Of all the celebrity billionaire parasites this one is the one I hate the most. At least Elon and Bezos has the decency to show us what scumbags they are… they don’t call Gates “No.1 Sugar Daddy To The PR industry” for nothing.

tech has nothing to do with him being a piece of shit,

We don’t call tech bros tech bros because they’re technical. We call them tech bros because they are pieces of shit.

TV Tropes has the best description of them.

A Tech Bro is someone connected with the technology and business industry; cultivating an image of intelligence mixed with money, counterculture attitude and social savvy. Whether they are actually hip, business literate, anti-authority or even intelligent in any form depends on the individual. Their goal is to charm investors into funding their project, so some degree of false presentation is necessary. Typically they are young men in their twenties and early thirties, insisting on casual clothing, shaggy hair and Perma-Stubble. Some of them are keen on partying and getting up to wacky hijinx, and are easily distracted during business meetings. Their speech is a blend of Technobabble and corporate buzzwords designed to attract investors, self-promoting at every opportunity. They see themselves as leaders, even visionaries, and they want you to know it.

And Apartheid tech bro up there is their god.

edit: I have to mention that I have no idea where anyone gets the idea that tech bros are in any way “countercultural” or “anti-authoritarian” - I’ve never seen a tech bro that’s anti-capitalist, which means they are as drenched in the politics of bootlicking as the rest. I guess the only difference is that they perceive themselves to be deserving of having their boots licked - despite the fact that they will happily lick the boots of Musk, Gates and the rest themselves.

Apartheid tech bro saying exactly what an Apartheid tech bro would say.

Not sure about that paper - it recommends ocular irrigation (with water) for OC gas… the exact thing you mentioned hurting so bad in your first response. The thing to remember here is that a lot of the discourse on this doesn’t distinguish between the use of a liquid to flood particles away from skin and membranes through it’s kinetic action (possible with CS gas and very necessary with white phosporous) and relying on the chemical properties of the liquid itself to bring any kind of relief.

I’m starting to suspect that masquenox is part of a propaganda campaign led by the basilisk itself!

We all have our price - it turns out mine is… dental cover.

The claim that fear of punishment or repercussions affects people’s actions shouldn’t be a controversial thing to say.

I didn’t say it was controversial - I said it’s pretty useless as a tool to predict a given society’s behavior with. Plenty of tyrants have discovered that the hard way.

demonstrated its orders-of-magnitude greater intelligence to you

The ability to ace IQ tests will never impress me… and it’s unlikely to make up for the fact that it needs a box.

simulate your mind, and create a hell for you where you’ll be tortured for literal eternity

That argument is no different than the ones co-opted religion has been making for thousands of years - and it still hasn’t managed to tame us much.

Of course, you’re always free to call its bluff,

Calling power’s bluff is something we do as a matter of course - the history books are filled with it. This doesn’t make power less dangerous - but there is no such thing as “unknowable” power.

But we don’t have any basis to say it’s impossible.

We have no basis to say it’s possible, either - as I’ve stated before, this entire sci-fi trope is based on nothing more than techno-fetishists trying to conflate consciousness with information technology… and sci-fi tropes doesn’t get more wonky than that.

It could be a thousand years or a million years.

Considering that we’ll be lucky if we can maintain Victorian-era levels of industry by the end of this century, I’d say a fallacious belief in “progress” is rather inappropriate these days.

Same as punishment for crime.

“Crime & Punishment” is a very dodgy thing to base anything off… our society barely does any of it and the little of it that does gets done is done for a myriad of reasons that has very little to do with either.

There’s a good reason why governments hide “Crime & Punishment” away behind prison walls - doing it out in the open will eventually have the opposite effect on a population. Good luck to an AI dumb enough to test this out for itself.

I’d say this should rather be called "Roko’s Earthworm-Pretending-To-Be-A-Lot-Scarier-Than-It-Actually-Is.

Fair enough.

Just because we don’t have the ability now doesn’t mean it’s not possible.

Yeah… no. It’s about as likely as humanity “colonizing” space - it’s not going to happen.

Consciousness isn’t fully understood,

True… and conflating consciousness with the trappings of digital technology is doing the exact opposite of getting us closer to any understanding of it.

torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development,

And the point of this would be… what, exactly?

The prospective AI punishment would be to have your consciousness ‘moved’ to an artificial environment and tortured for ever.

No, it wouldn’t, because that’s never going to happen. Consciousness isn’t software - it doesn’t matter how much people want to buy into such fantasies.

I don’t care what a pig has to say about anything.

If we can recycle single use plastic into this, then great.

They won’t - they’ll just use “Recycling!” as a pretext to continue business as usual… which was the whole point of “Recycling!” in the first place.

The capsacin is dissolved in an oil,

That only counts for OC gas (pepper spray) - most anti-dissent chemical weaponry doesn’t contain capsaicin. Milk won’t do shit for CS gas, for instance. For CS gas, water is the only thing that works.

Considering how many different types of this shit there actually is and the fact that they can mix them up pretty easily regardless of what the law actually says makes a one-size-fits-all solution pretty difficult.

edit: did I just say a one-size-fits-all solution to this is difficult? Silly me.

I have to admit that GIMP has me beat - I’ve taught myself plenty of progs (usually in a panic because I told the interviewer I could use it and therefore had to learn it real fast - that’s how I learned Illustrator, CorelDRAW and QuarkXpress), but I just can’t seem to get the hang of GIMP.

It’s just standard corporatese - if it’s not insulting your intelligence they’re not doing it right.

Her Majesty’s Penitentiary inmate Devon Fitzpatrick says early one morning in mid-May Her Majesty’s Penitentiary inmate Devon Fitzpatrick woke up and felt something moving in Her Majesty’s Penitentiary’s crotch of Her Majesty’s Penitentiary’s pants. When he reached in, he discovered Her Majesty’s Penitentiary’s rat had given birth there.

FTFT.

If they want to make it clear how thoroughly Her Majesty’s (or whatever mutant inbred blue-blooded critter they’ve got on the throne now) ownership of this person is, I say they shouldn’t be allowed to stop half-way.

Nor did I ever mention NASA nor make a judgment on which group was morally superior.

Oh, you didn’t have to - you just stepped in to help on of your fellow libs do a bog-standard and thinly-veiled “Jewish-Bolshevism” jig - that is all.

Aaaaaand…

It’s not terribly surprising that both NASA and the USSR space program did awful things to animals.

…the backpedalling begins.

Not very unpredictable, methinks.

And rushed it so bad they didn’t have fundamental tech that was applicable to a wider economy

I hate to break it to you, Clyde - but the central technologies developed by the space race was “applicable to a wider economy” on both sides of the Cold War. The USSR had weather and communications satellites, too - unless you want to argue that those served no economic purpose to the USSR, perhaps?. Perhaps you are a bit too dazzled by all the anciliary stuff that dominates your consumerist fantasies? I’m sure you believe NASA’s handheld vacuum cleaners made capitalism better for all the people that didn’t get to live the middle-class WASP dream thanks to the New Deal… but it really didn’t.

Handing off publicly-funded research and development to be used as a means of private profiteering for the capitalist class at the expense of everyone else (including you) is simply the way the US has always done technology - pretending that the USSR not doing the same is somehow a “flaw” is peak neoliberalism.

Their space program was callous towards both human and animal life.

I guess it’s a good thing that NASA wasn’t very forthcoming with their animal experimentation, eh? I wonder if the outcry would have been the same?

Yeah… sounds like Tuesday to me.

Khrushchev also ordered Leonid Brezhnev to head an investigation commission and go to the site.[11] Among other things, the commission found that many more people were present on the launch pad than should have been—most were supposed to be safely offsite in bunkers.

When Brezhnev arrived at the firing range on 25 October 1960, he said: “Comrades! We do not intend to put anyone on trial; we are going to investigate the causes and take actions to recover from the disaster and continue operations”

Afterwards, when Nikita Khrushchev asked Yangel, “But why have you remained alive?”, Yangel answered in a trembling voice, “Walked away for a smoke. It’s all my fault”. Yangel later suffered a heart attack and was off work for months.

After all… we can’t pretend thay the “Jewish-Bolshevist horde” would actually value human life now, can we? What would Reagan say?

Nah, I like my version better.

Yeah, you do, because you’re an edgy liberal self-applying the term “socialist” without understanding what it means because you desperately want to distance yourself from your capitalist and fascist brethren while still buying into the same beliefs they hold on to.