If an implemented NOTA only allows bureaucrats to fill offices by appointment
It's not by appointment - the press release will go something like: "Well, the voters haven't chosen anyone to lead this important position yet, so while we're waiting for them to make up their minds, the #2 person will be the acting director/manager/whatever." And as long services keep getting provided, then the average voter won't give a damn that they voted NOTA & someone they didn't pick took up the slack.
Like I said (and what it seems like you're saying), if you want REAL change to occur, then you need to make sure that NOTA _really_ means to shut down that office/department/whatever, not just leave a blank slot at the top.
then the office goes unoccupied until an election is held that also has enough people voting for a real candidate.
That will just mean that some non-campaigning "interim" or "acting" bureaucrat will fill the post.
If you want your idea to have teeth, then you need to shut down the entire office that supports that public position - so that it can't do any work, and it doesn't cost any money. Then wait to see if enough people scream about it going away to actually vote someone in.
Another alternative: a strong federal balanced-budget Constitutional amendment, plus some restrictions about playing with the cash-policies, would force the Congresscritters to make some tough decisions about where they're trying to spend their pork.
Yet another alternative: instead of having the government take peoples' tax money & figure out how THEY want to spend it, just mandate that people have to spend a certain amount of tax money & let the people figure out what public service they want to spend it on for themselves.
(Dunno if I trust people to make good choices about that, but at least it's an interesting alternative).
"String theory" matches that same description (can't be proven).
You didn't read the parent right - people try to _disprove_ theories, not prove them. A theory is just a guess that hasn't been disproven yet.
"String theory" covers a whole bunch of variations of metaphysics & particle physics, some variations of which smart people have already figured out problems with (and thrown them out), other variations which smart people have figured out possible tests (but which aren't possible with our level of technology), and some which people haven't been able to figure out tests for (but don't have any reason to believe that they won't be able to eventually figure out some kind of test).
I haven't read about anyone who has described an actual "string theory" which was theoretically untestable. _That_ would be the equivalent of a religion.
I figure there's no way for anyone to know what's waiting for us after death (and I think anybody who says that they do is just deluding themselves and/or others), so we'll just have to wait to die to find out.
While I'm waiting for that to happen, I'm going to enjoy my life as much as possible.
I would include reducing the student-to-teacher ratio. This would, of course, require that more teachers be hired, and would cost money, which a lot of short-sighted people seem to be reluctant to spend.
I have no idea why parents who drive themselves nuts trying to entertain 2 or 3 kids at home think that a single teacher should be able to handle 40-50 kids (some of whom are bound to have emotional and/or learning-disability problems) for 6-7 hours/day, and be able to teach them all something.
Apparently, many communities in the U.S. would rather pay for prisons than for public education.
(For the record, I'm a libertarian. I do support the criminalization of abortion. I don't think that government should sponsor stem cell research. Euthanasia is a complex topic, but I don't have any sweeping objection.)
It doesn't sound like you're much of a libertarian.
Evolution says we're all headed in the same direction
Evolution doesn't really say anything about "direction" - it describes only why random changes in a species may or may not be kept over time. As you know, the "Evolutionary Tree" does not end in a single branch, and in many cases the branches have died & will never go anywhere.
In addition, theoretically, a particular species could even keep evolving backward/forward over and over again (if it had a particular instability of its genes & there was a cyclical environmental influence to encourage such selection).
I (who am not the person you are replying to) would wonder why they aren't doing the ecological thing, and reintroducing natural predators. I realise that there might not be enough range for the prey/predator balance, although that's mostly human fault as well.
I think that hunting is actually a valuable skill to keep alive in a society, but think that the "curb animal overpopulation" is usually used as a rationale to allow people to hunt without practicing natural ecosystem management. I also frankly doubt that "hunting" with something like AK-47s, or not eating your catch, is anything more than satisfying bloodlust.
Well, I'm sure there could be a lot of behind-the-scenes deal-making & such, but I figure that running an auction is a pretty well-matured type of sales process that a lot of people understand quite well, even accounting for all of the usual possibilities of corruption.
Aside from my lack of a good solution about trying to figure out what to do if a patent submitter wanted to bid for their own patent, the most likely problem I can think of is if the legislators make the patent application & bidding process a closed system (like the FCC auctions for spectrum licensing, which sure feel corrupt to me). For the auctioning process to properly assign true market-valuation to each patent, it really needs to be open to as wide a pool of bidders & applicants as possible.
I've got an alternative to your alternative, although it's similar in concept: only allow a fixed, reasonable-sized number of patents at any given time. This will make it a lot easier to handle the patent database, and for people to know whether they are violating anything.
As slots become available when patents are invalidated due to expiration, obviousness or prior art, then the empty slots are filled from a pool of patent applications (new ones, obviously).
For a patent slot to be filled by a particular patent application, people/companies are allowed to bid for ownership on any patent application from the pool. The money paid by the winning bidders for each auction will go to the patent applicant.
The N available empty slots are filled with the patents from the top N bids.
Patent ideas which don't achieve an available slot become public domain.
By putting all of the applications into a bidding process, you force all of the bidders to do due-diligence on every application, since if they purchase ownership of a patent which gets thrown out later due to obviousness or prior art, that will represent a big waste of money.
The patent applicant will get an amount of compensation automatically equal to what the market thought that owning their idea was worth. For small inventors, this would probably be the equivalent of hitting the jackpot in a multi-million dollar lottery, without having to do much more work than thinking really hard. This scenario will definitely encourage a lot of smart, but not necessarily rich, people to keep submitting new ideas.
From a society benefit, things are good too, since the winner of the bid is much more likely to take full advantage of that idea than someone who is much poorer.
The only issue I haven't worked out fully is an alternative to allowing a person/company to bid for ownership of their own patent application, since if they're sure they can get it, they could just bid ridiculous amounts of money & pay themselves. For the bid process to be rational, you need to make sure that if someone wins a bid, then they actually have to pay someone that money (and not keep it). Perhaps the money could be automatically used for public domain "Applied Research" or something.
Why would a developer WHOSE SOLE MEANS OF INCOME is the production of IP want to weaken their position?
The bigger question is why should society allow individuals/companies to monopolize a concept, when it would be much healthier for the society to allow anyone & everyone to use it in competition?
I would fire anyone who's not able to use a keyboard, or doesn't check their input twice, especially when they are responsible for huge amounts of money.
I would also fire the people responsible for designing a system where somebody can TRADE such huge amounts of money without their trades being regularly sanity-checked somehow.
Big clue: Bush & Co. "conservatism" doesn't mean the same thing as judicial conservatism. Witness the growth in size & spending of the federal government during Bush's "conservative" administration.
Given past history, Bush & Co. will do _anything_, including whatever dirty tricks they can justify to themselves, to get a religous ideologue onto the SCOTUS bench.
We on the right don't want to get rid of the Bill of Rights.
There's the secular right, and the religious right. The fundie religious right would be perfectly happy to use the Bill of Rights as toilet paper & flush it, just before establishing a complete and total theocracy. They'd be perfectly happy with that result.
I have no idea why the secular right goes along with them (esp. since the size & spending of the federal government seems to be growing astronomically), except maybe out of some irrational sense of party loyalty.
But you've never had the right to copyright infringement.
Making a copy of your own private property is a "natural" right. Being able to stop someone from make a copy of their own private property, i.e., holding a copyright, is a _privilege_ which is granted & enforced by law.
No, it really is just about that simple. Making it more complicated is just a way to come up with fake excuses for asserting unnecessary controls over the free market.
If you can't come up with a solid social benefit argument for implementing a particular economic policy, then implementing that economic policy is just an exercise in either irrationality or greed. And before you say anything about the "social benefit" of current intellectual property laws, I will preempt your argument by stating that I do not believe that it has been shown that current intellectual property laws have actually provided a net societal benefit - just allowed a lot of parasites to make money in a way that a free market would not have supported - and with the way that the trend of intellectual property abuse seem to be going, there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that the current intellectual property laws are suppressing & inhibiting the true societal growth encouraged by free imformation flow.
Why would the corporation invest in the inventor, when it can just copy it? Thereby getting a jump on the corporation that invented it.
They can't "get a jump" on the inventor - by definition, the inventor has the invention first. If the inventor can't take advantage of his or her own idea to get ahead of the competitor before the competitor copies it, then for society's benefit, it's better that the competitor get to implement the idea.
Also, if one inventor derives an idea completely independently of another, then why should the other inventor be able to stop the 1st from capitalizing on his/her own idea, just because the 2nd one got to a filing office first? That's really arbitrary, and just points out the irrationality of ideas as "property".
Why would inventors invest in their own work, when it can be easily copied? And if they don't invest, where do these innovations come from?
So they can get a jump on their competition. Duh. If they don't, their _competition_ will do the innovation & leave them in the dust.
Your scenario means that only corporations, with money and personnel to invest in espionage security, can afford to invent.
No, it means that whoever can execute the idea the best will get the benefit from it. That's called competition, and it provides maximal societal benefit by allowing whoever can execute an idea the best to do the execution.
>Some IP protection means that individuals can invent, and have their investment generate return. Too much means only corporations can afford to invest, just like too little.
If lack of innovation becomes a societal issue, then society should just collectively fund "Applied Research" with the results available for exploitation by anyone. This would provide a direct way of making sure there is a steady flow of innovative ideas which will be implemented best by whoever can take advantage of them, society can easily control how much they are willing to spend to keep that flow of innovation going, and there is no need for "intellectual property" laws which override peoples' normal property rights.
Anarchy means that property belongs to the mighty.
B.S.
Eliminating "intellectual property" laws isn't even remotely like anarchy. Private property laws & public safety is still enforced. The only differences will be that 1) people will be to do whatever they would normally expect to do with their own private property, like make copies of CD or DVD, without worrying about whether the BSA or RIAA/MIAA will be knocking down their doors & destroying their lives, and 2) parasite companies whose business models depend on being able to control other peoples' private property will have to adapt or die.
Because the corporation thinks it can use the invention to get a jump on its competition. If the invention is easy to copy, then the company will have to keep innovating to keep ahead of its competition. This isn't _that_ complicated.
If you can't see the difference between a physical object like a table & the information in a book, then you seriously need to reevalute your model of reality.
Big hint: you can see/touch/feel the table. Please describe to me how you can do the same with information if you take away the book.
Exchanging goods for money is an old and well trusted system.
And services, not just "goods".
How can businesses make money on the ideas/information/programs they produced initially?
By providing desired services. If you can't sell a product or service for an amount, then it isn't worth that amount, no matter how much effort you put into it.
acknowledging the severe limitations of our economy to produce more without constraining their distribution
Eh? All that stuff gets generated like crap from a municipal sewer pipe. Constraining its distribution is just a means that lets some people get money for it that they don't necessarily deserve.
Merely that the variety and complexity of our universe is so great as to belie the possibility of it being totally random.
Massive variety & complexity sounds more like what I would expect from a universe generated from randomness than intelligent design. Are you sure you're using the same argument that the creationists do?
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It's not by appointment - the press release will go something like: "Well, the voters haven't chosen anyone to lead this important position yet, so while we're waiting for them to make up their minds, the #2 person will be the acting director/manager/whatever." And as long services keep getting provided, then the average voter won't give a damn that they voted NOTA & someone they didn't pick took up the slack.
Like I said (and what it seems like you're saying), if you want REAL change to occur, then you need to make sure that NOTA _really_ means to shut down that office/department/whatever, not just leave a blank slot at the top.
That will just mean that some non-campaigning "interim" or "acting" bureaucrat will fill the post.
If you want your idea to have teeth, then you need to shut down the entire office that supports that public position - so that it can't do any work, and it doesn't cost any money. Then wait to see if enough people scream about it going away to actually vote someone in.
Another alternative: a strong federal balanced-budget Constitutional amendment, plus some restrictions about playing with the cash-policies, would force the Congresscritters to make some tough decisions about where they're trying to spend their pork.
Yet another alternative: instead of having the government take peoples' tax money & figure out how THEY want to spend it, just mandate that people have to spend a certain amount of tax money & let the people figure out what public service they want to spend it on for themselves.
(Dunno if I trust people to make good choices about that, but at least it's an interesting alternative).
You didn't read the parent right - people try to _disprove_ theories, not prove them. A theory is just a guess that hasn't been disproven yet.
"String theory" covers a whole bunch of variations of metaphysics & particle physics, some variations of which smart people have already figured out problems with (and thrown them out), other variations which smart people have figured out possible tests (but which aren't possible with our level of technology), and some which people haven't been able to figure out tests for (but don't have any reason to believe that they won't be able to eventually figure out some kind of test).
I haven't read about anyone who has described an actual "string theory" which was theoretically untestable. _That_ would be the equivalent of a religion.
Just like the Muslims have a "different extra book".
I'm agnostic.
I figure there's no way for anyone to know what's waiting for us after death (and I think anybody who says that they do is just deluding themselves and/or others), so we'll just have to wait to die to find out.
While I'm waiting for that to happen, I'm going to enjoy my life as much as possible.
Look overhead - woosh!
He's quoting a John Lennon song (I think).
I would include reducing the student-to-teacher ratio. This would, of course, require that more teachers be hired, and would cost money, which a lot of short-sighted people seem to be reluctant to spend.
I have no idea why parents who drive themselves nuts trying to entertain 2 or 3 kids at home think that a single teacher should be able to handle 40-50 kids (some of whom are bound to have emotional and/or learning-disability problems) for 6-7 hours/day, and be able to teach them all something.
Apparently, many communities in the U.S. would rather pay for prisons than for public education.
It doesn't sound like you're much of a libertarian.
Evolution doesn't really say anything about "direction" - it describes only why random changes in a species may or may not be kept over time. As you know, the "Evolutionary Tree" does not end in a single branch, and in many cases the branches have died & will never go anywhere.
In addition, theoretically, a particular species could even keep evolving backward/forward over and over again (if it had a particular instability of its genes & there was a cyclical environmental influence to encourage such selection).
I (who am not the person you are replying to) would wonder why they aren't doing the ecological thing, and reintroducing natural predators. I realise that there might not be enough range for the prey/predator balance, although that's mostly human fault as well.
I think that hunting is actually a valuable skill to keep alive in a society, but think that the "curb animal overpopulation" is usually used as a rationale to allow people to hunt without practicing natural ecosystem management. I also frankly doubt that "hunting" with something like AK-47s, or not eating your catch, is anything more than satisfying bloodlust.
Well, I'm sure there could be a lot of behind-the-scenes deal-making & such, but I figure that running an auction is a pretty well-matured type of sales process that a lot of people understand quite well, even accounting for all of the usual possibilities of corruption.
Aside from my lack of a good solution about trying to figure out what to do if a patent submitter wanted to bid for their own patent, the most likely problem I can think of is if the legislators make the patent application & bidding process a closed system (like the FCC auctions for spectrum licensing, which sure feel corrupt to me). For the auctioning process to properly assign true market-valuation to each patent, it really needs to be open to as wide a pool of bidders & applicants as possible.
With the way it's working out, it becomes more like:
1. You think of this awesome idea.
2. You try to make a product based on the idea.
You might even get a patent on it.
3. Megacorporation with billions of dollars &
hundreds of patents crushes your company & ruins your life.
Now why were patents useful again?
I've got an alternative to your alternative, although it's similar in concept: only allow a fixed, reasonable-sized number of patents at any given time. This will make it a lot easier to handle the patent database, and for people to know whether they are violating anything.
As slots become available when patents are invalidated due to expiration, obviousness or prior art, then the empty slots are filled from a pool of patent applications (new ones, obviously).
For a patent slot to be filled by a particular patent application, people/companies are allowed to bid for ownership on any patent application from the pool. The money paid by the winning bidders for each auction will go to the patent applicant.
The N available empty slots are filled with the patents from the top N bids.
Patent ideas which don't achieve an available slot become public domain.
By putting all of the applications into a bidding process, you force all of the bidders to do due-diligence on every application, since if they purchase ownership of a patent which gets thrown out later due to obviousness or prior art, that will represent a big waste of money.
The patent applicant will get an amount of compensation automatically equal to what the market thought that owning their idea was worth. For small inventors, this would probably be the equivalent of hitting the jackpot in a multi-million dollar lottery, without having to do much more work than thinking really hard. This scenario will definitely encourage a lot of smart, but not necessarily rich, people to keep submitting new ideas.
From a society benefit, things are good too, since the winner of the bid is much more likely to take full advantage of that idea than someone who is much poorer.
The only issue I haven't worked out fully is an alternative to allowing a person/company to bid for ownership of their own patent application, since if they're sure they can get it, they could just bid ridiculous amounts of money & pay themselves. For the bid process to be rational, you need to make sure that if someone wins a bid, then they actually have to pay someone that money (and not keep it). Perhaps the money could be automatically used for public domain "Applied Research" or something.
The bigger question is why should society allow individuals/companies to monopolize a concept, when it would be much healthier for the society to allow anyone & everyone to use it in competition?
Why?
I would also fire the people responsible for designing a system where somebody can TRADE such huge amounts of money without their trades being regularly sanity-checked somehow.
Big clue: Bush & Co. "conservatism" doesn't mean the same thing as judicial conservatism. Witness the growth in size & spending of the federal government during Bush's "conservative" administration.
Given past history, Bush & Co. will do _anything_, including whatever dirty tricks they can justify to themselves, to get a religous ideologue onto the SCOTUS bench.
There's the secular right, and the religious right. The fundie religious right would be perfectly happy to use the Bill of Rights as toilet paper & flush it, just before establishing a complete and total theocracy. They'd be perfectly happy with that result.
I have no idea why the secular right goes along with them (esp. since the size & spending of the federal government seems to be growing astronomically), except maybe out of some irrational sense of party loyalty.
Making a copy of your own private property is a "natural" right. Being able to stop someone from make a copy of their own private property, i.e., holding a copyright, is a _privilege_ which is granted & enforced by law.
No, it really is just about that simple. Making it more complicated is just a way to come up with fake excuses for asserting unnecessary controls over the free market.
If you can't come up with a solid social benefit argument for implementing a particular economic policy, then implementing that economic policy is just an exercise in either irrationality or greed. And before you say anything about the "social benefit" of current intellectual property laws, I will preempt your argument by stating that I do not believe that it has been shown that current intellectual property laws have actually provided a net societal benefit - just allowed a lot of parasites to make money in a way that a free market would not have supported - and with the way that the trend of intellectual property abuse seem to be going, there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that the current intellectual property laws are suppressing & inhibiting the true societal growth encouraged by free imformation flow.
They can't "get a jump" on the inventor - by definition, the inventor has the invention first. If the inventor can't take advantage of his or her own idea to get ahead of the competitor before the competitor copies it, then for society's benefit, it's better that the competitor get to implement the idea.
Also, if one inventor derives an idea completely independently of another, then why should the other inventor be able to stop the 1st from capitalizing on his/her own idea, just because the 2nd one got to a filing office first? That's really arbitrary, and just points out the irrationality of ideas as "property".
So they can get a jump on their competition. Duh. If they don't, their _competition_ will do the innovation & leave them in the dust.
No, it means that whoever can execute the idea the best will get the benefit from it. That's called competition, and it provides maximal societal benefit by allowing whoever can execute an idea the best to do the execution.
If lack of innovation becomes a societal issue, then society should just collectively fund "Applied Research" with the results available for exploitation by anyone. This would provide a direct way of making sure there is a steady flow of innovative ideas which will be implemented best by whoever can take advantage of them, society can easily control how much they are willing to spend to keep that flow of innovation going, and there is no need for "intellectual property" laws which override peoples' normal property rights.
B.S.
Eliminating "intellectual property" laws isn't even remotely like anarchy. Private property laws & public safety is still enforced. The only differences will be that 1) people will be to do whatever they would normally expect to do with their own private property, like make copies of CD or DVD, without worrying about whether the BSA or RIAA/MIAA will be knocking down their doors & destroying their lives, and 2) parasite companies whose business models depend on being able to control other peoples' private property will have to adapt or die.
Because the corporation thinks it can use the invention to get a jump on its competition. If the invention is easy to copy, then the company will have to keep innovating to keep ahead of its competition. This isn't _that_ complicated.
If you can't see the difference between a physical object like a table & the information in a book, then you seriously need to reevalute your model of reality.
Big hint: you can see/touch/feel the table. Please describe to me how you can do the same with information if you take away the book.
And services, not just "goods".
By providing desired services. If you can't sell a product or service for an amount, then it isn't worth that amount, no matter how much effort you put into it.
Eh? All that stuff gets generated like crap from a municipal sewer pipe. Constraining its distribution is just a means that lets some people get money for it that they don't necessarily deserve.
Massive variety & complexity sounds more like what I would expect from a universe generated from randomness than intelligent design. Are you sure you're using the same argument that the creationists do?