1846 Immortals.

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A lot of times the only obvious difference between genius and insanity is results. If you look at the history of successful people when they talk about their ideas they are confident on a level that reads as insanity to most people. Old videos of Jeff Bezos make him seem like a nutjob who wants to use this “internet” thing to sell shoes. Of course now we know that Amazon was a great idea, and he’s being painted more and more as a villain who doges taxes, bullies employees, all while twirling his metaphoric moustache. If he had failed no one would know who he is because the expected result happened. So much of what we take for granted started out with someone who saw a potential that no one else could. Apple, Wal-Mart, Mcdonalds, Lego, Atari… Of course if everyone could see these sorts of things then everyone would be fighting to take the top spot, which also happens with these sorts of confident people. Tesla & Edison is a pretty good example. One guy ruled his empire with an iron fist, and the other died married to a Pidgeon.
Of course we already know that what Jess wants to do can work. It all comes down to if she can take hold of whatever it is in the cultural zeitgeist that makes something a success. It’s something that I am capable of observing, but can’t do myself. I’ve never been able to get ahead of the curve in a way that makes a person very successful. I’ve seen people do it accidentally, and a few on purpose, but never managed it myself. I’m too fearful to dive in to things the same way winners do. Fear stays my hand. It’s a trait I share with most of the world, so at least I’m not alone in that respect.

37 Comments

Yeah and that’s why privicy is gone.

But who let it happen?

“Let”, uhmmmm, not so much we ‘let’ as we gave it away. (I mean we in the sense of the Demos, the common people, who give all their data away to “fill out this entry for to win a free car!” Or worse, buy one, get one free! What’s free? Nothing. Who pays for it? You do.
“Oh, heck no!” you say? If they were giving stuff away, they wouldn’t stay in business. You name address and phone number, (only so we can contact you to come pick up the car) are worth a lot to them.

Stupid morning fingers, it wasn’t even spell check, not “for to” , but “form to”, stupid fingers, I left off the .m.
‘Spposed to be: “fill out this entry form to win a free car!”

Well, buy one, get one works on the idea that some people will only buy one without getting one. Same with any other coupon, really. The people who do not get the special price end up paying the full price, which is based not only on cost + reasonable profit for their purchase, but also for the cost of the coupon deal that others are getting.

So if you’re getting the deal, then you’re screwing over another customer, at the behest of the store owner. The weird part is that as the percentage of customers expected to receive the deal goes up, the value of the deal (as calculated by the store owner) will diminish. If you’re planning on “Buy one, get one” for everyone, then your price will ultimately be tagged to the ‘real cost’ of two.

But you’re absolutely right that we (Demos, I’ll have to remember that one) gave away our data in exchange for small perks, turning our identities into a commodity for someone else to profit off of selling. It’ll be interesting, over the next few decades, to see if there’s any way to shove the toothpaste back in the tube.

Getting ahead of that curb is always tough. No one really knows what will work exactly and a lot of people are afraid to try, but more just don’t “see” it. The nay sayers can trip a person up!

Tesla actually got fabulously wealthy by licensing his electrical motor and AC power delivery patents to Westinghouse.
He just subsequently spent it all on mad scientist laboratories while trying to sell the world on wireless communications(ubiquitous today) and wireless power delivery(which he swears he had working).
And then he went stark raving mad, as homelessness tends to weigh heavily on a person’s mind. (Though he DID pick up some of Marconi’s radio experiments during his own radio experiments, and became convinced he was talking to aliens…)

Edison was a devout advocate of the technically inferior DC power system, and created his greatest enemy by bringing Tesla to America and then making him mad enough to quit and go into business for himself.
Spoilers: all our cities are wired with AC. DC failed miserably.

Similarly, as much as people love to rave about Steve Jobs, many of Apple’s greatest successes were all products he had nothing to do with(and the world largely overstates his influence on the iPod and iPhone).
In fact, the Macintosh(based on Xerox STAR technology) was overpriced garbage until Jobs got the boot and the development teams were allowed to do things he hated(Like display in color. No, really, Jobs INSISTED the Mac be B&W.).
Jobs was a great salesman, though. Of himself as well as his products.

And, well… Amazon wasn’t the first online store by a long shot. They were just the ones capable of weathering the dot-bomb storm.

So really, it isn’t that the best man wins, but that history is written by the victors.

It’s actually a combination of the two. A lot of the time the actual device or products isn’t as important as the person marketing it. They become a symbol that people rally behind. And, as I said before, people like to be led.

Tesla at least wanted to make an impact towards the benefit of all whereas Edison was all about the money making interests so I can’t completely blame Tesla for being angry with Edison the way he did.

That’s fair. I just hate to see the salesmen being credited as genius visionaries as so many people do. Without Wozniak, Jobs is just another guy.

Also, I love pointing out that Tesla was a wealthy inventor who built a mad scientist lair with his fortune. He is everything I aspire to be… except for the “dead in a hotel room full of bird poop and convinced Marconi was an alien” part.

In Edison’s case he had the marketing machine and financing backing him up and was selling DC generators for every home that had access to coal gas – ubiquitous at the time as a source of light and power in urban areas. Country folk could just make do with batteries and oil lamps. Despite the massive marketing program, propaganda, disinformation, payola, bribery, horrendous stunts [look-up-electrocution-murdered-pets] and outright lying, his system had a very high tendency to kill people directly or burn down / blow up their homes.
The propaganda continues to this day. If you would take a trip to the Smithsonian, there is plenty of hype on Edison as the inventor of the incandescent light-bulb and a plethora of other devices, even though we now know he bought the patents or ascribed to himself what was developed in his labs by actual inventors, scientists, engineers. Up until a a year or so ago in the future of lighting section there was no mention of LED lighting yet space was given for [very-dangerous] light sources being researched by General Electric.

I just noticed but where/what is the server time set to for on this site?
I’m getting the YEKT time zone. [GMT+5] and it is confusing me =/

“horrendous stunts [look-up-electrocution-murdered-pets] ”

I believe “Let’s tesla this dog!” is an actual Edison quote from one of those stunts.

“DC failed miserably.”

Well, not completely, everyday stuff uses AC, but just from wikipedia:

“Direct current has many uses, from the charging of batteries to large power supplies for electronic systems, motors, and more. Very large quantities of electrical energy provided via direct-current are used in smelting of aluminum and other electrochemical processes. It is also used for some railways, especially in urban areas. High-voltage direct current is used to transmit large amounts of power from remote generation sites or to interconnect alternating current power grids.”

Don’t you dare do impure things to my Jo or her friends you mad witch

I’m pretty sure she’s -already- doing impure things with Jo’s consent. :P

If she’s not, I certainly hope she does off camera. Jo needs to have fun, and not be exploited. And deserves and needs to be treated well. She may tie Thomas for my favorite character. I’m sure he would enjoy being tied by Jo, very much.

Hey guess what I just wrote an essay on for my PD exam? The lust of humans for attention! Oh joyous coincidence.

Don’t forget about education, Jess! Teachers pretty much demand attention from students. It’s practically an entertainment industry; a teacher – like an actor – is trying to hold an audience’s attention and impart information to them… without them falling asleep!

Wow, Jess… delusions of grandeur much? :)) I hope that won’t be the cause of their downfall.
Cause well, you know what comes before the fall? That’s right, pride. And some over-confidence as well.

But how much confidence is too much confidence?
Is it only overconfidence if you fail?

Overconfidence is when you disregard any negative outcomes altogether in favor of your own views and efforts as if such outcomes can’t possibly exist even though they very well do.

Optimism does not excuse a disregard for realism.

Jess is ignoring the 800 lb gorilla in the room here: Market saturation. If the market has too much of the same thing, people will just disregard the latest attempts.

I’ll say this –

People aren’t always drawn in by confidence. Today, most people (older people) are drawn in by those who display AUTHORITY. Why are some people who wouldn’t normally be popular have such strong backing? Because they are seen as persons of authority – they are right because they have legitimacy to their cause/ideas. Whatever it is that gives it to them, they understand it to the point they can use it to get masses of people to stand behind them.

For example – let’s use Castro instead of the common trope (the H guy). Why was Castro so popular? Was it because he was confident? Well, he wasn’t so confident when he started out and he definitely waffled a few times even as the de-facto leader of Cuba. The reason was he created legitimacy for his cause which made him the AUTHORITY on Cuba’s impoverished and downtrodden. He knew how the people of Cuba thought, he understood how they felt, he knew how he could lead them to his end goal. He had true authority as THE Socialist in Cuba during the revolution. And he used that power of legitimacy to stay in power even when he didn’t show the confidence for it.

So when our leaders here in the US seem to win magically over others who should have won because they speak “for the people,” it’s because they demonstrated their authority over the opposition. Whether it’s religious authority, or a legitimate knowledge of business or a true understanding of the people who wanted change. The reason (and I know a lot of my true liberal friends hate this fact) the current guy is President is because he sold himself as the true authority of America. He painted all the opposition as being illegitimate and unknowing of what the vision of America should be. I don’t like him much, but we have to understand that when you show you have legitimacy against everyone else in an arena, you usually win. More times than not.

And where Jess is going to fail is that she’s confident, but really (in my eyes) is not holding the stick of Authority. Instead, she’s trying to be idealistic but not realistic. Which ends not well for those who can’t produce in the end due to a lack of authority in such matters.

And that’s the reason why Steven Jobs had everyone watching him. He painted himself during his lifetime as the “authority” of all things Apple. People went to him because he was the legitimate face of everything Apple. He won against the people who cast him aside, was there during the revolution of computer technology and could use that knowledge to win people over. He might have not understood the technology 100% or even cared about it, but he did bleed Apple, so people ran to him and Apple as the “authority” back then.

This is pretty much how all dictators throughout history won their positions, no matter how ill their intentions were.

Also, this is why the current democracy is a joke. Everybody wants to be represented until they get bought by authority. The vote is not a representation of power so much so as a relinquishment of it to those with real power.

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