Such a creepy thing, getting children to chant in devotion to a state flag in schools.
Apparently, schools will have to display the ten commandments in classrooms, which means all the kiddies with functional brains get to wonder why chanting to a piece of colored fabric isn't considered worshipping a false idol.
Also, all the military recruiters will get to awkwardly explain the whole "thou shallt not kill" thing...
Capitalists serve customershoard wealth through reckless profiteering irregardless of the costs to the rest of human society and do not operate in a vacuum.
FTFY. I do agree with your last part, though. The political racketeer establishments that enable them and the fascist security institutions that protect them are equally as culpable as they are.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Yes... why worship a piece of colored fabric and when you can worship a piece of paper with scribbles on it instead?