From the perspective of the gene it makes sense - genes that are more sucesful at making offspring (aka getting copied) should be expected to prosper through natural selection.
- There are as many revolutionary discoveries with and without patents
- Without patents, discoveries would be freely avalaible
As far as I know, two (related) arguments are generally made for patents:
- Patents create an indirect (by preventing the competition from using your invention) or direct (by licensing it) monetary return to innovation, potentially leading to more innovation
- If a company wants competitors not to copy their innovation, they can 1. keep it secret or 2. disclose it and patent it; without patent the choice is between 1. keep it secret or 2. disclose it and have everybody copy them. In this case, patents lead to more innovation being made freely avalaible (with a delay!).
Whether patents lead to more or less innovation is, as far as I know, contentious.
> There are as many revolutionary discoveries with and without patents
I explicitly don't: I mentioned the patent stops others from innovating on top of the patent. The necessity of patents to be public is one I had not considered though, being a force against trade secrets is a good counterpoint.
> Whether patents lead to more or less innovation is, as far as I know, contentious.
Honestly, I really have trouble accepting this. Not that I have an answer, but with the idea that researchers haven't been able to find some sensible way of measuring this by now. I already mentioned the example of light bulbs. Surely there are enough similar historical scenarios available to analyze where one can make use of global differences in IP laws and other variables to simulate control groups?
"Take any revolutionary discovery. Compare making it freely available to anyone, or limiting the availability to those holding the patents. [...]"
You take the situation where there _is_ a revolutionary discovery, with or without patents, and then wonder about the effect of patents on the next innovations. In doing that you do not consider that may be a revolutionary discovery with patents, and none without.
Extruded plastic took off before resin printers because the patents expired a few years earlier.
As far as I can tell, we could have had the 3D printing revolution in the 90s or early 2000s, but instead we locked the technology away to only be used in a few esoteric commercial applications until the patents expired.
Given the abundance of cheap eink book readers, price tags etc on the market, cost doesn't seem to be a problem. OTOH the limitations of the technology - in particular, the contrast and the refresh rate - and how expensive large screens get, prevents it from expanding into more niches.
Perhaps if there were no patent, there'd be more third-party research to improve all these things faster. But as far as adoption of the existing stuff goes, I don't see how license costs are a direct blocker.
If your point is that it offends "no one", except "people like [the other commenter]", i.e. people that are offended, then I guess this would apply to any word about any group.
I don't get it; why would it be _more_ of a problem than with current tax & benefits systems? Politicians can already make the "increase $benefit"/"decrease $tax" their #1 policy.
But they can play a constant shell game with those, distracting you with this one while backtracking on this other one. UBI, IMO, would unify these various systems and eliminate the distractions that allow them to make these promises while not really keeping them.
If you think this will force politicians to keep their promises, as opposed to breaking them in broad daylight, you need to pay more attention to politics.
UBI making shell games like that harder is a good thing if you ask me.
A very smart man, PG himself, once said [0]:
> I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before.
PG started writing essays about what he knows well (programming, start ups), then about things he knows a bit (painting) and then stuff like this, or his essays on economic policy. In any case, he predicted his own future quite well.
Popularity and power seem to do that to people quite often, don't say? Which is said, especially in PG's case, because I like his older essays a lot. The now ones, well, not so much.
There's a similar thing seen with authors - as they get more famous, apparently editors find it harder and harder to get them to rewrite their works, and later books can swell in size for no real advantage.
As you get richer and more famous, it becomes harder and harder to find an editor/friend you will trust to tell you you're being stupid. You can use the internet at large (that's always full of people to tell you you're stupid) but it can be quite hard to filter.
It's really tricky to compare marginal rates like that. Has the definition of taxable income changed over time? How many people were actually taxed at those marginal rates? And so on.
> andard to be a high ranking politicians like presidents, ministers, or CEOs. In the 20 years before 2017, they used not only have studied at the same school, the ENA, but where mostly from the same prom : 1978-1980, the (in)famous Promotion Voltaire.
For context, the ÉNA was a civil service school, i.e. it was for French civil service what West point is for the US Army.
