gohbgl

That does not take away from the fact that the double coincidence of wants is not a myth. A lot of card trades depended on both party having a card that the other party wanted when no monetary medium was used. I am not saying that this was always the case but it happened often.

When I was a child I used to trade Magic the Gathering cards with other people. I can assure you that the coincidence of wants is not a myth.

The PS2 plug on my keyboard has a flat surface at the 12 o'clock position which makes it very easy so plug in without looking at the pins.

These joke patents are relatively harmless. The real problem is the "good patents" which can actually be enforced and used to stifle competition.

Nobody stole his million pound painting and sold it.

Well over 100,000 utility patents get granted every year in the US alone [1]. Care to show me all the secrets we would been unable to reverse engineer or independently invent without the patent system?

[1] https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.ht...

Adding to pbhjpbhj's reply: The name "patent" goes back to letters patent which, among other things, was the practice of monarchs granting monopolies to favored cronies. This resulted in the Statue of Monopolies in England 1624 that restricted the monarch to grant monopolies to inventors only. Going forward this would form the basis for the modern patent system in the United States. Saying that the patent system is primarily about disclosing inventions is a bait because it most often does not matter. How important is it that William C. Hooker who invented the spring mouse trap (patent US528671A) had to publish the invention? If you want to sell your invention you almost always automatically reveal the secret.

Patents are primarily about getting a limited time monopoly. Publicly disclosing the invention is just a direct consequence and not a virtue of the patent system. So please stop marketing it like that. In many cases it is completely irrelevant because the invention is sold and can be reverse engineered.

Also: > Encouraging people to share information so that others can use it to make further advances is the whole point of the patent system.

This is meant as a joke, right? Is locking down a field of engineering for 20 years promoting further progress? Maybe it promotes the invention of sub-optimal solutions to work around the patent but that's about it. The latest example I can think of is all-in-one liquid cooling designs: https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3517-swiftech-h360x3-d...

What you wrote might be true for warehousing physical gold but not for (mostly digital) fiat money because the cost of digitally storing $1 and $10,000 is the same.

As far as I know there is no evidence that the patent system as a whole is a net benefit to society. The negative effects are clearly visible like the formation of oligopolies, litigation costs, licensing costs and so on. So unless one can present data that the positives outweigh the negatives the whole system should be abolished. As a practical matter it might be much easier to end software patents than it is to end all patents.

Everything they listed is also true for non-software patents. End all patents.

Find a better business model. I could care less about people not being able to extract enough money from their monopoly rights.

Goldmoney offers a gold debit card: https://support.goldmoney.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000526347...

Of course when both parties are clients of Coinbase or Goldmoney respectively then the ownership of the bitcoins/gold can be directly transferred.

It's not like the man uses the overtime money to buy a new Porsche for himself and a new dust mop for his wife. Also nobody is forcing women to do household chores. It's just how many couples choose to organize things.

I think that when you send fake data to a server to bypass a paywall (e.g. sending google UA) then you are using the server without the owner's permission, which makes it immoral. But in general I believe that being a journalist does not mean that others have to pay you. You as a journalist have to figure out a business model that works.

Why does the question of ownability even arise?

In my mind the purpose of property rights is to resolve conflicts over scarce resources. So what is the conflict with Bitcoin?

> Automation was always going to be involved sooner or later. This would just increase the rate of adoption.

The rate of adoption is actually something that matters. If you automate too early you lose money as a business. Also, the minimum wage not only changes the rate of automation but also the things that are automated; namely work that was previously performed by low skilled workers.

> And as for work worth less than minimum, then yeah maybe it's not worth doing by a human anyway.

What a great insight. Tell the people without jobs that it's not worth for them to work at $14,99 and instead to rely on government handouts for the rest of their lives. For many people an entry level job at low pay was how they started their career.

> C) These white or blacklists are circumvented due to bad parsing

The main problem is that the parsing is inconsistent between different subsystems, i.e. the parse function interprets the URL one way and the fetch function interprets the URL in another way. This is why I think the most practical solution is to add another layer of validation that checks that a given URL belongs to a very small subset of all valid URLs that is interpreted consistently across all your functions.

Airbags and seat belts were installed in cars long before they were required by regulators. The same goes for improvements in fuel efficiency. This all is driven by competing companies trying to make a profit.

Besides retroactive copyright being absolutely ridiculous, there are no studies that clearly show that IP promotes science and arts.

Having an implementation is not a requirement for getting a patent.

Cars had been equipped with seat belts before it was required by law.

This is empirically false as Boldrin & Levine describe in chapter 9 of their book Against Intellectual Monopoly that countries which had no patent protection for pharmaceuticals had a high innovation rate in this field.

Link to chapter: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004.pdf

The eu domain name is politically restricted. The UK is still part of the continent Europe.

Undoubtedly, Laissez-Faire and socialist economies have different technology improvement rates.

A bunch of racists who feel morally superior.

First of all, the minimum wage is popular with the crow. So it's a good tool to win votes. Second, a high minimum wage drives out low skilled workers. So high skilled workers have less competition. Third, companies who already pay more than the minimum wage generally favor raising it to their level because it would drive out competitors that cannot afford to pay that much.

The EU should force the other countries to lower their corporate tax instead.

There are also tons of "good" patents that prevent startups from innovating.

> as if you can make an informed market-based decision about which provider to use while in the back of a damn ambulance.

That's a pretty bad straw man argument. Of course you have to pick an insurer before the accident happens otherwise it's not insurance.