i = number of patents granted per year (estimate for next year)
c = cost of running patent office
f = small fee
n = number of years a patent has been in effect
All patents applied for would need to submit a cost of research and development. This cost would be auditable and failing an audit of research costs would also fail to get a patent.
All patents would need to be renewed on a yearly basis.
In addition, all patents would pay a yearly fee for the privilage of having a monopoly. This fee would be caluculated with the following formula:
Fee = (f+c/i) * 2^n
Such a patent fee structure would allow the patent office to run without any additional tax inputs. Further, the fact that the fee by definition excedes the cost of running the patent office would result in a surplus of funds for the patent office.
These surplus funds would be spent each year by the patent office to "buy" patents into the public domain by paying back the research and development cost. The patent office could buy back lot's of small cost patents or a couple of big cost patents.
The exponentially rising nature of the fee would serve to be a limiting factor in the continuation of buying a patent.
Truly profitable patents would be paid for for as long as the monopoly was profitable and then when the fee wasn't paid they would become public domain.
patents that aren't immidiatly profitable wouldn't likely be paid for by corporations, or if they were they wouldn't be paid for for long.
One really doesn't need to get all speculative to find alternatives to oil that become comparitively economic with rising oil prices. Coal, nuclear, wind and water are already there, although wind and water are hard to scale up. Once oil reaches $100/barrel, it becomes economic to extract oil from tar sand, which would mean Canada has more oil than Saudi Arabia; that source alone effectively doubles world oil reserves. At even higher prices, earth-bound and even space-based solar would become competitive. And I don't doubt that there are ideas not even yet thought of at prices beyond that. So yes, I am willng to bet on alternatives, and I consider that a quite safe bet.
I'm wondering what happens to the rest of the world economy when oil reaches $100/barrel or more.
It seems to me that if oil is that high in price, and other energy is "economical" that in fact the cost of producing or transporting almost anything has gone up and in turn the consumption of almost everything will go down. How long can a debt driven economy suffer such a thing?
To be sure, assuming the oil in the universe if fixed, one of these must happen:
1) Oil will run out.
2) People will switch to another energy source before oil runs out.
What's more interesting is what happens in either case: the total work potential of the economy goes down.
Why is work done using oil? Because oil is cheap. If any other source of energy could accomplish the same amount of work for less money, wouldn't people be using it?
Does this not imply that every other source of energy is less efficient or has less utility for some reason?
And in the end doesn't that mean that less work will get done as we use less oil?
It doesn't matter. You're just inventing ad hoc differences to reconcile an indefensible position. Diamond and copper hunting respond to demand, just like oil. "Necessity" doesn't matter at all. The same signals that make people find more energy make people find more copper and diamonds. Your supporting facts are wrong, in any case. Copper was, a hundred years ago, vital for everything the economy depended on. It was being depleted at an enormous rate. Idiots like you were claiming civilization would collapse as a result of an unforseen dropoff in copper extraction, while simultaneously not backing up that "firm" belief with actual purchases of copper futures. Copper didn't run out. Is that concrete enough for you?
Copper isn't a one use item. It doesn't burn up when you use it. You can, and people do, recycle it.
Also, copper doesn't equate to work in the same way oil does.
Peak Oil" goes further than this and says that *when* oil runs out, it will be a catastrophic surprise. This is ridiculous. Even if everyone studying energy markets and investing in energy futures misses this, the shock *cannot* be sudden. When you take a 50% pay cut, you don't eat 50% less, drink 50% less, care for your children 50% less, take 50% fewer showers, and so on. Rather, you toss the lowest ranked things on your priority list: entertainment, fancy clothes, DVD's, etc. Likewise, as oil becomes more sharply more scarce, food won't get stuck in the Midwest. The most trivial uses of oil will be abandoned. Stores will stock goods shipped from slightly less far away, and so on. Peak Oil just satisfies the anti-capitalist wet dream that they "were right all along" while those evil rich blindly consumed, but one day they'll be forced to suffer for not realizing this. That's why you don't hear about Peak Diamond or Peak Copper, goods which obey the same market conditions as oil.
It's certainly true that people won't eat and drink on some linear scale with their pay. These things are almost certainly some of the last things to go, and since minimum liquid and caloric intake is required for survival, even gluttonous American diets can only be curbed so much.
The problem is, food and water production don't account for the bulk of our economy. I'd like to say I recall agricultrue being around 15% of our GDP...but the exact number doesn't matter to much, the point is as people's pay is cut everything besides food and water drops in demand much faster than food and water.
It seems pretty clear that not everyone can make a living producing food and water, and thus the question becomes what will all these other people who's previous jobs are no longer in demand be doing with themselves? What will they do when they lose their job and can't pay their car bill or mortgage, and what in turn happens to the people who loaned them the money?
First of all, I'm of the opinion that oil futures that "guarantee" extraction at a later date to be rather dubious in nature. Such a contract assumes that you aren't being lied to, the companies in question aren't just plain wrong about reserves, and that neither natural nor political nor social nor economic disasters impede their oil drilling processes and or the markets on which you sell your futures. I'm more of a bird in the hand kind of guy. But if you like futures, by all means buy them up.
I'm still wondering what you think happens when you remove the potential to do work from an economy as happens when oil supplies decline (due to peak oil or even hoarding of any sort). As a result, an economy must either inflate (and eventually hyperinflate) it's currency to buy all the oil it needs to keep doing all the work it demands, or it must deflate and simply produce less.
Luckily for the US, our economy is currently bolstered by the fact that we have a desireable world reserve currency that almost all oil transactions are done in, and thus everyone needs dollars to buy oil, and when oil goes up in price they need more dollars, and thus to some degree the dollar remains strong even when oil prices rise. Things begin to change when countries don't want to use dollars any more and Syria, Iran, and other oil exporting countries begin to make oil transactions in the Euro or other arbitrary currencies. The more oil that is traded in other currencies, the less demand for the dollar, and the more likely it becomes that the US needs to address the fact that it can't afford all the oil it needs to do all the work it needs. Choice A: allow the economy to deflate, or choice B: print lots of money.
Please decribe for the class what happens when a massivly debt driven economy like the US suffers from deflation. I'm no economist, but it seems to me that a heavily debt ridden society would falter and likely collapse under the weight of deflation. The workers would not be able to pay off their debts, and in turn loans would be defaulted on and billions or even trillions of dollars would simply dissapear from existance because the promise to repay could no longer be met. Deflation of even a few percent would create circumstances comparable to the situation during the great depression.
alternatively, describe for the class what happens to an economy that choose to hyperinflate it's currencty in order to maintain production.
It seems to me that energy is the exception to this rule.
If one withholds oil from the system, they are literally withholding work from the system. Oil isn't an interchangable widget. There are economic implications beyond the availability of a particular widget when the supply of work is going down.
Over the last 5 years oil/gasoline prices have doubled or more. What interest rate is that? Without taking into account compounding, that would be 20% interest; and yet interest rates are hovering near all time lows for many investments. Why isn't everyone jumping on the oil storage bandwagon?
DON'T PANIC! Even if we have reached "peak oil," however that is defined, it will be a long process. Production will start a long, slow decline, and prices will start a long, steady rise. New conservation methods will come on line as prices rise, consumption will fall, and lifestyles will change, further slowing the process.
There are some big problems with a debt-driven, fiat currency economy having production decline.
The US economy has a huge amount of debt. Debt in this case can be equated to the promise of work. Absent cheap oil to accomplish work cheaply, the US economy is in trouble, and with it the world economy is also in trouble.
There are alternative energy sources to oil, but none of them are capable of delivering a return on the energy investment that oil has. For the last century oil has been able to return close to 30 units of energy for every unit of energy spent directly on extracting and refining it. This doesn't hold true for even oil today, and even good (and in my opinion bloated) estimates for fuels like ethanol show returns of only 5 units of energy per input. The bottom line is energy is going to be more expensive no matter what.
If energy is more expensive, then less work will get done. When less work get's done, people are making less money, borrowing less money, not paying off loans, and gernerally bad things happen to a debt-driven economy.
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
Can you point me to the moral authority that declared this to be so?
Just to be clear, a person who grows 90%+ of their own food, rides a bus a few times a year, and lives in a small, self-built wood frame house off the grid and off the public water and sewer systems is no different morally from a hummer driving, mcmansion owning person who eats 50% mass produced beef and animal products shipped from south east asia?
If that's how your morality works, you've got some f'ed up morals.
Intent might just be relevant to a reasonable person when considering the moralness of an action. If person A needs to ride a bus to aquire the money to pay the property taxes demanded of him such that his family can continue to live a nearly self-sufficient life, while person B uses 4 gallons of gas a day on a commute in his individually owned fuel-inefficient vehicle, to a job he could do from anywhere when he already has more than enough money to retire and his children's children will never need to work, who is being less moral?
get off your high horse and come down and deal with some of the relative aspects that need to be considered in the real world.
There are good reasons to think that the harder we try to be efficient, the faster we'll end up using up our fossil fuels. Efficiency only works if the whole world cries out and does it at the same time. Failing that, someone in the world can, and will buy up the cheap oil in an effort to get ahead of those silly efficient people.
You're right. If we had a buyout clause on a copyright, we should just allow anyone to buy the work into the public domain.
and even a 10 year copyright would be better than the BS system we have now, I'm just irked by the arbitrary number of years we choose. Not to say I'm not suggesting we pick some different aribtrary numbers...I'm just arbitrarily more open to the methods I suggest.
Who get's to determine what the peak annual revenue for a given work is? The accountants? Worldwide sales or just domestic? Do royalties count or just physical media? Do we fill out an IRS form for each work we publish? Do singles need a different form from albums? What about compiliations?
I think this would be a needlessly cumbersome method of implementing copyright fees.
Let's consider the origial intent of copyright: Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
It is intended that a limited monopoly will allow the markets to act as an economic incentive and promote progress in science and the arts.
Does it cost the government money to provide the limited monoply protection? Yes!
Since the government is using it's supposed exclusive use of force to insure that you have a monopoly such that you can use the markets to gain a profit that is supposedly your incentive, does it seem more reasonable that the people should pay for you to get rich via taxes or that you should pay a fee to the government for the privelege of using a limited monopoly?
To me, it seems quite reasonable that an individual using the government to enforce monopoly and supposedly recieve monetary compensation should pay.
If you don't want this monoploy, or it isn't economically viable, then too bad, no monopoly for you.
What would be a reasonable amount to pay? How about one share of the cost of running the copyright office and copyright courts? Take the total budget of the copyright office, add to it the percentage of the budgets of the DA and law enforcement that goes to enforce copyright, divide this by the number of copyrights and like magic you have an appropriate amount to charge.
Let's assume that we also want to ensure that our copyrights are actually "limited" like the clause says. We could choose an arbitrary number of years to allow a person to hold a copyright, but it seems like having the limitation be based off the supposed economic incentive might be a better way to go.
How about we add an arbitrary multiple to your copyright fee each year? Two seems like a nice number. Let's double your fee every year.
Further, let's force all copyrights to be buyable by the government such that they are released into the public domain. The government, and only the government, can exercise the buyout clause of a given copyright, and only for the purpose of realese to the public domain. The author can assign an arbitrary buyout value to their piece when they file for their initial copyright. They would then pay a fee based upon the buyout value...let's just say they would pay a fee of 1/10th of 1% of their buyout value, any arbitrary but proportional value will do.
With a system like this in place, the copyright office would be profitable. It would make extra revenue from buyout fees, and from the doubling of renual fees.
With this extra money, I suggest that they pay the buyout fees of longstanding copyrights.
In this way, no copyright can last forever, but very valueable copyrights can be very valuable to their holders.
It would be impossible for a copyright holder to always be able to pay a fee that increases at an exponential rate as they would eventually owe more money than there is wealth in the world. Thus all copyrights would come to an end. And should the owner want to pay huge sums of money for another year of exclusivity, who are we the people to argue with that? We'll take their money and buy thousands of other works into the public domain, thank you very much.
What does this system achieve? No taxpayer money required copyright exists for a limited time copyright maintanence is inherently linked to the enonomic viability of the copyright there are no orphaned works copyrights of economically non-viable works will rapidly fall to the public domain, where they should be
and once we have this in place for copyrights, let's use a similar system for patents.
I won't claim that there is hard science or good dialog behind the star wars films, but in the case of Han Solo and the Kessel run comment I would say his comment can be forgiven. Since the "kessel run" goes past a series of black holes, the closer you are to the black holes, the faster you'd need to go in order to avoid certain death. If you take a shorter path as Han suggests he did, you also must be going faster.
Here's to the willing suspension of disbelief in the name of entertainment.
Slashdot Mirror
i = number of patents granted per year (estimate for next year) c = cost of running patent office f = small fee n = number of years a patent has been in effect All patents applied for would need to submit a cost of research and development. This cost would be auditable and failing an audit of research costs would also fail to get a patent. All patents would need to be renewed on a yearly basis. In addition, all patents would pay a yearly fee for the privilage of having a monopoly. This fee would be caluculated with the following formula: Fee = (f+c/i) * 2^n Such a patent fee structure would allow the patent office to run without any additional tax inputs. Further, the fact that the fee by definition excedes the cost of running the patent office would result in a surplus of funds for the patent office. These surplus funds would be spent each year by the patent office to "buy" patents into the public domain by paying back the research and development cost. The patent office could buy back lot's of small cost patents or a couple of big cost patents. The exponentially rising nature of the fee would serve to be a limiting factor in the continuation of buying a patent. Truly profitable patents would be paid for for as long as the monopoly was profitable and then when the fee wasn't paid they would become public domain. patents that aren't immidiatly profitable wouldn't likely be paid for by corporations, or if they were they wouldn't be paid for for long.
One really doesn't need to get all speculative to find alternatives to oil that become comparitively economic with rising oil prices. Coal, nuclear, wind and water are already there, although wind and water are hard to scale up. Once oil reaches $100/barrel, it becomes economic to extract oil from tar sand, which would mean Canada has more oil than Saudi Arabia; that source alone effectively doubles world oil reserves. At even higher prices, earth-bound and even space-based solar would become competitive. And I don't doubt that there are ideas not even yet thought of at prices beyond that. So yes, I am willng to bet on alternatives, and I consider that a quite safe bet. I'm wondering what happens to the rest of the world economy when oil reaches $100/barrel or more. It seems to me that if oil is that high in price, and other energy is "economical" that in fact the cost of producing or transporting almost anything has gone up and in turn the consumption of almost everything will go down. How long can a debt driven economy suffer such a thing?
What's more interesting is what happens in either case: the total work potential of the economy goes down.
Why is work done using oil? Because oil is cheap. If any other source of energy could accomplish the same amount of work for less money, wouldn't people be using it?
Does this not imply that every other source of energy is less efficient or has less utility for some reason?
And in the end doesn't that mean that less work will get done as we use less oil?
It doesn't matter. You're just inventing ad hoc differences to reconcile an indefensible position. Diamond and copper hunting respond to demand, just like oil. "Necessity" doesn't matter at all. The same signals that make people find more energy make people find more copper and diamonds. Your supporting facts are wrong, in any case. Copper was, a hundred years ago, vital for everything the economy depended on. It was being depleted at an enormous rate. Idiots like you were claiming civilization would collapse as a result of an unforseen dropoff in copper extraction, while simultaneously not backing up that "firm" belief with actual purchases of copper futures. Copper didn't run out. Is that concrete enough for you? Copper isn't a one use item. It doesn't burn up when you use it. You can, and people do, recycle it. Also, copper doesn't equate to work in the same way oil does.
It's certainly true that people won't eat and drink on some linear scale with their pay. These things are almost certainly some of the last things to go, and since minimum liquid and caloric intake is required for survival, even gluttonous American diets can only be curbed so much. The problem is, food and water production don't account for the bulk of our economy. I'd like to say I recall agricultrue being around 15% of our GDP...but the exact number doesn't matter to much, the point is as people's pay is cut everything besides food and water drops in demand much faster than food and water.
It seems pretty clear that not everyone can make a living producing food and water, and thus the question becomes what will all these other people who's previous jobs are no longer in demand be doing with themselves? What will they do when they lose their job and can't pay their car bill or mortgage, and what in turn happens to the people who loaned them the money?
First of all, I'm of the opinion that oil futures that "guarantee" extraction at a later date to be rather dubious in nature. Such a contract assumes that you aren't being lied to, the companies in question aren't just plain wrong about reserves, and that neither natural nor political nor social nor economic disasters impede their oil drilling processes and or the markets on which you sell your futures. I'm more of a bird in the hand kind of guy. But if you like futures, by all means buy them up.
I'm still wondering what you think happens when you remove the potential to do work from an economy as happens when oil supplies decline (due to peak oil or even hoarding of any sort).
As a result, an economy must either inflate (and eventually hyperinflate) it's currency to buy all the oil it needs to keep doing all the work it demands, or it must deflate and simply produce less.
Luckily for the US, our economy is currently bolstered by the fact that we have a desireable world reserve currency that almost all oil transactions are done in, and thus everyone needs dollars to buy oil, and when oil goes up in price they need more dollars, and thus to some degree the dollar remains strong even when oil prices rise.
Things begin to change when countries don't want to use dollars any more and Syria, Iran, and other oil exporting countries begin to make oil transactions in the Euro or other arbitrary currencies. The more oil that is traded in other currencies, the less demand for the dollar, and the more likely it becomes that the US needs to address the fact that it can't afford all the oil it needs to do all the work it needs. Choice A: allow the economy to deflate, or choice B: print lots of money.
Please decribe for the class what happens when a massivly debt driven economy like the US suffers from deflation.
I'm no economist, but it seems to me that a heavily debt ridden society would falter and likely collapse under the weight of deflation. The workers would not be able to pay off their debts, and in turn loans would be defaulted on and billions or even trillions of dollars would simply dissapear from existance because the promise to repay could no longer be met. Deflation of even a few percent would create circumstances comparable to the situation during the great depression.
alternatively, describe for the class what happens to an economy that choose to hyperinflate it's currencty in order to maintain production.
It seems to me that energy is the exception to this rule.
If one withholds oil from the system, they are literally withholding work from the system. Oil isn't an interchangable widget. There are economic implications beyond the availability of a particular widget when the supply of work is going down.
Over the last 5 years oil/gasoline prices have doubled or more. What interest rate is that? Without taking into account compounding, that would be 20% interest; and yet interest rates are hovering near all time lows for many investments. Why isn't everyone jumping on the oil storage bandwagon?
There are some big problems with a debt-driven, fiat currency economy having production decline.
The US economy has a huge amount of debt. Debt in this case can be equated to the promise of work. Absent cheap oil to accomplish work cheaply, the US economy is in trouble, and with it the world economy is also in trouble.
There are alternative energy sources to oil, but none of them are capable of delivering a return on the energy investment that oil has. For the last century oil has been able to return close to 30 units of energy for every unit of energy spent directly on extracting and refining it. This doesn't hold true for even oil today, and even good (and in my opinion bloated) estimates for fuels like ethanol show returns of only 5 units of energy per input. The bottom line is energy is going to be more expensive no matter what.
If energy is more expensive, then less work will get done. When less work get's done, people are making less money, borrowing less money, not paying off loans, and gernerally bad things happen to a debt-driven economy.
Can you point me to the moral authority that declared this to be so?
Just to be clear, a person who grows 90%+ of their own food, rides a bus a few times a year, and lives in a small, self-built wood frame house off the grid and off the public water and sewer systems is no different morally from a hummer driving, mcmansion owning person who eats 50% mass produced beef and animal products shipped from south east asia?
If that's how your morality works, you've got some f'ed up morals.
Intent might just be relevant to a reasonable person when considering the moralness of an action. If person A needs to ride a bus to aquire the money to pay the property taxes demanded of him such that his family can continue to live a nearly self-sufficient life, while person B uses 4 gallons of gas a day on a commute in his individually owned fuel-inefficient vehicle, to a job he could do from anywhere when he already has more than enough money to retire and his children's children will never need to work, who is being less moral?
get off your high horse and come down and deal with some of the relative aspects that need to be considered in the real world.
There are good reasons to think that the harder we try to be efficient, the faster we'll end up using up our fossil fuels. Efficiency only works if the whole world cries out and does it at the same time. Failing that, someone in the world can, and will buy up the cheap oil in an effort to get ahead of those silly efficient people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
You're right. If we had a buyout clause on a copyright, we should just allow anyone to buy the work into the public domain. and even a 10 year copyright would be better than the BS system we have now, I'm just irked by the arbitrary number of years we choose. Not to say I'm not suggesting we pick some different aribtrary numbers...I'm just arbitrarily more open to the methods I suggest.
Who get's to determine what the peak annual revenue for a given work is? The accountants? Worldwide sales or just domestic? Do royalties count or just physical media? Do we fill out an IRS form for each work we publish? Do singles need a different form from albums? What about compiliations?
I think this would be a needlessly cumbersome method of implementing copyright fees.
Let's consider the origial intent of copyright:
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
It is intended that a limited monopoly will allow the markets to act as an economic incentive and promote progress in science and the arts.
Does it cost the government money to provide the limited monoply protection? Yes!
Since the government is using it's supposed exclusive use of force to insure that you have a monopoly such that you can use the markets to gain a profit that is supposedly your incentive, does it seem more reasonable that the people should pay for you to get rich via taxes or that you should pay a fee to the government for the privelege of using a limited monopoly?
To me, it seems quite reasonable that an individual using the government to enforce monopoly and supposedly recieve monetary compensation should pay.
If you don't want this monoploy, or it isn't economically viable, then too bad, no monopoly for you.
What would be a reasonable amount to pay? How about one share of the cost of running the copyright office and copyright courts? Take the total budget of the copyright office, add to it the percentage of the budgets of the DA and law enforcement that goes to enforce copyright, divide this by the number of copyrights and like magic you have an appropriate amount to charge.
Let's assume that we also want to ensure that our copyrights are actually "limited" like the clause says. We could choose an arbitrary number of years to allow a person to hold a copyright, but it seems like having the limitation be based off the supposed economic incentive might be a better way to go.
How about we add an arbitrary multiple to your copyright fee each year? Two seems like a nice number. Let's double your fee every year.
Further, let's force all copyrights to be buyable by the government such that they are released into the public domain. The government, and only the government, can exercise the buyout clause of a given copyright, and only for the purpose of realese to the public domain. The author can assign an arbitrary buyout value to their piece when they file for their initial copyright. They would then pay a fee based upon the buyout value...let's just say they would pay a fee of 1/10th of 1% of their buyout value, any arbitrary but proportional value will do.
With a system like this in place, the copyright office would be profitable. It would make extra revenue from buyout fees, and from the doubling of renual fees.
With this extra money, I suggest that they pay the buyout fees of longstanding copyrights.
In this way, no copyright can last forever, but very valueable copyrights can be very valuable to their holders.
It would be impossible for a copyright holder to always be able to pay a fee that increases at an exponential rate as they would eventually owe more money than there is wealth in the world. Thus all copyrights would come to an end. And should the owner want to pay huge sums of money for another year of exclusivity, who are we the people to argue with that? We'll take their money and buy thousands of other works into the public domain, thank you very much.
What does this system achieve?
No taxpayer money required
copyright exists for a limited time
copyright maintanence is inherently linked to the enonomic viability of the copyright
there are no orphaned works
copyrights of economically non-viable works will rapidly fall to the public domain, where they should be
and once we have this in place for copyrights, let's use a similar system for patents.
thank you
I won't claim that there is hard science or good dialog behind the star wars films, but in the case of Han Solo and the Kessel run comment I would say his comment can be forgiven. Since the "kessel run" goes past a series of black holes, the closer you are to the black holes, the faster you'd need to go in order to avoid certain death. If you take a shorter path as Han suggests he did, you also must be going faster.
Here's to the willing suspension of disbelief in the name of entertainment.