I think you’d be a shoe in for President of the IMO
One advantage over aviation is if you want to wire up an alarm panel, you can without spending 4 years fighting with the FAA over it.
Very true
You do know that there is actually a world out there that does not answer to the FAA 
I only held one FAA rating which was my original Multi Engine rating, I must admit I did take advantage of the system by getting my FAA rating and racking up substantial hours stateside which was much cheaper than doing it in the UK . As I had so many multi engine hours, most of it on King Airs but quite a few on F27 s the CAA granted me my CAA multi rating without further examination.
Hi 244
Wow! Ship pilot as well as an aircraft pilot … you certainly get around! No wonder you have been so vocal about airline pilot competency and training.
It was an attempt to better myself when I was a young man . The deeper I got into it the more I realised it was just the same as the maritime industry. Some good operators and some bad just like our industry.
What always pissed me off in later life was when folk asked me what I did for a living and I said pilot, after being asked what airline I worked for and when I said I was a marine pilot they just switched off.
Honestly taking the CPL was just a walk in the park for anyone who had taken a second mates FG certificate. The academics were dead easy. Navigation of course was also something we did with our eyes closed, then the art of aircraft handling was something that anyone who has ever handled a ship could master in just a few hours.
I distinctly remember the guy that instructed me doing multi engine remarking that I needed no instruction on ground manoeuvring and myself replying that I drove a twin screw ship for a living so it came naturally.
I also remember the same guy trying to get me lost on an exercise and of course getting frustrated, I again had to remind him that I was a navigator by trade so it was a very hard task to get me lost.
That’s a fantastic story! Somewhat similar experience on people switching off … when I decided to stop sailing, my wife and I landed at my brothers house in the SF bay area looking for greener pastures. Idea being I register for a MS program and take it from there. In meeting these silicon valley type people , they would ask what I did and when I told them I was a marine engineer they would quickly excuse themselves … 
Things turned out differently as a company was looking for somebody with my exact skillset … so did not pursue further studies!
Why did it take this long for a classification society to state the obvious?
Its a stone age industry and only responds to bulk deaths
Are there PC’s on bridges yet…
ECDIS, oh roaring success of no standards.
Because they certify to a classification they don’t operate anything.
This alarm situation has been going on for the entirety of my 40 year career. When i was a budding mechanical engineer I was working with a retired CE who had been employed on Standard Oil of NJ tankers and was then working in stationary plants. One of our first jobs was at a well known petrochemical plant, we were told to make the steam and other systems more reliable. I found it odd that none of the ink pens in the control room had tops on them and also there were alarms that were lit all the time. I asked one of the shift engineers about the alarms and he said they were nuisance alarms and stayed lit. He said as long as it was white alarm and not a red [which was a shutdown] they didn’t worry about it. Told the chief about it and he told me to inspect the relays in back of the cabinet. Sure enough there were Bic pen caps in the shutdown relays. The management would not shut the plant down to repair the bad flow switches etc so the shift engineers were forced to jam the relays to keep things running. The CE called the insurer and he said we might want to pack our bags. Inspector came and in short order repairs were made and strangely enough we kept our jobs. Six months later a sister plant incinerated.We were sent to investigate and on arrival the first thing I noticed was a big hole in the chain link fence. I asked about that and was informed the guy filling the vending machines saw the explosion and drove his truck thru the fence.
Later what frustrated me in shipping was the same tone and color for any alarm. Worse were known ‘nuisance alarms’. Some due to faulty sensors but many due to incorrectly set actual operational parameters settings. Such as alarm time delay and others. My thinking has always been there is no such thing as a nuisance alarm. It is either something that requires action or it should not exist. On Kongsberg and other systems it is easy to correct these impractical original settings but even though I had the password to make these changes I had to get permission from people with no clue to do so. It gets to the point where one just gets tired of fighting the ignorant and cowardly. When multiple alarms go off along with the ‘nuisance alarms’ with no indication of the severity of the alarm whether by yellow, red light or different tone it becomes mayhem. It is a completely preventable situation that I have brought up in numerous after action investigations but nothing changed. People nod their heads and agree but…nada. Rant over
It goes back further than that:
Source: https://www.kongsberg.com/maritime/contact/about-us/who-we-are-kongsberg-maritime/Our-history/
The problem with excessive alarm may be said to have started even earlier.
The first attempt at engine bridge control was in the early 1960s IIRC.
The Autronica control panel in the ECR was duplicated on the bridge, without any dimmer for the instruments, nor muting for the alarms:
The result was that the panel had to be covered by canvas (or blankets) at night to keep the night vison of the bridge crew.
Yep, true. Another thing that the class societies did that always amused me was when in the shipyard they ordered everyone off the ship while they shifted weight around to check stability. Once that test was passed you were good to go and we all knew the weights they moved around did not even come close to the people and cargo that would actually be onboard. This was especially true with the drillships.
an aside - a very long time ago I did a short stint as mate on a supply boat that ran containers from the East Coast to Bermuda. On the bridge there was a stability card that read something like max COG for loads on the cargo deck to be something like 3M - and we had containers 3 high. Asked the Capt if that is something we should be worried about - he said he wasn’t - and guess that was good enough for me too !
Doesn’t an incline test just need to heel the boat/ship over a few degrees and then you run the formula?