Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

>Where I'd imagine that we differ is that I think that the pendulum has swung way too far in the direction of the State. With a debt that is now bigger than our GDP and the last hundred years of mostly one-way growth of government and its agencies, the Government is a huge black hole for money that encourages, institutionalizes, and legalizes ever-increasing degrees of corruption.

Also, I don't think there really is a pendulum. As though you can swing back and forth between "too much government" and "not enough government", and then, by finding some balance between the two, get back an equitable, productive, and stable economic and political system.

I don't think the ruling class is so dependent on the government to survive as you believe. In many ways it's the other way around. You can talk about reducing the scope of government all you want, but it will only ever be talk since you have no way to achieve it because you have absolutely no power over your government. None at all. And in fact, for the ruling class, the more people agitate about reducing the scope of government (or, on the other side, reducing the influence of big banks) the better, because it means they aren't paying attention to the power brokers in Washington, nor the capitalists Wall Street actually serves.

Sorry if I'm getting too red pill / blue pill. My point is this: like it or not there is already class war being fought in America (and most everywhere else for that matter, but it's getting pretty dire in the US right now). One side though, for the most part, isn't fighting. Which is good for the side currently winning, because that's only way they can win. And if you don't believe me you can just observe the results: most Americans agree the US government needs to fuck off and quit doing a lot of the stuff it does, and most people understand that having a few megabanks holding a large fraction of the assets of the world is a pretty fucking dumb idea. How close are we to achieving either of those goals, do you think? Do you reckon it's time to be smart about achieving those goals, rather than pontificating about The Way Things Ought To Be if everyone would just be nice and play by the rules?

I think it's a terrible analogy:

1) Nuclear weapons are not even relatively cheap. (Certainly not for the Soviet Union.) ~$640B over the next 10y, and this is during a draw-down in weapons.

http://www.ploughshares.org/what-nuclear-weapons-cost-us

2) It's pretty ridiculous to suggest that nuclear powers covertly threatened smaller countries with the threat of their nuclear arsenals, let alone actually attacked smaller powers (unless you count the US bombing of Japan).

Using patents doesn't lead to Mutually Assured Destruction, and there are many cases of large organizations using patents to damage or defeat other smaller (or even large) organizations.

3) Many of the patent trolls are surrogates of big players who simply give them plausible deniability. Again, there's no analogy of a big power giving nuclear weapons to terrorists to conduct attacks on its rivals because the downsides are so immense. With surrogate patent trolls it's merely a matter of some bad P.R.

Individuals and corporations are not rational machines. Things are much more complex then an equation.

Zing!

In this story, it's regulation that has put some companies at the merci of competitors. Small Startup Y has to hope that Big Corp X wants to license a patent for a fair $ amount. Startup Y has no way to negotiate a large fee down to an acceptable level, pay the expensive licenses or fight in court if they ignore the patent.

Considering two companies with patents, you get the Nash equilibrium where both companies go to court for patent infringement (assuming the plaintiff always wins). The payoff matrix could look like this, where the numbers are the changes in profits in %.

            | court    | not court
  ---------------------------------
  court     | -5 \ -5  |  -15 \ 10
  ----------|----------------------
  not court | 10 \ -15 |  1   \ 1
  ---------------------------------

Assume the profit of the previous year is 14%.

  - If no company goes to court, both profits grow slightly with 1% to 15%.
  - If one company goes to court, and the other doesn't, the plaintiff's profit increases with 10% to 24% and the defendant's drops with 15% to -1% (placing it a loss).
  - If both companies go to court, the profits of both companies drop with 5% to 9%.

If you want a real-life example of this situation, just look at the lawsuits between Samsung & Apple. Probably the only case where they'll evolve to the pareto optimal solution, is when patents no longer exist at all.

A world without patents would allow companies to win customers based on pure attractiveness and features, not by getting competition banned. Note that this isn't the same as giving your key designs away for free. It means I could reverse engineer an iphone touchscreen and create a compatible version, without being sued by anyone. Apple would still have the early mover advantage with existing customers; the consumer would have more/better/cheaper choices and i would have a more attractive product. (Note that this might not be the case for other sectors, like pharma, where it costs a lot to develop a new drug from scratch, rather than the cheaper additive innovations in the tech sector).