Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

Now I understand where the author is coming from, and I agree there is a terrible lack of trust in modern America. I just don't agree that the cynical view, that all humans are untrustworthy shit-bags, is all that terrible. Cyncism causes parties to make explicit their assumptions about future behavior. We can then codify this assumed behavior in contracts.

If I was a battery manufacturer and I wanted to use Tesla's patents, I would approach Tesla and ask for a contractual agreement whereby Tesla agreed not to use those patents against me. If Tesla were unwilling to enter into this sort of contractual agreement with me, I would assume they were reserving the right to later use these patents against me.

The experience of the technology industry is that innovation happens in periods of monopoly. That monopoly might arise from first-mover effects, network effects, lock-in effects, or IP protections (patents, copyrights, and trademarks). This has been true from Bell Labs to Xerox to Google to Facebook. Bell Labs had its heyday when AT&T was a government-sanctioned monopoly. The Xerox Alto, which pioneered the GUI, the mouse, and networking, was invented at a Xerox that had 100% of the U.S. copier industry, a few years before an antitrust consent decree forced it to license its patents to Japanese competitors, quickly destroying its marketshare.[1] If another search engine could easily copy Google's data and algorithms, they wouldn't have the money to be working on self-driving cars and AI. Facebook is a textbook example of network effects precluding perfect competition.

In comparison, look at the PC industry, which is based on open standards and an OS licensed on non-discriminatory terms. What has happened to the PC? They have become commodities and innovation is essentially dead. Companies like Lenovo eke out single-digit profit margins, and nobody can afford to spend money on R&D.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#1970s

Actually, single-round winner-take-all democracy induces a race toward the middle, not polarization. (If everyone is aligned on a 1D spectrum and votes for the candidate closest to their position, then both candidates are incentivized move toward the median position.)

What you're really getting at isn't the idea of polarizations versus moderation, it's voting coordination (i.e. political parties) aka collusion. Unfortunately, alternate voting systems don't eliminate collusion, they just push it to a different level (e.g. proportional representative systems still have 51% coalitions at the level of parliament). You might reasonably argue that that's a better level to put that collusion, but it's definitely not eliminated through some simple choice of voting system.

If you really want to eliminate collusion and induce consensus making, you can consider "randomized parliaments". They operate in a way very analogous to the mechanism that makes poker showdowns rare. Although he chooses an unfortunate name of "quantum parliment" (since there's nothing quantum about the randomness), Aerts explains the idea well here: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0503078