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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • It seems you misunderstand the goal of goverment.

    This is your opinion of what you want governments to be, not what they actually are.

    What is the point of not researching and having bigger budget, if it can’t buy thing that did not get created?

    What a lot of negatives and hypotheticals. All solved by getting a return on investment and having that money to do more things with, including research.

    And then on goverment level there is no such thing as copyright or patent.

    I’d like to introduce you to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which is an intergovernmental organisation that does precisely what you say doesn’t exist.

    They STILL need to put in money to create their own product.

    Sure, but the cost to duplicate the product is tiny compared to researching, developing then creating a production run for it. And this fake normally severely impacts the profits for the inventor.

    But now we’re just repeating the same arguments.


  • You appear to want to completely burn down a system you don’t understand because of some examples of misuse. For example, as there are slumlords, should we make all property free? Or should we solve the underlying problem (of massive capital flows to the rich?)

    You also have no idea how to read and understand a patent. The way they are written is horrendously verbose and highly confusing, but so are medical research papers or legal case summaries, and for the similar reasons: these are highly technical documents that have to follow common law (i.e. a long history of legal decisions taken in IP disputes).

    The real problem in the US IMHO has been the constant defunding of the patent office that has allowed a large number of very poor patents to be filed. The problems you are screaming about largely go to that root cause.

    But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water - you have no idea how bad that would be for everybody but the mega corporations.


  • Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products,

    And cheaply, because the research and productisation has been done by somebody else - this is an argument for patents

    plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product,

    Not true. One major issue is that many competitors literally copy the product exactly. Fake products wreck the original company

    even if it’s a copy they still need to make it work,

    That is 100x easier when you have a working product to clone

    They’ll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share… This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there’s no patents…

    The point is exactly that the fake product undercuts the original by a huge amount (they had no investment to pay off).

    If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,…), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.

    I agree that the government model makes sense for a lot of areas and products. But note that a government won’t invest millions or billions in developing a product if another country immediately fakes the product and prevents the government from collecting back the taxes it spent on the research.

    As I discuss above there are lots of criticisms to the current IP laws - adjustment is 1000x better than abolishing a system that has driven research and development for several hundred years


  • All evidence points to the opposite of your conclusion.

    In places where IP laws are weak or non-existent, very little fundamental or expensive research is done by companies - because the result is immediately cloned by 100 competitors. In medicine, companies will not research and develop new drugs to market unless they can get a return on the investment. Even in places with strong IP laws, development of drugs that can’t produce a return in the limited monopoly window is simply not done (eg with a small number of patients or when 1 course of a drug will permanently cure the patient), so many diseases do not have treatments.

    In countries where there is strong IP laws, innovation jumps because innovating creates new things that people/companies can sell for profit. A personal area of interest is development of small-arms - every single advance from muskets to modern weapons is documented in patents in the US and Europe; the rate of innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries was incredible - and that is via patents and profit in the free market.

    Now, we can have a productive argument about state sponsored research - but unless the state undertakes all research in an economy (which would be staggering overreach), we need IP laws.

    We can also discuss patents on software (which IMHO are not needed because companies do fundamental research without patent laws like in the UK).

    We can also discuss what is the appropriate time that copyright should remain - the Disney law in the US is a ridiculous overreach. It was 25 years or until the death of the author/artist - that worked very well for centuries.

    You don’t need government promises of monopoly rights to create innovation in the marketplace, competition drives innovation.


  • Here’s one that I enjoyed and covers a critical period of modern East Asian history: “The Gate” by François Bizot.

    It’s him recounting how he travelled to Cambodia and was captured by the Khmer Rouge. He survived … just … By forming a relationship with Comrade Duch who

    as the Chairman of Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp, and head of the Santebal, Kang Kek Iew was responsible for the interrogation and torture of thousands of individuals, and was convicted for the execution of at least 12,272 individuals, including women and children [Wikipedia]

    While he covers the history of the Khmer Rouge period, his writing is highly empathic and discusses the suffering of himself and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens at the hands of other ordinary citizens and how could this possibly happen. It’s a highly emotional book.

    Best of luck with your reading!


  • That is a very profound point you’ve just made - it made me think.

    While I think you’re 99% correct, I think there is a serious counterpoint to:

    A difference in beliefs … can be addressed through the inspection and sharing of evidence

    This can only be true if both hold values that make logic/reason matter more than emotion or nihilism/postmodernism.

    Some people have fallen into the trap of emotionally rejecting other people’s arguments and denying what are self-evident facts (if you accept realism is basically true). By denying a shared reality, it is near impossible to jointly reason in the space of beliefs about reality.

    Sadly this is important because the right has spent about 40 years denying basic truths (like trickle-down economics doesn’t work and children dressed as cats have litter-boxes in liberal schools). In the last 10 years or so they have developed a complete alternate reality on the Internet, and the single most important facts in this reality are that mainstream media is lying, there is a giant conspiracy controlling the governments and science and that the best way to find the truth is to do your own research.







    1. Extra virgin olive oil for anything where the taste is a good thing
    2. Any oil with high monounsaturates and zero saturates (the rest being polyunsaturates). This may be a seed oil.

    Extra virgin olive oil (and it has to be extra virgin) is known and scientifically proven to be very good for you.

    Seed oils are today highly controversial - I avoided them for many years - but current science research suggests that they are perfectly safe, and indeed good for lowering cholesterol.

    Here’s a real scientist, working and published in exactly this area, talking about this exact question: https://youtu.be/VRlleOTBq7k


  • TSMC and Intel both use ASML lithography, but there are many many more steps than just lithography - Intel, TSMC, Samsung and other chipmakers use different processes to make the components on their chips (many of which are patented and so owned by specific parties).

    These things include the physical structure of the components and wiring on the chip, how the silicon is doped and with what ions, what coatings are put on to be etched in the lithography and what coatings are applied to the etched layers, how the chips are packaged and also how multiple chips can be combined into one package.

    Basically there are similarities but also hige differences between the different manufacturers, and a lot of trade secrets.

    If you’re interested in this kind of thing, I’d recommend the youtube channel Asianometry - the content creator is amazing.