- cross-posted to:
- science@lemmy.world
- videos@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- science@lemmy.world
- videos@lemmy.world
The blue LED was supposed to be impossible—until a young engineer proposed a moonshot idea.
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Really annoying that the company shat on him for years, and continued to do so after he multiplied the value of the company. Toxic behavior.
It’s an extreme example that perfectly illustrates how profit is extracted from employees by the employers. He didn’t have any leverage to get a larger share of the profit from his labor, as is the case with most employees. You could call it toxic behavior, and it is, but it’s the expected behavior, the behavior incentivised by the system.
It also shows how capitalism hinder innovation. It doesn’t create it. The potentially innovative path took money without any guarantee of creating profit. It’s bad business to be innovative. Capitalism prioritizing profit never chooses the best path, even if it gets a good ending eventually despite itself.
I’m not sure how you come to this conclusion. For every example of a capitalist avoiding risky investments, there are 100 capitalists betting on the next innovation.
Venture capital. Heard the term? AI, Metaverse, crypto, web 2.0, .com… The tech space alone is full of capital making (stupidly risky) bets. They also make good bets too, like PC, search engines, online shopping (oh, look how the tech giants came to be).
I get it, capitalism bad. But this is just a nonsensical argument.
I was working for a place that was the market leader in a certain niche of simulation software. Their simulation was about 10x more efficient than their competitors. However, that version of the software is strictly off limits for the public, and made a version which they sold with a sleep statement so that it was only 1.1x faster than the next best solution. That way they could remain market leaders any time the competitors released a better version. Even though many systems rely on growing simulations to simulate bigger scenarios that could help save lives.
Just an example of capitalism impeding progress.
Open source software solves that kind of hidden bullshit.
This video is recommended by Tournesol:
[33🌻] Veritasium: Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED#Tournesol is an open-source web tool by a non profit organization, evaluating the overall quality of the information in videos from community made comparisons, to fight against misinformation and dangerous content.
My favorite thing about widely-available blue LEDs was the effect on TV scifi.
Watch the Star Trek shows made in the 1980s and 1990s and the tricorders, alien gadgets, and other props were always twinkling with red, yellow, and green LEDs to look futuristic. A generation later and every single hand prop on 2000s Doctor Who, Torchwood, etc. glowed and twinkled blue because the LEDs had just become cheap enough for prop makers, but weren’t yet widespread in day-to-day life so the viewers were seeing something strange and unusual.
Now every color of LED imaginable is just common and whatever, but for a good stretch of time glowy blue became the standard “scifi” color just because that particular tech happened to turn up at that particular time.
Purple still seems to be a tough one for most rgb devices I’ve used lol
Excellent counter example to anyone claiming that we need patent and copyright to innovate.
This man made nothing on his invention and was not motivated by money but fame.
There are endless of examples of how those who do things for money hold back the creativity that leads to innovation. This is one of them. It almost didn’t happen because his pursuit was not seen as profitable.
Shuji Nakamura was a researcher at Nichia who was determined to create the first blue LED, which had eluded scientists for decades. Through innovative crystal growth techniques and materials discoveries, he succeeded in developing bright blue and white LEDs in the early 1990s. This breakthrough enabled LEDs to be used for full-spectrum lighting. Nichia’s fortunes grew enormously as a result, though Nakamura was not properly compensated for his invention. Today, LEDs powered by Nakamura’s blue LED technology are ubiquitous and have brought enormous energy savings worldwide.
Something interesting I found was that Nakamura persisted in his research for blue LEDs against the wishes of his company management, who saw it as a waste of resources. His stubbornness and belief in his work paid off by solving a problem that had stumped the electronics industry for 30 years.
He really got screwed. They didn’t want him even working on blue LEDs and then when he was right and actually made one they gave him nothing and made hundreds of millions of dollars. Then sued him when he left to work for another company for “leaking company secrets” which was really all his work. He counter sued and the courts awarded him like 189 million, then the company counter sued back and he got 8 million which just covered his legal fees.
Um… if someone pays you to do a thing, then they own it. Imagine if you paid me a hundred thousand dollars to build a house and then it’s my house to live in. Doesn’t make any sense at all.
I’m not defending the company, but the law is pretty clear on this. If you want to own your own work, then start your own company.
I think their comment is more a critique of wage labour than a misunderstanding of it.
