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> find a way to make anything like the average income of any of us on HN

a) This is not about trying to protect the incomes of people working in Big Tech

b) In his talk Doctorow gives examples of business opportunities that are actually being repressed by the laws against reverse engineering

It's not just about big tech. It's about what enables highly productive societies in general. Without IP, I suppose everyone could share to some limited extent what is already known, but why would anyone ever sink big dollars or time into coming up with something new that'd immediately get stolen by people who did nothing to contribute to it? Indeed, it's part of the problem with manufacturing in the West, there's no robust enforcement of IP with China due to political sensitivities so manufacturers have to have strategies to protect themselves from the fact that if they release a new product they've got maybe 90 days before a copycat hits the market.

I can't help but wonder how much stronger the core of the EU economy would be with actual robust management of their trade relationship with China. The US too but I think the EU is suffering a bit more in real time.

No doubt it makes Doctorow the star of certain types of intellectual circles but the theories have never made a people or country actually well off and never will. But, things don't have to work in the real world to be popular, or even to become policy.

Eh the dude who played Minecraft that named himself after that one Doctorow story couldn't even survive the first year of COVID.

Maybe in the past, but who in the present who isn’t already rich is or would have the income hurt by eliminating IP laws? Keep in mind that most indie projects make barely any money, most of those that do are free + ads or Patreon, any software not under expensive DRM is easy to pirate, and AI companies pirate to train LLMs.

> what if you dont want what they do with it in the first place? what if (heh) you just don't like the end user and you know they will irk you with it?

What if you don’t like what somebody does with “your” ideas in their own personal bubble? Why care? Try to ignore them. I’d rather that than have somebody restrict what I can do with whatever ideas they claim are theirs.

cool. as long as we are clear people are free to commit mass genocide and i dunno peel peoples' skin back or i dunno, something out of a robin wiliams scifi movie or phosphorus bombing or something with what you have invented. just trying to get some clarity on the concept of 'belongings' and property law.

For a very brief window of time, USA did a little bit more good than bad.

Those of us wanting to believe USA was more better than not have struggled to recalibate our beliefs.

> We sorta fumbled things after we, to put it bluntly, nuked the Japanese twice

What?

I believe OP is saying that the US has not been reliably sane in its public policy since ending WW II via nuclear warfare.

I don't know if I agree with the claim overall, but I certainly think nuking civilian populations was an execrable choice (even if the official targets were technically military ones).

They were already being firebombed to death by "regular" bombs and/or starving to death from various blockades. Why single out those attacks?

The destruction of Tokyo, Dresden, and so many other cities were also unconscionable acts. The war was absolutely full of them (though I think the Axis was clearly aiming for unconscionable overall goals, such as the Final Solution, so I still argue the Allies were fighting a just war, even if they often carried it out through unjust means).

The nuclear bombings were what the OP brought up, so I was just registering my opinion of those.

With the nukes in particular, there were a lot of other options, as they were announcing weapons that would completely change the balance of warfare.

I think a good first step would have been to find an uninhabited island and explicitly tell Japan through diplomatic channels, "We are going to destroy this island entirely with a new weapon we have developed. Please observe, and surrender afterwards if you do not want your military force to be annihilated by these means."

Then Japan would have had a strong reason to back down that didn't involve the US destroying entire cities and civilian population.

Why single out the only two instances of nuclear weapons being used in anger in the entire history of their existence? Why single out the single largest escalation in force in the world's history? Why single out the two largest single bombs ever deployed against an enemy?

Surely you aren't nearly so naive that you think these aren't significantly different from other bombings...

I don't understand the naivety involved in thinking that this matters to the people dying from the bombs.

I haven't personally died from a bomb, but I find it super hard to imagine a scenario where I would be happier if I died from a regular bomb vs a nuclear bomb.

More people died from the single bombing raid on tokyo than died from the nuclear weapon being dropped on hiroshima. Yes, people also died from radiation poisoning during the days and months following, but people also died from all sorts of injuries sustained from the "regular bombs", burns, smoke inhalation, etc.

Comparing which type of agonizing death is worse is rarely a useful way to spend time.

> Surely you aren't nearly so naive that you think these aren't significantly different from other bombings...

This is the point I want to make. It really wasn't that different. Yes, a city was destroyed in a single night. Over seventy other cities were destroyed in a single night in Japan alone during the year of 1945.

It's not about two bombings. Yes, the Tokyo bombing was a ghoulish war crime. Obviously.

But nukes as a weapon are fundamentally different. A single airplane can level a city. A single submarine can destroy a country. I'm sorry, but they are a Pandora's box that was opened and changed the course of the world afterwards.

So your argument is that this was worse not because of what it did to people at the time but because of what might happen in the future?

The difference being that it cost a lot more to destroy those two Japanese cities alone than it did in total to destroy 72 other Japanese cities to the same degree.

Later on, that type of weapon became cheaper and several thousands were created and became the basis for a long window of relative peace.

Strictly speaking, the first city cost a whole lot of money, the second was basically free, through the magic of not amortizing the cost of R&D to win an online argument.

It's my understanding that the two bombs used were not the same technology so you can't just amortize the whole research costs from one to the other.

win?

Moreover, what's the argument here as you see it?

The argument is that nuclear bombs made destroying entire cities dirt cheap, and it's one of the big atrocities of history that they were used on a civilian population. "Terrorists have hidden a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan" is one of the unthinkable nightmare scenarios routinely portrayed in US films, and yet that's exactly what the US did to Hiroshima.

I'm looking back several hours here and not seeing where this is laid out.

I'm also curious as to why what the US did to Hiroshima is an unthinkable nightmare scenarios whereas what the US did to Tokyo is not (and nor is what the US did to 71 other cities in Japan also not that).

Do you see a difference in razing a city with one bomb in an instant or with thousands of bombs over months?

> with thousands of bombs over months?

Say what now?

  Tokyo was bombed by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) ..

  The strikes conducted by the USAAF on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, constitute the single deadliest and most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history.[1] Sixteen square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

> Do you see a difference in razing a city with one bomb in an instant or with thousands of bombs

Tokyo vs. Hiroshima - https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/

Do you?

(Aside from thousands of conventional bombs being significantly cheaper and lower tech than a nuclear bomb).

to be fair a link from september 2014 (almost twelve years ago) about things that occurred in 1945 (almost (relatively) a century ago), in the brains of people that were not even alive yet, and even if they were, unable to process the events through anything like a remotely similar scope or in a contextually contemporaneous way, or even relatively approaching the neurological pathways that someone from that time would have used, is...

Are you a markov chain?

One bomber is considerably harder to defend against, otherwise, I don't think the people who died really cared.

The human suffering in both cases is the same but one ended the war while the other did not.

If your goal is to end a war, there are much easier ways. If your goal is to win the war, well...

Wow yes the USA and friends could have just surrendered. Brilliant insight. Very clever. I'm sure everyone being tortured to death by the various Japanese military units would super appreciate that.

As much as the people vaporized by the atomic bomb would, I'm sure.

I'm sure they would have preferred being torn apart and burned alive by conventional weapons.

Perhaps they shouldn't have STARTED THE WAR THEN.

The specific goal at the time was to test two prototype weapons of differing design.

well, glad someone finally figured out how to measure human suffering.

If you can't measure human suffering then what's the argument for claiming the nukes are worse than anything else? You can't have it both ways.

I think you need to educate yourself a bit here. Japan's surrender was inevitable, largely due to Russia pressing them. The war was ending whether those bombs dropped or not.

The other awkward detail was that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were picked from a conventional HE & incendiary bombing targeting list; had they not been destroyed with the first atomic weapons then they would have been destroyed to the same degree by a wave of heavy bombers overnight, just as Tokyo and 71 other cities were.

This is the point I keep trying to make, like, I don't want to downplay, you know, literally being nuked, but I also don't want to downplay the results of 1000+ heavy bombers dropping thousands and thousands of tons of "regular bombs" on a city during a single night.

Dead is dead.

sure but they were picked because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. but who knows maybe that was Germany bombing us or them and we just were ignorant.

That's a famous myth. Among other things, russia didn't have a navy, or a strategic bombing force, so they essentially posed no threat to the actual island of japan.

You are correct in the sense that Japan was going to surrender at some point, whether that was due to conventional bombings, starvation from naval blockades or an actual invasion by the USA, there's no scenario where they don't sign an unconditional surrender.

Most of those scenarios would have killed more people than the two nuclear weapons being dropped.

> The argument is that nuclear bombs made destroying entire cities dirt cheap, and it's one of the big atrocities of history that they were used on a civilian population

The cost of causing death isn't the atrocity. The atrocity is the death happening. If "terrorists" somehow managed to create 1000+ b52s and drop 10,000 tons of "regular bombs" on manhattan, it would be just as atrocious as a nuclear weapon going off. Obviously the single nuke is a slightly more realistic threat, but that's not the point.

If you want to argue that anybody dying ever is an atrocity, that is one thing. If you want to argue any civilian dying during a war is an atrocity, that is a different thing and, among other things, would require you to define civilian in a useful way.

actually my comment was not really about how america waited to get involved in ww2, then finally did, back almost a hunded years ago (that is, this is not a veiled reference to some other time or place); it was about the USA's quest for "empire" which ramped up once "d-day" occurred.