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Used Tesla prices tumble as embarrassed owners look to sell (arstechnica.com)

submitted 23 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

if Nikola Tesla weren't a eugenicist i'd agree with you

[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 minutes ago

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/nikola-tesla-the-eugenicist-eliminating-undesirables-by-2100-130299355/

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

Oof, that's a tough read.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

it was the turn of the 20th century; everybody was a eugenicist. that's why we say 'people from the past sucked'.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 minutes ago* (last edited 5 minutes ago)

People say that because they support it and they don't think it's a big deal. There were always anti-eugenicist movements (and always people opposed to fucking children, and having slaves, and even eating meat or going to war, and other morally shitty things justified with this excuse). That's literally how the movements against these things came about - people throughout time have been against them. You just discount them because you align yourself with the other side, for some reason.

Tesla was not mentally well. But he had the power to make weapons, including a so called "Death Beam" https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html

And look, Trump connection:

After a three-day investigation, Trump's report concluded that there was nothing which would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands, stating:

"His [Tesla's] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.[233]"

In a box purported to contain a part of Tesla's "death ray", Trump found a 45-year-old multidecade resistance box.

https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html

An operation code-named "Project Nick" was heavily funded and placed under the command of Brigadier General L. C. Craigie to test the feasibility of Tesla's concept. Details of the experiments were never published, and the project was apparently discontinued. But something peculiar happened. The copies of Tesla's papers disappeared and nobody knows what happened to them.

The morning after the inventor's death, his nephew Sava Kosanovic´ hurried to his uncle's room at the Hotel New Yorker. He was an up-and-coming Yugoslav official with suspected connections to the communist party in his country. By the time he arrived, Tesla's body had already been removed, and Kosanovic´ suspected that someone had already gone through his uncle's effects. Technical papers were missing as well as a black notebook he knew Tesla kept—a notebook with several hundred pages, some of which were marked "Government."

P. E. Foxworth, assistant director of the New York FBI office, was called in to investigate. According to Foxworth, the government was "vitally interested" in preserving Tesla's papers. Two days after Tesla's death, representatives of the Office of Alien Property went to his room at the New Yorker Hotel and seized all his possessions.

Dr. John G. Trump, an electrical engineer with the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was called in to analyze the Tesla papers in OAP custody.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Imagine disregarding the entire domain of Tesla's work - changing the entire world as we know it with his research and innovations - and the comment they need to make for online points is some virtue-oriented pat-me-on-the-back-im-ethical blorp about random social norms of the time. lol but cry.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

yeah, dude was so good at electrical shit I literally cannot comprehend how he got to some of his ideas from where he was.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 minutes ago* (last edited 20 minutes ago)

He had really bad autism. He was in love with a pigeon. Brilliant he was, but mad as a hatter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 42 minutes ago* (last edited 21 minutes ago)

I think he was just intuitively good at seeing what exactly is the portrayal of electricity and magnetism. A unique genius with a certain insight.

I sometimes feel that there were many businesses concerns that grew around his early research and they were so successful that his newer research must have been a threat to that.

Through all the mystery, half-truths, and frankly magical thinking people have with this man, it's really hard to know what he was up to in his final days of work, before he became a homeless bag-man. I somehow feel, without making any kind of declarative statement, that he was working on transmission of energy with longitudinal (vs transverse) waves, and discovering methods of conveying and extracting electrical potential from and through Earth.

Inline Edit: To expand on the above paragraph: The Earth doesn't really "absorb" electrons like a pillow absorbing a ping pong ball. The energy in the negative charges that the Earth grounds must move in waves, therefore they're grounded but now the waves are bouncing around in the Earth; that energy still exists and may sum with other waves in an additive way. I believe, again without making a declarative statement, that Tesla recognized this and was pioneering research on how to gather momentum from those waves.

The word "free energy" always obliterates any form of rational discourse. But there was something to it in a way, but to clarify, not in a literal way. Not in the sense of violating fundamental laws of conservation, rather seeing the "other side of the coin" that if the Earth is effectively infinite Ground then it's also effectively an "infinite" source of power if harvested.

I've never really "researched" the man directly but what I do know comes from quite a bit of my casual STEM self-study over decades.