731 karma · joined July 28, 2013
I can't help but think like your comment is more intended provoke heated responses than encourage constructive discussion.
They site numerous objective data points to support what is well summarized by that quote. Whether or not you are convinced is up to you but suggesting that AP news is withholding information and doing everyone a disservice in publishing the article seems like a bit of a stretch.
The markets in Texas generally work pretty well except for where they don’t. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that basic regulations that power generation needs be winterized (among others thing) may cost slightly more on a day to day basis but costs consumers far less in the long run.
Everything in life is a trade off and unfortunately the voters of Texas have prioritized centralizing regulatory authority (a little counterintuitive but ERCOT runs basically everything and local municipalities are not allowed to much wiggle room), blind faith private entities that are accountable to no one and loose very little when something like this happens (the generation companies aren’t paying for everyone’s burst pipes, the property owners who’s insurance premiums are going through the rough do and the American people in general through Federal aid).
Agreed, patents are flawed. But so is basically every law in the United States. However, laws can change and we have influence on that so rather than chalking the idea of patent law as “fundamentally flawed” let’s look at ways we can tweak the existing system to work better for everyone.
For example, one commenter had an interesting suggestion of increasing the patent fees exponentially over time incentivizing only orgs that are using the technology and disincentivizing trolls long term.
It that tweak perfect? of course not, but rather than viewing it as an all of or nothing game of us vs them let’s keep working together to make it “more perfect”.
I’m all for putting pressure on them with antitrust lawsuits but ultimately consumers are who will drive meaningful change
I haven’t worked with it extensively (I use nix on my workstation) but I’m a big fan of what the Guix folks are doing targeting the scientific community https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2019/05/gnu-guix-1.0-foundation-f...
https://medium.com/@schwartz4live/invitation-for-community-d...
Congrats to the Eth folks though, this really was a big undertaking.