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I'm reading the comments on the earlier thread and thinking 'shit, people are really negative'. I refresh the page and this thing shows up. Nice to see that at least on HN people possess Second Thoughts or would this be Thirds Thoughts?
I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism. OT rant here: I don't think this is related to Tesla opening up at all. "We make the World a Better Place" is self-important bullshit in 99.9% of cases. The most likely outcome is that what you are doing has no measurable impact on the "goodness" of…
I've been thinking of patents as nukes during the Cold War lately. Superpowers (US/USSR, Apple/Google) acquire very large nuclear/patent arsenals under the guise of protection/defense. These arsenals are relatively cheap for superpowers to build, but they are expensive for small states (small countries/small businesses) to acquire. The US and USSR were roughly equivalent in their arsenals so it made little sense for…
As a consequence, nuclear scientists/physicists of the Cold War era are analogous to patent lawyers today. Kind of sad don't you think ? :)
Patent lawyers just make money. Go to trial? Pay up (even if you loose) Need a new patent? Pay up. Want to enforce your existing patent? Pay up. Want to check to see if someone is infringing on your patents? Pay up. The lawyers, more or less are neutral benefactors of the patent wars.
This explains, at the very least, why rampant partisanship is an inevitability in a large Democracy, despite it being worse off for everybody (including politicians themselves). Instead of saying "in a large Democracy" it should say "in a large Democracy which uses plurality voting." Some voting systems (for instance Condorcet compatible ones) do not encourage partisanship in the same way as plurality does. In fact o…
> In fact other systems actually encourage cooperation and favor candidates that are more in the center. 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 o…
I've been thinking of patents as nukes during the Cold War lately. Superpowers (US/USSR, Apple/Google) acquire very large nuclear/patent arsenals under the guise of protection/defense. These arsenals are relatively cheap for superpowers to build, but they are expensive for small states (small countries/small businesses) to acquire. The US and USSR were roughly equivalent in their arsenals so it made little sense for…
Interestingly, this analogy works very much at the company level, but reverses at the country level. For companies, patents represent weapons in an arsenal, in which MAD prevents offensive action, as you've said. For countries, the reverse holds: a country that jettisons its patent architecture, or never evolved a restrictive one to begin with, will be a bastion for innovators. The stable equilibrium is no bad patent…
The US economy has been an extreme bastion of innovation for 200 years, while also having a robust patent system (one that has only recently become particularly stifling). In fact I'd argue there has hardly been a greater bastion of innovation in world history than the US economy from 1800 to 2000 or so, very few countries compete for that title.
I'm very much not a fan of how the US patent system works today, but I'm finding it difficult to prove your claim based on historical evidence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That and even if the states that developed them in the first place never intended to use them, they remain in the environment for many years after, poisoning entire regions of the landscape. Sometimes to the point of making those regions uninhabitable.
On the other hand, regions which make it uninhabitable for humans make it habitable for animals. Chernobyl is now a haven for wildlife.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around-...
"Birds around Chernobyl have significantly smaller brains that those living in non-radiation poisoned areas; trees there grow slower; and fewer spiders and insects—including bees, butterflies and grasshoppers—live there. Additionally, game animals such as wild boar caught outside of the exclusion zone—including some bagged as far away as Germany—continue to show abnormal and dangerous levels of radiation."
And there are likely plenty more terrible results we don't yet know about.
really like this article... but your font (or font weight) hurts my eyes :(
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of alternatives to Capitalism that do not involve State-heavy mechanisms. For instance, in Communism, despite your assertion to the contrary, there is actually no state at all.
Can you name a historical example where such a system has been successfully implemented?
And that's also honestly not relevant to the discussion at hand. OP stated "the alternative to capitalism is to remove negotiation from individual interactions by implementing more State-heavy mechanisms like Communism" and asked if (s)he was making a straw man. I responded that (s)he was on many levels -- there are plenty of alternatives to Capitalism other than Communism, and Communism is also the opposite of a "state-heavy mechanism" given that it literally has no state.