Comment by TeeDub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeeDub | Hacker News Reader

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>So you're saying: "It's very complicated, you won't understand my arguments."

No, that's not at all what he's saying. He's saying that intellectual property is actually an immensely broad and complicated issue. (Rather: That's what I interpreted him to be saying; I could be wrong here.)

I don't think you can really make a statement like "IP laws lead to slower development of science and industry..." because "IP laws" are such a broad category of laws. Do you mean patents? What kind of patents? (Does a 5 year patent on medicines, something proposed by the Pirate Party, count as an IP law that reduces development? Why? How does it differ from other patents that are longer / renewable?) Can I make a contract to stop someone from disclosing an idea of mine? Is that an IP law? (Probably) Is it aggregating money into the hands of the few? (More dubious claim there...)

Don't get me wrong, I tend to agree that there should be limits on the sorts of monopolies that IP laws tend to foster, and I think that the current IP regimes that are dominant are typically very damaging. But I also think there could be certain IP controls that are acceptable and positive. (Allowing for IP regimes that are basically "trade secrets only" seems a bit inadequate to me, especially since patents offer valuable protections to certain kinds of innovations.) This is a view that your wildly over-broad/under-specified interpretation of IP would not accommodate.

You interpreted me right. One dimension that needs to be considered is that, as opposed to Newton's day, the average human has substantially less chance of dying from a consumer product.

The pharma industry is a very good example of this...the costs of drugs and the tricks pharma companies use to extend patents is rightly criticized...on the other hand, the research and regulatory process is massively lengthy and costly, and one that no one would pursue if another company could swoop in and profit on billions of R&D.

There's also something else...rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower than it was in the past few centuries, because of a natural diminishing rate of return. To paraphrase -- I think, Stephen Colbert -- it's easy to make scientific discoveries when not burying diseased corpses next to your water supply is considered a health breakthrough.

>"There's also something else...rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower than it was in the past few centuries, because of a natural diminishing rate of return. To paraphrase -- I think, Stephen Colbert -- it's easy to make scientific discoveries when not burying diseased corpses next to your water supply is considered a health breakthrough."

This is a particularly superb point! I really like this argument.

Really depends on your metric of "rate of advancement". If it's going to be about what common people think, then consumer-product and lifestyle innovations would be over-weighted. Viewed by a specialist in any field, that field's progress would be overweighted. From the perspective of productivity increase (or GDP per capita increase), qualitative changes in lifestyle would be underweighted. etc.

Furthermore, even after deciding on a vague sort of metric, it's hard to quantize (choose a measure, in math jargon), advancement to be able to have rates.

>> rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower

Wow, it's amazing how different our views of the world are. IMHO the rate of advancement is now far, far, far surpassing any other time in the known history. The PC (1975), Web(1991), FB(2004), iPhone(2007) have created such an enormous change so fast. Have a look at "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought" by Ray Kurzweil to see how crucial sciences nowadays are advancing by the month.

We are barely living any differently than we did in 1962 - our vehicles are not any fundamentally different (maybe more fuel efficient / safer due to standards implemented), the way we grow and consume sustenance has not changed (green revolution was mostly in the 40s / 50s), the vast majority of our electricity comes from the same sources (long dead plants), we die of the same things (cancer and heart attacks), our education system is the same (in America), our roads are the same freaking roads from the national highway system in that decade (in the USA).

Besides the communication revolution as a product of the internet, and the ability to create images and sounds much more effectively using those devices, the average persons life has not changed much.

We have changed in some ways though due to that communication revolution - it has had profound effects on workforce distribution (labor jobs, if any chance exists, are simply deposited where the labor market is cheapest while stable enough not to have large overhead from unstable nations), wealth in the USA has been dramatically concentrated in the richest 0.1% as a result of that globalization due to computerized communication, we are much more involved as a species with each other, etc.

And communication improvements are great. But they are a tiny aspect of life, and they are about the only thing getting noticeably better. A lot of that is due to copyright, patents, and draconian laws holding back self driving cars, stem cell grown replacement limbs, 3d printers in the home, thorium power, and a bunch of other just-out-of-arms-reach revolutions in the way we live our lives outside of that audio / visual space computers vastly improved.

Consumer goods are, however, much cheaper now as compared to 50 years ago (at least in urban Asia where I live). It makes a huge difference between spending 10% of my income on daily necessities, as opposed to 50% like my ancestors did.

Arguably, this matters mostly to those below a certain threshold income (difference of 2% and 10% not as big as 10% and 50%), i.e. matters more to the poor than to the rich. I think American citizens tend to be richer than the rest of the world.

The cost of a loaf of bread in that decade was 5 cents, the average wages per hour in the US was 35 cents. Today, a loaf of bread is $2.50 and the average wages is $12 an hour. A house would be $10k to build (my grandparents built their house in '72 for $15k, it is now worth $250k) where a person was making $6k a year. Today a house averages $250k and you make $60k. In actuality, the costs of necessities have gone up, but the costs of almost everything else dropped due to globalization. But you can't outsource growing food, buying land, or building houses really well.

While I agree with a lot of your points; in 1962 a lot of people in us/europe went abroad once or twice in their lifetime. Now, many go twice a year.

Was that systemic of high prices in traveling / hotel fees, or because of other causes? I can imagine a lot of things - a fledgling tourism industry, the Cold War stifling international travel, not enough information / knowledge about foreign nations, no advertising campaigns attempting to attract people to visit. That could be due to a lot more than just "travel / hotel costs have dropped a lot" (only because I don't know if they have).

I actually think the dumbphone was the biggest change, not the smartphone or anything else on your list. No matter if it is SMS, Facebook or HN - that was the moment people started getting emotionally chained to computers and text-only interfaces. Being punctual and reliable also matters a lot less since then.

I don't think we're disagreeing here. I said "seem" slower when in actuality, we are progressing quite fast. However, it seemed that you were implying that our rate of progress was not fast enough because of the IP laws we have now.

In any case, I don't see the point in making a big debate over this on a post that's about porting C&C to HTML5. I think it's enough to point out that when there are protracted debates, it's because the issues involved are much more complicated than just a conspiratorial power-grab.

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