To get started for free, visit brilliant.org/Sideprojects/ or click on the link in the description. The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription.
Such crazy hatred / racism towards America in the opening of the Ponzi story: " A truly American Dream" - RIGHT AFTER SAYING THE GUY WASN'T AMERICAN! USING SLAVE LAVOR EARNINGS!! OLDEST STORY IN HISTORY!!! I can hate America too, butt, you need better examples ... LOL "A Pyramid Scheme = SOOOO American " wtf!?!?! Pyramids are Egyptian, DUNCE😹
Simon is one of the original RU-vid LEGENDS!! He may not write much of his material, but his delivery is the very definition of EPIC. Full Kudos to this guy and the teams of writers and researchers behind him.
it must be true! Bill Gates uses his fortune to employ innumerable tiny men of immense brain size to defeat me at any computer game I ever tried to play. it makes so much sense. Also my irony detector is in full working order and the readout is set to 'laughter' (it wobbles occasionally towards applause) ;-)
ChatGPT: If we're drawing parallels between Mario and Charles Darwin, Luigi could be someone like Alfred Russel Wallace. Both Luigi and Wallace played significant roles alongside their more well-known counterparts, contributing to their respective fields of study (biology and evolution) in important ways.
The mechanical turk is a strikingly clever machine. If Kempelen or Mälzel had marketed it as a magician's illusion for entertainment purposes, I think they'd have made a fortune. Maybe Kempelen thought that kind of presentation would tarnish his image as an inventor, or cast a dim light on members of royalty who already fell for the trick.
In the 1980s when I was at uni studying anthropology among other things, my brother shared this interest so I pranked him. I told him that a hominin ancestor had been discovered in a bog in northern Europe and that it had an adaptation to the cold which was preserved by the acidic peat. It appears the creature was completely covered in a very soft, fine white feathery material. After registering his astonishment I delivered the punchline. Yep, they're calling it Quilt down man. He still brings it up. In fact, I think he's used it on a few people😂.
Hearing William's last name, which is the same name as my previous employer, definitely perked my ears up. That was pretty hilarious to me, even if there's no potential relation.
The BBC’s Spaghetti tree and a year later, the American tourists who were hunting the wild Haggis in the Highlands of Scotland. Both were fantastic modern hoaxes in times when people should have known differently.
I still love Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast. I don't know if it was intended as a hoax, but the reaction it caused was certainly akin to what a hoaxer would hope to achieve.
That actual number of people fooled wasn't even that large, apparently the story was greatly inflated by newspapers trying to discredit this new form of media (and competition): radio.
In elementary school a kid believed penguins could fly and used this one photoshopped image of a penguin flying as evidence, and the teacher punished me for telling him he was too gullible.
Probably a better name for it is a pyramid scheme. I highly doubt Ponzi was the first to have employed it. It plays on the constant human emotion of greed and "easy" money. The cryptocurrency craze reeked of it and while a good number of people did make money with it, at the end of the day...what is it literally worth and what backs it up?
@@aftersexhighfives yes ofc I know ponzi happened first🤣 that’s the point of my comment is that decades later we have yet *another* ponzi. We will continue to never learn I’m convinced 🤷♂️🤦♂️
Im an accountant, Ive said right from the start of crypto, thats its a classic Ponzi scheme. Been shouted down by believers all along, coz they made money, some of them a lot of money. Just like Ponzi's original investors. And incredibly, ppl still are so myopic, that they think, just coz they got in (and important got out) early and made money, then it cant possibly be a Ponzi scheme.
It's absurdly funny to me that someone named Charles Dawson ended up being being a fake Charles Darwin. I guess Dawson is legally distinct from Darwin LOL kind of like how they have to call fake cheese, "cheez".
They call the non-cheese "cheese _product_ ", actually. I'm sure there are some that use "cheez", but even a basic understanding of how the law works should make it clear that any product that intentionally misspells it's own descriptive name is doing so for protection against potential litigation.
Another factor in the Piltdown Man was the discovery of Neanderthal's in Germany in the 1850's. Naturally certain members of British society decided that obviously we should have our own human ancestor whether real or not. This of course, all played into the eugenics, colonialism and racism still rife in the period.
Didn't know Ponzi was on School Street in Boston. There's a Walgreens there now, with an old bank vault roped off in the back. I walk past it so much I've never bothered to see if there's a plaque or something. Now I'm curious to see if it dates back to his time and if he possibly owned it at some point.
Like calling Maria Theresa queen of Bulgaria (which was under Ottoman control) and Romania (only Transylvania since Romania as a state didn't exist yet). And not Archduchess of Austria, the Holy Roman Empress, and ruler of several other much bigger and more populous countries.
Poe's essay argues "of course it's a hoax. If it were a machine, it would play perfectly and never lose. Whereas we know it does lose from time to time."
An example of legal arbitrage happened in Brazil in the 1980s during a period of very high inflation. People would purchase gold and then resell it in the US at a profit. The way it worked was they would place an order for a gold transaction and the price would be fixed at the contract date. It would take a couple of weeks to months for the order to be processed and in that time inflation was significant enough that the currency exchange guaranteed a healthy profit. People were wiling to take a loss on the gold because it meant they got stable US dollars.
Report the spam! Also, do you think exchanging a standard index in a country with a stable dollar might effect the inflationary trend of the country you are supplying with a gain outside your countries foreign exchange? By exchanging a precious metal with an exchange commision that was willing to pay you twice the value of your economy's value, wouldn't it create a surplus of your currency(fiat) with finite valued goods? Maybe legal, but certainly helped the inflation market. Loves!
Pay me loads of money for money that excist online only. You can't see or touch it. But it's yours, promised. You can sell it to other people later with the same promise.
@@petrpokorny7768 Eccept that with normal currency I can pay everywhere I want. Try paying with bitcoin in the supermarket. Or any other normal shop for that matter. I don´t know of any shop that accepts bitcoin.
Any computer can be rendered mechanically, so the mechanical turk isn't totally outlandish, especially for the Era. Though the engineering of even a simple chess program in clockwork would be stunning
The whole thing would have to be extremly large. Babbage's more simple calculators were the size of wardrobes. Engineering from the 1800s would have needed vastly more space for something like that then the first vacuum tube computers, however what a sight it would have been.
Isn’t Binance shifting money around the way Ponzi did to calm nervous investors? Paying some money back and freezing transactions when withdrawals exceed a limit?
Report the spam... also humans have a set of upper teeth called canines. They are the sharp pointy ones for tearing into flesh and ripping fibrous vegetable matter before is is gnashed (sp?)[i stand by it] by the molars!
Literally, every omnivorous and carnivorous mammal has canine teeth. That includes bears, cats, and bats. The term "human-like" implies that the creature was a hominid, not a canid. I get that you were trying to be funny, but jokes tend to work better when they're properly researched and based in some element of fact.
as a money lover.. ponzi got what he deserved as half of us probably do. But and also; I LOVE THAT QUOTE THAT IT WAS WORTH FIFTHTEEN BECAUSE I HAD EM BY THE BALLS.. i gotta say i feel the hell outta that. GOD BLESS YOU ALL!!
You ever watch an informational video, or the news, about something you know inside and out, and they begin to talk out of their ass and make completely false claims? Then you wonder if everything they say is all horseshit? That was my reaction to this video.
@@breno855Well first, he said Maria Theresa was the Queen of Bulgaria and Romania, she wasn't lmao. She was the Queen of the Holy Roman Empire. The only territory of modern Romania she controlled was Transylvania. Also, the Holy Roman Empire never controlled any territory of Bulgaria. I'd love to know where his writers got that information from lol
TBH, I almost feel like the way the Mechanical Turk worked was even cooler given it was a Hoax. Like yeah it wasn't actually a thinking computer, but the level of complexity involved to pull all that off is just fascinating!
This reminds me of watching the Madoff series on Netflix. I find it hard to feel bad when so many of the interviewees who said "it seemed impossible to continually make profit when the market would fail....but we kept our money with him." Your greed is what cost you and think of the how many people who made millions during the decades of scheming.
At first, when you got to the subject of covering Ponzi, stating: "The scheme that consists of taking on new investors for the express purpose of paying off earlier investors, until there are no more gullible investors to con at which point, the entire scheme collapses." I thought you were going to use that to expose Bitcoin. . .
That was a lazy mistake given the Maria Theresa is a major figure in European history and not some minor monarch. Of the many lands she ruled, he named Bulgaria which was under Ottoman control and Romania which didn't exist as a country yet. Transylvania was part of her realm. Then he referred to François-André Danican Philidor as emperor instead of composer.
The Enigma code was cracked before the beginning of WW2 by Polish mathematicians, which were able to work with the first copies of the Enigma and who then informed the British (who were regarded as Poland's protecting power at the time). Poles and Germans share a long history in what are now Polish territories. The Poles can rightly be proud of what they have achieved. At around the same time, Konrad Zuse developed the first electronic calculating machine in Berlin (in his parents' living room in Berlin Kreuzberg using telephone equipment, relays, etc.). Programmability was added over time and Zuse's computers remained the most important calculating machines in Europe for a long time. Zuse had only carried out a few calculations for the Nazis, but they did not yet recognize the potential. In any case, much of the widespread Enigma-Turing story is a cover-up.
Maria Theresa was the emperess of the Austro-Hungarian dominon: She was the sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Mantua, Milan, Galicia and Lodomeria, the Austrian Netherlands, and Parma. Romania and Bulgaria did not even exist at that time...
Turing didn’t break Enigma, the Poles did, with pencil and paper… what Turing did was automate it, speeding up and parallelizing the work the Poles and others had already done. He gave us imperative programming and a lot of the basis of computer science, but credit where credit’s due.
This is just wrong. Why oh why does nationalism continue to inspire such revisionist and false history? What is it about this hole in people's egos that makes them so eager to fill it with the accomplishments of others, so long as those others share the geographical region from which they originated? Conceptually it's a very small stretch from that to outright racism. And for that, people happily recite absurdities, while denying credit where it is really due. I encourage people to look up the facts and details of this story. While the Poles did contribute to the overall effort, to say that they broke Enigma is to completely mischaracterize what they actually did. Turing, on the other hand, DID break Enigma, an accomplishment that was orders of magnitude beyond that of the Poles. There is really no comparison to be made here, and those who claim otherwise are making one that is just completely false.
@@JamesThompson-zk1ht Britain’s own museum at Bletchley Park makes it perfectly clear that it was the Poles who cracked the Enigma cypher, and numerous statements by members of the Bletchley team have always backed up the Polish cryptanalysts as being vital to the work of breaking the cypher and all the mathematical work that formed the basis of Turing’s Bombe… which did, indeed, increase the speed of that breaking by orders of magnitude, making meaningful Allied interception possible, but it’s certainly not my (non-Polish, non-British) nationalism that in any way inspires giving credit where credit is (rightly) due. The fact that the posters and a memorial at Bletchley back up those facts doesn’t do much to help your argument.
From what I heard, what actually happened was that von Kempelen scoffed at François Pelletier's illusion act and told his patron, Maria Theresa, that he could do better. He then created the Turk and wound up stuck keeping up the show when he'd rather have gone back to his usual work as, more or less, court inventor.
I was expecting the Hitler Diaries, and Bernie Madoff. I did not know the original Ponzi was as big or bigger than Madoff was for his day. Interesting.
Who ever picked this zippy bumblebee sound in the background needs a swift kick in the shins and please don't do it again. It's louder than Simon and just headache inducing.
Why would the french care that the mechanical Turk bested Benjamin Franklin? He was an ally of France from what was then a minor geopolitical backwater.
stone henge was built with diesel powered cranes, There are photos readily available online. They took everything apart and then rebuilt it with modern equipment so stone henge is not original and is not an actual ancient megalith anymore.
@@MrPleers I actually think there’s a difference between pagan and Wiccan, even though Wicca does qualify as pagan. I know they (I’ve only known one personally) emphasize being a WHITE witch and only worship nature, but….
@@j.p.6932 They can call themselves whatever they want. But the point is that only wiccam's call themselves witches. Outsiders don't consider them as witches. In fact if someone would tell me he or she is a witch, I would most likely just laugh. Or roll my eyes.
"The hoax is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent, too - hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art." -- Kevin Young
Maria Theresa wasn't the queen of Bulgaria and Romania lol She was the Queen of the Holy Roman Empire and ruled from Vienna Austria. The Habsburgs never even controlled Bulgaria or all of Romania so I'm not sure where your writer got that information?
And it all started with a slick-talking serpent pulling a fast one on an unsuspecting innocent woman for something she didn't even need. (tell 'em what their itching ears want to hear)
Joe Biden with his corrupt son filtering money to him? "The Big Guy". Or maybe Nancy Pelosi somehow always pulling in record profits on her stocks? Or maybe Maxine Waters giving her family members giant paychecks for obscure useless jobs? Or maybe even the Clintons with their pay to play fund the Clinton Foundation that laundered millions for them? The list goes on...
Maria Theresia queen of Bulgaria? Seriously? Bulgaria was never under rule of the Habsburg family. Romania as a country didn´t exist. Bulgaria and parts of Romania where part iof the Ottoman empire und Transylvania a part of the Habsburg ruled Kingdom of Hungary.
I don't want to sound criticall, but Maria Theresa has nothing to do with Bulgaria. When she was ruller of Austro-Hungary, Bulgaria was under Ottoman ocupation.
Lol calling Maria Therese the queen of Bulgaria and Romania …She was the sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Mantua, Milan, Galicia and Lodomeria, the Austrian Netherlands, Parma and a Holy Roman Empress.
