Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Could Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower Have Worked?
dryriver writes: For those who are unfamiliar with the story, from 1901-1902, inventor Nikola Tesla had a 187-foot-tall experimental wireless electricity transmission tower called the "Wardenclyffe Tower" built in Shoreham, New York. Tesla believed that it was possible to generate electrical power on a large scale in one part of the world and transmit that electrical power to electrical receivers in far away parts of the world wirelessly, using parts of Earth's atmosphere as the conducting medium. Tesla had huge problems getting the project financed -- powerful banker J.P. Morgan didn't play along and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson didn't help a pleading Tesla either. An excerpt from a Wardenclyffe documentary shows the tower finally being dynamited and sold for scrap in 1917. The Wardenclyffe Tower never reached operational status; wireless electrical transmission between continents never happened; Tesla became an emotionally broken man who died regretting that he did not manage to finish his life's work; and to this day nobody knows exactly how the Wardenclyffe Tower was supposed to function technically. To the question: Do you believe that Tesla's dream of electrical devices anywhere in the world essentially being able to draw electrical power from the sky with a relatively simple antenna could have worked, had he gotten the necessary funding to complete his experiments?
Hint: socialism is the collective ownership of the means of production. That implies that at least some production is going on.
"From each according to his ability" = you work in the capacity as far as you are able.
You may argue that no one will have incentive to work if what they produce is being taken away, but that is what is currently happening under capitalism: your boss and the government take the majority of value from what you produce. Yet you still keep showing up at that job.
You are conflating Socialism with Communism. One of these definitely does NOT work and the other definitely DOES. See if you can guess which is which.
Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany's bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on others what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for foodstuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism.
That is from Time's 1939 Man of the Year for Hitler. Compare that to the current "socialist" mantra of the Democrat party: ownership of companies, restriction on profits, nationalization of industries, wealth taxes. The Democrat party is literally the party of Nazism, and Hitler's platform is enshrined in their own platform, just with different names.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!