Cruisin' For Confusion

We've just had the latest cruise mishap.  The Carnival Triumph was disabled by an engine room fire, which led to lots of unplesentness.  This brings up a lot of questions:

• Repeat after me, cruise ship designers: "single point of failure"  This is the fourth time a technical problem has transformed a Carnival cruise ship into a big floating piece or metal.  It's hard to believe that the designers would allow a problem in one component to disable the entire ship.  Apparently they had generators to power manoeuvring systems, so it did occur to them to prepare for failure, but was it really that hard to supply back-up power to the toilets too?  Or to put it another way, which is more important, four restaurants or two electrical systems?
• Anyone else find it ironic how a cruise ship goes from the height of human standard of living right down to the bottom that fast.  One hour you're living a life of gluttony that even we in the developed world find a little over the top.  The next, you have no heat or clean water, limited food, and sewage right outside your door.
• Speaking of the world's poorer nations, I wonder how ticked-off they are about this:  In their part of the world, it takes hundreds of deaths in a ferry sinking to get onto the global newscasts.  But an American ship gets on the news just because the people had to survive a few days in conditions that the citizens of developing countries experience every day.
• I've always been bugged by how movies and TV tend to gloss over some of the practical difficulties of having people stuck in a confined area.  Sitcom characters get trapped in a storeroom overnight, a kidnap victim is locked in an attic.  They never cover where the person goes to the bathroom.  These disabled cruise ships offer a reminder of just how, um, "messy" human beings become when forced to live in a limited area for more than a few hours.  Hopefully we'll have some more realism now if nothing else.
• The Titanic is often seen as a symbol of humanity's hubris.  Arrogantly claiming its infallibility, only to see it destroyed at the hands of nature.  But at least that was a dramatic failure.  Now our arrogance is embodied in a modestly advertised cruise ship, nature's revenge is an easily contained fire, our dramatic downfall is a hundred backed-up toilets.  We won't even be able to get a blockbuster movie out of this one.