GBRK
14d ago
It's worth noting that in at least one place (https://old.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/1jzgmzs/please_explain_karmelo_anthony_support/), the response to this from self-professed liberals has been pretty uniformly, "stabbing people is wrong."
GBRK
14d ago
I'd wager that the difference is largely practical.
If there's a large group of people that believe in a source of objective truth and mortality deeper than any human logic, no propaganda will sway them from its commandments. And if you try, you get martyrs and religious warfare. So, the government lets them swing their fists until they hit someone else's nose.
For non-thesists, however, while their beliefs can be self-consistent within an axiomatic system by definition there's no source of irrational/beyond-rational (depending on your viewpoint) certainty in the axioms they use. Therefore, the government can reasonably bet on trying to shift their axioms-- especially since they're not in any sort of community that might organize retaliation.
(If atheists get together to decide on objective moral principles they're going to set in stone and propagate forever... then congratulations, they've re-invented religion and become entitled to the same protections. See: the "Church of Satan" people.)
I think what you're missing is...
nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
Contingent on the supreme court actually deciding to go for the outlaw thing (which is won't, and probably shouldn't), a court declaring someone an outlaw would be the due process of law. If you want to talk about traditions, americans have historically been a great fan of lynchings, and very often none of the perpetrators ever faced trial. If one branch of government can simply decline to use its powers because it doesn't like what another branch is telling it to do... well, that's pretty generalizable.
GBRK
21d ago
I bring up GDP growth because I think it's a good indicator of innovation-relative-to-resources. I'll concede that if we had some measure of absolute innovation, the chinese would probably not be ahead-- but the important part is that they're system structurally advantages them, and as the resource gap closes their innovation will accelerate, not decelerate.
The fact that the most productive chinese people live outside of china is the opposite of reassuring-- it means they're not even operating at their full power level. As china approaches parity with the US, while also having better infrastructure and standard of living for elites, re-immigration will look increasingly attracive. That's a double benefit for them-- strengthening them at the cost of the west.
America's main competitive advantage is it's historical ability to drain the best brains of the entire planet, but Trump is putting sort of a damper on that given his obvious hostility to even university-educated immigrants.
GBRK
21d ago
Empirically, GDP growth is higher than ours, and they're an increasingly large part of earth's industrial and scientific base (measuring by goods produced, scientific papers written.) I understand the impetus to blame copying and catch-up effects, but I think that's cope; if it were true their growth would be going s-shaped but instead they're releasing Deepseek and producing electric vehicles and solar technology better than everyone else.
GBRK
22d ago
The difference between actual private property and intellectual property is that private property i excludable. If a person other than the owner takes that property to use for themselves, then the owner is directly harmed by their inability to use it. Consequently, it makes moral sense to defend that property because you are defending against an aggressor, and the state ultimately benefits from reducing the cost o violence by taking that responsibility to prevent theft upon itself.
But intellectual property isn't excludable. You are not harmed when another person uses it. You have no moral right to commit violence to prevent other people from innocent use of your ideas. You're raising the "but what if we have less innovation" objection as a practical objection-- but in the natural experiment of the US versus china, the chinese have been out-innovating us as a direct result of their poor enforcement of IP law. The empirical result is that the justification for IP law is fundamentally unsound.
GBRK
22d ago
This means that everyone who invested valuable early 21st century dollars into fixed-income dollar-denominated assets gets paid back in worthless middle 21st century dollars.
That's probably the optimal outcome. Old people and rich investors caused the problem with their poorly thought-through voting and investment strategies, so it's only fair if the fix comes out of their pockets.
GBRK
26d ago
You can't run a drug research program off of kickstarter. You can't build a new airplane internal part by having all the airlines sign up for an engineer's Patreon.
Do you seriously believe there are no possible financial instruments that could result in complex projects being completed without IP law?
Patreon is an an object lessons of how the market adapts to scenarios where IP law stops being relevant. (In this case, to how the internet makes traditional enforcement of copyright law against individual consumers near-impossible.) Kickstarter proves that complex engineering products can be pre-funded directly by consumers, without need for investors. It's true that we don't currently have Biotech Patreon, for example-- but I'm arguing that that's a consequence not of the boundary conditions of capitalism, but of the specific market distortions introduced by government enforcement of IP law. Looking at the current state of things and saying, "this is the only possible system that results in innnovation" is like living in the 1800s and saying, "the royal monopoly granted to the British East India Company is the only possible system that result in trade with India."
GBRK
26d ago
All businesses can profit from creating useful IP -- whether they are joint-stock, private, sole-owned or otherwise. This ability is completely independent of ownership structure.
But if there was no IP, the valuation of a business becomes more independent of its past accomplishments, and rests more on its ability to keep producing new ones. It would destroy the ability for vulture capital firms to buy up a business with promising IP, fire all the innovators, run it into the ground while extracting maximum rents, and then sell of just the IP later, for example. Removing IP law would change the balance of power between middlemen and producers, to the benefit of producers.
You say that executives determine all of corporate spending, but that's missing the deeper point-- that some proportion of business spending is allocated towards productive investments, but that executives use the power inequalities between them and their consumers/producers to claw away rents for their own personal benefit. I'm talking about corporate money spent on making impressive executive offices, building new corporate headquarters closer to where they live, buying prestige-enhancing charity products, etcetera. And like you mentioned, re: inefficient firms, the ability for executives to do this is a direct result of corporate bureaucracy and much of corporate bureaucracy exists because of IP law. Paying people to file IP claims raises the "value" of a company, but has no material effect on its ability to actually produce a product.
GBRK
26d ago
As much is invested and it's done by what is essentially the same apparatus as today.
That's just not what empirically happens. Look, we've effectively already performed a natural experiment on repealing IP law when it comes to art, books, and music. Instead of no one publishing anything, or alternatively the exact same business models persisting, we get Patreon + Kickstarter for the writers and artists, and Soundcloud + Touring/Streaming for the musicians. There are still middlemen involved, of course, but as compared to publishing companies or record labels they're taking far smaller cuts.
GBRK
27d ago
You're coming at this from the perspective that the current dominance of stockholders is a just a natural feature of society, but it's not. Joint-stock companies are a useful economic innovation, and stockholders a necessary feature of capitalism, but their power is completely distorted by their ability to extract rents from using IP. If the government didn't enable that, stockholders would have less money, and consumers would have far more, and consequently consumers themselves could provide the capital investment required to create-- for example-- new vaccines.
And I'm absolutely sure that should be possible all capital investment ultimately derives from consumers paying for things anyway. The money required is already in the economy. Have no fear of free-riding stifling innovation. If people want a product, they'll pay for it, and financial-services whiz kids will figure out how to connect buyers to sellers regardless.
executives are paid massively, but are so few in number that they constitute a tiny fraction of corporate spending
They constitute a tiny fraction of corporate spending (ignoring stock compensation, which I'm lumping in with "stockholders"), but they determine a massive part of it. And specifically, they determine it should go to all sorts of middlemen-- layers of layers of lawyers and middle management and HR. Not because that actually enables them to make more products, but because those are the people that let them extract their economic rents.
GBRK
28d ago
IP is corrupted because investors capture most of the value of the IP development what if instead we [A system in which investors capture most of the value of the IP development].
Not investors-- consumers. There's a critical difference. An investor doesn't necessarily need or want the end product; they want the chance to perform arbitrage between the producer and the consumer. But-- to use a concrete example-- pharmacies, hospitals, government entities, and charitable organizations would still want new antimalarial drugs even if they can't prevent other people from manufacturing them. Their goal would be to fund the research and production of a certain amount of drugs at a particular price-- and then if other people get the drugs after they do, that doesn't change whatever supply/demand calculus drove their funding in the first place.
There would still be a role for investors in creating financial instruments intended to mitigate e.g. the free rider problem. But after the information is actually created, they wouldn't have the power to extract rents for using it.
GBRK
28d ago
My argument applies globally. Why should the researcher get to create a rent-seeking monopoly to extract wealth from the work of process engineers? Why would process engineers get to rent-seek from the work of factory laborers? If people actually want a thing, and are willing to pay for that thing, there will still be plenty of market forces conspiring to give them that thing. I just want to take all the rent-seeking out of the equation. Maybe it served a purpose two hundred years ago when we had far worse transportation and communication infrastructure, but now it's a crutch. Our financial services technology has evolved to the point where IP law is wholly unnecessary.
GBRK
28d ago
I didn't panic sell, but I'm on a month-and-a-half time horizon, and that's why I didn't buy.
GBRK
29d ago
All told, this was an excellent exercise in letting the markets price my risks. Since the initial announcement, I haven't bought or sold stocks-- because I'm saving up for some personal risks, but also because there's no sense panicking when the market isn't. SPY is down about ~15% from the peak rn, which sucks, but it's "economic contraction" territory rather than "economic disaster" territory.
GBRK
29d ago
The philosophical justification for patents is that they allow the genius of a new idea to capture the benefits of their contribution to society, thereby encouraging them to be geniuses. Except-- that almost never actually happens! The people actually responsible for the ideas that lead to vaccines, or to AI advancements, or to new machines, typically only capture a tiny fraction of the value they generate anyway. The rest goes to stockholders and to upper management. And while that parasitical class tries to present themselves as necessary to the genius' ultimate success, you should view that with the same skepticism as if an FDA regulator claimed to be responsible for the creation of some new cure or treatment. Maybe they're contributing something-- but the primary reason they exist is because of a distortionary, monopolistic government intervention. So the default assumption should be that they're worthless rentseekers-- extracting value from consumes and producers through their artificial control of resources that aren't naturally excludable.
Companies might stop investing-- but that's fine, because companies are full of unproductive middlemen. But if people want something done, then they'll invest. Have more faith in the free market! Can you seriously not think of a single financial instrument that might be used to fund research by purely self-interested parties? I can easily imagine something like a "transferrable kickstarter" system, where I put seed money into a research-production concern that's building something I'm interested in, and in return they guarantee me the right to buy a certain quantity of the product early, which gives me access to a potential for arbitrage. Sure, another person might start their own concern, intending to steal the advancement and produce it themselves... but then I get the thing I want even faster, and they have to risk their own money on a product that might not work out, against an unknown number of competitors that want to do the same thing.
And in practice, we already see so many companies funding open research, and posting the results publicly. If it benefits a company to invent something new, they will-- and if their competitors are interested in the same thing, then they're likely to contribute, rather than copy-and-fork, because that gives them the ability to determine the course of the initial development.
GBRK
29d ago
You're right that I don't exactly have a high opinion of chinese IP protections. Though honestly-- it's not like I'm currently respecting chinese (or japanese, or korean) IPs either... R.I.P kissanime. But As /u/HalloweenSnarry guessed, I want to do away with any fig leaf, any pretense that IP law matters. It's a consummate waste for us all to be jumping through hoops, when increasingly it won't even be humans coming up with new ideas-- it'll be AIs, running on illegaly acquired training data.
The ONLY exception I'd make is for trademarks. I would actually protest against, as you called it, "Chinese Batman." The right to advertise a work as "Batman" should be restricted to original inventor, and their heirs-- a sort of maker's mark, used to guarantee authenticity. In contrast /u/HereAndGone mentioned the use of IP inside another property, and I'm fine with that.
GBRK
29d ago
There is entertainment that appeals to a large number of people, and there is entertainment that is designed to be mainstream. Post-IP law, the former kind of entertainment will persist, but there will be no point in creating the latter kind except in the form of excludable physical objects and in-person events.
Just think about it:
No more soulless, toyetic cartoons. No more lowest-common-denominator reality television. No more hyper-generic romantasy novels getting polished tiktok campaigns.
These properties only exist because they can be marketed-- because they're the type of cultural product that let middlemen extract the most wealth. Without them taking up a huge chunk of our cultural vigor, more earnest works will have the space they need to thrive. Or not thrive, as the case may be-- but that's fine, because that's natural selection.
Without any protections it seems like success will be defined even more by name recognition and marketing skills rather than genuine creative talent.
My experience with fanfiction (and fanart) proves this wrong. Fanfiction authors have sub-zero protections against "theft." And yet, authors are constantly appearing and making a mark as a direct result of their creative talent. And by establishing their bonafines for quality, they can even start making money themselves off of patreon. Name recognition and marketing will matter, yes, but just think about the incentives-- your goal isn't to sell your last work, it's to sell your next.
Frankly, you have insufficient faith in the free market. It's trivial to think up business models and financial instruments that could pool money from interested readers to generate new texts. Even if every current creative immediately goes out of business, people will still demand entertainment! The market will find some way to make the transaction happen.
GBRK
29d ago
China's pledge to stop respecting American IP-- and in particular copyright for hollywood movies-- is possibly the only silver lining of this tarrif business. The american entertainment industry is a juggernaut, but that comes at the cost of making sanitized slop consumable by the maximum possible audience. On the liberal end of the table, no one is willing to make movies that really push the boundaries of sex and culture-norm violation (gay people holding hands is the tamest shit ever), and on the conservative end of the table we similarly don't have anyone willing to push the boundaries of violence and jingoism. Plus, completely giving up on IP law is the first step in actually re-industrializing the united states. The whole point of IP law is to create monopolies, and monopolies are intrinsically inefficient-- so the western world's respect for IP law is a massive albatross around our neck. In a world without IP law the only thing we lose is the class of parasitic middlemen that can make a living on the bullshit legal fiction that ideas are an asset.
GBRK
30d ago
As a member of the top 10%, I want to note that it's extremely feasible to have cross-border shopping trips for expensive items where relevant. Especially if your job involves international travel. If I wanted lululemon, for example, nothing would stop me from getting it, and I still wouldn't pay tariffs. Actually, it would be a better status symbol than ever before as these luxuries would become less affordable for the middle class while remaining the same cost for me.
GBRK
30d ago
I see these rants about instituting a muscular system of top-down control over the american economy and culture and think--
Have you considered communism?
No, seriously. What you are proposing is just globohomo minus the globo and the homo. And I don't mean that as a joke-- you are speaking to the exact same complaints that motivate the world's marxists and socialists. In particular, I could imagine the words "incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated," being a pointed critique of capitalists out of another person's mouth.
I don't say this as a rebuttal of your comment, exactly-- because there isn't much to rebut. Your line-level proposals are mostly things I like, and I firmly believe that the vast majority of all humans would prefer for things to get better rather than worse. But in response to proposals about how we should all push toward a particular unifying cultural norm, I'm always thinking... well, why doesn't the speaker just capitulate first? And the answer is always that their individual ideological quibbles really are more important to them (and everyone else) than linking arms with their ideological opponents.
GBRK
1mo ago
Were I a (post-elementary) teacher , I would give every single student an A, and let anyone who wanted to goof off all year do so. Meanwhile, I'd offer in-class tutoring, and offer study materials and optional homework to any student that actually wanted to learn. Out of an (overpacked) 30 kid english class, I think I'd get 2-5 kids with an actual, serious interest in writing and another 15-25 willing to discuss the occasional book and study exactly what they need to learn for standardized tests. The rest of the kids were a lost cause from the start. Credential inflation is a race to the bottom and there no sense wasting everyone's time trying to win it.
...well that's the power fantasy I have, at least. In practice you and I would be bound by whatever the school administration and the district parents wanted, actual learning outcomes be damned.
GBRK
1mo ago
I haven't played as many 4Xes (in particular I haven't played any Paradox games),
That would explain why you're completely wrong about strategy games. Paradox (and other indie publishers) continue to push the boundaries of what a strategy game can be. Victoria 3, for example, attempts to simulate literally the entirely population of earth over its timespan-- down to their professions, wealth, culture, religion, and political preferences.
It's really not that concrete at all. In the rittenhouse case, rittenhouse claimed to be provoked into acting in self defense (credibly) but his opposition claims (also credibly) that he deliberately created a situation such that that provocation would happen and he would have an excuse to commit violence. In this case, the stabber also claims that he was acting in self-defense (unknown credibleness), but no one (so far) claims that he was looking for an excuse. Plus there's the additional matter of him using a knife, rather than a gun, and killing one person instead of many. The situations at hand are neither symmetric nor complementary.
Personally speaking, I do martial arts, and I would consider pulling a knife on someone who wants to throw hands a reasonable, proportionate act. There are far too many ways to get permanently injured or killed from blunt trauma. I would not consider it reasonable to then attack them with that knife if they backed off-- but maybe the football player saw the knife, assumed there was going to be some stabbing, grabbed for it-- and as a consequence, got Rittenhouse'd. Is that what happened? I don't know. But I'm content to say, "stabbing people is bad" and let the rest sort itself out through the legal system.
(I don't know anything about the gardener case. When I look up "gardener murder" I get a convict who committed a bunch of rapes and murders.)
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