Patent laws are the reason why I’m reluctant to work on my idea for a mini-joystick (thumbstick) with force feedback, because even if I manage to get it through without violating any patents of the patent troll by the name of Immersion Technologies, I wouldn’t want the technology to be locked to a single console manufacturer for a decade, then to be only available to certain manufacturers for yet another 5 years or so.
Yes, Intellectual Property must go down. People often think positively of copyright, thinking that no one would support artists if they weren’t forced to, and that artists couldn’t possibly make a living if it weren’t for copyright. I think we are rich enough that if we were to share it properly we could give everyone, not just the talented, time and resources to create art. And I think the talented would still gain advantages by being talented, people want to support artists that mean a lot to them. But to be fair, limiting or removing copyright is not only not that popular of an idea, it’s also the least of our worries, cause it mostly concerns entertainment purposes.
Patent laws is where we need to act. To give a clear example: patent laws mean that excessive amounts of money goes to pharmaceutical companies, This is always defended by saying that they in turn will invest this money into research. The problem is
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They spend far more money on marketing than on R&D, which effectively means that you’re often not getting the best medicine, it means your getting the best marketed medicine.
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When money does go to R&D, the research that’s being done, is limited to that which benefits the pharmaceutical company. This is an unacceptable limitation. For example it is not in the interest of pharmaceutical companies to to cure disease, it’s far more commercially attractive to make it a manageable chronic disease, where you rely on medication for the rest of your life.
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Companies will not share their knowledge. For a company these are trade-secrets that could benefit their competition and if you have to compete obviously sharing knowledge is not in your best interest. But if you want to help humanity forward, obviously you should.
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Drug prices are often excessively high, in part because of the previously mentioned marketing costs that you pay for.
Neither of these problems would exist if R&D was funded by governments and charity. And the pharmaceutical is just one industry that’s taken as an example. The way that intellectual property is holding humanity back can not be overstated. Basically we need to go free and open source on IP,
though usually stupid and fucky copyright laws have one advantage - if someone bigger than you steals your idea you can take them to court. without copyright laws we’d have giant corporations just taking shit and using their platform to sell stolen ideas without a single cent going to the original creator…
which happens anyway, but uh, i guess it’d happen more?
honestly idk, let’s do a test run of a year without any copyright laws and see if anything changes like at all
though usually stupid and fucky copyright laws have one advantage - if someone bigger than you steals your idea you can take them to court. without copyright laws we’d have giant corporations just taking shit and using their platform to sell stolen ideas without a single cent going to the original creator…
It’s very difficult for some small independent creator to take a big corporation successfully to court. Imagine going up against The Mouse or someone similar with a lawyer paid for by your legal insurance. You might as well just not do it at all.
The same thing is even worse with patents. I made a few things that I could patent. But for that I’d have to cough up a few thousands per year, roughly 100k over the life-time of the patent, and in turn I only get the right to sue someone violating my patent. I don’t even get the guarantee that my patent is valid.
Patents are designed exactly so that big corporations can use them excessively to suppress smaller competitors while they are too expensive and too uncertain for small inventors to use them.
yeah at first i wanted to say “corporation” and “individual” but that’s not an equal playing field at all. So i just switched my woring to “bigger” thinking of idk, a writer in the same field who has a bigger following than you
i didn’t even get into the patents part because i’d be ranting about Adobe for hours again, and i already spend too much time thinking about them
edit: but then i said corporation anyway lol, i blame the fact i just woke up when i was writing that comment
one advantage - if someone bigger than you steals your idea you can take them to court
I’m against the notion that ideas can be stolen. I mean, you can keep an idea to yourself, choose not to share it, but if you share your ideas in whatever shape or form, it’s there for others to do with as they please. Or atleast, despite that not being the case, in my opinion, that’s how it should be. You can of course disagree, but in my view the idea that the first one to come up with an idea, can plant a flag on it and then own this idea, is not helpful. Rather it is limiting, it is holding us back. I think humanity as a whole functions better if we can use eachothers ideas as we please. Humanity functions by copying eachothers behavior and ideas and occasionally improving on them. Like with FOSS, if an idea is improperly executed or can be improved upon, even if just according to some, it is helpful, that the idea can be forked.
Like I said, I prefer to focus on patent law first, rather than copyright law. But fundamentally I think there is no difference.
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On related note, Luanti (formerly Minetest) is a platform for playing and developing block mining games a la Minecraft and Vintage story.
Capitalists say the free market is king then they go and make laws to stifle and restrict it so they can make monopolies and gouge everyone out of their hard-earned income.
Capitalism is an egotistic not an idealistic movement. Capitalists don’t become capitalists because they think it benefits everyone, but because they think it benefits them. That’s why someone like Elon Musk is only against government subsidies if he’s not the recipient.
Buy everything up so your choice doesnt really latter because the money ends up in theirs either way. And put hurdles in the way so no one could try to get any funny ideas and make their own thing
They are not Capitalists. In fact capitalism is a great idea, it just we don’t have it.
Maybe it’s Crony capitalism instead?
Other way around. They’re capitalists but don’t support the free market. So they want the factory to be privately owned and run for profit, but they still want the government to interfere with patent-infringing sales.
And I’d argue that capitalism is an inherently bad idea, even in theory. Nobody deserves free rent just for owning something, like land or natural resources. Property manager is a job, landlord is not.
So they want the factory to be privately owned and run for profit, but they still want the government to interfere
We should take a step back and recognize that they want the government to interfere by recognizing and enforcing their ownership of the factory in the first place.
Properly regulated capitalism isn’t strictly horrible. The biggest issue we have is that first bit, unfortunately.
-Me, a dirty socialist
oh see here that refers specifically to militias
Ohhh, is that that other thing the US doesn’t do? 😂
In a classic example you have a village with 2 bakeries, one of the bakers came up with a machine to kneed the bread, so he can make more bread and sell it cheaper. This is sort of the story people tell to show how great capitalism is.
But we have reached a point where that one bakery now owns a chain of bakers, adds ingredients to the bread to make it more addictive, skips on actual ingredients needed for bread and replaces them with sawdust, made donations to the current political party so any competition has to jump through hoops to get a bakery license, etc.
And don’t forget how one bakery could pay their employees only the bare minimum, cut corners where they can and use the profit to undercut the ‘good’ bakery until the ‘good’ bakery goes bankrupt and the ‘bad’ bakery can simply be a local monopoly and raise prices as they like.
Capitalism only works if it’s regulated. Unregulated capitalism just becomes feudalism again. In your example, the owner of the bakery chain no longer has to innovate or compete. They simply own something and wait for money to be delivered to them.
Of course, for the government to be able to regulate things, it needs to be bigger and more powerful than the businesses it’s regulating. You can’t have Amazon being worth 2.3 trillion because it can easily make itself immune from competition and immune from regulators.
A mixed capitalist / socialist economy is the best solution we’ve come up with so far that actually seems to work in the real world. Only the most insane would want things like fire services to be fully privatized, or for every road to be a privately owned toll road. But, a fully state owned economy didn’t really work either. Trying that caused the USSR to collapse, and it caused China to switch to a different version of a capitalist / communist / socialist setup. The real issue is where to draw the boundaries. Most countries have decided that healthcare is something that the government should either fully control, or at least have a very strong control over. Meanwhile, the US pays more and receives less with its for-profit system. In England, they privatized water, and it seems to have been a disaster, meanwhile the socialist utopia of USA mostly has cities providing water services.
Where do you draw the line? Personally, I think Northern Europe seems to have the best results. Strong labour protections, a lot of essential things owned by / provided by the government, but with space for for-profit private enterprise too.
Agreed. I feel as though capitalism is a good option for things which can have elastic demand. Luxury items, entertainment, etc can all benefit from a competitive market because I have the luxury of not needing to buy them. On the other hand, I do absolutely need food, housing, and healthcare in order to live. Applying supply and demand principles when demand must be inelastic only leads to people getting hurt.
My dream system would be one in which, as a baseline, all human requirements for survival are provided no matter the situation, and where currency is only used for luxuries.
I mostly agree with you, it’s just that historically governments have been really bad at producing some necessities of life.
I really wouldn’t want anybody other than a government providing clean drinking water. I think they’ve proven they’re great at that, and private industries just mess it up in various ways. OTOH, governments historically haven’t been very good at producing crops. It seems like every time a government wants to fully take over farming, the result is a famine. Having said that, farming subsidies, and programs where governments are guaranteed buyers of farmed stuff is pretty great.
It really pisses me off that some of the most right-wing, most anti-government people in the US are farmers, and farmers are absolutely supported by the government. There are certainly some flaws in the system. The corn subsidy being so high is ridiculous, and results in things like high fructose corn syrup being available nearly free, and so it’s in everything. OTOH, it’s thanks to government intervention that the US is absolutely secure when it comes to price shocks for food items. Almost everything is made domestically. And, while there can be quirks like egg prices being high (which again is due to unregulated / badly regulated monopolies) the overall system is very stable.
Housing is another thing that is iffy if it’s 100% government made. The awful apartment blocks of former soviet republics are an example of that. But, unregulated housing construction is even worse. This is one where you need to find some balance between fully capitalist and fully government run.
Mostly though, right now, the governments of the world just need to start cracking down on capitalist businesses that are harming the public. The EU is at least trying, but the results have been mixed. The US was starting to do something under Biden and then Trump took over and… wowza. I think the recent NYC election shows that the population is well to the left of the democratic party establishment, and that cracking down on big business could be a huge win in future elections.
one of the amazing features of the USA is water companies… providing water to your house… because that’s how it’s always been done here
And then uses his immense wealth and contacts to make frivolous lawsuits against smaller bakers trying to make their own machine, knowing full well they will not win in court but will financially ruin the smaller baker and tie them up in litigation for years, then forcing them to an unfair arbitration where they make a shit offer to buy out the competition
Even in the best case s scenario - bakeries compete making uniform quality products without involving political shenanigans - the price of bread is independent of the cost of production.
What you’re looking for as a business is the “clearing price”, which is the price at which your (sales * price) generates the maximum revenue.
New capital that lowers per unit cost does not change the price. It raises profit margins. Only when multiple vendors in competition have access to this capital does the clearing price fall.
The major premise of Capitalism is risk vs reward. We hit a tipping point though, where 99% of people do not have any capital to risk, and the people who do have the capital have enough to nullify any risk.
Tax the rich.
Not just having capital, but got a hostage situation where their failure would collapse the economy therefore they are not allowed to fail and must be bailed out by the government they paid (often for far less) for earlier.
I don’t buy into the “too big to fail” idea for individuals.
I really think it only applies to banks, mainly because they hold the money of common people. Anyone else should be allowed to fail. Probably the greatest financial policy fuckup of my life was bailing everybody out in 2008 and not holding anyone accountable for their actions. That gets back to risk and reward breaking down. Those companies should have been allowed to fail. The money, workers and demand for services don’t disappear, they shift to more stable competitors.
Sometimes I get mad about how we in practice have basic income for the rich. If you have a few million dollars, you can park it in zero or low risk investments (eg: high yield savings, bonds) and get free money. Then you can just fuck off and pursue your dreams. No risk. Lots of reward.
But if you’re poor? Well you better take any job for any salary or you’re just a parasite blah blah blah. All pain, some risk, little reward.
My ex gets an allowance from his grandparents every week. They also bought him a house.
He’d get a job for a couple years, fuck around and get fired. Only got through college because I did his homework.
He has a house, he has a fridge full of food, he can go to restaurants and order out and take weeks off for vacation.
I worked full time through college, often three jobs. I still have massive student loans. I work two part time jobs, because the career field I went into is collapsing, and I’m not welcome as a trans person anyway.
I have always worked; he has not. I sleep on a rug and stack of pillows; he can pick out whatever luxury furniture he wants.
Work is entirely disconnected from reward.
Rich people also get handed so many free things.
Put over $100,000 in the bank and they will throw free accounts, low interest credit cards, rewards, free safety deposit boxes, personal concierge services. And that’s just the start.
Oh yeah I forgot about that. One of the banks here refunds ATM fees if you have a minimum balance of $2500 (and waives the monthly fee if you have $25,000). Like, my guys, the people who don’t have money need that fee waived a lot more. But the bank just wants to make money and that means appealing to rich people.
Fortunately it’s not hard to find banks who have no fees for those, in the US at least.
This one is appealing in that they refund the fee even if it’s from some other bank. So you can go to the ATM at the corner shop that charges $3 to withdraw, and get that refunded at the end of the quarter. Most banks don’t have fees at their own ATM, but this is no fees anywhere. For rich people.
Ally Bank whoop! Online only bank. Used to be unlimited free ATM withdrawals, now $10/mo reimbursed. Plenty for most!
There’s a few credit unions that will do that even. (With a refund limit per month ofc)
Wow, I must be banking at the wrong place.
We hit a tipping point though, where 99% of people do not have any capital to risk
When do you think this tipping point was? Because as far as I can tell this was around the French revolution.
In modern economics, a massive change came about in the early 1970s. Productivity and profits decoupled from employee wages, and continued to rise while wages stayed flat. Fast forward 50 years, account for inflation and shifts in technology, and it’s easy to see that employee wages HAVEN’T RISEN in meaningful amounts for 50 years. Meanwhile, companies are making more money than ever.
So, I’d say it was in the 70’s.
Hmmm. Good question. I’m not an economist, but I’d say it was around the time Reganomics got started, maybe a little bit beforehand, since I think Reganomics was probably a consequence of the powerful having enough money to out-fund the general populace.
Capitalism, since its inception, has been 99% of people having no capital.
TaxEat the rich.weve tried taxing them before.
And it went pretty well, until they bought enough politicians to change it.
So taxing the rich is an unstable temporary solution, and more fundamental changes are required.
I propose harsher, more lethal, punishments for politicians that accept bribes
this is exactly what i mean. we need systemic change to solve this, not just tax.
I’m down. I think every year, we ought to take the richest person in the country and redistribute 50% of their assets.
And their body parts as well
The Game Boy alone proves this whole capitalist rhetoric wrong. It was the most successful hand held game system for two reasons, it was cheaper than the rest and it went through batteries slower, otherwise it was objectively the worst handheld game system on the market at the time. Look at the food you are able to eat, the clothes you are able to wear, and the place you are able to live and try to tell me the driving force on those decisions was quality. Capitalism is not concerned with improving anything, that is not the goal of the system.
The goal is to get the highest score.
Copyright and inheritance can’t exist in a capitalist society
Under true capitalism, everyone starts at 0 regardless of their birth and the only way to make more money than someone else is to work more hours regardless of profession. Over saturation of a given market is fixed by the invisible hand where people just move onto something that gives more hours
the only way to make more money than someone else is to work more hours regardless of profession
Workers aren’t capitalists. The whole point of Capitalism is to ensure the ruling class never has to do the actual work. Capitalists make their money by exploiting workers, not working themselves.
Capitalists are people who own the means of production. Working in a capitalist system you will never earn enough to buy the factory. Inheritance is one of the main ways to become a capitalist. Sure some people get lucky but with few exceptions if you are rich the way you got rich was by exploiting other people .
Copyright was a halfway decent idea when it first came out. Give a chance for an artist or inventor to profit from their work for a few years and then it becomes public property. Thanks to corporations like Disney, that has all been twisted, and now it’s used as a cudgel to keep others from competing and it takes almost 100 years for something to go out of copyright now (thanks congress).
A system where you do the work and get paid for your value is closer to Socialism than capitalism.
Now compare democracy with both systems.
Democracy is a form of government.
Capitalism and Socialism are economic systems.
You could have a Democratic Socialist system, if the majority of people wanted it.
You could have an Authoritarian Dictatorship that allowed Capitalism.
It’s a little more complex because people are used to living under Capitalism and many people don’t really understand Socialism and would fight against their own interest to revert to the status quo, as a result some socialist philosophers have suggested not giving people a choice but to accept socialism, a so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat”, but even in such a system you could have a constitution that enshrines socialism as the the economic system, while still giving people the ability to vote on everything else.
For example “Private Property” could be abolished. Factories and business could be owned by all of the employees as a whole and the profits shared equitably. After a short time living in such a system it would be unlikely that the majority of people would vote to return power back over to just a few individuals.
This would likely depend on the transition going smoothly. Give people a little hardship and the knee jerk/reactionary response would be to proclaim they were “better off” before.
The main problem with Socialism is that people are so used to having ‘rulers’, that they simply do not know how to act in their absence. This creates a seeming ‘power vacuum’. Unscrupulous individuals can use that fact as a way to assume the roles vacated by the formerly rich and powerful in the name of being a force that maintains the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, when very often they seem to become dictators themselves.
In my personal opinion, violent revolution will always lead to that outcome. If we ever want to evolve as a society, people must first understand what Socialism actually is and why it’s the best choice for the majority of people. We must freely choose it, because it’s the right thing to do.
That is made extremely difficult because the rich and powerful like being rich and powerful, and will use every bit of their resources to ensure they stay rich and powerful. It’s easier to convince cops to side with them to keep them in power by sharing a tiny bit of their wealth, than it is to convince them to do the right thing, when they aren’t even sure what the right thing is.
There is a reason that Education is a political battleground in the US. If people were actually taught the truth, they probably would choose to do the right thing. The capitalists won’t allow that to happen if they can help it.
Anytime you see someone trying to cut funding for education, or try to have a whitewashed version of history taught. This is the reason.
This is also the source of “Red Scare” propaganda and fear mongering. ‘Keep people scared, ignorant, and confused’ will probably be the subtitle of the last 100 years if they make a movie about it in the future, provided the Fascists and/or Capitalists don’t win.
Edit: JFK once said “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” I think there is a lot of wisdom in that and I wish people in power would take it to heart, though I know they wont.
Under true capitalism, everyone starts at 0 regardless of their birth
Then true capitalism will never exist. At best, it’s a Platonic Ideal.
A society where no one has capital and the only way to get ahead is to provide more labour? And you call them steamed hams despite the fact they’re obviously grilled?
The ideals of capitalism were to punish the rich land owners/nobles who were wealthy without ever working and empower the workers who were poor despite working for their whole lives
It’s a good lesson to teach that the wealthy would rather rebrand their image than give up wealth
The ideals of capitalism were to punish the rich land owners/nobles who were wealthy without ever working and empower the workers who were poor despite working for their whole lives
Where are you getting this from?
The Wealth of Nations/Adam Smith
Well it’s blatant propaganda. Think about it, when people got rid of kings and ‘nobles’, they didn’t take the wealth from them. Those people stayed rich and invested that money into business. The ruling class never changed, they just changed job titles.
There has also never been a system (under capitalism) where peoples wealth is taken from them when they die.
The whole idea that under Capitalism everyone “Starts from 0” is just laughable.
Capitalism was never a punishment for nobles who didn’t work, it was a way for them to continue to stay in power, and still not have to work.
The vast majority of wealthy people were born wealthy. The vast majority of people who start from 0 will die with basically 0.
Adam Smith himself was born wealthy.
Very occasionally, someone like a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs will come along and be successful, but they are the exceptions to the rule. And most of their wealth came from exploiting people.
A few professions could be a path for poor people to succeed, like for example Lawyers, but you have to have the money for Law School in the first place, so most of them came from well off parents.
Capitalism wouldn’t exist if it were a fair system.
It’s a good lesson to teach that the wealthy would rather rebrand their image than give up wealth
Hence this part, if you’re looking to change the system then you have to counter the rebrand and set up a system that can’t be undone
Sure. The way to counter the rebrand is to question it and call BS on it when you encounter it, expose it for what it actually is. That was the point of my post.
Just like the Bible, no one actually reads it
Copyright used to have a hard limit in years. Inheritance used to pack a substantial tax.
Is no one going to talk about how a rune pickaxe is WAAY more expensive than a bronze pick?
Not if you’re using duplicate item cheats
Someone gets it.
Lets instead do this:
Every citizen, irrespective of their nationality, skincolor, gender has the right to:
- living quarters
- work
- maximum of 7 hours of work
- free healthcare
- paid vacation
- equal pay and treatment for women
- freedom of religion and speech
This is directly taken from a 1936 constitution. Today one could improve on it but we’re so much worse, everywhere.
Now guess which one.
Go check those living quarters they had lol, and food queues, and how well the health care worked if you had nothing to bribe with. Those sweet shortages of everything.
You should talk to someone who actually lived in the “union” and stop slurping kremlin propaganda. But will you? I wouldn’t bet on it.
I did my 7h of work, I’m retiring now.
And those were obviously 100% kept 🤡
The maximum hours you can work did not apply to everyone as my former boss has stories of working 12+ hours in the gulag he was sent to for reasons he does not know.
Luckily, the Soviet union treated homosexuals to a similar standard. /s
Couldn’t we just add equality for sexual orientation and gender expression to a new list of rights, along with the things already mentioned?
OP even said, “Today one could improve on it,” implying that the referenced constitution isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list for the modern day.
The Soviet Union didn’t particularly treat homosexuals any worse than most countries at the time. Sure, it should have done better, but there are limitations to ideology when lessentially your entire ideological base members die in the struggle against the Nazis due to being the first to volunteer.
After the October Revolution of 1917, homosexuality was decriminalised in Soviet Russia with the repeal of the legal code of the Russian Empire, and this decriminalisation was confirmed with new criminal codes in 1922 and 1926. Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet government reversed course in the late 1920s and promoted harsher policy against LGBTQ rights. In 1933, homosexuality was recriminalised in the Soviet Union, and Article 121, which prohibited male homosexuality, was added to the Soviet penal code in the following year.
You don’t get to blame this on the Nazis.
Again, not any worse than any other country of the time.
Actually it is worse because they were better and then actively decided to make things worse.
If you had actually read anything on the “decriminalization” of homosexuality in Soviet Russia after 1917, you’d know that there was not really any social movement on the side of legalizing homosexuality. The fact that its criminalization was repealed is mostly due to Bolsheviks wanting to repeal essentially all Russian Imperial law.
Homosexuality wasn’t even well-understood at the time, they conflated gender and sexuality, which is why only male homosexuality was criminalized. The Soviet Union, due to it being heir to a very patriarchal society, wanted “stronger men and workers”, and lesbians were seen as a more masculine version of men (which was accepted) whereas gays were seen as “feminized men”, which was seen negatively.
Even then, my point is that after the 40s most of the theorists of socialism were fucking killed at the hands of Nazis, and that’s one of the biggest reasons why social policy didn’t develop sufficiently in the Soviet Union. But even so, the criminalization of homosexuality for the most part wasn’t particularly prosecuted compared to many countries, there’s a difference between something being illegal and something being prosecuted.
All in all: yes, they should have done better, but the material conditions of the moment didn’t really allow for much better.
Uh… This is coming from the folks who said “he who does not work, neither shall he eat” during a famine so… uh… yeah, that’s not the flex you think it is.
Edit: And in case anyone is wondering, this gets worse with context.
As opposed to the current time of surplus and abundance where it is if “you don’t work you don’t eat”. Which is morally a lot worse considering there is more than enough food to feed everyone
Yeah… no. Very little in modern history is morally worse than Soviet management of the famine of 1930-1933 (which they caused, too). That shit was at least on par with the Irish Famine in terms of sheer moral depravity.
Let me get this straight. To you, a famine produced unintentionally through policy that spiked class war and originated primarily from rich farmers sabotaging the crops and livestock as a response to their lands being collectivized in the first successful collectivization of a country in the history of the Earth, is to you as morally depraved as the English colonists literally starving Irish to death because of colonial and racist beliefs?
I won’t dignify this slop with a response. Fucking tankies, man.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
- Jean-Paul Sartre
You won’t dignify me with a response because you’re simply replicating propaganda that you’ve heard on Reddit, and you can’t argue from knowledge but from vibes.
I don’t know choosing to not feed people when there is enough food to feed everyone seems a lot worse than choosing which people to not feed during a time of famine.
Obviously more people die from the famine, but at least that’s due to a lack of resources and not a manufactured scarcity
I can’t find a way to phrase this that’s not offensive, so I’ll just go ahead: Are you being obtuse or do you just not know what you’re talking about? Because if it’s the latter you should at least take a scroll down this Wikipedia page before you talk about this stuff. However, I will say that sacrificing millions of people for holy communism (which is what happened; the famine was a choice) isn’t much better than sacrificing them for holy property rights. Not asking for foreign aid and denying a famine even existed was also inexcusable.
take a scroll down this Wikipedia page
I am once again asking liberals to stop treating Wikipedia as holy Scripture.
the famine was a choice
It was a result of bad policy, and that policy was a choice, but it’s pretty misleading to try and spin that as making the famine itself “a choice”.
citation needed
look up just a few of the atrocities the capitalist west has committed. some in the name of destroying socialism.
if you think mismanaging a famine is worse than enslaving entire countries you are either misinformed or speaking in very bad faith.
They also created the famine by decentralizing agriculture and planning, but at least that sort of people learned their lesson from it and didn’t repeat the exact same blunder in China years later, right?
during a famine
And this was said about able-bodied parasites such as owners of the means of production, shareholders, landlords, and others living off society on non-labor income. At the same time, the population received old-age and disability pensions, maternity leave for women in labor and a huge number of social payments and compensations. Too bad most believe Goebbels propaganda and don’t study history.
And this was said about able-bodied parasites such as owners of the means of production, shareholders, landlords, and others living off society on non-labor income.
And Ukrainians, don’t forget Ukrainians. I know enough about early Soviet history to know that Stalin was a cold-blooded murderer. Not that the rest of the Communist Party was full of upstanding global citizens, but Stalin was particularly egregious.
I know enough
Translation: I saw it on Reddit
I know enough
I assure you: you do not.
Here we go again with the false claims of hunger directed particularly against Ukrainians.
The Bolsheviks gave Ukrainians for the first time in history borders of their own, representation of their own in politics and the right to study for free and in their own language. There are literal letters between Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin in which Rosa argues against Ukraine getting its own representation as a nationality, and Lenin argues in favour of it (which ultimately was done).
The president of the Soviet Union after Stalin was Ukrainian. There is no precedent, no continuation, and no following episode of hunger spiking particularly in Ukraine as it more-or-less did in the early 30s. And millions died outside Ukraine too during that hunger episode, primarily in southern Russia and Central Asia.
Trying to make the 30s famine about Ukrainians is a propaganda exercise first invented by the Nazis to draw Ukrainian sympathy during the Nazi invasion, and it’s picking up strength again as it’s used in Europe to stoke Russophobia and anti-communist sentiment.
Of course you do, from the textbooks of Goebels and his followers.
https://liva.com.ua/lenin-ukraine.html
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
edit: updated links
Surely anyone who dares criticize the great Soviets is a straight up Nazi! There can be no other explanation!
That’s a strawman: they certainly didn’t say all critism of the USSR is Nazi. Just that particular piece.
I don’t think that’s what they’re saying. There are countless pieces of Nazi propaganda that were taken as fact at some point in the intervening 80 years. Famously, the number of people killed in the Dresden bombing was hugely inflated by the Nazis to smear the Allies, and those numbers were accepted for a very long time.
In this case, yes. These criticisms are literally Nazi propaganda.
How are those comparable? In one an able bodied person refuses work, for they need not to. On the other someone incapable of work receive negligible amounts so they may survive
I also very much so doubt you know who Goebbels is
Stalin 1936 constitution. Holidays for “enemies of the people” were unpaid and in a quite cold climate of Siberia. They also cared about fitness of citizens by ensuring no one has too much of food. And if you didn’t like it, you get a free ride in a black car to the place of final rest.
Holidays for “enemies of the people” were unpaid
Not true. The GULAG system, which is simply the prison system of the Soviet Union at the time, did pay inmates a wage while they worked there, this is common knowledge and you can check it up if you want to.
and in a quite cold climate of Siberia
Really? The Gulags were all in Siberia? How about you actually check what you’re talking about instead of spreading misinformation? From the Gulag museum:
www.gulag.online/articles/mapa-taborovych-sprav-gulagu-a-pribehu-ze-stredni-evropy?locale=en
Wow, a ton of Gulags were actually to the west of the Urals, not in Siberia, who would have thought. If only this information was widely available and public…
They also cared about fitness of citizens by ensuring no one has too much of food
Huh? Life expectancy in the Soviet Union rose exponentially, it was below 30 years of age before the Russian Revolution and 60 by the time Stalin died. The diet of the Soviet citizen was by the 60s healthier than that of a US citizen. The CIA itself says this BTW, check out on google “CIA USSR nutrition”, you’ll find a 1983 document claiming, and I quote, “American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of rood each day but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious”. Almost as if centering food production around the needs of the population instead of around the profit of food producers, gives a better result…
Just admit it: you don’t have any fucking idea what you’re talking about. You’re repeating talking points you’ve heard on Reddit or TV without actually checking anything.
My former boss was in a gulag for most of his teens. He was not paid and to this day he has no idea what crime he was convicted of. He just knows he served time and was targeted by guards because he was Jewish and the Soviets were very bigoted.
Maybe take a second to ask yourself what your real life experience is with the USSR.
My former boss was in a gulag for most of his teens. He was not paid and to this day he has no idea what crime he was convicted of.
Maybe your former boss was bullshitting you. Maybe he knew precisely why he was in prison, but didn’t want to admit his crimes to his employees. It’s pretty common for ex-cons to falsely claim innocence.
He just knows he served time and was targeted by guards because he was Jewish and the Soviets were very bigoted.
There were many prominent Jews in the Bolshevik revolution, and Jews continued to be active members of the Communist Party, in soviets, and in the Politburo.
you mean exactly like US prisions? or my country.
Surely people going to jail for the wrong reason is something exclusive to the Soviet Union and not to all countries with a legal system? Like, damn, I feel sorry for your boss, but in dire circumstances such as those of the late 30s / early 40s in the USSR, excesses and abuses were sadly made because of the overwhelming conditions.
Your boss may have spent his teens in a gulag, but the fact that he lived to tell you that is because the Soviets managed to miraculously defeat the Nazis and prevent them from genociding the Slavic peoples they categorised as “Untermenschen” according to the infamous “Generalplan Ost”, which implied genocide of almost all people between Germany and the Urals. If it wasn’t for the Soviets, your former boss would have been murdered in a concentration camp by the nazis.
Surely people going to jail for the wrong reason is something exclusive to the Soviet Union and not to all countries with a legal system?
It isn’t common for people to be sent to slave camps as a punishment for years without knowing why they were charged. That’sthe kind of evil unique to totalitarian shitholes like the USSR.
Your boss may have spent his teens in a gulag, but the fact that he lived to tell you that is because the Soviets managed to miraculously defeat the Nazis and prevent them from genociding the Slavic peoples they categorised as “Untermenschen” according to the infamous “Generalplan Ost”, which implied genocide of almost all people between Germany and the Urals. If it wasn’t for the Soviets, your former boss would have been murdered in a concentration camp by the nazis.
The same nation you are praising put him IN a concentration camp for no fucking reason other than potentially because of his race.
Like, damn, I feel sorry for your boss, but in dire circumstances such as those of the late 30s / early 40s in the USSR, excesses and abuses were sadly made because of the overwhelming conditions.
No, you don’t. You wouldn’t be supporting their evil actions in this case if you had any empathy.
You are making a lot of apologies for overt racism, why are you doing this and why do you think the USSR’s racism should be praised?
It isn’t common for people to be sent to slave camps as a punishment for years without knowing why they were charged
Ever heard of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo?
That’sthe kind of evil unique to totalitarian shitholes like the USSR.
The Gulag episode lasted less than two decades, by the mid-50s it was a thing of the past and never resurfaced in the country. Almost as if it was a mass hysteria response to Nazi infiltration, and not born out of a desire to oppress people inherently. Again, at the peak of the Gulag system, the prison population was similar to that of modern USA. Much more authoritarian if you ask me
The same nation you are praising
Yes, I’m praising this nation because even if it did mistakes, by industrialising eastern Europe and by eliminating Nazis it saved hundreds of millions of lives.
You wouldn’t be supporting their evil actions in this case if you had any empathy
I’m not supporting the excesses of the Gulag repression, it’s something that we can and should criticise. I’m supporting the rest of things of the country, which led to the saving of hundreds of millions of people from hunger, disease and Nazi genocide. The Gulag repression seems horrible until you realize the Nazis murdered 27 million Soviets at that time. It was an extreme measure carried out in extreme times.
You are making a lot of apologies for overt racism
I’m not. If he was jailed for his race that’s wrong. You’re just making too much criticism of the country thst saved Europe from fascism and which saved hundreds of millions of lives in the process.
Are you a little bit slow?
did pay inmates a wage while they worked
In a form of a piece of lead in their heads, no doubt.
Really? The Gulags were all in Siberia?
Where did I say ALL gulags were in Siberia, sweetie?
The diet of the Soviet citizen was by the 60s
Stalin was alive in 60s? News to me.
Another tankie. 🙄
The diet bit is correct because Soviets typically have less meat and more veggies in their diet as well as less sugar.
In a form of a piece of lead in their heads, no doubt
What a stupid argument. Literally just asserting you’re right based on nothing.
Another fascist. 🙄
Another fascist
Only for a brain dead tankie someone criticising Stalin and gulags is always a “fascist” 🤡
Criticizing them from a Nazi perspective, no doubt.
Another brain dead fascist 🤡
In a form of a piece of lead
You could literally open up a book someday and check your info, gulag inmates were paid. Wages were lower than those of a free worker, but nothing like the modern slavery that the USA uses in its prison system for example.
Where did I say ALL gulags were in Siberia
By using the cliche of “forced labor to the cold Siberia”, you’re propagating misinformation about the system, willingly or not. The fact that the majority of Gulags were in fact not in Siberia is kind of a strong statement in that it shows that the intent of gulags was not that of mass-murder of dissidents (which is the claim anticommunists like you normally do). The vast majority of gulag inmates were actually not political dissidents, but normal criminals. The gulag system was the prison system of the USSR for all crimes. Why would you send your average criminal who stole from another person to a death camp instead of trying to reform them? Why did most of the deaths in gulags coincide with a famine that affected the entire Soviet Union during a war and not before or after that? Why did the Gulag system, at its peak during the mass hysteria against nazism, have a number of prisoners similar to that of the modern USA? Maybe if you weren’t a propagandized misinformation spreader you could answer any of those questions. But no, you can’t, because you haven’t lifted the cover of one book in your entire life.
Stalin was alive in 60s?
I brought up the 60s because the Soviet Union was essentially industrialised by then. In 1917, when the Bolsheviks get to power, the former Russian Empire was a predominantly agrarian country where 80+% of people worked the land and the life expectancy was <30 years, there was no industry to speak of. The civil war which the fascists started, and in which England, France and the USA invaded Soviet Russia for the sin of being communist and gave material aid and troops to the pro-tsarist fascists, and which came right after WW1, left the country in a state of utter destruction, and the economy didn’t recover to pre-WW1 levels until 1929, the year when the first 5-year-plan was adopted. Industrialization of the Soviet Union was FAST as lightning, with GDP growths above 10% per year, the fastest industrialization process in history up to that point (and only surpassed by China to this day). But in 1941, as you may know, the Nazis invaded the country, and murdered about 27 million Soviet Citizens and essentially leveled the entire country west of Stalingrad. After 1945, the industrialization progress continued to its previous speed together with the reconstruction of the country, but it isn’t until at least the 60s when you can say the country was properly industrialized. This is why I said the 60s, because comparing a predominantly feudal country in terms of food security to our modern standards is an exercise of either ignorance of bad faith. So tell me, are you arguing from ignorance or from bad faith?
You could literally open up a book someday
That’s what you should start with.
check your info, gulag inmates were paid.
Check, you i… Tankie. Or just check another response to your moronic post.
cliche of "forced labor to the cold Siberia
Listen, you moron: millions of people died in Siberia, murdered by your beloved Stalin. Denying this is like denying holocaust. Go and fuck yourself you genocide denier.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
- Jean-Paul Sartre
You haven’t read my comment because it’s too long for your peanut brain, or refuse to address 90% of it because it goes against your propagandised beliefs. Have a good day, ignorant.
And there it is again. Dont you ever wonder why they had a constitution like this but treated their people like this. Do you have a window in your room? Can you check what happens to enemies of the state where you live? What happens again if you become disabled in our “civilized” societies?
have you ever wondered if you’re being fed bullshit?
Dont you ever wonder why they had a constitution like this but treated their people like this. Do you have a window in your room?
“Tankie’s thoughts”, page 423.
What you’re doing is called a “thought stopper” or “conversation stopper”. It is used in propaganda for hundreds of years.
thought stopper
I am pretty sure that would be a permanent condition you are suffering from.
When pressed, the anti communist reveals that insults and thought terminating cliches are all they have
Is your user name ironic?
Wow. You’re showing very civilized behavior. Maybe i should rethink my stance. :D
Maybe i should rethink my stance.
Don’t bother, you tankies are incapable of logical thinking.
maximum of 7 hours of work
productivity has increased so that we don’t need to work so much anymore.
Absolutely correct. Thats why I said one could improve on it.
I like the idea of little guys coming up with things being able to get a head start from the companies with massive budgets
HOWEVER. imo the big company should not be able to patent anything
Patent protections should be severally limited if not out right done away with minus a few exceptions maybe.
This meme shows a complete misunderstanding of patent law. A patent is a social contract that allows for a limited amount of protection for an invention being copied (usually 20 years) in exchange for it becoming public domain after that. This enables people to make a living inventing things. Are games played with the system, sure, does it work perfectly- no, but it’s better than the alternatives. (Source, am inventor)
This comment shows a complete misunderstanding of patent practice. Patents exist not for inventors, but for companies. Destin, from Smarter Every Day, has a recent video trying to make a grill scrubber in which he talks with many people about how Amazon for example constantly avoids patent claims from small inventors.
Humanity progressed from hunter-gatherers to the industrial revolution without the need for a judge to determine whether I can arrange atoms in a given way or not without giving a canon to someone else who decided to arrange atoms like that before me.
The problem is with corporations pushing up against weak public institutions and finding no resistance not those public institutions dummy.
Without corporations there isn’t a need for intellectual property. Public research, i.e. most research, is conducted without intellectual property, and most scientists dedicate their live to science not because they think they can get rich by selling one product, but because they get a decent wage and position for doing so, intellectual stimulus, and social recognition. Research and invention don’t necessitate intellectual property, only private companies do.
Oh boy here we go. What is a corporation? What does it mean for corporations to not exist? How exactly does that even work in practice?
Yes creative scientist invent things spontaneously without expectation of reward. But no scientist will contribute as much as a well funded and motivated team with a clear goal. And I’m sure all the scientists love it when you tell them they won’t be credited for their work and literally anyone will be able to take their idea and do whatever they want with it, that’ll do so much to help foster humanity’s innate desire to learn and be creative.
And it’s about coercing people who won’t act in good faith with the system into doing so. Most people would keep a secret to make money especially if their livelihood depended on it. Why force creatives to choose between sharing their works and profiting from them?
Private companies don’t need intellectual property. A corporation will steal your creation and outcompete you in profiting from it if given the opportunity. Intellectual property laws are what stop them from doing so. Again, the system has been eroded and misused by companies but at its core it protects workers and their labour.
I’m sure all the scientists love it when you tell them they won’t be credited for their work and literally anyone will be able to take their idea and do whatever they want with it, that’ll do so much to help foster humanity’s innate desire to learn and be creative
Literally yes. Why do you think every fucking scientist loves sci-hub and is against Elsevier, and even submits their papers to arxiv for anyone to read for free? You clearly have no experience in the field and are talking out of your arse
What does it mean for corporations to not exist?
Through the existence of exclusively public institutions, whether cooperative or government-owned, which don’t work in direct competition but either in cooperation or in emulated competition (I.e. a contest instead of a struggle to drive each other off business).
And it’s about coercing people who won’t act in good faith with the system into doing so
This literally doesn’t happen in public research.
Most people would keep a secret to make money especially if their livelihood depended on it
In public research it works backwards. The more you publish (i.e. make available to the public), the more you earn. You really don’t seem to understand the concept of public research.
A corporation will steal your creation and outcompete you in profiting from it if given the opportunity.
Great, so make knowledge accessible to everyone and abolish private corporations.
Yeah some of what I’ve said doesn’t portray my arguments well. In trying to explain that IP law is a process that protects creatives and without it creative endeavours would be eroded. This is not a point of debate. Virtually every country has an IP law. IP law doesn’t make it so people won’t share their ideas, it makes it so people who do are rewarded.
IP law is a process that protects creatives and without it creative endeavours would be eroded. This is not a point of debate
How is it not a point of debate? I’m giving you arguments as to why it’s a very good point of debate and you don’t seem to be able to respond to them.
Virtually every country has an IP law
Virtually every country also has homeless people and I disagree with that, that’s just an argument from majority, kinda useless to me.
IP law doesn’t make it so people won’t share their ideas, it makes it so people who do are rewarded
I already explained how there are already existing mechanisms without IP pushing for the rewarding of intellectual production, such as the “publish-or-perish” system in public research. You may very well have arguments against it, but the fact of the matter is that you don’t need IP as a mechanism to reward people who engage innovation/creative/research processes. Public openings at institutions (whether a national orchestra, a research institute or a cinema academy with subsidised production), contests and grants… IP is not the only method for material rewarding of intellectual creation, which is what you’re trying to argue.
Patents are available to all. It protects the individual as well as the corporation.
I understand what you are saying but i hope you never invent something that can solve a current day crisis.
We are already behind schedule to solve things like climate change. If someone invents breakthrough tech then we need that today and open so other minds can quickly iterate and improve. Not after 20 years of stalling on a bureaucratic advantage.
If it wasn’t for capitalism chaining survival to productivity there would be no reason for this system to exist and we can move on to teach that “all good ideas should be copied” And “the same ideas can emerge in multiple different minds”
People work for material gain. By not entitling creators to the product of their labour you will discourage them from creating (and also be stealing from them). Patent law is exactly the kind of thing that protects the interests of working people but our current system is too weak to stand up to corporations.
What happens if the person who can solve climate change decides instead to trade stocks because saving the world doesn’t put food on the table?
IP laws are not your enemy, corporations are.
People, in general, do not work for material gain. They work because they have to in order to live, procreate and raise their children. People want a minimum amount of prosperity and economic safety. Beyond that, they want to work in a way and a place that fulfills them. Work itself is fun when done right, and working with others is awesome. Not even the “smart ones” or whatever work mainly for material gain in general. There are an overwhelming amount of counter examples to any variation of your claim. It would be more accurate to say people work for fame and glory, or to get laid (again reproductive success).
But even if what you said was true, it does not justify a complete monopoly. You could have something like “congrats you patented a new idea - if it catches on you will get a free house as a price!”
Of course you know all this and are just arguing facetiously. If “the person who can solve climate change” does anything but trade stocks they would contradict your argument. There is no money in inventing climate solutions. But nice insult to the people who are working on things like that.
Your actual argument is that we reward gambling and non-productive activity too much. That the smartest people are not working towards the survival or wellbeing of humanity, but for… crumbs off the table of the capitalists. That our economic system is not efficient in working towards our shared human values.
All of the jobs needed in society are not all of the jobs people would do if left to their own pursuits. Incentives are required.
The people who create products don’t own the IP, the company that employs them does.
Again, not a problem with IP law, a problem with corporate structure.
It is a problem with the law, corporations should not be allowed to own IP only the creator of the IP
I am aware that there are people like that that exists and that its quite a big number of people
But I will never understand how people like that exist. And to be very controversially honest I don’t trust the sincerity and thus ideas of people that think like this. Though i still respect such people like anyone else all the same.
Granted i am a certified autist but personal gain has almost no value to me, to the point that being paid actually demotivates me because:
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I believe i deserve to have a good quality life regardless of economic value and know that statistically humanity has enough resources/food to guarantee such for everyone. It being conditional makes me feel exploited.
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I always want to be the best possible version of myself and accomplish whatever i, with my human limitations, am able to, which has the most general positive effect on the total universe. Regardless of anything. I consider it personality offensive others assume i would want anything else.
I feel devaluated because society appears convinced that i would not do work if they were not threatening my survival, and because corporate hierarchy is what it is i actually have to underachieve all the time because fighting to make actual improvements would quickly threaten the control of higher ups and thus become a risk for my own means of survival.
Sure, if i could solve climate change and no one would even thank me for it leaving starving poor then i would be very sad. But self worth and identity would be Intact because i would be doing what i know is right.
While changing that in favour of stock trading maybe my life standards would be better but with the lack of any real value and living of a system designed around exploitation of existing value will make me feel worse to the point i may actually end up an existential crisis and kill myself.
To die sooner for the right reasons is a better life than to survive longer for the wrong reasons.
While i know my stance is rare i know there are plenty of people who think exactly like i do about this.
Anyway i also got a bit side tracked because this wasn’t about ip laws anymore, but my belief remains that if people can work on what they want without it affecting their personal access to luxury then there is no reason why they would not work on things that benefit all of society and thus themselves.
You don’t understand why people deserve the fruits of their labour? What are you on about bruh we’re talking about the patent office. People need to be incentivised to work because all of the work needed to create the society of excess you so want to enjoy isn’t all of the work people would do if left to their own devices.
The fruit of our labor should be a better world for everyone and future generations.
The belief that people won’t work without external pressure is contradicted by human history, cooperative work and mutual aid have existed for millennia before formal economies developed.
Its known that when people’s basic needs are met, the desire to create and contribute is a natural human drive.
Also as a bit of a sidenote to avoid confusion, i believe all people deserve and could be given more comfort and luxury then their labor currently grants them. So its not correct that i would not want people to have those things, just that it should be non conditional.
It’s not exclusive. You can meet everyones needs and then say, “hey if you make some cool fucking shit we’ll give you a little extra.” Why insist on people doing good solely because they feel like it. Why not push people to be better.
We know what people do when their needs are met, they’re called retirees. They don’t provide a net gain of almost anything btw. Yes people will pick up rubbish off a beach out of the goodness of their hearts. But the amount of litter collected from philanthropy is not greater than the amount made. And it’s a rounding error when compared to the amount of rubbish managed by garbage collectors.
IP laws are good precisely because they encourage people to create and discover even if all their needs are met. They compliment the selfless and persuade the selfish.
I am not sure this logic holds well.
People who are rich are still involved in society to the point i wish they would stop exploiting to chase more profit and just retire already with their near infinite wealth.
And the actual retirees your refer towards that don’t do anything are usually old people who slaved an entire career for a total less then some rich “earn” in a single day.
I do think people who build cool stuff deserve to be rewarded though, we could give them a cool artwork, trow them a party or just continue to respect and thank them for their accomplishments.
Currently the reward is “here are the means that someone else could use to not starve that you can now use to go on a holiday with.”
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In that case literally every court also shows a complete misunderstabding of patent law
So…
If it were a misunderstanding, why do we always see a spike in innovation once a patent expires? According to capitalist ideology, isn’t competition the best that could happen, instead of having an unlimited monopoly for 20 years?
I think their point was that in a way, patents are supposed to be more equitable because it allows the inventor to meet their basic needs by being the one to invent the patent.
There’s also the argument that while innovation skyrockets after a parent opens up, there would be less incentive to invent new things if Walmart could just copy it for cheaper the day after you show how you make it.
Or people would be super secretive with instructions for how to make their products that innovations could die with their creators since they have no incentive to release it.
I think we need to differentiate between the potential of something versus the reality of something. We see people being super secretive of innovations right now and because they’re patented they cannot even be reverse engineered. Innovations do die all of the time because the thing that is patented is a black box and even people who would reverse engineered it would get copyright trolled to hell.
My favourite example is spare parts for trains. Because the parts themselves are encumbered, it is illegal to repair trains yourself, thank you Siemens and Bombardier. Because if you get caught manufacturing spare parts, which are the intellectual property of someone else, you’ll get into big trouble. How exactly does this behaviour help with innovation?
Another example are video codecs. AV1 was specifically engineered to avoid any sort of patent trolling. How much better would AV1 be if all of that engineering time could have been spent on innovation instead of trying to avoid encumbrance?
Also in your example, if there was a small invention and Walmart would just copy it, would the small inventor really have the resources to pursue Walmart in court for years on end? Best example is Amazon. They steal innovations all of the time and because they’re doing it with small inventors, they face zero consequences because they do not have the resources to compete with a megacorporation.
But the biggest problem I have with patents is that it’s not even internally consistent with capitalism. Example being, capitalism says competition is an objective good, while a monopoly is an objective bad. So why grant an unlimited monopoly for something if competition is good? Because if people were competing, then everyone would try to make the best version of something.
I mean, the theory may be pretty neat from some perspective, but the reality is we get the worst of both worlds. Innovations get killed off because everything is super proprietary and reverse engineering is prohibited and megacorporations can do whatever they want because, well, it’s a free country. If you don’t like it, just sue the megacorporation for years on end and just maybe get recourse for their transgression.
Corporations will do whatever is most profitable for them. If the strategy to patent something and then copyright troll the world to hell and back is the most efficient thing, that will be done. If the strategy to make the best product possible and get the most customers possible is the most efficient thing, that will be done instead. This would be internally consistent with the ideology of capitalism. " Why should the big government intervene with the free innovation of the free market? Let the invisible hand guide the innovation and may the best innovation win."
Edit: Also about trains. Train companies with the resources repair them all of the time, luckily. Because try to piss off someone who holds the power to just annihilate hundreds of millions worth in contracts overnight if they wanted.
Patents are a good idea in every form of society. People are motivated by material rewards. By ensuring a creator is entitled to their labour and that some scum fuck corporation isn’t going to steal it, society incentivises innovation. The problem isn’t patents, it’s corporations abusing the system to serve their own interests because public institutions (such as the patent office) aren’t strong enough to push back.
I’m not super familiar with patents themselves, but I used to work in genetics back when human genes were able to be patented, and Myriad Genetics used their patent of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes to lock genetic testing for these common factors in breast cancer predisposition behind a massive paywall. Even after gene patents were no longer allowed, they refused to share their previous test results with researchers trying to develop a more comprehensive, accurate, and cost-effective test, slowing down medical research.
Research eventually progressed without Myriad Genetics’ help, and within a few years after the genes stopped being patented, genetic testing for the BRCA genes and many more was down to an affordable price, even for people without insurance coverage. We now learn more and more about these genes quicker than ever, and can offer tests that cover many genes at once for a low price and with high accuracy, due to the sharing of test results between labs that never would have happened while genes were patented.
This may be an outlier in patent usage - though I doubt it - but it still shows that big companies can use patent laws more to bully fair competition than to offer a better product. Patents are a good idea for helping small businesses and individuals protect their right to make a new product without a big company swooping in, but there are still massive issues with the process that need to be fixed to keep those same big companies from using the process in reverse to keep small businesses from growing into the competition necessary for a healthy economy.
Then patent law is better than intellectual property law, I think it’s 50 years after the creator dies and there are loopholes for companies
Technically IP law covers patents, trademarks, copyright, and designs (sometimes also called design patents). Patent protection is 20 years (plus a little bit extra under certain conditions. Trademarks is indefinite in theory. Copyright (in many jurisdictions) is 70 yrs after death or 50 yrs for certain works (e.g., music recordings). Designs, I’m not really sure.
Copyright (in many jurisdictions) is 70 yrs after death until next time Disney extends it
All other things aside, 20 years is a long fucking time. 20 years ago we barely had cell phones. The iPhone was 2007 I think.
We barely had mobile phones 20 years ago? You sure about that?
I think i meant smart phone. Apparently cell phone adoption was in the 60%+ range in 2005
As low as that, eh? I got my first mobile (Nokia 3310) in 2003, and I felt like I was the last of my peers to get one (my classmates had mobiles around 1999, I remember Snake being big during my GCSE years). I expect at that time they were just more common among millennials than the older generations? I’m sure I was the only one in my year group from Year 11 to the end of Year 13 to not have a mobile.
Would it not be cooler just to be able to live with having to toil and labor for the crumbs of your capitalist owner and you know invent things because you liked to? (Source, you are brainwashed)
The whole IP debate is just pure nonsense. It still relies on the cartesian mind/body dichotomy and an idealism of some sort where “the ideas” exist in their own immaterial cognitive realm. And they think that I can steal these imaginary immaterial entities and they will be gone for good. Yeah…
It’s about incentivising people to share their ideas by ensuring they’ll be rewarded for it. Without IP laws it’s beneficial to keep new ideas a secret so you can profit off of them. It’s a social contract that promises creators compensation for creating. Everyone benefits from the system the problem has been its exploitation due to weakening public institutions.
Oh, so uouve never gone on a spirit journey, cutting your way through dense pneuma with an enchanted cgainsaw to get ideas?
I bet thats why you’re poor, and i thought of ’bank but on computer’, ‘music but on computer’ and ‘books but computer’, so get 50% of all thevworlds resources.
But wait, I arranged atoms in this order before you did! Now you’re not allowed to arrange atoms in this order unless you pay me!!
I feel like so many people don’t understand the purpose of IP law.
So someone arranges some atoms for the first time, let’s say they make a vaccine. Now the creator of that vaccine might be financially motivated to sell it for profit. If no IP law existed then the only way to ensure that they’d be able to profit from their arrangement of atoms is by keeping the way they managed to create it a secret. IP law is a social contract that says “hey, if you share this massively beneficial idea with the rest of society we’ll make sure that you can make a profit off of it.” In this way IP law incentivises creators to share their creations with society in a way that everyone benefits from.
The problem is with public institutions being eroded away by corporate interests not with the concept of IP law.
Also for anyone coming out with the “creators aren’t profit motivated” bs. Yes they absolutely are. No it is not because of greed. Material success for people who have made contributions is the most valuable encouragement.
If you can only understand monetary motivation that’s your fault. Most people who spend 10 years in med school + residency don’t do it because of monetary incentives, they do it because of social and personal incentives.
Most research actually comes from the public sector (universities, research institutes…), where people work not because they hope to get rich one day through patenting something, but because they get paid to do research. 99 scientists in the public sector will do 99% of the work towards a technology, then a private company will take the final 1% of progress, patent it, and prevent everyone else from accessing the mostly publicly-funded development. For fuck’s sake, we saw this literally 5 years ago with the development of the COVID vaccines, it was predominantly based on university and institutional research that hadn’t been commercialized, and then some companies took all this research for free, got a ton of public grants on the side, and then made the vaccines at an absurd profit. For a counter-example to that, tell me, if the profit motive from private companies is what drives research fastest, why was Cuba the first country to vaccinate all of its population from COVID using state-funded research and production?
Okay tell me, are you more motivated by the innate human desire to contribute to society and discover the universe, or by the innate human desire to contribute to society, discover the universe and a paycheck that will give you material benefits such as free time and luxuries too?
Yes companies profited off of public sector work. Strong protections for what a person creates is exactly the kind of thing IP law is. Again, the problem is weak public institutions being eroded and misused by companies, not the public institutions themselves.
You want to talk about Cuba aye. Lol. Lmao even. Tell me. What’s Cuba’s patent law like. Go on. I’ll let you google it.
oooops I think my brain did it by itself. Wait who is my brain?
Patents mean genocide.
They slow down adoption of innovation and raise prices to levels the market can afford. With the existential need to change and improve like 50% of all industrial processes, this results in too slow change. It never mattered if climate change is anthropogenic or not.
