The 'anti-5G' USB stick
May 28, 2020 12:47 AM   Subscribe

If you believe in 5G conspiracy theories but aren't comfortable committing arson, there is an alternative - a device which claims to protect against the 'negative health effects' of 5G. It's a USB stick and it retails for £339 (three hundred and thirty-nine pounds sterling).

The device appears to be the brainchild of Ilija Lakicevic, inventor of the Omnia Radiation Balancer, and is marketed by the people who brought you Klotho Formula.

To be fair, the price on the product's own website does appear to have been dropped from £339 to £283.

(I've chosen not to link to said website, nor to those of the protagonists or related products, as it can send you down a pretty unhealthy rabbit hole, but they're all easy to find on Google, should you like to know more.)
posted by Cardinal Fang (77 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Does it come with bee stings?
posted by chavenet at 12:51 AM on May 28, 2020 [17 favorites]


I wish journalists wouldn't resort to both-siderism and neutral language when things are so clearly a fraud. Just call a fraud a fraud. Clearly the reporter knows this is a fraud, but the problem is that the world is full of dumb people who don't know how to read between the lines. Objectivity isn't the only ethic in journalism: truth-telling and plain speech are important values too.
posted by Skwirl at 1:18 AM on May 28, 2020 [56 favorites]


The stupid tax is getting pretty pricy...even on markdown.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 2:19 AM on May 28, 2020 [5 favorites]


I am not in the market. I have chosen to believe the rumours that 5G is part of the govt's ongoing feminisation plans and have taken to rubbing myself against alleged 5G masts like a bear scratching its back, to increase my exposure.
posted by Acid Communist at 2:32 AM on May 28, 2020 [47 favorites]


I genuinely looked into the feasibility of bulk buying some kind of copper necklace from China for pennies and trying to sell them for £29.99 with appropriate wording to imply 5g protection.

But I just couldn't.
This nagging vestige of ethics is what stands between me and my Ill gotten millions
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:38 AM on May 28, 2020 [34 favorites]


Electronic placebo.
But he had no regrets about buying it and since plugging it in had felt beneficial effects, including being able to sleep through the night and having more dreams.

"I also felt a 'calmer' feel to the home," he told BBC News.

And he had thought the company might be able to develop a system that could offer protection to the whole town of Glastonbury against the effects of radiation from electromagnetic fields.
Someone in town should build a big beautiful blinky box that, you know, neutralizes all of the harmful effects of 5G for everyone living anywhere within 25 miles. Install it downtown and show it on the local news along with interviews with people who can now relax and sleep and dream and not burn down towers. "No need to buy your own protection, Glastonbury. We've got you covered."
posted by pracowity at 2:43 AM on May 28, 2020 [15 favorites]


I can't get angry at people who get sucked in

I can. Because they suck other people in.

Similarly I don't get angry about people who refuse to socially distance, as long as they do it without going near other people.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 2:47 AM on May 28, 2020 [27 favorites]


Do we know if the towers being set on fire are 5G at all?

There's an older report in the Guardian which says that of the 40 attacked at that point (mid-April) "In many cases, mobile networks say, the sites attacked do not yet have 5G technology installed."
posted by scorbet at 2:51 AM on May 28, 2020 [6 favorites]


All my mother's friends are apparently buying some kind of lotion you cover your hands in and it has tiny spikes that pierce the virus and deflate it. Soap? I asked. No, because it costs about fifty times as much as soap. Also it supposedly lasts all day, even if you wash your hands and touch things.

Neither the anti-5G scam nor the anti-virus lotion scam is just a stupid tax, or otherwise harmless, because people who believe in these things are going to engage in riskier behaviour when using them because they think they are protected.
posted by lollusc at 3:02 AM on May 28, 2020 [32 favorites]


Someone in town should build a big beautiful blinky box that, you know, neutralizes all of the harmful effects of 5G for everyone living anywhere within 25 miles. Install it downtown and show it on the local news along with interviews with people who can now relax and sleep and dream and not burn down towers. "No need to buy your own protection, Glastonbury. We've got you covered."

Liar! We all know your non-working box is part of the conspiracy because I STILL GET HEADACHES. (etc., ad nauseam).
posted by jaduncan at 3:16 AM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]


I find the language/framing of the article weird, it's almost like it's saying there are real anti-5G USB sticks (and therefore a real 5G threat), but this particular product is a rip-off.
posted by carter at 3:49 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Buy your new 5GBioShield today, as recommended by one of the most trustworthy names in journalism!

"Promises to protect your family from 5G, using ground-breaking quantum technology" -- The BBC
posted by chavenet at 4:37 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Of course by far the best way to protect your brain from 5G is to construct a faraday cage around it, a, um, tin-foil hat, if you will ...... of course wearing one marks you as a nutter ..... but if the (tin-foil) hat fits ....
posted by mbo at 4:46 AM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]


I wish I lacked any sort of ethical compass, because I could be a very wealthy guy, marketing all manner of woo to conspiracy nutjobs like these.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:56 AM on May 28, 2020 [7 favorites]


Does it have blockchain though.
posted by jquinby at 5:06 AM on May 28, 2020 [28 favorites]


Ugh. A contingent of our Hungarian family is really into a conspiracy theory that 5G causes coronavirus... which wouldn't make a lick of damn sense coming from anyone, but they're pushing this theory with videos by David Icke. David "Secret Lizard People Rule the World" Icke.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:14 AM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]


it's almost like it's saying there are real anti-5G USB sticks

Happily there is plenty of choice for the consumer. There's one called '5G Rezotone Shield' which has been available in Russia allegedly since 2011. Amazon lists the 'Aulterra EMF Home Protection Anti Radiation USB for Whole House Protection to Neutralize Harmful Incoherent EMF Frequencies Including 5G', as well as a plethora of non-USB 'solutions' including the aforementioned Omnia Radiation Balancer, and the 'eLink EMF Neutralizer - Wireless Tower Protection Device'.

This last one is particularly intriguing. It's 'Fulfilled by Amazon', costs £40, is about the size of a smartphone stood on end, and looks like a lava lamp full of coloured sand. It has a protection field of 'up to 150 square metres', which is an unusual number of dimensions to express it in; I assume that means it protects within a radius of sqrt(150/pi), or roughly 7 metres, but only on a plane, so you guys upstairs are going to be glowing like Ready Brek Kids by this time next month. It doesn't specifically claim to protect against 5G though; my favourite Q&A on the website is this one :-

Q: Does this protect against 5g emf?
A: I do hope so

You could of course just splash out on one of these.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 5:44 AM on May 28, 2020 [9 favorites]


A little context for those less local: Glastonbury is well known as a "hippy" sort of a town. On the high street, every other shop seems to be one of those places that will sell you healing crystals or reiki or the like. I guess this is in part circular - some of these places open up to serve the tourist trade that is attracted by this reputation - but there's no doubt that town seems to have a higher than normal concentration of the sort of people that fit into that scene. The author of the BBC piece presumably knows this and expects that his readership do too.
posted by merlynkline at 5:47 AM on May 28, 2020 [7 favorites]


The price of a Glastonbury Festival ticket is now £265.

That fence around the festival site used to be to keep the hippies in.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 5:51 AM on May 28, 2020 [9 favorites]


the 5G people ... the consumer ... the hippies

Have we tried unplugging and plugging it back in.
posted by Fizz at 5:59 AM on May 28, 2020 [5 favorites]


Hackaday has a teardown of a similar (and similarly "effective") product, if anybody wants to DIY a tiger-repelling rock of their own.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:59 AM on May 28, 2020 [6 favorites]


@Skwirl
... the world is full of dumb people who don't know how to read between the lines. Objectivity isn't the only ethic in journalism: truth-telling and plain speech are important values too.
The problem is that "objectivity" (not objectivity, but "objectivity") is the only ethic in journalism, or we wouldn't be having this conversation.

My siblings are sick of me ranting about how political journalism studiously does not report the most significant stories of our time, replying that the truth is pretty plain in what is reported. I tell them "you have better language skills than 98% of your fellow humans, and that distorts your perceptions about these things," but they can't make that leap.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:19 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


My ethical compass is wavering.

If we are entering Idiot Induced End Times then I will need some extra cash for several cases of high end rums and single malts to help smooth the ride down. Might as well make the Idiots pay for it.
posted by Pouteria at 6:20 AM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]


At least you get a 128G stick for your troubles. I think back to scams like the Quadro Tracker or the ADE 651. These were hunks of plastic with antenna attached. They're were such obvious scams and had serious consquences.
posted by beowulf573 at 6:22 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


At least you get a 128G stick for your troubles.

It isn't a 128G stick. It's a 128M stick.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:24 AM on May 28, 2020 [8 favorites]


I'm pretty plugged-in internet-wise... at least on pop culture/politics stuff. I know there's some conspiracy theory surrounding 5G, but I honestly don't know many more details than that.

The bullshit and craziness comes at us so fast these days that I'm not keeping up. I don't think I can keep up. I turn 50 this year, and lately I've been wondering what "things" I will start to get behind on in my old age. This happens to everyone. Perhaps being "behind the times" with crackpot stories and bullshit issues will be like WiFi and Internet issues are for my now-elderly parents.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:27 AM on May 28, 2020 [7 favorites]


It isn't a 128G stick. It's a 128M stick.

Well, that is a rip-off. Time for more coffee. I used to be surprised at such obvious scams folks would fall for. 30 years ago I chuckled when folks I knew gathered in a circle around a car holding crystals trying to fix the engine.

Now I just find it sad, and expected.
posted by beowulf573 at 6:29 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


These same people sold me an Elephant-Repelling Rock for only $650, and I tell you, there is not one single elephant anywhere in my yard. A+++ would buy again.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:41 AM on May 28, 2020 [10 favorites]


How do scammers decide which kinds of empty nonsense products will sell in a particular place and time? Why is a USB stick the thing for resisting 5G as opposed to a "radiation reflecting" blanket, hoodie, or hat, for example? Why not pills? Hairspray?
posted by Western Infidels at 6:46 AM on May 28, 2020 [4 favorites]


The good news for the entrepreneur of above-average moral flexibility is that there is an abundance of cheap crapgadgets suitable for equally cheap after-market modification into high-margin miracle tech. If new-agey-looking USB drives aren't your ticket, you could go for novelty golf ball finders (successfully sold as IED detectors in Iraq, and more recently seen as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' “magnetic coronavirus detectors”, or you could do what the guy who bought a cheap Shenzhen smart watch and rebrand it as an aid to picking up girls did. One could browse through dx.com and use it as writing prompts for scammy business plans.
posted by acb at 6:48 AM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]


Our pediatrician (a board-certified professional, licensed by the state to practice medicine on children, with extensive education that presumably included some amount of science) repeatedly recommended we turn off the WiFi in the house at night. He insisted that this would result in improved sleep for everyone in the family.

We now have a new pediatrician, the WiFi has been running uninterrupted for over a year (the last disruption being a power outage), and everyone is sleeping just fine.
posted by nickmark at 6:50 AM on May 28, 2020 [13 favorites]


I like that in the Mirror story, the journalists contact a director for the company that makes distributes these gizmos. When asked how they work, the director says:
"We are in possession of a great deal of technical information, with plenty of back-up historical research," she said.

"As you can understand, we are not authorised to fully disclose all this sensitive information to third parties, for obvious reasons."
This is sort of the 2020, “I know more about this than you can possibly imagine.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:51 AM on May 28, 2020 [9 favorites]


I wish journalists wouldn't resort to both-siderism and neutral language when things are so clearly a fraud. Just call a fraud a fraud. Clearly the reporter knows this is a fraud, but the problem is that the world is full of dumb people who don't know how to read between the lines. Objectivity isn't the only ethic in journalism: truth-telling and plain speech are important values too.

To my British sensibilities, there was nothing between the lines in that article at all. The reporter was blatantly calling everyone involved either a fraudster or an idiot, just in that rather dry BBC way.
posted by Faff at 6:54 AM on May 28, 2020 [6 favorites]


~I wish journalists wouldn't resort to both-siderism and neutral language when things are so clearly a fraud. Just call a fraud a fraud.
~To my British sensibilities, there was nothing between the lines in that article at all. The reporter was blatantly calling everyone involved either a fraudster or an idiot, just in that rather dry BBC way.


There's also the particular British laws concerning libel and slander that can often make outright declaring someone (or something) fraudulent a bit dicey.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:02 AM on May 28, 2020 [10 favorites]


There's also the particular British laws concerning libel and slander that can often make outright declaring someone (or something) fraudulent a bit dicey.

Also the BBC, as state broadcaster funded by public subscription, is subject to unique regulations (broader than Ofcom); BBC News isn't allowed to do op-eds, and that likely includes explicitly calling anything (or anybody) a fraud.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 7:10 AM on May 28, 2020 [6 favorites]


"Lisa, I want to buy your rock!"
posted by SansPoint at 7:12 AM on May 28, 2020 [9 favorites]


I'm still trying to figure out if the technical improvements promised by 5G are just another gimmick to goose cell phone and cellular network equipment sales.
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:27 AM on May 28, 2020 [4 favorites]


This is great! Finally we have a solution for all those poor souls who are sensitive to 5G. All they have to do is buy this device, believe in it, and they're protected. Solves a lot of problems.
posted by Nelson at 7:28 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


Y'know, I really resent that all the extremely valid reasons to oppose 5G have taken a back seat to the crazy reasons to oppose 5G. Back in January pretty much everyone was dead set against it - not wanting to generate tonnes of landfill full of perfectly good phones, and howling at the government for letting Huawei get involved.

Then COVID-19 hit, and a bunch of 5G towers got set alight, and Facebook couldn't help but pop those stories right at the top of your news feed, could they? Now if you oppose 5G, people lump you in with the arsony conspiracy whackadoos. And this is a thing that does tend to happen, the angriest, loudest, craziest voices speaking for an entire "side" of a debate by simply being the loudest - but until very recently, there wasn't some fucking bloke at Facebook giving the nutty fringe a megaphone and saying to his mates "watch this." The nutters weren't louder, there weren't *enough* of them to be louder, they were AMPLIFIED.

Worked like a fucking charm, that.

If I wanted to get social license to roll out a technology that's exclusively gonna be used to make everyone spend money on new phones, spy on us, and make more money for sociopathic billionaires, and I knew that the arguments supporting it were flimsier than Boris Johnson's credibility, this is exactly how I would've done it.
posted by FeatherWatt at 7:29 AM on May 28, 2020 [11 favorites]


jquinby: "Does it have blockchain though."

We're working on that now! It'll cost more, but your health is worth it. Isn't it?
posted by caution live frogs at 7:53 AM on May 28, 2020 [7 favorites]


They're not actually lying when they say that if you plug in this device 5G radio will not harm you. I'm tempted to argue that, like homeopathy, this falls into the, "at least it's harmless, and maybe a placebo, except for the money you could have spent on something actually useful or fun" category of less-scary garbage science. But, that they say, "relativistic time dilation and biological quantum entanglement at the DNA level," makes it pretty clear these are scientifically literate people punching down, rather than true believers. Fuck them.
posted by eotvos at 8:31 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


I can't get angry at people who get sucked in

I can. Because


they're missing the f***ing point. Because I think 5G is very dangerous. Not because of the lunacy inherent in invisible vaccinated rays or whatnot, but because well, given the convoluted mess we've thus far collectively made of the already high-speed info highway -- all secrecy, no privacy, targeted marketing straight to the heart and soul etc, everything that's wrong with giving everyone everywhere exactly what they desire (which itself has been manipulated and cajoled from the moment they were born) and all of this with no meaningful education required toward what one could call a media literacy relevant to the realities of even the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first.

Blah-blah-blah. Rant-rant-rant. There are so many very real things to get concerned, worried, fearful, outraged and ultimately active about, but nah, let's fall for some c-grade sci-fi villainy.

Or as somebody put it yesterday on Facebook. I wish we had a penalty box for folks who dive headfirst into the STUPID and then start spreading it around. But not some place where they would just sit and be bored for a few minutes, nah, they'd have to watch a bunch of Marshall McLuhan and Adam Curtis videos ... and then maybe do some volunteer work, helping people who have real problems beyond just being catastrophically confused and manipulated and too narcissistically egotistical to admit it.
posted by philip-random at 8:37 AM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]


Wait! The Russians have had 5G for 9 years and they’ve been holding out on us?
posted by sjswitzer at 8:40 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


Mr. President, we cannot allow a 5G gap!
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:10 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


a technology that's exclusively gonna be used to make everyone spend money on new phones, spy on us, and make more money for sociopathic billionaires

Huh, I'm looking forward to more reliable, faster, lower battery requirement networking. Wireless technologies are particularly valuable out here in the rural US where it is literally impossible to get wired service.

Yes, the regulatory environment could be better. That doesn't mean 5G is awful.
posted by Nelson at 9:19 AM on May 28, 2020 [7 favorites]


I'm still trying to figure out if the technical improvements promised by 5G are just another gimmick to goose cell phone and cellular network equipment sales.

OpenSignal compares 5G experiences across ten major carriers

Verizon’s nationwide 5G will only be a “small” upgrade over 4G at first
posted by Thorzdad at 9:26 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


Plugging in USB cables and trying to figure out which way fit the port has cost me more of my life than any possible conspiracy theory/ fraud / 5G woo or chemtrail ever could.
posted by srboisvert at 9:27 AM on May 28, 2020 [7 favorites]


give me convenience or give me death
posted by philip-random at 9:42 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


There are so many very real things to get concerned, worried, fearful, outraged and ultimately active about, but nah, let's fall for some c-grade sci-fi villainy.

A million times this. Applied to every single conspiracy "theory." There are actual flagrant, widely-reported conspiracies going on right in front of everyone's faces that are resulting in a shittier quality of life for everyone.

And I'm positive that among those people burning 5G towers there are those who pray for coal mines to reopen, that among the "coming race war" types there are those who ignore the daily fucking holocaust of cops killing black men with impunity, that among the anti-vaxxers there are those who are taking lupus drugs because the president is an irresponsible senile fuckwit.

Alex Jones and David Icke should be put in stocks so we can pelt them with rotten cabbages. They should have all their toys taken away. They should be forced to listen to themselves played backward.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:53 AM on May 28, 2020 [9 favorites]


Encouraged by the comments here, I've now read the article and come away with even more interesting quotes than mefi provides in these comments. This gadget has been praised by a member of Glastonbury Town Council's 5G Advisory Committee, which has called for an inquiry into 5G. A quote from the gadget website is helpfully supplied, describing a USB key that: "provides 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 [electromagnetic field] emitting device".

And yes, my understanding of the tone of the article is that they could hardly be clearer in calling the 'business' people behind this a bunch of mountebanks. One of their other projects, Immortalis sells a dietary supplement called Klotho Formula. Its website - rather similar in design to that of the BioShield - says Klotho Formula uses a "proprietary procedure that leads to relativistic time dilation and biological quantum entanglement at the DNA level".

It's all a bit like those telly adverts for live yoghurt or shampoo that have a string of unlikely-sounding scientific names of their ingredients, but hell, yoghurt rarely costs more than £3 and shampoo more than @15. Perhaps this scam is just a bit bigger.

I can't find where it says the memory size of the thing though.
posted by glasseyes at 9:59 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


41 years ago we moved into a new flat and the previous tenant for whom we had no forwarding address kept getting regular large packets of stationary in the mail, and after a while, I opened one. It was all leaflets about dianetics, and very expensive application forms to go onto the next level. I recognised Ron Hubbard's name as that of a science fiction writer so this sudden introduction to scientology came as a bit of a surprise.

I think blaming 5G for the idiocy that occurs online and criminal slowness of governments to get some oversight of it is missing the target. There's a physical structure and a conceptual structure. The conceptual structure of the internet comes freighted with an ideology peculiar to both its nation of origin and to the type of brains who developed it. I don't see that has anything to do with 5G. And as for the question of obsolete kit, there's already a huge turnover there - what is it, every 18 months? that long? - and we've had 4G for 10-11 years. Anyone here got a phone that old? Let alone a laptop(*)

Has there been much 5G tower burning in the US? Do you have 5G yet? Because if not the venn diagram wouldn't include the people you describe. I'd have thought it would be more people worried about morgellons and electricity pylons/overhead cables myself. Or contrails or plastics in paint.

* me! me, I have that old of a laptop
posted by glasseyes at 10:28 AM on May 28, 2020


My ethical compass is wavering.

I know, god help me I know. It's just ... I mean, the nitwits that fall for this kind of thing are so aggressively, willingly, openly , unrepentantly stupid. If they're going to fuck up the entire planet with their ignorance (scientific, political, economic, everything), maybe I shouldn't try to be decent. Maybe I should just grab the cash while cash still means anything, because maybe we can't be saved. Maybe the ship is going to go down, and the only question is am I gonna be the polite doomed dude who stands at the prow while the waters rise, or am I gonna be the not-doomed dude in a lifeboat rowing frantically while I jab drowning victims away from my boat, then later spin a story of my heroism and spend the rest of my days living in what passes for comfort in a doomed world.
posted by aramaic at 10:31 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Anyhow I should think Biosheild got a consignment of faulty usb sticks even cheaper than usual and that was the inspiration for the scam. It's not as if anyone paying £339 for their anti 5G properties is going to be using them as a flash drive.
posted by glasseyes at 10:34 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


Stupidity turns out to be like smoking, in that one can suffer from passive stupidity without being stupid oneself.
posted by acb at 10:35 AM on May 28, 2020 [10 favorites]


Would it be ethical to overcharge for building actual, working Faraday cages into people's homes? Or perhaps in "Zen Focus Chambers" at festivals or downtown?

I mean, they would stop the EM. They wouldn't actually do anything for your health, mind you, but $HOUSE_COST/1000 per sq foot installed...

Asking for a friend.
posted by cowcowgrasstree at 10:38 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Oh! Linked from that report is this one: Glastonbury 5G report 'hijacked by conspiracy theorists'

Last month, the town council of Glastonbury in Somerset published a report calling for a government inquiry into the safety of 5G. It promised to oppose the rollout of the next-generation mobile networks in the town.

Now, three members of the group that produced the report have told the BBC they resigned because it was taken over by anti-5G activists and "spiritual healers".

.... "The whole thing was completely biased from the beginning," says Mark Swann, one of those who resigned. "Genuine scientific expertise has been scorned in favour of conspiracy and hearsay," wrote David Swain in his letter of resignation.

posted by glasseyes at 10:39 AM on May 28, 2020 [5 favorites]


I wonder if one could file a complaint with the local FCC equivalent arguing that these devices are interfering with legally-licensed use of assigned spectrum. They're not, of course, because they can't, but it would be amusing to get the charlatans to say so on record.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:18 AM on May 28, 2020 [7 favorites]


lollusc: All my mother's friends are apparently buying some kind of lotion you cover your hands in and it has tiny spikes that pierce the virus and deflate it. Soap? I asked. No, because it costs about fifty times as much as soap. Also it supposedly lasts all day, even if you wash your hands and touch things.

2020, the year Natural Selection came to Earth. And wouldn't leave.
posted by sneebler at 12:59 PM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


Well, I've seen one "5G Defense" method that costs nothing and may do more good than any other, since it effectively keeps 5G idiots from leaving their homes.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:23 PM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


give me convenience or give me death I am in the platter business, I can get you one big enough for both...
posted by Oyéah at 3:48 PM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


The fact that he was sleeping better and felt better was probably down to the placebo effect and if it works for some people because of that, for them,it may well BE worth the money.
posted by Burn_IT at 4:24 PM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Now why would you make these things £339 when you could probably sell more than ten times as many for £34?

For one, the list of people both gullible and affluent enough to buy it at £339 would be very valuable in and of itself; and for another, you might be able to sell the opportunity to load malware onto to these sticks for much more when you're selling them for the higher price.
posted by jamjam at 4:44 PM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]


This is lifted straight from audiophile scammer playbook except, you know, harmful.
posted by deadbilly at 6:02 PM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


I have a hard time railing against this or any other specific product because there are just so many versions and flavours of this sort of hucksterism out there believed in by otherwise nice honest people. And at least this one isn't actively harmful unlike say Goop Yoni Eggs or Homeopathic "vaccines".
posted by Mitheral at 7:39 PM on May 28, 2020


Now why would you make these things £339 when you could probably sell more than ten times as many for £34?

Because the true electrosensitives wouldn't think something so cheap would work on them. Pricing it higher makes it sound more like a "real" product, like a medical device.

The clever version of this scam would sell several different products at different price points. Maybe imply the $50 one works OK but the $500 one works really well. And if you really care about not getting cancer/Lymes/Morgollons, you should buy the $5000 one.
posted by Nelson at 7:41 PM on May 28, 2020 [7 favorites]


Y'know, I really resent that all the extremely valid reasons to oppose 5G have taken a back seat to the crazy reasons to oppose 5G. Back in January pretty much everyone was dead set against it - not wanting to generate tonnes of landfill full of perfectly good phones

The perfectly good phones are going into landfill (or recycling) anyway. At least, hopefully. Modern phones are potentially a major security issue, and their software only receives updates for so long. You don't want lots of old smartphones kicking about in the market ideally. And non-smart phones? They'll continue to work as they always did.
posted by Dysk at 8:33 PM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


exclusively gonna be used to make everyone spend money on new phones, spy on us, and make more money for sociopathic billionaires

That's . . . already what smart phones do just fine. No 5G required.

I feel any assertion that there's a unified force pushing 5G specifically to get people to upgrade their phones requires citation. If there's genuinely something more insidious going on than when they rolled out LTE, I'd like to see a source on that.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:42 PM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


posted by Just this guy, y'know: This nagging vestige of ethics is what stands between me and my Ill gotten millions

It's the only thing that's stopped me from becoming a televangelist. I would be so good at it. So. good.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 10:01 PM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]


"relativistic time dilation and biological quantum entanglement at the DNA level," makes it pretty clear these are scientifically literate people punching down

It really doesn't read like that to me. Instead it reads like someone who has an understanding of the english language who has scanned buzzwords present across scientific literature and has constructed them about as well as a markov chain based AI neural network into a sentence designed to sound smart, but instead says absolutely nothing. It is a lot like the French speaking people going on about the Unified theory that they've developed with structure in the atomic nucleii and how protons are the same as electrons but they are just opposite ends of a single dipole. They are almost using the correct language, but not quite. To an outsider it would be difficult to tell the difference, but to someone with even a redumentary grasp of the science it is absolute horseshit.

It is much more like the video showing what different languages sound like using nonsense words. To soneone who doesn't understand the language it is impossible to know that it isn't real, but to a speaker it just is very confusing because it sounds right, but it just isn't making any sense.
posted by koolkat at 12:08 AM on May 29, 2020 [4 favorites]


Some videos about the English sounds to non-english speakers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU2wkD-gbzI
posted by koolkat at 12:13 AM on May 29, 2020 [1 favorite]


The article has been updated: London Trading Standards and the City of London Police are now on the case.

This time we've got a quote (from a third party, so it doesn't break the BBC's rules on impartiality) :- "We consider it to be a scam," Stephen Knight, operations director for London Trading Standards told the BBC.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:26 AM on May 29, 2020


Now why would you make these things £339 when you could probably sell more than ten times as many for £34?

So some of my husband's colleagues were considering selling crystals that they produce as a byproduct from their work, marketing them towards people who might think it could cure a disease or improve their health. (They occasionally get weird unsolicited email from such people in the first place). They actually decided they couldn't bring themselves to do it, but during the discussions one principle they landed on was that they definitely would sell them for ridiculously high prices, because they only wanted to take advantage of people who could afford to spend thousands of dollars on a a crystal, not people who might be choosing between spending money on this vs food. Also because they somehow felt less morally bankrupt scamming fewer people rather than more people.

Anyway, as I said, they decided they couldn't bring themselves to do it anyway, so don't @ me.
posted by lollusc at 1:59 AM on May 29, 2020 [6 favorites]




I feel any assertion that there's a unified force pushing 5G specifically to get people to upgrade their phones requires citation. If there's genuinely something more insidious going on than when they rolled out LTE, I'd like to see a source on that.

From a cell company perspective, 5G has almost nothing to do with the direct consumer market, other than some vague ideas about 5G eventually replacing the majority of wired connections, but they honestly said the same thing about 4G. It has way more to do with differentiated charging methods (which the lower latency and other network changes make possible) for commercial IOT devices and commercial devices that are not phones.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:37 AM on May 29, 2020 [2 favorites]


thanks to the wearable holographic nano-layer catalyser […] Through a process of quantum oscillation, the … USB key balances and re-harmonises the disturbing frequencies arising from the electric fog induced by devices…

GEORDI LA FORGE: [TECH]
posted by snowmentality at 1:57 PM on May 30, 2020 [1 favorite]


Every time I mention the concern that 5G could make weather forecasts less accurate, people treat me like I just mentioned con trails or something.

https://www.wired.com/story/5g-networks-could-throw-weather-forecasting-into-chaos/
posted by Former Congressional Representative Lenny Lemming at 2:20 PM on May 31, 2020 [1 favorite]


one principle they landed on was that they definitely would sell them for ridiculously high prices, because they only wanted to take advantage of people who could afford to spend thousands of dollars on a a crystal, not people who might be choosing between spending money on this vs food

Clearly they had never dealt with the kind of compulsive addicts who would spend thousands of dollars on something vs food.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:47 PM on May 31, 2020


« Older A slew of Siouxsie Sioux videos   |   "you know, pulling a JK Rowling, essentially" Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments