Sunday, June 25, 2023

A Deep Sea Tragedy


 

"Back in 2012 I took a trip down to Macaé, Brazil to train a wonderful group of engineers how to build a Virtual Maintenance Trainer for an unmanned submersible. 

The reason they needed such a complex trainer was due to the quick, costly, and violent ways that one of these multimillion dollar undersea expeditions could go wrong if proper launch and safety procedures weren’t followed exactly correctly. And this was just for an unmanned drone. Yes the memes about the OceanGate failure are great, but what I’m more excited about is how quickly this event is changing peoples perception about the plutocracy. 

That was a hack dash pod sent to terrifying depths piloted by a CEO that loved to brag about how he saved money by skipping over safety features and redundant development (he didn’t even put anchor points on the vessel he sent down, so even if the coast guard did find them there was literally no way for them to hook onto it and pull it back up). 

This skirting of safety, building it quick and breaking things approach is how the millionaire and billionaire class have made their fortunes for generations. 


They’ve done it by skipping accountability. My hope is that this moment in time has a longer impact on how we view those with wealth and how they’ve amassed it over time. 99% of the time it’s not due to being the smartest or the hardest worker, it’s often because they skirted around societal norms, regulatory enforcement, and was almost always due to leveraging gains by exploiting those with far less. And of course when something goes wrong this plutocracy class of individuals ALWAYS gets an immediate response to try and save them while the rest of humanity is still fighting for table scraps. Keep the memes up, keep pointing out the classical humor and fallacy of this failure alongside the original titanic expedition, but also start conversations on how we can limit the power, exploitation, and privileged safety nets that the plutocracy enjoys on the backs of each and every one of us."

 Benjamin Ellis 

Monday, June 19, 2023




KEEPING THE FAITH: RANDOM PRAYERS "ON THE DOWNLOAD"

DEAR GOD: My heart is heavy with my own failures. I try to excuse them and explain to myself why they occurred, because I want to be free from the feeling that I am unworthy and incapable of being all that I can be. But I find it easier to accept your forgiveness than to forgive myself. When I try to forgive myself, it seems I only remember and re-play my failures in my mind, and a sense of hopelessness floods over me. Help me to know that my past actions are a part of my growing humanity and that even when I fail to live up to what is your will for me, every single moment can be lived anew. Remind me that refusing to forgive myself only keeps me from experiencing that newness. Assure me of the truth that by casting “my sins into the depth of the sea”, you have freed me to discard them myself and live the next moment as if it were my first, for indeed it is. I ask this for the sake of your love. Amen.









































































"Mommy, can I go to Timmy's blog and play?"



































Click on image to enlarge for reading






Click on image to enlarge for reading



Click on image to enlarge for reading