable.
To your very last, the window closed, ship sailed, been torpedoed and it's baked in. Simple solutions won't work anymore, now we have a "wicked problem" ( Wicked problem - Wikipedia )
I am pretty sure scuba is not the only business that has acquisitions, mergers, and companies going out of business. If I want to buy a new car, I will not be buying a Packard, Hudson, Rambler, Nash, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Saab, etc. If I sit down to discuss it with friends over a beer, we will most likely be drinking something belonging to one of the mammoth multinational firms that control almost all of the brewing market. If it gives us headaches, the remedies we seek will also be owned by huge multifaceted corporations.
Before I retired from public education, I created one of the first online schools in our state, and I co-created the state's official online education program. Upon retirement, I was hired by a small online education company to be their director of curriculum and instruction. I created the vision for the company, and we thrived. We were then purchased by a major corporation headed by the famed Michael Milken, and I was suddenly the Executive Director of Curriculum for K-12 Learning, the largest such company in the world. I went from creating much of our coursework at the desk from which I am writing now to directing teams creating each course with a budget of at least $100,000 per course.
That was good.
Unfortunately, as we grew, I lost control. My vision of a targeted market for our product was changed by executives I never met to making one product that would work for every market, which meant it could not be just right for any market. We also had to use some of the 30 or 40 other companies in our family for much of the work, and some of them just plain sucked. For example, they made us use one of their companies in India to create an Advanced Placement Art History course, and the first time I looked at what they produced, I was aghast. Not only could they not write in clear English, even with my limited knowledge of art history, I could see that much of what they wrote was simply wrong. The pictures they used were misidentified, and it would only take me a few seconds on Google to confirm that. When I talked to them about it, I realized no one in their company knew a thing about art history.
So I see the good and the bad of mergers and acquisitions, but I don't see how any of it can be controlled.
Before I retired from public education, I created one of the first online schools in our state, and I co-created the state's official online education program. Upon retirement, I was hired by a small online education company to be their director of curriculum and instruction. I created the vision for the company, and we thrived. We were then purchased by a major corporation headed by the famed Michael Milken, and I was suddenly the Executive Director of Curriculum for K-12 Learning, the largest such company in the world. I went from creating much of our coursework at the desk from which I am writing now to directing teams creating each course with a budget of at least $100,000 per course.
That was good.
Unfortunately, as we grew, I lost control. My vision of a targeted market for our product was changed by executives I never met to making one product that would work for every market, which meant it could not be just right for any market. We also had to use some of the 30 or 40 other companies in our family for much of the work, and some of them just plain sucked. For example, they made us use one of their companies in India to create an Advanced Placement Art History course, and the first time I looked at what they produced, I was aghast. Not only could they not write in clear English, even with my limited knowledge of art history, I could see that much of what they wrote was simply wrong. The pictures they used were misidentified, and it would only take me a few seconds on Google to confirm that. When I talked to them about it, I realized no one in their company knew a thing about art history.
So I see the good and the bad of mergers and acquisitions, but I don't see how any of it can be controlled.
