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The extremely rich would rather not have another Einstein unless they knew they could control them and it wouldn't hurt the bottom line.

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Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩

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  • Venicon@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I may be wrong but I believe Nikola Tesla was financed by wealthy New Yorkers after his separation from asshole Edison but they pulled the plug when they realised he was going to give away free power to people.

    May be apocryphal but I think there was someone who invented a car that ran on water but big oil stepped in.

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    • muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The water car is one of those great conspiracy theories that carries just enough weight to sound plausible.

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      • untorquer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        … Carries just enough water to sound plausible.

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    • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      How would yu run a car on water? Water is spent fuel.

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      • Tehdastehdas@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        If you’re in a dry, hot environment and evaporate water in a swamp cooler, you lose about 2.3MJ/l, from which you can skim maybe ~10% with a thermocouple. If you’re charging a Dacia Spring consuming 156Wh/km, you’d have to evaporate ~30 liters of water to drive 100km.

        en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization#Ot…
        en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator#Ef…
        ev-database.org/…/energy-consumption-electric-car

        But then, what if you bought solar panels and a wind turbine instead of thermocouples and water?

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    • burgersc12@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The Why Files has a good video on the mysterious deaths around “free” energy technology.

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    • umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      the water car is fake, but they had viable electric cars in the 90s.

      and for a brief period in the 20s

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    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The state of science education is so disheartening.

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  • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Well of course. Einstein was a socialist.

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    • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Imteresting

      …wikipedia.org/…/Political_views_of_Albert_Einste…

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  • Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Isn’t it always how it works? For example nerds invent stuff, “business people” monetise it, nerd gets nothing.

    It’s like parasitic behaviour.

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    • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      “Socialise the cost. Privatise the profit.”

      Much of the research comes from the public sector, especially universities. But business tycoons act like they are the ones who invented something from scratch and took all the risk to commercialise the idea.

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    • Notyou@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yes. A couple nerds invented a way to process and manufacture steel quickly and Carnegie bought the patent and made all the steel.

      It’s like way to not add anything of real value Carnegie. Anyone in his position would have said, oh let me buy that and then produce my steel faster than anyone else in the world. The only reason he had wealth to do that was luck. Someone took him under his wing as a kid and raised in up in the business/manufacturing/world. Carnegie worked hard, but he had a lot of luck.

      Not to completely shit on Carnegie. He started donating some of his wealth away and tried to convince his peers to do the same. He could have been paying his workers more the whole time instead, but waiting to the end helps some workers that might have still been alive, at least.

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    • Sergio@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The nerd can also create a startup, and get a friend to be the business person. Usually this involves selling the startup to a large company at some point.

      If the nerd is an academic, the university can “help” the academic to market the invention; the academic will get a tiny amount and the university gets the rest. Or the academic can create a startup on the side, and set up their favorite graduate as the business person.

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    • Tedesche@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yes, but that is also precisely why OP’s shower thought is incorrect: advances in science nearly always lead to new inventions, which make money.

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  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is why so many highly intelligent people devote as much time in their lives to art as they possibly can.

    It is only through art that you can begin to subvert an architecture of stolen and foreclosed futures.

    In another world maybe Pynchon just became an unbelievably good editor for aeronautics technical journals.

    Let us not forget that the rich, even on the allies side of WW2 (insofar as the rich keep up the theater of needing to pick a side) **would rather not have had even a single Alan Turing if they could not impose a conservative trauma upon him and make him deny his basic self, and so he was executed.

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  • StinkySocialist@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Especially since he was a vocal socialist

    Why Socialism? by Einstein

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    • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Doesn’t even have to be about that. Einstein was a disruptor. He scribbled some theories on paper and it dramatically reshaped the global power and wealth dynamic.

      The extremely rich have a singular top priority: to stay that way. Unpredictable change, regardless of the net change for good or bad, is not their friend.

      This works at all levels. I was hired into the mid level of a company to “lead research to improve the product” - but I quickly found out: that was just a carrot to get me and others like me in the door to fill roles required by regulatory bodies: so many degreed this and thats to oversee implementation of the quality procedures, etc. Everyone above Director level in that company was making fat bonuses every quarter and they didn’t want ANYTHING to change, not even an improvement in the product, it was making plenty of money with no signs of competition on the horizon. To announce a potential future improvement would be to derail current sales volumes, and there were new mansions under construction that still needed more quarters of bonuses to complete.

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      • StinkySocialist@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I mean I think I get your point that it’s not necessarily as big as the economic system. Innovators disrupt on smaller levels but the disruption you’re describing at your company is under pinned by a profit motive so in a way it is threatening capital. Idk not really disagreeing with you per say as saying were describing the same thing for different perspectives

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  • seven_phone@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Poochie we have to move past this, the reason you failed Basic Physics is not because the rich are trying to hold you back.

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    • Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I wish I never took physics.

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      • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        What did physics ever do to you?

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  • untorquer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    People capable of Einstein’s genious are born daily. There’s two major reasons we don’t her about them.

    First, we have to live under capitalism. Opportunity is distributed poorly and depends directly on circumstance and luck. So most people who could be another Einstein end up working at a service job to survive.

    Second, the sciences have grown so much that these works are now the leaves in the canopy of a dense forest. Sure, you can see the trees, you can see the leaves, but every single tree is a different subject, every branch a new revelation, every ring built upon the previous, every leaf subdivided into thousands of little bits, and even the cells with component parts. Once you start learning about a subject you start to see just how complex something as simple as the tree really is. So just like you don’t see every individual leaf, you don’t hear about these people.

    Bonus: science isn’t the only place for genius, there’s tons of absolute geniuses working as artists, and that’s a good thing.

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  • Tehdastehdas@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That pattern is strong in the sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration. The real geniuses were sidelined and kept poor.
    www.quora.com/…/Harri-K-Hiltunen

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    • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I have spent 30 years developing computerization of traditional medical tasks. Anytime a project gets anywhere near M.D. territory they villify it mercilessly, it’s a threat to their cash cow, a threat to their status as the exalted font of all knowledge, a threat to their $600K/yr practice income - they think.

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  • tkk13909@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Musk would have called Einstein woke

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  • Xaphanos@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is a major plot point of The Dispossessed by Le Guinn.

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  • asteriskeverything@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I read this as Epstein and had a completely different response ready

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    • isolatedscotch@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      to be fair the phrase applies to both

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  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    A cure for all diseases? Nooooo, we don’t do “cures” we do “maintenance”!

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  • KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    “If Einstein was alive today, he’d be working on Adwords.” --Paraphrased by Zed Shaw

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