Yes, you're ignored, and I read your comment anyway.

No, in saying "use drugs," I was not "implying cannabis." I said "use drugs" because I meant "use drugs." Rather than trying to interpret or 'read into' what I'm saying, it might help if you responded to my post, and not what you post in your mind on my behalf.

And I will take you up on your 'challenge:' below is a list of ten "highly intelligent" people who have used cocaine (note: at no point did I say "encourages the use of cocaine." I said "use drugs" without becoming addicted, and being able to function), so that you can provide me with 10,000 more** whose lives and families have been destroyed by it. (**And note here, we're talking about individuals whose lives were destroyed by the use of cocaine itself, and not by the pointless drug laws that imprison people for having a mental or emotional condition that provokes "self-medication" as a form of treatment. Nor are we talking about the illegal status of cocaine which, itself, gives rise to violent cartels that function in the shadow of its legal status.)

So, while certainly many of the following list of "highly intelligent" (non-cognitively deficient) and successful "celebrities" may no longer be using cocaine, all of the following have used cocaine and are/were not addicted and function(ed) just fine:

Sigmund Freud
Thomas Edison
Oprah Winfrey
Stephen King
Tim Allen
Hunter S. Thompson
Angelina Jolie
Robert Louis Stevenson
Steven Tyler
Robert Downey, Jr.

There are others (like William Burroughs, Eric Clapton, Grover Cleveland, David Crosby, Arthur Conan Doyle, Isadora Duncan, Ulysses S Grant, Abbie Hoffman, Elton John, King George V, Larry Kudlow, Sir Paul McCartney, & Barack Obama), but I thought I'd stop at 10.

And if you post the 10,000 names of those whose lives and families were destroyed by cocaine (and not by the pointless drug laws or its illegal status) by the end of the week, I'll take your point.

That's true for a post industrial POV.
When machines already exist, and you just need energy to get things moving.

The energetic concerns of bygone eras were :
Whale oil, and later kerosene. For lighting. (note: back then, a day's work would only buy minutes of light)
Firewood, and later coal. For heating.
Manpower was the only energy user when it came to food production.

Early machines such as the combine were horse drawn, and did not need an energy architecture in place. (ignoring "food" as an energy)

Later machines used steam power, and hence could piggy back on the already existing wood/coal energy architecture (in turn stimulating it to grow larger).

Once the machinery industry was established, and the revenue generation was in place, it was possible to invest in improvements and alternative energies - ultimately leading up to oil burning machinery being common.

In any case, historically, industrialization drove the energy industry. (As it should, why have an industry to produce a product (energy) that isn't needed?)
And industrialization depended on a conducive society. A place where an inventor could own his invention, and could sell it, allowing things that were no more than ideas or garage trinkets to transition into products - which in turn place demand on other resources such as [forms of] energy.

In the past, there was nothing, so everything was build from the ground up. Industries grew out of nothing, they weren't established up front.
Modern times are different, where you have investment capital from entities who's entire existence revolves around investing, and you can front the establishment of an industry in the calculated hope of future demand.
(Granted, lords/aristocrats had a hand in industrial investment. Just not the kind or scale that you can see today.)

What you say applies a bit later, when industrialization was already well under way. Like when Thomas Edison used investment capital to fund power plants and an electrical network, in order to power the first [practical, but not 'first'] light bulb in New York.

-scheherazade

As part of his campaign to smear Westinghouse's AC standard in favor of his own DC standard, Thomas Edison really did electrocute stray dogs (and an elephant...I swear it's true) to try to demonstrate how dangerous AC was. Ultimately, Westinghouse's alternating current won.

The big winner in the great current wars of the late 19th century: Australia's greatest export, AC/DC.

*happy memories and *history too.

I like his Thomas Edison reply.

And Thomas Edison gets too much credit. When somebody is the public figurehead of a group, and that group has a coherent personality, then it's meaningful to identify the actions of the group with the figurehead.

The gestalt entity known as Ronald Reagan kicked the supports out from under the California state government, and then went on to do the same to the federal government. I can't think of one aspect of the current financial/political crisis in the US that can't be clearly linked to the reagonite program. Barring everything else, he choose to be the symbol of that, and I'll continue to treat him as such.

>> ^Yogi:
Reagan gets a bad rap

>> ^iwastheturkey:

first!


No, sir. You weren't first, nor was Thomas Edison. *rolleyes*

Congratulations! Your comment has just received enough votes from the community to earn you 1 Power Point. Thank you for your quality contribution to VideoSift.

I normally insta-downvote animal cruelty, but I didnt downvote this because it serves as a reminder of what a cnut edison was. Admittedly I had seen this before in some documentary film (Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.) and was disgusted.

Everything I've heard about edison since only makes him more of a slimeball, and Tesla more of a genius. Apparently he did this to show how dangerous AC and Teslas ideas were. He didnt give a crap about the elephants criminal record this was about money.

Somebody probably said all that already but I'm too tired to go back and check

>> ^robbersdog49:

Why are people voting for such a distasteful video? I have been shown this before so I'm assuming this is just the film of the elephant dying in agony.
Why would anyone want to watch this? What kind of sick freaks are you?

>> ^garmachi:

Did anybody even read the description to this, or was it added after people started insulting Edison. It's not like he did it on a lark one lazy Sunday. That would be a dick move.
Imagine if a killer whale or a lion mauled and ate three trainers. The public (many of you, in fact) would take up pitchforks and torches demanding the termination of such a beast. This is exactly what happened here.
Although admittedly, it would seem far less cruel if the elephant didn't have such a damn cute name!


No, he really was an asshole

>> ^ToKeyMonsTeR:

I dunno if its true, but someone on reddit was saying the elephant was going to be killed anyways for having killed its trainer or a spectator or somethin... Edison still seems like a dick imo, but he may not have just killed a random zoo/carnival elephant.


yah it had gon on a rapage at an event , i think it killed a spekctator as well.

Thomas Edison: Dick.

For those of you who follow the Assassin's Creed storyline, Thomas Edison wasn't just an asshole, he was a Templar. They had Tesla killed because he was working on a power plant to provide the world with free electricity -- and the Templars didn't want that at all.

They wanted a worldwide commercial empire that everyone was beholden to...

Tags for this video have been changed from 'drunk history, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, crispin glover' to 'drunk history, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, crispin glover, john c riley' - edited by enoch

Tags for this video have been changed from 'drunk history, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison' to 'drunk history, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, crispin glover' - edited by enoch