ywvcbk

> Why does that level of effort entitle someone to a "comfortable living"?

Because people enjoyed his books and were willing to pay for them? (But all the profits when to the printers in Belgium etc)

> That's on the order of a few words a day.

That irrelevant. It’s about the value/utility you provide and not the amount of labor.

Also you(or me) really have no clue how many words he wrote per day even if that were relevant. Maybe he wrote a dozen drafts for each book which he discarded, how would that change anything?

I mean… if you wrote down 500 words per day would you believe that you deserve to be paid more for that than Cervantes for e.g. 0.01 of his words?

> Shakespeare

Ran a theater (together with his partners) i.e. he was both the writer and the publisher.

His final theater troupe was sponsored directly by the King (previous one by the Lord Chamberlain) and had a royal patent and operated in a heavily regulated market. So surely not a very good example?

Or is patronage and a system heavily regulated by the government preferable to legal copyright? Because that the only realistic alternative besides having no content.

> entitle

What entitles you to the content of your bank account or retirement savings? Maybe even your house? What kind of a question was that even? (I don’t really get it)

> The free software movement has shown

It’s very successful in areas where software is a “cost center” (i.e. allows companies to use it reduce the cost of developing (semi)proprietary software)and not the end product. Everywhere else it’s mixed or a failure (e.g. video games).

> Publisher sells millions in the first week

That’s not how it worked back in the 1800s, that’s not even how it works now.

In any case Charles Dickens would have earned less than he did and a larger proportion of surplus would have went to printers and publishers. How is that in any way a positive thing?

And of course without physical distribution your “business” model is even more absurd (being very absurd to begin with).

I’m not sure if you are aware (presumably not) but that’s how publishing worked in the 1500s. Cervantes got a lump sum for the Don Quixote (and his other books) and he was never able to sustain himself by writing and a had to have a daytime job.

His books were (relatively) extremely popular at the time and no publishers outside of Spain paid him anything. It seems rather absurd that even someone like him could never make a comfortable living by writing?

> Rent seeker has to get a factory job or dies

These bizarrely unhinged anti IP takes are truly something else..

I mean sure the “fair” duration of copyright is up for discussion, author’s life + 70 years is probably excessive.

Innovation and progress happened at a snail’s pace (by modern standards) before IP rights (at least rudimentary) became a thing. Not saying there was a causal relationship necessarily but if we look at some of the most important inventions like the steam engine it’s unlikely that it could have been invented and perfected at the time it was without patents.

It’s rather [extremely] simple and obvious , generally R&D requires significant investment. If you can’t get any return on your investment, you won’t invest.

Of course there needs to be a balance to minimize rent seeking beyond a certain point.

To be fair it’s not like the Chinese were unwilling to buy western goods (not just opium) it’s just that the ultra mercantilist Qing government didn’t allow them to..

Well… by Western standards the patent on silk (tea is probably no even applicable) would have expired a couple of thousand year prior to the 1800s. Nobody is arguing in favor of perpetual patents..

Edit: the Romans first “stole” silk in the 500s, but still

> So what it sounds like is copyright stifles societal growth to ensure the originator gets his rent

If you’re ignoring copyright and IP rights while catching up? That’s just freeloading, you need someone to pay for all the research/innovation.

> if I have to navigate patents

Albeit still more likely than if you have no funding? Investors don’t have as many incentives to provide that if they can’t get a return.

Of course you need a balance, over restrictive IP protection might be as bad as not having it at all.

> average Norwegian

That’s the problem. You should comparing it only with states like Massachusetts, Connecticut etc. (and even then.. Norway is inflated by oil revenue, IMHO Denmark is a lot more impressive).

> as most high tax countries

Yet you listed two relatively tiny countries. Which don’t even have (relatively) very high taxes.

France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece etc. all have higher taxes on labor

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/tax-wedge.html?oecdc...

e.g. Denmark and Norway are closer to US than to France

> have full employment and very high standards of living for decades now

Yet those standards have barely improved over those decades. Prior to 2009 the gap between US and the EU was closing, not it is the complete opposite.

It’s not even remotely close to what Alexander did, almost the complete opposite in every conceivable way.

> much later that Greek society appropriated him as one of their own

His father generally put in a lot more trying to “fit in” and be accepted by other Greeks. Alexander was a bit more ruthless and the whole “divine king” didn’t really fly in in Athens etc. I’m not sure he really tried but rather just wanted to do his own thing (entirely razing once of the most ancient cities in Greece didn’t help much either).

High taxes and strict regulation do have a negative impact on job and income growth in much of Europe, though.

Almost entirely because of free movement of capital/people and not because the tax had a negative impact on productivity.

Yes, I think we might be talking about slightly different things. I don’t really see OS model working for higher-end / leading-edge chips.

In segments where chips are almost an interchangeable commodity and the R&D cost might be insignificant relative to manufacturing/foundry it would make a lot more sense.

Seems a bit more like price segmentation. Basically everyone is socially forced to pay as much as they can regardless of the actual price.

Do costumers in Washington, California, New York etc. tip less, the same or even more than in those other states?

> will bring them up to $7-8/hour

Maybe 20 years ago? Almost nobody in the US is making that little these days regardless of the Federal minimum wage.

And in nicer states you get $15-20 + tips.

Seattle is allegedly about on par with London CoL wise.

Min wage for tipped workers is $17.25 per hour. London is ~$18. So with exorbitant tipping it should be considerably higher?

Also taxes might be lower.

I guess if you are talking about the customers then you technically might have a point…

tipped workers would probably be making considerably less on average than now if tipping just disappeared. Especially in states like WA, CA, NY etc. which don’t even have a tipped minimum wage

Are there technically/legally any “tipped positions” in Washington? Since tipped minimum wage is not a thing.

A mandatory fixed/clearly defined tip is effectively a service tax. Nothing wrong about that if it’s clearly advertised (e.g. you don’t have to pay it if you take out). Quite a few countries in Europe have stuff like that.

Variable, pseudo-optional tips seem like a much bigger problem.

> Baristas in Norway get paid far more than here

Are they? Google claims the average is about NOK 200 per hours? That’s barely above the tipped minimum wage in Washington or California. So it would be considerably less with tips?

> Any city built and or designed before

So not most European cities? Unless you only count villages and old towns of larger cities.

Europeans have been building and designing towns around cars almost since after the end of WW2. They just used a somewhat different approach (since European cars were tiny compared to NA ones in the 50s and 60s). There has also been a reversal with more focus on pedestrians and public transport over the last 20-30 years.

Ford has gone pretty much entirely native in Europe. though. Their line up for decades has been pretty indistinguishable from German or French carmakers.

Their European division was a bit similar to what GM/Opel had going.

Presumably you have to draw a line somewhere, though? There is not liking someone's political views and there is not liking someone's attempts to undermine the whole country by (possibly purposefully) selling it to Russia etc.

Hardware is not software. Almost nothing alike. Surr it might happen for low-end/old chips with low margins but nothing cutting edge or competitive on the high-end

> they can't advertise that it's RISC-V due to the branding guidelines

Unless it’s a superset of RISC-V. They can still have proprietary extensions

> No different than ARM

Everyone has more or less the same access to relatively competitive Cortex and Neoverse cores. As ARM’s finances show that’s not a very good business model so it’s unlikely anyone would do that with RISC-V.

You can make opensource cores, but nobody investing massive amounts of money/resources required to design high end CPUs will make them open source. The situation with ARM is of course not ideal but at least the playing field is somewhat more even.

> RISC-V

We’d just get a bunch of proprietary cores which might not even be compatible with each other due to extensions. Companies like Qualcomm would have zero incentives to share their designs with anyone.

ARM is not perfect but it at least guarantees some minimal equal playing field.

> Afaik, ARM also licenses ready-to-go cores

Which is the core of Qualcomm’s business. All their phone chips are based on Cortex. Of course ARM has a lot of incentives to keep it that way, hence this while thing.

> If ARM wins

Qualcomm pays them.

> Qualcomm moves to RISC-V

That’s like chopping your foot off to save on shoes…

It would take years for Qualcomm to develop a competitive RISC-V chip. Just look at how long it took them to design a competitive ARM core…

Of course they could use this this threat (even if it’s far-fetched) to negotiate a somewhat more favorable settlement.