A $350 “anti-5G” device

gpw928

gpw928

Ars Technica has the lowdown on a company that sells the 5GBioShield:
The product's website charges £283 for a single 5GBioShield, which converts to nearly $350. That's what it costs to get "protection for your home and family, thanks to the wearable holographic nano-layer catalyser, which can be worn or placed near to a smartphone or any other electrical, radiation or EMF emitting device."
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Spoiler: save $350 and use an aluminium foil hat...
 
Cathy herself was profoundly affected by the 5GBioShield, saying that the product restructured reality itself. "The first night just before going to sleep I felt an increasingly deep sense of relaxation as if I was sinking down into something," Cathy wrote. "As this went deeper I experienced the understanding that reality was being restructured at a very deep level."

I want whatever Cathy is on.
 
Although the product maker says the device works without being plugged in, some of its users seem to think otherwise. "One minute and a half after I plugged it [in], I felt something wrong disappeared in the air," Daniela wrote.
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Yes, Daniela, that was your sanity disappearing.

I'm not too familiar with UK law, but aren't there consumer protection laws for this? It's clearly snake oil,
 
SirDice said:
I'm not too familiar with UK law, but aren't there consumer protection laws for this? It's clearly snake oil,
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Nah, we are all so miserable over here, if some absurd placebo manages to make some of us happy, then we say go for it XD.

However if my dear sweet mother was interested in buying one, my opinion might change haha.
 
The new rage is the fusion of those technologies, Nano and AI, and this is precisely what drives the success of the product we're talking about.
This is called Nano I, standing for "Nano Intelligence", the key to this prodigious user experience.

vigole said:
Nano is the wrong buzzword, it's deprecated. They should try AI or DevOps.
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On a more serious note, such scams thrive not on stupidity, as one might think, for their most of their customers have a higher education, but rather on suffering. More and more people tend to lock themselves in illusions in an attempt to bear a little longer, if not forget their suffering. Cannabis being gradually legalized in more and more countries is a hint public authorities are aware of this and actively foster the diversification of the "palliative care" offer. And this is really no good news.
 
20-100-2fe said:
... such scams thrive not on stupidity, ... but rather on suffering.
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I'm afraid I'm a little more cynical. I have seen it most recently described as the youtube phenomenon.

To hell with the scientific method, randomized block experiments, competent statistical analyses, generations of earnest scientific endeavour, refereed publications, and the calamitous impacts on the career of any scientist required to print a retraction.

People will willfully discard mountains of competent, hard-earned, objective evidence in favour of memes they see on youtube.

That's dangerous to society in so many ways (vaccinations, climate change, pandemic management,...).
 
gpw928 said:
That's dangerous to society in so many ways (vaccinations, climate change, pandemic management,...).
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Exactly, and the problem is that the violence of society is responsible for behaviors that further increase the danger.
This positive-feedback loop is obviously part of a regulation mechanism, like those at work in the global climate change.
I wish we wouldn't be there to witness such times, but here they are.
 
20-100-2fe said:
On a more serious note, such scams thrive not on stupidity, as one might think, for their most of their customers have a higher education, but rather on suffering.
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Suffering? From what would they suffer? (very serious question)

Then, let's get something important clear: We Do Not Know if G5 might have detrimental effects on health. At current we know of no such effects, but that is all that can be said - there is no proof of the contrary (and techically such a proof is not even possible).

gpw928 said:
To hell with the scientific method, randomized block experiments, competent statistical analyses, generations of earnest scientific endeavour, refereed publications, and the calamitous impacts on the career of any scientist required to print a retraction.

People will willfully discard mountains of competent, hard-earned, objective evidence in favour of memes they see on youtube.
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And these mountains of evidence contain what? As just explained, they contain nothing.
So do away with these mountains, because they again are only a believe-system.

Until today, nobody knows what makes a living being living. We have tons of data about the details of how life functions, but we have no idea how it comes into existance, or what exactly creates the difference between a functioning, self organizing living being and a heap of lifeless organic material - we just take life as a given fact. And nobody has ever succeeded in making a living being in any other way than letting nature (aka God[1]) do it.

Our medicine is crude at best. It has some means to sustain life by technical means, and some means to adjust parameters (in a very crude way, by just throwing some chemicals into the system), but it has no means to heal anybody. Healing is always and only done by the self-healing abilities of life itself, the doctors can only improve some conditions.

So, as we actually have no idea about what sustains life (in a profound way that would enable us to rebuild it), we are in no position to say what could be detrimental to it's influencing factors (because we do not even know these).

More and more people tend to lock themselves in illusions in an attempt to bear a little longer, if not forget their suffering.
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They always did this. You will find no culture on earth that does not sustain some kind of religion, with the purpose to
  • give people a common ground to describe their experiences
  • regulate basic social behaviour
  • provide some illusional answers on what it is all about.
We could talk about why this is the case - but let's just look at what has happened here: due to a couple of influences[2] our traditional religious culture has been dissolved. But what has not dissolved, is that urge of people to believe in something. Instead, that believe has found a new and now socially legitimate source: science. People do now believe in science and treat science as a religion.
As shown above, science does not have and cannot provide the relevant answers, but nevertheless people tend to argue for a scientific viewpoint with the exact same vehemence and irrationality they would otherwise argue for their religion - mainly those people who are interested in and fond of modern technology.

Some other people are not satisfied with such a worldview - and certainly it is a very cold and sober worldview, leaving all the warm, emotional qualities of life unresponded and out-of-the-equation.

But then we hear the exact same thing as the priests have always said when challenged:
That's dangerous to society in so many ways
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The disbelievers are dangerous to society.
They do not make any attempt to fix the flaws in their religion, they just blame the others, and call for prosecution (i.e. witchburns).

Now back to my initial question: what do people actually suffer from? Why do they have that vehement urge to believe in something? Because, I do not understand that - I just followed Paracelsus' advice[3], and found all things becoming clear in these lights.

-----------
[1] for all practical purposes, "nature" and "God" can be considered the same word.
[2] in short: the cleric stand has been dethroned by Bauernkriege and Aufklärung, then the respectable authorities have been discredited by socialism, and finally social rules have been overthrown by the hippies.
[3] https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/learning-with-electronic-devices-at-early-age.66357/post-391732
 
20-100-2fe said:
Exactly, and the problem is that the violence of society is responsible for behaviors that further increase the danger.
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This is no wonder. If you create a religion that excludes all the emotional qualities, then these qualities will not simply disappear (because they essentially belong to life); instead you will get the very worst of them.

In order to create a working religion (which is identical to a functioning society) you need to explicitely foster the positive emotional qualities. That's the stress on love in christianity - but that was already flawed; earlier pagan religious systems went a lot further (see e.g. hieros gamos).

Lets dig deeper: as mentioned above, the hippies achieved the final overthrow of our established western culture. That wasn't too difficult, because they had LSD, and so they could understand what makes a god a god - and they also did understand the basic necessities of life, and it came down to "make love not war".
But then, strangely, the AIDS-story did appear and put and end to that. So, what remained was the notion that social rules are just fabrications and can be done away with - but now nothing in replacement! The consequence was now not love, but a borderless and all-overspilling selfishness as the new lifestyle.

That was already bad. But then the Internet appeared, and I was deceived - because I thought something good might arise from it. I thought that people would now become able to exchange their minds&souls, freely and without being judged by appearance or social conventions - and that way they would detect that they are all just equal, that they share the same common desires, hopes and anxieties.
But instead the Internet was taken over by big corporations, and it's users were reduced to mere consuming robots, to functional NPCs.

And if that weren't bad enough, we now have the virus-hoax, which perfectly serves all the wet dreams of those in power: It gives an irrefuteable legitimation to unlimited overboarding governmental debt. It provides authorities with a legitimation for social repressions a nazi tyrant couldn't think of - and that without needing to fear any resistance. And it ensures that the consumer zombies stay locked up in their cages, without any social interaction whatsoever.
 
PMc said:
And if that weren't bad enough, we now have the virus-hoax, which perfectly serves all the wet dreams of those in power: It gives an irrefuteable legitimation to unlimited overboarding governmental debt. It provides authorities with a legitimation for social repressions a nazi tyrant couldn't think of - and that without needing to fear any resistance. And it ensures that the consumer zombies stay locked up in their cages, without any social interaction whatsoever.
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Because you understand this, I think you know what I mean when I talk about suffering. We are the only species whose arrogance goes well beyond insanity, up to the point we're destroying the ecosystem that allows us to live at an incredible speed and with an unwavering determination. However, we ARE part of nature, how could we not suffer while helplessly witnessing our self-destruction?

And those who understand what's happening suffer twice: once like all others, and once more because they feel so lonely, lost in an ocean of self-blinding peers.
 
F
20-100-2fe said:
Because you understand this, I think you know what I mean when I talk about suffering. We are the only species whose arrogance goes well beyond insanity, up to the point we're destroying the ecosystem that allows us to live at an incredible speed and with an unwavering determination. However, we ARE part of nature, how could we not suffer while helplessly witnessing our self-destruction?

And those who understand what's happening suffer twice: once like all others, and once more because they feel so lonely, lost in an ocean of self-blinding peers.
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A, but there is hope.
 
Now, as I'm already at it, let's look at another phenomenon of the modern worldview: the "experts".

Whenever you meet a proponent of the modern, rational, well-researched non-tinfoil worldview, and you ask them something, they usually do not have answers. Instead, they point you to the experts, and You will have to listen to the experts.
Also, if you turn on the TV and watch a news show, on any impeding matter they will bring along some expert, and that expert then tells you what you ought to believe.

Now, what are these "experts", and where do they come from? Some personal story: in the early times, say, the late 80's, I used to be somehow associated with the ChaosComputerClub (you know the stories - NASA-hack, similar things). At that time it was really cool there, it was a space for all kind of unconventional thinking, great inspiration and exchange.
Then, later on, say around the millenium change, in the TV shows I occasionally happened to see some of the people I had met there - they now did appear as the computer security experts. (Specifically, those people who were willing to say what those in power wanted to hear.) Also, at that time the club had changed. It still fostered critical thinking, but now it was the kind of streamlined "critical thinking" - those kind of things which we all get told every day that we should be concerned about: the privacy, the carbondioxide, the LGBTs, etc. - the Greta-stuff as it is told to the masses in school.

So much for that one. So, yes, we should always listen to the experts, and believe what they tell us. And for every field of knowledge, there will be an expert to tell us what we ought to believe.
But then, what happens if there isn't?

Some more personal stories: I happened to travel exotic places. And when I ventured into Indonesia (not the tourist places), I met indigenious cultures which at that time had barely reached iron age (the legendary man-eaters, you know). And then there were no experts available, to tell me what I was supposed to see there. Because these cultures were not yet explored, their languages weren't even known! By mere accident, by just travelling around I had happened to come across the brink of our modern-world-knows-everything, and into cultural white-space on the map. So I had to see with my own eyes and make up my own mind - which, after all, is still possible.

Another example: in the late 90's I happened to aquire a regular job - which came as quite a surprize; actually I had been trying to live as a hippie. What I was supposed to do: help design new compute-centers. It was the time of the first dot-com bubble, and besides the we-sell-each-other-a-webpage-and-make-big-money-with-going-public scheme, there were also the big corps, the major banks, insurance and other companies which all suddenly wanted to get rid of their mainframe stuff and switch to client-server technology (which simply meant: unix and tcp/ip). So people were needed who would design and build such new infrastructure for them. And suddenly I was busy flying around in the world and showing all these big corps how to do it. Nobody had ever told me what actually to do - all I got told was "here is your customer, here is your flight, now see to it". So I had to do whatever was the demand - design a backup strategy, build a high-availability scheme - all kinds of systems management solutions. There were no experts I could have asked, nobody told me how to do it - but I had ten years of practice running unix machines for myself (to be able to access the internet) and I had the RFCs to read, so I just did what should be supposed best practices. And all the customers appeared to be happy to have somebody they could ask and who actually knew how all the stuff was supposed to work, and could fix it under any circumstances - they obviousely were used to less competent advisors. It really was a nice time.
Now, this is all different today: nowadays we have the experts in place, and all has to be asked from the experts, and nothing is allowed to be done unless the experts approve it. Consequentially, nobody needs me anymore, and so, since I'm now to old to be a hippie, I'm just the usual unemployed trailerpark trash.

So much for the experts. It seems to me, just like in religion: if you want to talk to God, you're not allowed to do so. Instead, you have to go to a priest, pay the priest, and the priest will handle the communication on your behalf, and tell you what God is saying. Same is now true for the experts: if you want to do something, or decide something, or experience something, you're not allowed to do so. Instead you have to go to the experts, pay the experts, and the experts will tell you what experience you are expected to have. And certainly, this is all for our protection.
 
Right, today you have to be your own expert. It's your life, it's your body, it's your mind, your health -- and the decision over these vital matters is YOURS as well. So... you CONSULT them "experts", do your research, form your opinion and act upon it. But it wasn't much different 3000 years ago, I guess.
 
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