We appreciate your enthusiasm! It’s support from our many potential customers that motivates us to work hard every day to deliver as much unnecessary unendurable punishment as technology permits straight to your cerebrum.

I thought affordable torment was at least ~10 years away. This is indeed great news

Using the methods available to us as little as a few years ago, you’d be right. Fortunately, thanks in part to tireless researchers at the Torment Studies Department of Stanford University, whose researchers are working with what some worrywarts might describe as “worryingly large” sums of public funding, we’ve developed several shortcuts in our torment delivery framework. Fears that the speed of our development is the result of dealmaking with dark forces with subtle motives beyond our ken are, of course, false - it’s purely the result of some creative thinking coupled with a hard-nosed dedication to the scientific method. For example, experiments show that torment can be delivered via supersensory means, inducing feelings of dread, anxiety, and exhaustion without the user even aware that they’re being tormented! Abilities previously thought to be unique to haunts and spirits confined to the non-physical planes can now be harnessed with a little boring engineering. For other concerns, we’ll refer you to our Huey “Expandable” Mandibles, who was just promoted from our finance office to the role of Chief Ethics Officer.

Not at all, thanks for asking!

Hellion is making massive strides on the Torment Nexus project, with record-breaking reports of dissatisfaction among volunteer beta testers. We’re still working on clearing the necessary hurdles to achieve mass torment at scale, but our prototype devices are capable of delivering steady streams of up to 100 agons per hour at standard loads, and incidences of spontaneous combustion into clouds of of brimstone-scented smoke and the insane giggling of a being driven beyond the pale of sanity whose warped mind can no longer be considered fully human are way down from our alpha testing. The engineering team feels like we are currently well ahead of our initially projected timeline to market. We plan to begin delivering affordable torment to customers in select US markets by Q4 2025.

Seems less likely to succeed than my startup Hellion, which seeks to generate nigh-unlimited amounts of clean energy by opening a portal to the Infernal Abyss.

So what you do is you take a nuke. Drop it in a hole. Then drop another one in. Then another one. Hope you brought a lot of nukes. Eventually the gas law (Pv=nrt baby) dictates that you end up with an atmosphere dense enough to be breathable plus you’re definitely low enough down that you’re shielded from radiation. Bring some looooong cables to connect to solar panels up on the surface, crank up the heater, hang up a grow lamp for your potatoes, and live large in the miles-deep, yards-wide prison you dug for yourself.

I’ve been thinking about this comment a lot over the last couple of days. I do my research in agriculture and food systems so I’ve had a lot of exposure to the “future is rural” philosophy, but it’s mainly in the context of climate change. It seems like anyone talking sense about the trajectory our society is on is quietly buying small plots of land for smallholder agriculture or posting about how farms are probably going to stop supplying food systems and start focusing on meeting their own needs as conditions get less hospitable. It’s interesting to consider that there’s a convergent response emerging as a result of automation.

Meanwhile I’m sitting here on my small expensive urban plot that couldn’t sustain more than some summer vegetables because I thought I’d get bored doing actual agriculture

What do your preparations look like?

The article reads like it was also written by an AI.

In Accelerando,

Really makes you wonder if these companies that keep naming themselves after Sci fi villains have our best interests at heart.

Anyone could’ve guessed that if you put a glass door in a fishbowl there’s bound to be leaks

My grocery store has added an automated narc cam that plays back a video of you putting the item into the bag when it thinks you didn’t scan it.

Hoo boy wait til you see what Zelenskyy was up to.

Without NATO aid, Ukraine will just plainly be taken over by Purine Russia

Ah, I think I’ve found the issue. Here at Hexbear we only support Pyrimidine Russia. We hate fuckin’ cytosine, don’t we folks?

I believe this is yours

Yeah, it’s not what I’d describe as a serious attempt at problem solving.

The Pareto principle is an economics idea - something is considered Pareto efficient if you can make someone better off without making someone else worse off, and you are at a Pareto optimum when you can’t make anyone better off without making someone worse off. Of course, because “better off” and “worse off” are entirely up for interpretation, people argue that taxing the rich to improve the lives of the poor is not Pareto efficient because you’re worse off if you have less money regardless of how much money you have left. So the only Pareto efficient solution is to grow the economy until all the poor people make enough money.

You can’t be poor if you’re dead