The Prestige Still (or: How Academia Distills Fame from Futility)

The ERC grant is the Moonshine Lab of Science—a gleaming copper contraption for masked eugenics experts masquerading as golden spires!

Designed to boil down 200,000 hopefuls into one barrel of Elite Researcher™ brand whiskey.

The procedure? Flawless.

The motivation? A green card or gold-embossed bottle labeled Tenure. Gold flakes at high end restaurants? Rocket scientists creating machines that allow deaf people to feel | hear music ?

Si!

Problem? The output is 99% sludge—papers so dense they sink ships; IP so niche it only cites itself.

The real world stays bone-dry; sipping from a cracked cup of applied topocalculus !

Plot twist: The 0.1% that slips through—the quantum weirdos, the away-from-the-mainstream maniacs—aren’t just byproducts.

They’re the secretion; the stash, the moonshine so strong it melts the still.

Quantum computing and the various patents wasn’t ERC-approved; it was brewed in a bathtub by folks who stopped reading the manual.

Moral?

The system isn’t broken—it’s not measuring proof instead of proof.

Records?

Innovation isn’t a patent like the intrapreneur mentioned above; it’s a hangover cure no one saw coming.

Cheers to the bootleggers.