domain:worksinprogress.co
ulyssessword
22m ago
Bystanders desperately tried to assist the injured man as emergency services raced to the scene.
Mr Baitson was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery.
However, he died four days later.
Stranger things have happened, but dying four days after a leg wound is certainly up there IMO. I'd think you would either die in a few minutes or get enough help to recover, but maybe there's a middle ground.
Pigeon
coo coo
36m ago
I don’t know how to interpret chasing off famine relief with gunboats… it far exceeds any of the evidence for the intentionality of the Maoist famines.
Not sure about this one as IIRC starving people were killed when trying to access grain in warehouses during the Great Leap Forward, and one of the reasons why the famine was so horrific was because Mao and co. continued to export food for political gain and refused foreign aid for at least a year or two.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
41m ago
The galaxy is only 100,000 light-years in diameter. Starships moving at a mere 0.1 c could get from one side to the other in only a million years.
That's peanuts in astronomical time. If you can make a 0.1 c starship you need not worry about biological lifespans. 'Aliens exist but are too far away' doesn't make any sense. They could've shown up 100 million years ago and still be here. There are centuries old engravings of weird shapes in the sky, recordings from egypt, footage from modern jets and sensors.
Furthermore, our understanding of the universe is extremely limited, bordering on pathetic. 95% of the universe is 'dark' to us, we have no clue about it. Logically, that's the most likely place for the bulk of the aliens to be. Not only is it the vast majority of the universe's mass and energy, it provides a simple explanation for the apparent absence of aliens in the tiny portion we understand.
It makes no sense to play around with Dyson Spheres or largescale structures we might be capable of observing, it's not cost-efficient compared to 'dark' enterprises.
We prank the North Sentinel Islanders with drones and occasional plane/helicopter overflights, some missionaries showing up and getting killed. The real estate they control is so small it's worthless. Nobody wants to live on a crap jungle island. It's probably the same with aliens but instead of crap jungle island it's 'entire visible universe'. There's no real serious intent, more like casual observation. The only thing interesting on Earth is us.
i.e. people who got them unwillingly.
I'd say soldiers and sailors who were putting their life on the line and thus could never really be sure if they'd make it back to respectable society would also get a pass, although that also kind of falls in my "symbolic of something meaningful" exception.
Oh, and its worth mentioning how it seems like now full sleeves are kind of the default for Cops, Soldiers, even firemen these days. Like its functionally part of the 'uniform'!
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