Most cars are built using unibody construction so removing the cabin is not an option. Body on Frame vehicles are heavier which impacts performace and the connections will add complexity to the vehicle which increases costs. Someone has to pay the costs of having several chassis. This will be recouped by much higher operating costs.
In the end people die when eating certain animals so the absolute statement of "if it moves, it's edible" is false. To be more accurate "If it moves, parts of it are edible".
Why should this be a problem for a battery switching system? Isn't it much easier to cool the batteries when they're outside of the car? Seems like this is a case of an advantage for the swapping system.
The system must also be able to be charged direct while the battery is in the vehicle. The Better Place model was that the car would be charged overnight at home most of the time and battery swapping would mainly occur on long trips. Much like the fast charging stations used by Tesla Motors. Lithium batteries need to be cooled during discharge as well as charging.
So you'll need more batteries than cars upfront, but in the long run, you will keep discarding the degraded batteries without an additional hassle to the owners and it will even out.
Who pays for the additional up front costs? Would you rather borrow $20,000 today and pay me back in 10 years or $10,000 now and another $10,000 in five years? In the second instance you save five years of interest on $10,000. Higher up front costs cause higher long term costs.
The cost for 50k of range for swap-able batteries and the additional cost for designing and building the car with the swap-able battery far outweigh the day or two inconvenience to replace the battery. Swap-able batteries are really only useful for high mileage vehicles that recharge frequently throughout the day and Better Place failed to target them.
The beauty of the standardized recharging plug is that it is a small component. Plugs of many different shapes could be accommodated in any car and the industry picked one standard.. The battery on the other hand is integral to the design and performance of the vehicle. A standardized battery restricts those considerations too much to be viable.
Vehicle owners don't care about follow on uses for used batteries. They care about the cost and performance of their car and the cost of re-charging, Swap-able batteries will be more expensive to build and more expensive to recharge (considering all the more expensive stations and standby batteries) and have poorer performance due to design compromises. Better place never overcame these issues and it may not be possible..
so if you can one that's not up to your expectations, swap it again.
It is difficult to swap a battery in the middle of nowhere if it fails unexpectedly. The point is that the range on different batteries will effect driving. As batteries wear out they will have to be swapped more often and it will be to the station owners' advantage to use them as long as possible. The convenience of swapping batteries has not been shown to override the limitations.
Form: If it's a BEV or one with a range extender that only charges the battery but doesn't power the car, there's no transmission to worry about.
What I was getting at was that batteries are shaped to fit the car and not the other way around. Some cars have T shaped batteries. Other cars have rectangular batteries. I don't see where I mentioned transmissions.
Cooling: I don't know how the Fluence ZE handled this but they did - and they were selling cars in Israel, a fairly hot country.
Cooling is provided by a combination of of the car and the battery. Sure a car and battery can be designed together with proper cooling. Difficulties in designing the chassis can be compensated for be changes in the battery designThe issue comes in when the car has to conform to the cooling requirements of the battery. There is much less flexibility.
Duplication: Actually more like hundreds of thousands in batteries per swap station but a big part of the Better Place plan was a communications network and the ability to both charge from and feed back into the grid, Swap stations could potentially be used as for peak-shaving, load-following or voltage regulation.
So to get this off the ground would cost billions of dollars in batteries. Who will pay for that?
Since many stations and batteries would be built in advance of significant sales, this would be a initial source of income ( or mitigation of losses ).
A source of income for the battery manufacturers but not the car makers or swap station owners. Again, Who pays for all those batteries?
Certainty: The Better Place Fluence has / had Internet connectivity, a list of nearby swap stations and the ability to reserve a battery
There is still the possibility that there are no batteries available within the remaining range of one's battery and then we are back to waiting for a charge.
Take a look at it from the point of view of the owner of an electric car service station. With quick charging Initial costs 1. Buy/lease land 2. Build a small restaurant. 3. Buy and install 10 charging stations Operating costs 1. Restaurant expenses 2. Power costs 3. Servicing 10 charging stations.
With battery swap 1. Buy/lease land 2. Build a small restaurant. 3. Buy and install 10 charging stations 4. Buy a number of batteries of each type 5. Buy and install automated swapping systems. Different batteries may require different swapping systems. Operating costs 1. Restaurant expenses 2. Power costs 3. Servicing 10 charging stations. 4. Maritain swapping systems 5. Replace worn out batteries. 6. Dispose of worn out batteries
Battery swapping technology has a number of issues;
Form; Most electric cars shoe horn batteries into the smallest space possible requiring them to have different shapes for different cars. Standardizing restricts the form of the vehicle as well as the form of the battery.Right now almost every vehicle has a different battery.
Cooling; To charge and run properly batteries must be cooled which further restricts the form of the battery and vehicle.
Structure; Currently batteries are within the structure of the vehicle for strength and protection purposes. If the battery had to be removable so would the surrounding structure. This adds weight and complexity to vehicles.
Certainty; When pulling up to a charging station is is certain that there is electricity to use. At a battery swap station it is quite possible to pull up and all the batteries of the desired type may be discharged. The swapped battery is an unknown quantity. How does one know that the battery has not been abused by someone else and won't fail in a few miles?
Self service; At a charging station it is simple to plug a car in and charge it. An swap station would require much more skilled operation. What happens if the battery jams due to mud or snow? Who controls the charging of the batteries? Sure much of this can be automated but automation costs a lot of money.
Duplication; High performance batteries are expensive. There would have to be multiple batteries in multiple places to support one vehicle. There would be tens of thousands of dollars in batteries sitting waiting to be used. Someone would have to pay for that.
EV batteries are much more complex than the batteries one puts in a flashlight.
Bad fracking 1. Shallow wells 2. permeable layers between fracked shale and aquifer 3. Poor handling of fracking chemicals
Good fracking 1. Deep wells 2. Impermeable layer between shale and aquifer 3. Close monitoring of site and disposal of chemicals.
By the way, a similar thing has bee done for decades in oil fields where hot water is injected down one well to increase production on others. The difference with fracking is the chemicals used to create and hold open the cracks so the natural gas can flow.
It does however have several examples of image reuse which might be of interest to PubPeer members and readers.
- Fig. 2F is a slightly cropped version of the cell microscopy image in Fig. 6D top left.
- Fig. 6D top right, the cell microscopy image is a slightly cropped version of supplementary Fig. s5, top right. The cells in 6D are labelled as "h-ESO-NT1 Ph" yet in figure s5 they are labelled to be "hESO-7". We understand the former to inherit caffeine-treated somatic nuclei whereas the latter are original stem cells.
Under pressure to assemble the figures for rapid publication, one can understand making a cut and paste figure assembly mistake. Nevertheless it should be noted that image cropping does take extra work.
- Figure S6 top centre and top right are the same image.
The second article was mentioned to draw parallels between image reuse and scientific misconduct.
Why offer an all you can eat buffet and then complain when somebody tries to stay at a table for days on end?
He was not cut off due to the volume of traffic though that is what brought him to the company's attention. He was cut off due to running servers on the connection which is against the TOS.
To fix the analogy; They offered an all you can eat buffet that excluded sumo wrestlers because they eat too much. That is the same way the company offered unlimited bandwidth but prohibited running servers.
Max speed and duration are not generally used together when doing specifications. Everyone knows that range will be reduced the closer to max speed the item goes. Duration is usually calculated under standard operating conditions and not extremes.
I always love people who do not understand the difference between a toy and a piece of equipment that one's life may rely on. A toy can break down and one loses a bit of fun. A vital piece of equipment breaks down on the battlefield and people can die.
Here are some things that increase prices of military gear. 1. Higher specifications. They must operate in much greater temperature and weather ranges. This causes the components to need to be much more rugged. 2. Higher damage resistance needed. If you toy breaks you go buy another one at the store. If it breaks on the battlefield there are no replacements. 3. Lower quantities. Consumer products are run off in batches of thousands and economy of scale makes a big difference. 4. Higher capabilities. This quad copter uses GPS plotting to fly. The operator sets the altitude and position on the plot and the copter goes there. This is not an RC toy where the operator directly flies the drone. High resolution IR cameras are expensive. The gimbals you cited are only tilt and not pan. Most transmitters do not have a 3 mile range with such high bandwidth. 5. More testing to ensure it can survive the battlefield.
If you think it is expensive try comparing apples to apples. If you can find a quad copter with the same capabilities at this one for a lower price I would applaud but I doubt very much you can.
I agree that there have been many stupid military procurement but the knee jerk reaction that every expensive project is overpriced is not valid.
One thing that the study didn't look into is the number of unique authors of the papers. If one author who writes ten papers with opinions towards AGW does it outweigh the author who writes one paper against?
Another point is that by separating into four broad categories the study maskes many of the results. For example, a study that concluded that man is contributing to global warming but only small portion would probably go into the "endorse AWG category". There is a big difference between contributing to and causing.
Among abstracts that expressed a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the scientic consensus.
The issue is that only 33.3% of the papers had AGW positions. What were the other climate change papers about? Of all climate change papers 32.6% endorsed AWG. That is far from a consensus.
So instead of dispersing the heat in the air directly (plus the heat generated by the chillers) It is used to heat houses. Even if the warmed water was dumped directly into the sea it would make little difference in the temperature of the water.
But the big problem that the summery overlooks is that its just about as hard to put a laser range finder on a target as it is to put a bullet on target.
The difference is that you can press the lock on button as the laser spot crosses the desired target and the stabilizing mechanism will stop the laser movement. This is very different that holding the target spot while calming your breathing and timing the squeeze of the trigger. It takes a split second to do the former and a few seconds to do the latter.
Since I will not pay to see the paperI looked up maps of magnetic pole shifts. They all looked like this one. Since the turn of the century the North Pole has been moving toward Russia and is still going in a straight line. The article talks about a course change in 2005 but that is not shown on the map. Why is their information so different than the information available to the public?
The second point is that there are only 400 years of data to look at. We have no idea if this kind of change in the speed and direction of polar shift is a common occurrence and this time just happens to correlate with ice loss. Notice the major shifts in direction in 1700 and 1850? I don't remember any reports of major ice loss around either of those times. So why did the direction shift so drastically? This points to the shifts be more random that the authors of the paper believe. Correlation is not necessarily causation.
This looks like another study by climate scientists who look at changes in the earth and then look for a way to link them to global warming. By not looking at alternative explanation they are decreasing the validity of their study. To me, suspect studies like this do not strengthen the global warming case but weakens it as I am always suspicious about theories supported by suspicious science.
Unmanned is am misnomer. Even if the pilot is on the ground there is still a person involved with controlling the drone. Calling a drone "remotely manned" is much more accurate.
All of those are relatively small cost items that break down over time and protect much higher value items. For example, if the engine coolant breaks down enough excessive corrosion can ruin an engine.That is very different than replacing a router with a new slightly faster router even though there is no current issue with speed.
Does the differential oil really need periodic replacing?
Yes, as a chemical it breaks down over time reducing efficiency and increasing wear. It also accumulates small metal particles which increase wear. The choice is to spend $50 replacing the differential oil at 60K miles or spend thousands to replace the differential sooner than necessary.
Do you need new drive belts if there's no visible damage?
The have come up with a business model that works. It is a business model based on government sanctioned short term monopolies on their inventions. It just happens to be a business model that you don't agree with.
Can you come up with a business model that overcomes the advantage of not needing to do R&D to make new products? I don't know of any. The "Find a better business model" statement sounds a lot like a famous quote from Marie Antoinette when told that the people had no bread to eat. She is purported to have said "Let them eat cake".
Even if that were true, I believe freedom is more important than such nonsense.
So you see good in the freedom of one person to make money of of the time and investment of another person?
I have not seen any evidence that that is true.
Actually there is evidence that the ability to recoup investment has a major effect on what is researched. They are called orphaned disorders. Many rare diseases and disorders do not have cures because there are too few afflicted people to recoup the R&D costs. Try to look at it from the perspective of an investor. Would you spend money on R&D if there was no way to get it back and no possibility of profit. You would be better off buying a GIC.
It comes down to the basic fact that most people with money do things to make money. If there is no possibility to make money they don't do it.
Yes, what would we ever do without government-enforced monopolies?
We would have fewer companies spending money on R&D if there was no chance of recouping it.
How about this business model? Wait for someone else to spend time and money inventing something. Spend a tenth of that amount reverse engineering it and undercut the inventor. You make all the money and the inventor never recoups the investment in R&D. Patents are a government enforced monopoly but for a specific period of time. They are given that time to recoup R&D costs and make a reasonable profit. After that time, anyone can make the object. Case in point, the patent on Roundup expired in 2000. As of now everyone can make their version of Roundup and many chemical companies do.
I agree that patents need to be reformed, they are too long and given for stupid things, but they do have a place to protect investment.
Slashdot Mirror
Most cars are built using unibody construction so removing the cabin is not an option. Body on Frame vehicles are heavier which impacts performace and the connections will add complexity to the vehicle which increases costs. Someone has to pay the costs of having several chassis. This will be recouped by much higher operating costs.
In the end people die when eating certain animals so the absolute statement of "if it moves, it's edible" is false. To be more accurate "If it moves, parts of it are edible".
There are animals, such as the puffer fish, where parts are edible but other parts are poisonous. Many people have died from incorrectly prepared fugu
Why should this be a problem for a battery switching system? Isn't it much easier to cool the batteries when they're outside of the car? Seems like this is a case of an advantage for the swapping system.
The system must also be able to be charged direct while the battery is in the vehicle. The Better Place model was that the car would be charged overnight at home most of the time and battery swapping would mainly occur on long trips. Much like the fast charging stations used by Tesla Motors.
Lithium batteries need to be cooled during discharge as well as charging.
So you'll need more batteries than cars upfront, but in the long run, you will keep discarding the degraded batteries without an additional hassle to the owners and it will even out.
Who pays for the additional up front costs? Would you rather borrow $20,000 today and pay me back in 10 years or $10,000 now and another $10,000 in five years? In the second instance you save five years of interest on $10,000. Higher up front costs cause higher long term costs.
The cost for 50k of range for swap-able batteries and the additional cost for designing and building the car with the swap-able battery far outweigh the day or two inconvenience to replace the battery. Swap-able batteries are really only useful for high mileage vehicles that recharge frequently throughout the day and Better Place failed to target them.
The beauty of the standardized recharging plug is that it is a small component. Plugs of many different shapes could be accommodated in any car and the industry picked one standard.. The battery on the other hand is integral to the design and performance of the vehicle. A standardized battery restricts those considerations too much to be viable.
Vehicle owners don't care about follow on uses for used batteries. They care about the cost and performance of their car and the cost of re-charging, Swap-able batteries will be more expensive to build and more expensive to recharge (considering all the more expensive stations and standby batteries) and have poorer performance due to design compromises. Better place never overcame these issues and it may not be possible..
so if you can one that's not up to your expectations, swap it again.
It is difficult to swap a battery in the middle of nowhere if it fails unexpectedly. The point is that the range on different batteries will effect driving. As batteries wear out they will have to be swapped more often and it will be to the station owners' advantage to use them as long as possible. The convenience of swapping batteries has not been shown to override the limitations.
Form: If it's a BEV or one with a range extender that only charges the battery but doesn't power the car, there's no transmission to worry about.
What I was getting at was that batteries are shaped to fit the car and not the other way around. Some cars have T shaped batteries. Other cars have rectangular batteries. I don't see where I mentioned transmissions.
Cooling: I don't know how the Fluence ZE handled this but they did - and they were selling cars in Israel, a fairly hot country.
Cooling is provided by a combination of of the car and the battery. Sure a car and battery can be designed together with proper cooling. Difficulties in designing the chassis can be compensated for be changes in the battery designThe issue comes in when the car has to conform to the cooling requirements of the battery. There is much less flexibility.
Duplication: Actually more like hundreds of thousands in batteries per swap station but a big part of the Better Place plan was a communications network and the ability to both charge from and feed back into the grid, Swap stations could potentially be used as for peak-shaving, load-following or voltage regulation.
So to get this off the ground would cost billions of dollars in batteries. Who will pay for that?
Since many stations and batteries would be built in advance of significant sales, this would be a initial source of income ( or mitigation of losses ).
A source of income for the battery manufacturers but not the car makers or swap station owners. Again, Who pays for all those batteries?
Certainty: The Better Place Fluence has / had Internet connectivity, a list of nearby swap stations and the ability to reserve a battery
There is still the possibility that there are no batteries available within the remaining range of one's battery and then we are back to waiting for a charge.
Take a look at it from the point of view of the owner of an electric car service station.
With quick charging
Initial costs
1. Buy/lease land
2. Build a small restaurant.
3. Buy and install 10 charging stations
Operating costs
1. Restaurant expenses
2. Power costs
3. Servicing 10 charging stations.
With battery swap
1. Buy/lease land
2. Build a small restaurant.
3. Buy and install 10 charging stations
4. Buy a number of batteries of each type
5. Buy and install automated swapping systems. Different batteries may require different swapping systems.
Operating costs
1. Restaurant expenses
2. Power costs
3. Servicing 10 charging stations.
4. Maritain swapping systems
5. Replace worn out batteries.
6. Dispose of worn out batteries
Which one do you think an investor would choose?
As I stated;
The swapped battery is an unknown quantity. How does one know that the battery has not been abused by someone else and won't fail in a few miles?
Battery swapping technology has a number of issues;
Form; Most electric cars shoe horn batteries into the smallest space possible requiring them to have different shapes for different cars. Standardizing restricts the form of the vehicle as well as the form of the battery.Right now almost every vehicle has a different battery.
Cooling; To charge and run properly batteries must be cooled which further restricts the form of the battery and vehicle.
Structure; Currently batteries are within the structure of the vehicle for strength and protection purposes. If the battery had to be removable so would the surrounding structure. This adds weight and complexity to vehicles.
Certainty; When pulling up to a charging station is is certain that there is electricity to use. At a battery swap station it is quite possible to pull up and all the batteries of the desired type may be discharged. The swapped battery is an unknown quantity. How does one know that the battery has not been abused by someone else and won't fail in a few miles?
Self service; At a charging station it is simple to plug a car in and charge it. An swap station would require much more skilled operation. What happens if the battery jams due to mud or snow? Who controls the charging of the batteries? Sure much of this can be automated but automation costs a lot of money.
Duplication; High performance batteries are expensive. There would have to be multiple batteries in multiple places to support one vehicle. There would be tens of thousands of dollars in batteries sitting waiting to be used. Someone would have to pay for that.
EV batteries are much more complex than the batteries one puts in a flashlight.
All fracking is not the same.
Bad fracking
1. Shallow wells
2. permeable layers between fracked shale and aquifer
3. Poor handling of fracking chemicals
Good fracking
1. Deep wells
2. Impermeable layer between shale and aquifer
3. Close monitoring of site and disposal of chemicals.
By the way, a similar thing has bee done for decades in oil fields where hot water is injected down one well to increase production on others. The difference with fracking is the chemicals used to create and hold open the cracks so the natural gas can flow.
The reuse was in both articles. From PubPeer;
It does however have several examples of image reuse which might be of interest to PubPeer members and readers.
- Fig. 2F is a slightly cropped version of the cell microscopy image in Fig. 6D top left.
- Fig. 6D top right, the cell microscopy image is a slightly cropped version of supplementary Fig. s5, top right. The cells in 6D are labelled as "h-ESO-NT1 Ph" yet in figure s5 they are labelled to be "hESO-7". We understand the former to inherit caffeine-treated somatic nuclei whereas the latter are original stem cells.
Under pressure to assemble the figures for rapid publication, one can understand making a cut and paste figure assembly mistake. Nevertheless it should be noted that image cropping does take extra work.
- Figure S6 top centre and top right are the same image.
The second article was mentioned to draw parallels between image reuse and scientific misconduct.
Why offer an all you can eat buffet and then complain when somebody tries to stay at a table for days on end?
He was not cut off due to the volume of traffic though that is what brought him to the company's attention. He was cut off due to running servers on the connection which is against the TOS.
To fix the analogy;
They offered an all you can eat buffet that excluded sumo wrestlers because they eat too much. That is the same way the company offered unlimited bandwidth but prohibited running servers.
Max speed and duration are not generally used together when doing specifications. Everyone knows that range will be reduced the closer to max speed the item goes. Duration is usually calculated under standard operating conditions and not extremes.
I always love people who do not understand the difference between a toy and a piece of equipment that one's life may rely on. A toy can break down and one loses a bit of fun. A vital piece of equipment breaks down on the battlefield and people can die.
Here are some things that increase prices of military gear.
1. Higher specifications. They must operate in much greater temperature and weather ranges. This causes the components to need to be much more rugged.
2. Higher damage resistance needed. If you toy breaks you go buy another one at the store. If it breaks on the battlefield there are no replacements.
3. Lower quantities. Consumer products are run off in batches of thousands and economy of scale makes a big difference.
4. Higher capabilities. This quad copter uses GPS plotting to fly. The operator sets the altitude and position on the plot and the copter goes there. This is not an RC toy where the operator directly flies the drone. High resolution IR cameras are expensive. The gimbals you cited are only tilt and not pan. Most transmitters do not have a 3 mile range with such high bandwidth.
5. More testing to ensure it can survive the battlefield.
If you think it is expensive try comparing apples to apples. If you can find a quad copter with the same capabilities at this one for a lower price I would applaud but I doubt very much you can.
I agree that there have been many stupid military procurement but the knee jerk reaction that every expensive project is overpriced is not valid.
One thing that the study didn't look into is the number of unique authors of the papers. If one author who writes ten papers with opinions towards AGW does it outweigh the author who writes one paper against?
Another point is that by separating into four broad categories the study maskes many of the results. For example, a study that concluded that man is contributing to global warming but only small portion would probably go into the "endorse AWG category". There is a big difference between contributing to and causing.
Here is where massaging statistics comes in
Among abstracts that expressed a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the scientic consensus.
The issue is that only 33.3% of the papers had AGW positions. What were the other climate change papers about? Of all climate change papers 32.6% endorsed AWG. That is far from a consensus.
So instead of dispersing the heat in the air directly (plus the heat generated by the chillers) It is used to heat houses. Even if the warmed water was dumped directly into the sea it would make little difference in the temperature of the water.
But the big problem that the summery overlooks is that its just about as hard to put a laser range finder on a target as it is to put a bullet on target.
The difference is that you can press the lock on button as the laser spot crosses the desired target and the stabilizing mechanism will stop the laser movement. This is very different that holding the target spot while calming your breathing and timing the squeeze of the trigger. It takes a split second to do the former and a few seconds to do the latter.
For some people hunting is not sport but a way of acquiring food. For you it is a challenge. For others it is food on the table.
Since I will not pay to see the paperI looked up maps of magnetic pole shifts. They all looked like this one. Since the turn of the century the North Pole has been moving toward Russia and is still going in a straight line. The article talks about a course change in 2005 but that is not shown on the map. Why is their information so different than the information available to the public?
The second point is that there are only 400 years of data to look at. We have no idea if this kind of change in the speed and direction of polar shift is a common occurrence and this time just happens to correlate with ice loss. Notice the major shifts in direction in 1700 and 1850? I don't remember any reports of major ice loss around either of those times. So why did the direction shift so drastically? This points to the shifts be more random that the authors of the paper believe. Correlation is not necessarily causation.
This looks like another study by climate scientists who look at changes in the earth and then look for a way to link them to global warming. By not looking at alternative explanation they are decreasing the validity of their study. To me, suspect studies like this do not strengthen the global warming case but weakens it as I am always suspicious about theories supported by suspicious science.
Unmanned is am misnomer. Even if the pilot is on the ground there is still a person involved with controlling the drone. Calling a drone "remotely manned" is much more accurate.
All of those are relatively small cost items that break down over time and protect much higher value items. For example, if the engine coolant breaks down enough excessive corrosion can ruin an engine.That is very different than replacing a router with a new slightly faster router even though there is no current issue with speed.
Does the differential oil really need periodic replacing?
Yes, as a chemical it breaks down over time reducing efficiency and increasing wear. It also accumulates small metal particles which increase wear. The choice is to spend $50 replacing the differential oil at 60K miles or spend thousands to replace the differential sooner than necessary.
Do you need new drive belts if there's no visible damage?
According to this article, yes.
The have come up with a business model that works. It is a business model based on government sanctioned short term monopolies on their inventions. It just happens to be a business model that you don't agree with.
Can you come up with a business model that overcomes the advantage of not needing to do R&D to make new products? I don't know of any. The "Find a better business model" statement sounds a lot like a famous quote from Marie Antoinette when told that the people had no bread to eat. She is purported to have said "Let them eat cake".
Even if that were true, I believe freedom is more important than such nonsense.
So you see good in the freedom of one person to make money of of the time and investment of another person?
I have not seen any evidence that that is true.
Actually there is evidence that the ability to recoup investment has a major effect on what is researched. They are called orphaned disorders. Many rare diseases and disorders do not have cures because there are too few afflicted people to recoup the R&D costs. Try to look at it from the perspective of an investor. Would you spend money on R&D if there was no way to get it back and no possibility of profit. You would be better off buying a GIC.
It comes down to the basic fact that most people with money do things to make money. If there is no possibility to make money they don't do it.
Yes, what would we ever do without government-enforced monopolies?
We would have fewer companies spending money on R&D if there was no chance of recouping it.
How about this business model? Wait for someone else to spend time and money inventing something. Spend a tenth of that amount reverse engineering it and undercut the inventor. You make all the money and the inventor never recoups the investment in R&D. Patents are a government enforced monopoly but for a specific period of time. They are given that time to recoup R&D costs and make a reasonable profit. After that time, anyone can make the object. Case in point, the patent on Roundup expired in 2000. As of now everyone can make their version of Roundup and many chemical companies do.
I agree that patents need to be reformed, they are too long and given for stupid things, but they do have a place to protect investment.