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Right to repair’s unlikely new adversary: Scientologists
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
What have they to gain from advocating against it?
But isn’t their whole operation snake oil? Aliens crashing into a volcano and possessing humans is pretty dumb.
That wasn't always public knowledge. It was a thing you only learned about later on when you were more indoctrinated. Then undercover reporters found out and South Park made it very public.
It was mostly publicized via Usenet by Arnaldo Lerma, Dennis Erlich, Karin Spaink, David Touretzky, and other activists and ex-Scientologists starting in the early 1990s. The South Park episode didn't come out until over ten years later in 2005.
Gotta give them points for snake oil creativity though. Their nonsense is much more entertaining than hearing "invisible sky wizard did it" as the answer to every question for millennia.
Wait, their thing is alien volcano ghosts?
Yes, a long time ago an evil alien enslaved people and crashed into a volcano on Earth where they became ghosts and possessed the primitive humans living there. South Park has a good explanation of this lunacy
I've always wondered if the "THIS IS REAL SCIENTOLOGIST BELIEF" ticker was something planned early on, or if there was a moment of taking the whole thing in and someone went "This is fuckin' South Park. Everyone is going to think we're being extreme. We need to clarify."
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=BU2EUfinwHo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Correct, but they want to keep plausible deniability.
Yeah. But in a world where JFK is coming back or something, a volcano cult isn't like stand-out crazy anymore.
Nobody finds out their religious contraption doesn’t do anything and/or explains to other Scientologists what it actually does
It's a Wheatstone bridge, a very well-known circuit that's used to measure resistance very accurately. That's about it. You can slap one together at home very easily. There's nothing special in this device that would even benefit from right to repair, any halfway decent engineer or hobbyist can figure it out. It's like wanting to repair a desk lamp, you don't need schematics or data sheets to do that.
While they are still essentially measuring galvanic skin response, modern ones have a lot more going on internally.
TIL that I learned about Scientology in EE classes lol
My guess is the machines are a complete fake and don’t do anything outside of having some fancy dials and meters that a select few people are trained on how to ‘trick’ people into making look like they do something.
If people start digging into it then shit will hit the fan.
My guess is they want this stopped or at the least delayed until they can come up with some other bullshit method.
They do do something. They are simple ohmmeters. They measure the body resistance of whoever's holding the probes. They took a common electronics tool and made it a religious artifact.
I thought some of the meditative religions did it first... They're always like "ohm"
blessed be the jewel of the lotus
Make it harder for the free Scientology groups to operate. The groups offering the same services for free and without the accuser and they use second hand e-meters.
It's the methadone to the CoCs opium and the church doesn't like it.