408 Request Time-out

This means that at the same time that cowboys were reaching their end, so too were samurai.

Leia is very competent and very dangerous and when she lets down her guard around people they are suddenly like, "Oh. Smol. Soft. Cute." And it's a hard to earn privilege that will absolutely get you a death glare if you bring it up to Leia.

Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there's now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?

We've becoming very, very good on restoring them. Natural environments, when given space and time to heal, can return to that they were. And after all, all natural enviroments are managed by human societies. It is up to us to implement a good management, un buen gobierno.

I firmly believe our children and grandchildren will see a restoration of Earth like never before.

Spix's Macaws were extinct in the wild for 70 years, and now captive breeding and conservation groups have reintroduced a small population (with more on the way) and there are babies being successfully raised in the wild again.

And what else is there, but hope? We exist for the grace of hope. Those who have lost all hope don't stay here. If you are here to send an ask like this, it is not because you have given up, it's that you are hoping someone will show you that that hope is worth having.

It is!! It always is!!

And let me just say these Coast Guard guys at this hearing appear to be REALLY feeling this image:

It's not a matter of "we didn't know" or "exploration is risky". It's more like EVERYONE told you it was a bad idea but you did it anyway. Some of the interviews with ex-Oceangate employees were heartbreaking because they knew their boss was a jackass but were pressured into following the cult.

They stored their billion dollar submersible in a parking lot during the off season, exposed to the elements. For months at a time! Then they'd just hose the crud off, plunk it into the ocean with minimal testing, and descend 2.3 miles to the bottom of the ocean like it's a trip to the store. With paying passengers!

And then there's the whole "let's treat the Titanic mass gravesite as a tourist destination" angle that's disgusting. Rich assholes excited to go there like it's Disneyland. Video of Stockton Rush foaming at the mouth with excitement to see Titanic yet again for the 88th time.

I think what was most bewildering was how... sloppy, Oceangate was? Being convinced the submarine had to be made out of an unsafe and untested material that kept showing signs of weathering, fine. Not doing doing proper upkeep or testing, following minimal safety checks or maintenance, pre-launch doing such a poor job checking on the vehicle that they didn't check THE BOLTS WERE EVEN DRILLED IN?

It’s always like, I’m just a SecUnit, the only reason I’m better is because humans somehow have worse judgement than me in my very narrow field of expertise, and I have the ability to process multiple things at once, and I don’t die when I get my shit wrecked. None of these are advantages over other bots, so I’m actually just average as far as skills go.

Meanwhile, Murderbot’s track record is something like ‘regularly takes out other SecUnits, regularly hacks fairly complicated systems, takes out multiple hostiles while saving and protecting clients/hostages, beat two Combat Bots in succession, and went toe to toe with a Combat SecBot while taking out two other SecUnits, rounding it off with inhabiting spaceships and crushing the incredibly difficult and malicious killware infecting them.’

There’s a line in Exit Strategy, “Bots are instructed to report and repel theft attempts, but no one ever tells them not to answer polite requests from other bots.”

Murderbot makes use of this a lot. It talks to other bots, like ART and Miki. It offers equal trades of assistance, like with the Combat SecUnit in Exit Strategy, SecUnit 3 in Network Effect, and the ComfortUnit in Rogue Protocol.

In Exit Strategy, it reached out to the human supervisors to get Dr. Mensah an opening to get onto the shuttle. Even at the very beginning, in All Systems Red, it warns the team about the external combat over-ride.

Another important piece of context I haven’t seen enough people mentioning (because news stories are leaving it out): Adriana Smith’s family was forced to pay for this.

Adriana Smith’s family, while dealing with the grief of suddenly losing her and watching her body linger and knowing she would never wake up, watching her body being used as an incubator after being given no choice in the matter (and worth noting for so-called “pro-life” folks, Smith’s mother April Newkirk has said “I’m not saying that we would have chose to terminate her pregnancy. What I’m saying is, we should have had a choice.”), is also BEING BILLED for this indignity, this cruelty, this undoubtedly racially motivated miscarriage of justice.

And much of this at THE HOSPITAL SHE WORKED AT AS A NURSE - her coworkers, by choice or by “just following orders,” were the ones to perpetrate this disgusting removal of personhood and agency — after she went in (to another hospital) complaining of a headache and was dismissed with pain medication, with NO TESTS ORDERED BY HER DOCTOR. She was declared brain dead from blood clots the next day, and that’s also 100% the racism, sexism, and ESPECIALLY misogynoir of the American medical field at work.

There was someone who was like “I’m thinking of retiring to [AREA]. How quickly could the ambulance reach [AREA] in an emergency?” and everyone was like “It would take an hour or more. Do not retire here if you plan on ever getting sick.”

The area of Tennessee they moved to is known for having Rich White Racist Tennesseeans. It is the richy white area of a part of the state that is, honestly, pretty poor. These Rich White Tennesseeans are so used to being the richest in the area. They flaunt their wealth and their money and think they are the most important people of all time.

They found out real quick that being Rich in California is different than being Rich in Tennessee.

They had an influx of Republican Californians come in and buy up all the real estate at above market prices. Like, genuinely, look up the difference in housing prices in Tennessee and California. The Californians swooped in and flashed their money and bought these MASSIVE homes and made the housing market price for the area SKYROCKET. Not only that, but they paid a bunch to the private schools in the area to let their kids in. Which meant some of the Tennessee Rich kids...got cut from the program. The Tennessee kids might have to *gasp* go to a public school!

It led to a whole MELTDOWN at the townhalls. They were BEGGING local government to do something about the influx of these Cali Rich Republicans. Absolute shouting matches at the local gov level. They couldn't STAND the thought of them not being the richest fish in the ponds.

According to the person I talked to, it has been hilariously entertaining watching the meltdown with the rich Tennesseeans. The Cali Republicans are completely BAFFLED by the negative treatment they have gotten by the locals. They thought that Tennessee would be the Racist Promised Land, but now they are getting treated poorly by the other rich white people. And the normal people have not been all that affected. Like, probably couldn't have afforded 5 bedroom 4 bath houses anyway. I would hazard a guess that overall inflation for the area got a bit worse, though.