Have you always wanted to breathe underwater
without bulky tanks?
The Triton underwater gill system has been
making the rounds on the internets for while now. A magical piece
of equipment, able to turn man into fish by filtering oxygen
molecules from the water. It was hailed as a scientific advancement
that’d free us to explore the depths at our leisure.
All bullshit, of course.
Couldn’t possibly work, merely
the brainchild of a trio of scammers who hit on a notion into which
the poorly informed would happily dump their hard earned money.
Pretty much crowdfunding in a nutshell.
The Indiegogo campaign featured amusingly edited footage of a swimmer blowing
bubbles underwater, begging the question, why not just
pay a freediver to stick the thing in their mouth and play around
in the ocean? I could’ve done it. Would’ve for a cut of their
swindled dough. Not often you get a chance to monetize the ability
hold your breath and swim downwards. Would’ve looked super cool,
drag the thing down to a hundred feet and clown around a bit.
But they half-assed it, and lost their money. Yesterday
Indiegogo suspended their campaign, refunding the $900K that a mind
boggling number of morons had pledged in the face of overwhelming
proof that it was a scam.
Oh well, no big deal, live and learn. Obviously there’s no such
thing as a magic gill system. Some of us knew that, now everyone
does.
Or so you’d think. After their initial project was shut down for
violating Indiegogo’s TOS (read: being a scam), they changed their
rhetoric, popped up a new campaign that claims to use “liquid oxygen technology,”
and took off running.
You’d think, no one could possibly be stupid enough to dump more
cash into their pockets.
But you’d be wrong!
They’ve got a new video, featuring some guy sitting in the
shallow end, breathing through what is obviously a cunningly disguised pony bottle.
They’ve already conned nearly $200K worth of idiot bucks out of
the uninformed and unintelligent! Amazing! Almost admirable, that
refusal to back down from a con in the face of your own
falsehoods.
Thankfully, we can take solace in the fact that breathing
compressed air underwater is horribly dangerous without training.
Even with, which is why I’d rather risk shallow water blackout than
suck air at any depth.
If they actually follow through and ship the product we’ll get
to see backyard pool owners the world over experience the joys of
pulmonary baurotrama, drowning, and death. Which possibly isn’t a
nice thing to joke about, but I’d enjoy a world free of a few
thousand morons.
The only thing they could do to improve it now would be to slap
on some stripes and call it a “shark deterrent.”
Perfect opportunity for synergy, grab that overlap between the
cowardly and outright stupid.
