Socialize the Social Network & End the Facebook Monopoly

by Glen Wallace

“Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes we can turn to another.”

- F.A. Hayek 'The Road To Serfdom'

Should social networking sites be considered monopolies? I contend that Facebook and similar sites effectively prevent competition not through deliberate monopolistic trust efforts but just by being successful. While there may be competition in the fight to become the dominant social networking site, once any site has achieved that status then the choices of the consumer become very limited. For instance if I want to announce something to my friends online at one website, then I have no other option, if I want them to see the message, other than posting it on Facebook. I mean, I suppose I could post something on MySpace or Google+ if I prefer either, but who is going to see the post? Where is the competition induced meritocracy that is supposed to exist in commerce when it comes to online social networking? The very nature of such sites prevents competition to exist much at all. A fundamental difference exists between a site like Facebook and other sites whether it be a search engine like Google or a news site such as nytimes.com. If I want to search for something on Google or read a news article on the New York Times online site, it doesn't matter if I'm the only one using the site, the quality of the content remains the same. But with a social networking site, the quality deteriorates according to how much less other people use the site.

While one might point out that with some products, the only way for a company to provide a product is if they have a large number of customers to provide the revenue to make the capital intensive product. The difference there, however, is that it is still practical to have more than one vendor for any given ordinary product. There may not be as many vendors to choose from as compared to a less capital intensive product, but still there should be at least a few vendors that are able to raise sufficient funds to run a business that provides any given product or service. But with social media, it is so inconvenient for multiple users to use multiple vendors that a certain degree of cooperation is necessary among all the consumers to use just one portal as a vendor. A similarity emerges between a general social media website like Facebook and a public utility that acts as a well regulated monopoly. The problem of course is that Facebook is not regulated like a public utility even though it still behaves and functions like one.

Personally I would rather such a de facto public commons website be either a non-profit like Craigslist, or a government, citizen owned public website or some sort of cooperative. People often complain about the changes that Facebook makes and their use of users information and posts. But really, the users have little to no control over what the behemoth Facebook corporation does, leaving users at their mercy.
I also don't like the fact that I am inundated with all the ads on Facebook that pay for the huge executive salaries and helped turn Mark 'Hoodie Boy' Zuckerberg into a billionaire, and many of his minion of employees into multimillionaires. Why should we the users be made to feel like ungrateful users when complaining about a free site that has so many ads, when in fact it is us users that are really the givers, providing the valuable content that drives the hundreds of millions of visitors to the site to see the ads that provide the fortune of revenue to Facebook?  Without the content that us 'users' provide, with all of our 'status updates,' without any expectation for remuneration from all those Facebook millionaires, the whole Facebook website would be completely worthless and all those young Facebook employees would all be just another worker bee struggling to make ends meet instead of being in the very comfortable financial position they are today. They should be on their knees thanking us 'users' for doing all the work that made them so rich. It is, after all, our content about our daily lives and thoughts that is unique and special and not the ordinary glorified cloud database software that is Facebook that the engineers there seem to be constantly busying themselves trying to fix what aint broke. Or to provide an another analogy, we the users are providing the goldmine of data and interesting personal stories and the Facebook corporation is providing an ordinary utilitarian mineshaft that has nothing special about it and any other mineshaft builder could have just as easily built and maintained just as well or better than Facebook has done. But in the field of social networking, I may want to use someone else's 'mineshaft', but if almost everyone else is using another mineshaft builders shaft (Facebook), it doesn't matter how much better the others mineshaft is to use, without the gold at the other end, it's of little use.

That's why I'd like some other choices, but know that effectively I do not due to their monopoly over social networking. In terms of commercial user input websites, I would prefer something like wordpress.com were the default social networking site due to their minimalist approach to placement of ads. While wordpress is more of a blogging site, because it already allows 'following' and user updates, it wouldn't take much modifications to turn it into a social website also. But despite the assurances provided by Hayek's quote at the opening of this essay, even though Facebook refuses to satisfy my wishes there is no other social networking website out there to turn to that both satisfy my wishes of minimalist ads and also a goldmine of online socializing. No freedom of choice exists because there is no competition due to the unique nature of online social networking.

So what is the solution? The situation is unique here compared to other monopolies such as the famous Standard oil which was simply broken up into smaller parts that could compete with each other. But how would one go about doing that with a social networking site? Would you have to have your friends list get broken up into separate parts with each part going to a new social networking site that could compete with Facebook? That wouldn't make much sense. The only viable solution that I see is to nationalize Facebook (and Twitter for the matter) I think I would then change the name of the site to something more appropriate, like 'The Public Commons.' The only problem I see with such a nationalization is that, even though we are supposed to be living in a democracy, the federal government and its programs, often has become too much of an ivory tower organization, distancing itself from public input as to how it operates. Therefore I would insist that new 'Public Commons' website be a truly of-the-people organization with a barrier of control separating itself from the rest of the federal government. Therefore the new website would be one run entirely by a combination of open source and referendum votes on implementation of various open source solutions to the websites problems and proposed improvements.
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The deliberate destruction of workers rights in the modern era

 By Glen Wallace

There was a famous labor conflict back in the 1800's between the workers of a steel mill and Andrew Carnegie, the owner of the mill.  The striking workers actually locked the gates to the plant preventing any scabs or management from entering the plant to keep it running.  Back then, no state or federal agency would come to the rescue of the ownership, sending in the national guard like they would today.  Instead the owner had to fend for himself.  In the case of this particular strike, Carnegie hired a gang of Pinkerton thugs to break up the strikers and get the gates open to clear the way for the scab replacement workers to come in and get the plant running again.  Now, while all this was going on Carnegie, not wanting to soil his delicate bourgeoisie 'civilized' hands with the mess, had left his henchman Andrew Frick to organize and direct all the dirty work, while Carnegie was off in Europe on a hunting trip.  Unfortunately the striking steelworkers were no match for the Pinkerton professional brutes.  That was fortunate for Carnegie because for him to both hire new scabs and the Pinkertons' was an extremely expensive endeavor that he could not have possibly sustained financially for very long even for a man as wealthy as himself.  Now looking back at those events of that strike I have to wonder if maybe the striking steel workers might have been successful had they employed a different strategy from what they employed of directly taking on the Pinkertons' when challenged.  Had I been there in that place in time I would have advised the strikers to retreat as soon as the Pinkertons arrived and allow them to open the mill for the replacement workers to come in and start the plant up again.   Then as soon as it appeared that Carnegie and the Pinkertons had succeeded and thus left, the strikers would come back to shut down the plant again.  Of course Carnegie and Frick could have just turned around and hired the thugs to come back, but that would have resulted in another big bill that Carnegie would have had to have eaten.  I suggest that it would have been much easier for the striking workers to maintain such a 'stick and move' pattern that would have slowly undermined Carnegie to the point were he would have been forced to capitulate and meet the strikers demands.  I find it remarkable that the strikers back then were allowed to do as much as they did without government intervention as would happen today under similar circumstances.  Today if a union tried anything similar, the National Guard would surely come out to break up the plant shut down.  What should be clear from this is that the government has taken on the very same role that the Pinkertons took on during the steel mill site.  The state, local and federal government has clearly become the protectors and advocates for the plutocrats at the expense of the proletarians interests.  I like to think that I'm pretty clever to think up such a strategy that I believe would have been successful in such a historically famous event where a different strategy had failed.   But here and now in the present day as I type this I try to think up strategies that might help advance the interests of today's prol's and 'I got nothing.'  And I don't think it's that I had just a 'one hit wonder' strategy, it is that the doors of opportunity for common man to, in general, advance,  have been strategically slammed shut by the plutocrats so that every possible move has already been thought up by them and has been blocked off to the proletariats.

The mysterious disappearance (censorship?) of Roger Swardson's book from Amazon

by Glen Wallace

Update: I recently discovered a listing for his book on the British Amazon website  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Down-Out-America-Roger-Swardson/dp/0465017002, so why not on the US website?

I've recently discovered that Roger Swardson's book 'Down and Out in America' has disappeared from any listing on Amazon's website.  It has just disappeared even though for a long time I remember that the book could still be found at least as an entry on the site even though the book has been out of print for a long time and no used copies were available.  I have to wonder if this omission by a mega corporation of a book that is so supportive of labor rights and does such a good job of highlighting the plight of the underclass in a very entertaining manner is accidental or deliberate.  I thought that Amazon would continue to list an entry for even the most obscure work that is out of print and without any available used copies.   It seems like an awfully big coincidence that a book like Swardson's stops being listed from a corporate site like Amazon. Here is a book that could be considered critical of the sort of general labor practices of low pay for workers that a corporation like Amazon has become dependent on for its product shipping distribution networks to maintain its already low profit margins that has allowed it to continue its dominance in online retail.   Any resurgence in the labor movement in this country I imagine could easily first hit Amazon, given that much of the shipping work, due to its nature, could not be outsourced and therefore give leverage to the workers in Amazons shipping warehouses to demand better pay and working conditions.  And even though his book was never a big seller, I think that his writing style could, given the chance, popularize a new labor movement. And therefore, I wonder if someone at Amazon saw that and decided to nip any chance of such a labor resurgence from happening in the bud by making Swardson's book disappear from Amazon's database.

The Illusion of Influence

By Glen Wallace

The illusion of influence by the populace has perpetuated the current flawed republican form of government.  Had our government been in the form of a constitutional republic with appointed rather than elected governing officials the citizenry would have likely revolted a long time ago.  But under a pseudo democracy as we have, the people tend to blame each other for the problems of the government.   Which is understandable given the illusion of democracy makes people think that the electorate are the ones  wielding the influence over the politicians that are deciding what laws are created that governs society.  Constituents think all that needs to be done is sway their fellow citizens to vote another way.  When that doesn't work, people get frustrated, but unfortunately they don't give up on the representative democracy system altogether.  For some reason, for the vast majority, the populace never even considers the option of completely altering their fundamental form of governance. If only they realized that we are living under an appointed republic and not a democratic one, then the people would declare our government unacceptable. Instead, they just keep tilting at windmills thinking 'this time will be different' and all will be well if only their candidate will get elected to office.

Unfortunately, the illusion serves as useful fiction for those that are in power.  It becomes much easier to manipulate the people when they think they are the ones in charge.  Once the illusion is in place many different forms of manipulation become available that would be much less potent tools if the populace lost their sense of importance in running the country.  I believe a certain degree of malaise and apathy would come over the constituents with respect to the day to day governance of the country if they didn't think they had a role to play in that regard.  However that apathy would quickly be replaced with a sense of outrage if their material condition or freedoms were severely compromised.  Such outrage could then easily evolve into a mob that could leverage its numbers and in a real act of influence, overthrow their dictator.  But once the illusion is present then among other techniques of manipulation, perhaps none works better than the old divide and conquer technique whereby parties of different political persuasions are pitted against each other, thus distracted from the pillaging of the resources and freedoms.  But the 'dance off' between the parties is as carefully orchestrated as a professional wrestling match.  When the ruling elite like things just the way they are, they order a continual partisan stalemate with both sides so evenly matched that no resolution occurs and therefore no change happens with the matter at hand.  However, if the powers decide they want something changed, like the enactment of a new free trade agreement, the powers order a bipartisan unity that insures that the agreement is passed.  Never mind that such free trade agreements hamstring the peoples ability to leverage, through tariffs, the trade deficits that the US is continually experiencing .  The interests of the masses, or the democratic majority, are not what matters in our so-called representative democracy.

Another case in point is the recent proposed legislation known as CISPA and SOPA.  While many may think that the first round attempt to pass those laws failed because of a grassroots movement came together in protest against those bills, I doubt the general public had anything to do with the failure of the two bills.  I believe those with influence, the large cap internet corporate behemoths such as Google, Amazon and Ebay protested and thus stopped the bills.  In our society, the only hope the proletariat has is if their interests and the interests of those with real influence are one and the same.   

In another case, back during the Clinton administration, I believe it was during his first term, all of a sudden there was this upswelling of a populist tax reform movement.  It seemed every day there was all this talk and pressure to reform both the tax code and especially revenue enforcement in favor of the common man.  It even got a great deal of national mainstream news coverage where the news would interview people who would give their horror stories of dealing with the IRS.  But from my recollection this sudden movement occurred when the Democrats held control of not only the presidency but also congress and given that the Dems tend to be less inclined to be for tax reform, they took on the role of being the resistors to these reforms that predominantly the Republicans were putting forward.  And so the true life narrative in this case played out that the Dems played the role of preventing any significant tax reforms to come out of this new tax movement.  Now, fast forward to the George W Bush administration where I believe at least at some point during his tenure the Republicans had a significant amount of control of both the presidency and congress.  So, wouldn't that have been a good time to revive the populist tax movement that sprung up during the Clinton administration?  Well if there ever was the goal to help the masses with their taxation then that would have been a good time but that was never the goal.  The brief tax reform movement during the Clinton administration was just a planned theater designed to reinforce the illusion of influence for the masses to think they started and brought to the public conscious the need to reform the system of tax collection for their fellow citizens.   By making the movement so public with the help of the mainstream media which is in collusion with the powers to reinforce the illusion, the public had their mistaken belief in their political potency nicely reinforced.   Look at all the power they seemed to have and look at how it was only because of those darn Democrats that nothing came of the movement.  Of course the powers that were actually behind the sudden movement were counting on and weren't disappointed in the public's short term memory insuring that almost everyone would have forgotten the brief tax movement once the occasion came to pass where what had been seemingly the only obstacle, the Democrats hold on power, to success in reaching the goal of the movement, no longer existed.   I didn't forget, but I think almost everyone else did.  

One more example of the lack of influence by the common man over public policy in our supposed democracy is the demise of the trolly car system back in the 1950's.  It was a perfectly good public transportation system that every one seemed to love to get around and also had recently been updated with new cars at the time of its dismantling.  If the people were really the ones in charge then it must have been at their behest, demanding that the trolly cars be removed that caused the system to be brought almost entirely to a halt around the country all at the same time.  One might think people despised those trolly cars because they were so quickly removed from service around the country.  But that wasn't the case at all, from what I have heard from people who actually used the trolly cars when they were in service, the trolly cars were heavily utilized and enjoyed by the public because the system did an excellent job with its intended purpose of getting  people to where they needed to go within the city.   The trolly cars did such an excellent job in fact that their use was replacing the use and consumption of oil, automobiles and the batteries that started those automobiles.  So, there is good evidence to indicate that those three industries: big oil, big auto and battery manufactures colluded and used their real influence over politics and government and in one of the worst ever acts of crony capitalism, pressured politicians in a successful attempt to trash the then perfectly good trolly car system.  That the people liked the trolly cars didn't matter because in the minds of career politicians, the people don't matter and as result the common mans opinion has no influential sway over the actions of those career politicians who make the public policies that we all live under. 

A popular technique to reinforce the illusion is to assign make-believe titles to the public such as 'taxpayer' as though being a taxpayer affords a citizen any special rights not available to a citizen that doesn't have to pay any taxes.  But still the citizen is humored into thinking that he is saying something significant when he cries "I'm a taxpayer!" People tend to equate being a citizen with paying taxes so much so that the term 'taxpayer' has become synonymous with the term 'citizen.'  But from a legal standpoint, such a synonym is inaccurate.  There is no quid pro quo contractual agreement between a citizen paying taxes and receiving some good or service.  There are many revenue sources and potential revenue sources that a government has at its disposal to cover its expenses.  The expenses, what the government spends money on, are typically determined by an elected so-called representative who is supposed to make their government paying decisions based on the wants and needs of their constituents.  The is no de jure reason for the representative to make an expense determination based on a monetary consideration provided by the citizen by way of payment of taxes.  Paying taxes does not necessarily provide you the citizen with any special privileges over and above the privileges afforded to the citizen that pays no taxes at all.  While there are laws that demand taxes be paid or the citizen may face certain penalties, those laws were created by the representatives to insure revenue but not as any civil intervention in a breach of contract matter.  So it is a mistake to think of the term 'taxpayer' as synonymous with the term 'citizen.'  From a rights, privileges and entitlements as a citizen standpoint it doesn't matter that you are a 'taxpayer.'  But it is so much easier to pilfer revenue from the citizen if they don't think of it as pilfering but rather as consideration in a binding business agreement between themselves and the government.  

Sometimes you will hear, on one occasion a politician urging Americans to support, with the help of military force if necessary, the spreading of democracy around the globe.  But then on another occasion the same politician, when faced with a question as to why some change hadn't been enacted that would have been in the general public's interest and that the majority of Americans want to come about that politician might respond with a "whoa whoa whoa this is not a true democracy where we go around willy-nilly doing whatever the whims are of the masses, allowing the tyranny of the mob to come about, we are instead living in a constitutional republic where we have these wise representatives to make the tough decisions about what is best for us and therefore we shouldn't be worrying our pretty little heads about such matters and should instead turn our attentions over to a sporting event or the latest celebrity gossip and stop meddling and interfering with the decision making process of the important people!"

We should have either, as much as is practicable, a pure democracy or a constitutional appointed republic that is revokable by the citizens.  It should be very clear by now the ineffective coupling between the desires of the populace and the government's response to those desires that exists in a so-called representative democracy.  

Why there is a need for a good non-profit internet search engine

By Glen Wallace

When one thinks of how nice it is for just about anyone with a an internet account to become a published  author, there are some assumptions involved that may not be entirely true.  If we think of the term 'publish' as being 'to make public' or 'to make publicly available' then in the strictest sense that is true but what one has in mind by the idea of 'publicly available' and the reality of the relationship between one's work that one thinks is now 'in the public' may be significantly different.  If some other member of the public does a search on the internet in a quest to find ideas about the subject that you wrote about and made public by publishing on the internet outside of any publishing house, then you might tend to think that that other person would not have too much difficulty coming across your work upon doing that search.  My contention, however, is that the difficulties encountered by that other person in finding your work, unless they already knew the exact title of your work, can be so considerable that in many cases the stranger doing the search will be highly unlikely to come across your work.  Now, compare such an internet search to someone doing a search at a public or university library using the libraries card catalog system of organization.  Such a library search would be many orders of times easier to search and would come across a variety of works that the searcher may be entirely unfamiliar with as compared to doing an a comparable search for the same ideas or information on the internet using an internet search engine.  And I don't think it is just a matter of the internet having a higher quantity of works, but rather I believe the libraries card catalog is so much more organized that doing a search in what would supposedly be a very antiquated system still provides a much higher quality search experience compared to doing an internet search using an internet search engine. 


 In my opinion the search results using google or any other for profit search engine yields very messy results.  What is returned is just one big hodge podge of different categories of websites from shopping sites to encyclopedias to newspapers to university professors' papers.  However, one trend that I did notice when searching for a subject like communism is that the search results seemed moreso skewed towards Wikipedia type descriptive entries rather than what some might classify as opinion piece like my essay on communism.  In my essay I tried to look at the subject of communism from a new, unique and inciteful angle that I think might open some minds to the possibility that maybe communism is not only not that bad after all but in some respects it is downright utopian in nature.  Which leads me to wonder if that is why it is so hard to find my
essay 'The freedom that communism brings' -- could it be that the giant corporate behemoth Google can see in my work a potential for a burgeoning meme that could eventually result in a complete overthrow of the capitalistic empire and all those behemoth corportate giants like Google?  But regardless, it is still my contention that Google search results are a disorganized mess where one looking at the results will have a hard time sifting through to find the sorts of sites that they have in mind.  Any search engine should have some basic operators as part of the search that through the searches selections, categorize ahead of time the kinds of results the searcher is looking for whether it be purely factual, opinion, do it yourself instructions, helpful hints, fiction, scientific, pop-science, or philosophical. I'm thinking also that maybe what the search engine itself searches could be categorized in a manner similar to or even identical with the old library standard, the Dewey Decimal System.


I was thinking how nice it would be to have a non-profit internet search engine available.  My impetus for that wish started by looking at the view numbers for this very blog.  This blogging website provides a nice feature called 'stats' where the blog's creator can view the number of views for each posting on one's blog.  Well, my stats in terms of the number of views is rather paltry.   While I've been blogging with some regularity for about one year now with a total of about 30 published posts, I've only received around 800 total visits to my blog over the course of that year.  But when looking at the number of views  for each published essay and add them all up the total number of view is much lower still -- maybe around 150.  And I think the views per post gives a more accurate picture of number of real people actually interested in what I've written and accessing my blog from a search on the topic I've written about in a published post here.  So that got me thinking and wondering how difficult it is to find my essays on this blog if I do a Google search for the keywords covered in my essays here.  Well, I found it rather difficult indeed.  Now keep in mind I wasn't looking for a confirmation of any conspiracy theory from the start.  I know how large the content of the internet is and how easy it is for that content to get 'lost' in the mass of internet 'noise.'  But even after doing some advanced searches where I entered all my keywords along with limiting the results to items published within the shorter time frame that my post I was searching for was published within, on at least one search I couldn't find a link to my essay anywhere in all the results that were returned from the google search.


 In supposedly helping make it easier for one's posts to be found by a search engine blogger.com offers something called 'labels' where the author of the blog post can write in some keywords the author thinks are relevant to what he or she has just written and someone who wants to find the relevant essay in a internet search can hopefully do so by typing in some of those label keywords into an internet search engine such as Google.com.  So I searched for those keywords that I had already entered and published in the 'labels' field some days before my search, presumably giving the search engines bots plenty of time to crawl to the post, note those keywords and make my essay available to be found based on someone searching for those keywords.  And yet I was entirely unsuccessful in finding my own post after searching using all of what should have been the right words to enter in that search to find my essay.  I didn't think that would happen, I wasn't looking for a conspiracy but I'm left to wonder if maybe I have found one.  You may have already guessed where I'm headed with this -- could it be that my posts are being deliberately hidden from search engines because of the nature of the content of my posts?  Perhaps you may be thinking that I am just flattering myself by thinking little old me with no prestigious titles or academic or literary reputation, could be considered important enough that the words I present need to be effectively censored from widespread public access. Well maybe I am flattering myself, but the power of the written word still is very great and reason itself is a great equalizer that doesn't recognize titles, prestige or awards.  Memes can be just as effectively infectious in a positive way coming from someone with no prestige as someone with a great deal of it.  That is because it is the idea itself that takes on a life of its own as a meme in a way that the intellectual milieu of the very culture with the propensity to forge a sea-change in the sociopolitical governance that guides the direction of society.  And a theme can be found through many of my essays here of what some might construe as anti-capitalist.  While whether or not those posts where anti-capitalism or not is a matter of question, but I certainly can see where someone who does not want to see the principles of capitalism and what they see as a 'free market' tarnished might want to take measures to prevent my essays from being viewed by anyone who might be influenced by my essays in manner where the ideas presented therein might be spread in an exponential manner on into the collective conscious and unconscious of the society at large.  One interesting tidbit is that the website I've been blogging on, blogger.com, is owned by the Google Corporation.  I believe blogger.com started as an independent organization that was subsequently bought by Google Corporation.  Which makes me wonder, why did they really buy Blogger.com?  Was it for the ad revenue or did they want an easy access to the idea generators out there like myself that they wanted to be able to keep a close eye on and easily block from search results if they so desire?  One must keep in mind that Google is a publicly traded corporation and as such must abide by certain rules and laws that all public traded businesses must follow.  One of the most important rules, I believe it is a law actually, is that a corporation must act in the best financial interest of the shareholders of that companies stock.  Just imagine what would happen to the value of Google stock if the ideas I have presented in the essays I've published here were to be implemented into the governance of the U.S.? I think it is safe to say that Google owns a great number of patents and thus enjoys the revenue from those patents.  If patents were to suddenly disappear, those revenues that Google currently enjoys from them will correspondingly also disappear.  In one of the essays I have written, I openly advocated for the abolishment of patent protection.  If my arguments in that essay convinced enough people, then maybe patent protection would finally end and with that, presumably so would go the gravy train Google currently receives from they patents it already owns. I have also written essays that have advocated for the expansion of a form of communism as a replacement for the current form of capitalistic tyranny we all suffer under.  Let's face it, Google has grown into a behemoth of a corporation with a market cap as of this writing at 262 billions dollars.  That's a lot of dollars riding on the success of a corporation that has grown to that size largely by tapping into a capitalistic system of commerce by matching up buyers and sellers of goods and services for the private enjoyment of the purchaser of those goods and services.   It is hard to tell what the effect of the implementation of my ideas could possibly have on their program of revenue if my ideas were implemented by law, but since I do advocate for less capitalism and more communism, I think there is reason to believe my ideas, if implemented, might have a detrimental effect on Google's ad revenue.  In a capitalistic system of commerce, the goal is to seek out profits, not benefit mankind.  In my essays I advocate for breaking down barriers that have been set up by capitalism for its benefit but have been disguised as being for societies benefit.  Those barriers include the patent monopoly protection and our entire system of mainstream medicine.  If those barriers were removed then a lot of industries would lose an enormous amount of revenue.  If I did a Google search for, for instance, patent lawyers, I'm sure I would find an abundant number of enhanced search results with ads to the top and to the right of the search results screen for patent lawyers hawking their services to those doing patent law searches.  If patent protection would entirely disappear, then presumably there would be no need for patent lawyers anymore and as a result there would no longer be any patent lawyers buying ads from google any longer either.  That revenue would completely disappear for Google if my recommendation for the elimination of patent protection was implemented. 

 While Google may have the motto "don't be evil" I don't find that motto any more reassuring than I am reassured by Asimov's '3 Laws of Robotics.'  The value of the motto and those laws are only as good as the fallible humans that run the corporation or build the robots.  In a way the corporation that Google now is, is similar in some ways to a robot -- a revenue seeking robot that the builders and maintainers of which are required by real laws of the land to look after the financial interests of the shareholders but I'm not aware of anything in those laws of the land about "not being evil" or following Asimov's robot laws. 

 Ok, I had put this essay on the 'back burner' for a while thinking that maybe I was exaggerating things.  Since I had written this piece (and saved it here but not published it) I did some more searches using Google and had a little more success.  And my stat numbers were looking ever so slightly better.  But after my most recent published post that to date is my longest one yet, and one of what I thought was one of my more important posts about the failings of the moonshot for cancer program I had only received a grand total of 2 hits to that essay. Usually I quickly get at least 3 visits within a day even if after that for a lot of my essays there is a plateau and may stay at just 3 visits.  But for the moonshot essay it took the full day to reach 2 views.  Before then there was just one view.  So I did a search for some of the keywords in that essay; both 'SU2C' and 'Moon Shot' and in separate searches on google that were narrowed down to searching for sites that had been updated within a week, I did not get a single search result linking to my moonshot essay!  Are the people at Google trying to mess with me?  Or am I just flattering myself to think that anyone at such a giant corporation as Google would go out of their way to keep people from finding my blog because of the anti-capitalism arguments that are often found on the essays on my blog?  Ok, I just did a word for word Google search without quotes of the title of one of my blog posts and I am to page 22 of the search results and I have yet to see my essay come up.  Instead I am seeing a great myriad of different combinations of those search terms scattered about in the tittles and content of the websites in the results.  The only way I can get my essay to come up is to put the title in quotes and then only my blog comes up and no other results for any other web sites.  Update: my 'moonshot' essay has now been up for 3 days and I have still only had 2 views for that essay.  Additionally I did a Google search using my title, verbatim, without quotes, of the moonshots essay restricting the search to web pages updated within a week and after looking at every single result I got to the end of my search and my essay was nowhere to be found.  I'm really finding more reasons to be suspicious here.  

While there is a popular non-profit browser called Firefox, and a popular non profit website that offers public domain items that can be streamed or downloaded called Archive.org,  why is there no non-profit internet search engines? (Well I just recently have been making some effort to find some non-profit open source search engines and have been largely unsuccessful at least in terms of finding anything like a non-profit equivalent of Google.com where someone could go to a web page and punch in a few terms and see a listing of other web pages that supposedly reflect or match your search.  While there does appear that some individuals have made an effort to start something similar to what I have in mind, I'm still not finding any working web site that is comes very close to what I have conceptualized.)   It seems like if ever there was a need for a non-profit in the world of the internet it would be in the form of a search engine.  After all, Chrome and Internet Explorer are not really any worse at opening a non-profit or communist website than Firefox.  It's not as though when one tries to go to Archive.org using Google's Chrome browser to legally download public domain movies or music, that some screen pops up saying something like "wouldn't you rather go to Amazon or Netflix to download the latest releases for nominal fee?"  Nothing like that happens at all if you use a browser built by a for-profit software company.  But it seems like to make the most out of the internet as a free exchange of ideas from across the world, an impartial search engine without a conflict of interest as a median of idea exploration would be preferable the current search engine choices.  As it is, you can decide between a variety of for-profit search engines, it is like if you had a radio station and you were told you had a selection because you could choose between one of the two stations -- either the country station or the western one.

It is rather hard to tell what the algorithm Google uses to determine which websites get top billing in any given search result such that the top billed site ends up at or near the top of any search result listing for any given search , or in my case whether my blog gets any billing whatsoever.  I think Google keeps there search algorithms as a very closely guarded secret.  That kind of secrecy just raises the suspicions of a conspiracy theorist like myself.  Now I wouldn't necessarily have problems with such secrecy if the algorithm was just for commerce searches where the determination was for what sites end up near the top of anyone's shopping search result.  But I do have a problem with Google as a de facto internet search engine that keeps secret the reasons why the search results come up as they do for all information and ideas on the internet whether or  those ideas or information are being put forth for commercial purposes or just because someone like me is trying to create a better world through their ideas. 

Why the 'Moon Shot' cancer research program is using a poor analogy

 By Glen Wallace

A recent push by celebrities and scientists frustrated by the slow pace to finding a cure for cancer has led to the creation of the moonshot effort by the researchers and something called 'stand up to cancer' or SU2C by a collaboration of celebrities helping to fund groundbreaking cancer research.  The moonshots title is given to the cancer research program to emphasize and describe both the nature of the effort to find a cure and to provide the hope that a cure can be reached just as we reached the moon despite the seemingly daunting nature of the task.
 
One problem with the moonshot for a cancer cure analogy is that when we got a man on the moon we could say "mission accomplished" just by that alone.  Sure, we wanted to get the astronauts back alive and well, but once we got one of them onto the moon, alive, that alone was enough for we as a country to say that "we did it, we succeeded!"  But you may be thinking "well, why couldn't we call one of our researches finding a cure for cancer as a success in reaching our goal?"  The answer -- what good would such a finding be if we just stopped there and that cure never got to the patients suffering from cancer now and in the future?  It's not enough just to find a cure, that cure has to get to the patients and heal them before we can say "yes, we did it, we made it!"   Now you may thinking "of course a cure, if found, would find its way to the cancer patients, why wouldn't it?"  I'll tell you why a cure might not reach the patients -- the researchers in the cancer cure moonshot program are not the ones who are going to manufacture and distribute any cancer cure.  As our current system of mainstream AMA and FDA approved system of medicine is set up, the only way a pharmaceutical drug of any kind reaches a patient is if some for-profit drug company decides it is in there best financial interests to do so.   When a cancer patient goes through chemotherapy, unless they are in some research trial, they will be buying that chemo either through their insurance company or directly out of their own pockets, but either way the patient is only getting the chemo because a drug company decided it was in their best financial interests to manufacture the drugs and will bill for them and expect to be paid.  And the compensation that the drug companies receive from drug therapies is very handsome.  I believe I read somewhere that the average cost for an entire course of cancer treatment averages over a hundred thousand dollars.  So if one of those moonshot researchers finds a cure that for whatever reason, the drug company will not be able to profit from at least to the same extent as the current cancer drugs they sell, then why would they bother to manufacture and sell that money loser just because it cures cancer?  While there may be a great number of non-profit charities trying to raise money to help fund some cancer treatment research trial, I'm not aware of a single drug manufacturer that is a non-profit organization.  And that's where the patient gets their medicine from -- the drug company, that is only in it for the money, and not from the charity that cares so much for the patients.  The refrain I usually hear at this point is "given that humans are running these drug companies and they already know the toil that cancer has wrought and many of them already know someone or even a loved one that has cancer then surely they would step up and say the heck with profits we're going to manufacture and sell this cure even if it bankrupts us."  Maybe so, but keep in mind, for one, many of these drug companies are publicly traded corporations and as such have a legal obligation to look after the financial interests of their shareholders.  While they may have a legal obligations to insure some degree of safety of their drugs, they otherwise have no legal obligation to act in the best health interests of the patients who consume their products.  Additionally, many worker bees within some for-profit business act as a mere cog in the whole operation that limits their ability to see beyond the single specific task they have been assigned and as a result are unable to see the effects of their actions along with their other coworker 'cogs' working together in a business operation that as a whole behaves like a machine or robot that was designed from the ground up to achieve the single goal of reaping a profit for the owners of that machine.  And the owners of that business machine may never pay much close attention to all the damage it has wrought in its path as that business robot machine stomps its way along, harvesting those profits.  All that the capitalist owners of the business robot machine pay attention to is whether the robot is functioning properly and harvesting the profits or malfunctioning and not harvesting enough or any of those profits.   

There are a variety of reasons why a cancer cure might not turn out to be profitable for a drug company.  The most likely reason for non-profitability is that a drug providing the cure may not be patentable.  Most whole herbs, for instance, as naturally occurring plants, cannot be patented.  There is even one common substance found in the pantry of most households, baking soda, that one alternative cancer treatment doctor has touted as being able to offer outstanding results against cancer.  But even if a drug company were able to patent a new cancer cure, eventually the patent protection for that cure would run out and which would grind to a screeching halt their patent protected monopoly gravy train the drug company had been riding for so long.  Given the current state of affairs in the cancer treatment realm, there is this ongoing struggle where the land of milk and honey is always just over the horizon, where there is always hope to spur the struggle to find the next patentable drug before their current patents run out but never get to the promised land of a cure because then there will be no hope of and endless supply far into the future of the monopoly profits that patent protected medicines provide.  A cure then, even if it was patentable, would effectively be a dead end for the drug companies that have for so long have been enjoying enormous revenues and profits from cancer treatment chemotherapy drugs.      
 
  This brings us to another problem with the moonshot analogy -- with the moon landing we could all be pretty sure that we were the first and no previous space program had sneakily snuck someone onto the moon and didn't tell anyone before the Apollo 11 program did the same.  If someone did the moon landing previously we would surely all know about it.  But with cancer cures, the picture becomes much more vague.  All it takes is a quick internet search to reveal that there are numerous claims that many different cancer cures have already been found that either have been suppressed or ignored by the mainstream medical field.  How can we be so sure that none of those claims are accurate?  While some might argue that if any cure had already been found, then the mainstream medical establishment would have recognized it even if the for-profit drug companies decided not to manufacture it.  Such an argument, however, makes the critical thinking error known as 'the argument from authority.'  The argument from authority commits the error of attempting to substitute good reasoning and logic with the prestige of academic titles awarded to some group making a statement.   But since there is not form of logic whereby a title such as Doctor or PHD can be used as an operator that creates a valid argument out of an argument that would be invalid without those titles in place, the academic prestige of someone presenting an argument is useless in determining the validity of that argument. Therefore the fact that the prestigious mainstream medical community has not accepted the belief that a cancer cure or cures already exists in no way impairs the degree of veracity of such a claim.  But even so,  I believe many prestigious doctors and other individuals within the mainstream medical field have already stated that cancer cures already exist but have either been ignored or worse, ridiculed until they either make stop making such statements or they leave the field entirely.  Please remember that the individuals that make up the medical field are humans and as humans they are still social creatures to the same degree as the rest of us despite all their years of rigorous analytical academic medical training.  As an example, I used to work in a hospital radiology department as a clerical worker.  As part of their training, medical residents and students would gather for weekly conferences in the radiology dept where one of the radiologists would go over cases with them to help the residents better understand diagnostic radiology.  For a while, I was stationed with my desk in the hallway right where the residents had their conferences.  My desk was facing a wall and the computer screens and x-ray film viewing lights were all against the wall right behind me.  On many occasions there was a rather good turnout of residents to the point where it got rather crowded in that hallway with all those residents gathered in one location.  Often the residents would arrive early for the conferences and would chit chat about things like who was getting married or what their future plans were for some occasion -- rather ordinary mundane socializing.   Sometimes, when it was all crowed, I still needed to get in and out of my desk.   And you know what I noticed -- when it was crowded by my desk with the residents just socializing before the conference got started, it was a lot more difficult for me to get their attention for them to move aside for me to squeeze through to my desk than it was during the actual conference when the radiologist was showing and talking about the radiology images up on the screen.  The point of that whole story is to illustrate and emphasize that the power of  the social instinct seems to be no less strong in those individuals dedicating their careers to medical practice.  The need for social acceptance among those residents is automatic and acts as a sort of glue binding them together that I had to struggle to break through to get to my desk.  Their desire to socially connect eliminated the need to make a deliberate effort to maintain that connection once it had already started with another individual.  However I believe they had to make more of a deliberate effort to listen to the radiologist and as a result, the residents could be more easily distracted to get their attention.  If true, there may be some psychological factors at play in the medical field whereby the social influences that automatically occur, even if the individuals are not fully aware of, within the minds of practitioners of medicine that pushes them in some direction that supersedes any purely academic or intellectual reasons for move in some direction.  Therefore, a medical doctor may psychologically block from their minds some belief that the acceptance of which could result in ridicule from their academic peers who by default are also their social peers.  Correspondingly, a doctor who may have vested herself in some belief such as 'no cancer cure already exists' may without realizing it lash out at someone who suggests otherwise and do the ridiculing out of some sort of psychological defense mechanism because the thought of being so wrong for so long about such an important matter may be too difficult to consider. 

A third problem with the moonshot analogy and one that ties in with the first problem above, is that the entire moon landing program was entirely a publicly funded and run operation from start to finish.  With Apollo 11 the orders and goals were clear and all parties involved were given all the funding and operational prerogative to reach the ultimate goal of landing a man on the moon.  While despite what I have already written some may still persist with the belief that no cancer cure has already been found and if these moonshot researchers do find one then that treatment will surely get to the patients that need it.  From that I respond -- well if you are so sure then it wont hurt to make it all legal and official.  By that I mean let's write and enact laws that require what so many assume will happen anyway without the laws.  That is, create, by law a medical system whereby the goal in medicine is to help the patient from a medical standpoint.  We should make it illegal to withhold information about some medical treatment whether that treatment be for the common cold or a cancer.  Require by law that if a cancer cure is found that everything that is possible is done to insure that it gets to every patient that needs it regardless of their ability to pay for it.  And if a manufacture refuses to make such a cure, then take the next step in more closely emulating the moonshot analogy by instituting a publicly funded and run program to manufacture and distribute the cure.  If ever there was an appropriate time for the refrain of "if we can put a man on the moon..." surely then this is it.  If necessary maybe we can put the whole cancer cure program under one program just like Apollo 11 where from the start of research to the discovery or rediscovery of a cure, to the manufacture and distribution to the cancer patients so the ultimate goal of curing those patients can be reached.  Often times we hear people bad-mouthing government run programs, but we only need to remind those naysayers that the moon landing was a government program from start to finish to give the naysayers some serious pause.  So let us create a program that is a much truer analogy to the original moonshot program where the goal, ability and funding to reach that goal of a cancer cure accessible by every cancer patient, is all provided under one program with all the focus and determination of the original Apollo 11 program. 

Gender imbalance of corporate executives is not a great social problem

The following is a comment I posted in a response to an article in the Star Tribune about a Sheryl Sandberg's book 'Lean In' encouraging women to be more aggressive in climbing the corporate ladder to become leaders in the business world. 

I have a hard time seeing as a social problem needing a national conversation the fact that any group is lagging behind another group in the race to having the most members classified as overpaid, paper pushing executives.  My view here is sort of the opposite of my view on unions where people should think "maybe I can rise with the help of Unions to where I am as well paid as they currently are."  But in the case of this article my thinking is that nobody should be paid, or given the credit for a corporations results or any subsequent knock-on effects for the country, what CEO's of large corporations are, regardless of gender.  When looking at compensation in the business world, in general it seems like it is those that get paid the most are those that accomplish the least in terms of materially affecting the wealth of the nation.  I mean, taking the example from the article, what exactly would have been accomplished in that hypothetical meeting in San Francisco other than a lot of jawboning?  What is Zuckerberg and Facebook accomplishing in their lockdowns other than creating a better Rube Goldberg social networking device? -- All people want to do on FB is share what they're doing in comments and photos -- it's not complicated.  The national conversation that is needed is not that we need to find ways to make sure the one percent that is enjoying an even greater share of the pie is more evenly divided between men and women.  It's not as though the world is going to be a better place if there is more female Gordon Gekkos.  The national conversation that is really needed is to figure out how the material wealth of this nation can be distributed in a fair and just manner that at the same time incentivises activities that further improves the material condition of the nation.  And yes, if that system is really fair and just then by default there shouldn't be any discrimination based on gender, race or any other group.  But insofar as the sort of gender discrimination described in the article and book exists, it exists because we are not living in a meritocracy but rather in the business world it is more of what I call an 'Office Politocracy' where the ability to navigate relationships within the office successfully is all that is incentivised in the business world.  It sounds like the author of the book in question is merely suggesting more women 'lean in' and be more aggressive at marketing themselves as some confident figure that people could rely on as a strong leader.  Never mind that they may be just as good as any man at steering the corporate ship into a reef -- at least they did it with confidence!    

First to file patent criterion may be a disincentive to making an invention public

By Glen Wallace

The following is my response to an article in the Star Tribune about the new first-to-file provision in the patent application process:

Kalinsky states regarding the new first-to-file provision: "For the garage inventor, it changes little. He or she does what they’ve always done. You come up with an idea, you raise funds and you file for a patent."

What if the garage inventor has a hard time raising the funds for the application process but still wants to utilize his invention for a small home-based business?  Could some big corporation then reverse engineer or just copy the invention utilized in the garage inventors product?  Could the big corporation that does have the funds and expertise to file and acquire a patent on the garage inventors invention, then turn around and file a patent based on what they copied and then demand compensation from the actual inventor, the little guy, for patent infringement?  I'm not an attorney, but if the criterion is really first to file, then I don't see any reason why a corporation wouldn't be allowed within the law to sue the actual inventor in such a scenario as I describe above.  While the costs for provisional filing may be low for a large company, those costs could be considerable for the garage inventor or home based small business.  Therefore this new act just gives further advantage to those already with the bulk of wealth and further disadvantage to those already without.  I thought patent protection exists to incentivize the creation of inventions that help society.  While I question if patents have ever has been a creative incentive, I would say this first to file development if anything is a disincentive to making a beneficial invention public because unless the inventor is willing to wade through the lengthy and costly patent application process, they may prefer to keep their invention secret, depriving society of its benefits, in order to prevent some wealthier interest from stealing the idea and turning around and suing the true inventor in such a scenario I had described above.

The so-called America Invents Act that created this "first to file" rule has about as an appropriate title as the Patriot Act.  A better name would be 'America Files Act' or 'America (Patent) Trolls Act.'   This is an act that puts not inventions first put the legal machinations surrounding inventions first.  I can envision scenarios whereby individuals might come up with a new process or invention that unbeknownst to them have some value as patentable ideas.  Those individuals however, out of the goodness of their hearts, in an effort to help others, could publish a youtube video of their ideas that the inventors believe might assist others in making their lives better in some way by solving some problem they're having.  But at the same time there could be some patent troll firms searching through youtube videos with the sole goal of finding such patentable ideas made public that have not yet been filed yet with the US Patent Office.  The troll firm then does the filling, thereby being the first to file and so once the patent is granted the patent troll firm can now extort money out of the real inventors because they are infringing on first-to-file patent troll firm.

Edit to add:  It recently occurred to me a possible legal conflict regarding the first-to-file rule.  I believe I read that a copyright automatically belongs to an author even without the author ever registering their work with any U.S. government office.  So, when I think of copyrights and authors I think of writers.  But then I wondered -- why wouldn't the writing of programming code be considered authoring something that would then automatically belong to either the author of the code or the authors employer?  Well, I also understand that a great number of patents have been issued for and profited from computer processes.  Now I'm not sure if it is the process that is patented or the code but even if it is the process for which the patent is granted, it seems inevitable that for any specific computer process, wouldn't much of the wording have to stay the same in the code that was used to first create the process?  And if someone then copied that code in order to be the first to file a patent, wouldn't they then be violating the copyrights of the original author of that code.  Would a loophole exist if the first to file used a different programming language from the original code to duplicate the process?  Or would the same principles that protect a translated common language written work also apply to a 'translated' work of computer software code?  I'm assuming that even though a great deal of work is done in any ordinary common language translation that the copyright still belongs to the original author that wrote the piece in the first language it was written in.  And if we allow programming code to be legally considered works that were authored, where first to create is granted the exclusive right to copy, then to what extent could the same principle that would grant such an allowance also be generalized to include material constructions that serve some purpose be considered as created or authored and be thus granted the same copyrights to the author that created the work.  Doesn't the copyright principle that applies to authors of ordinary language works also apply to artists, including sculptors?  Now, supposing some inventor decides to label his or her work as a work of art as, say, for instance, a moving sculpture?  Does the creator of a work get to decide whether something is legally considered a work of art that is copyrighted or purely utilitarian device that is instead patentable?  If it is the author or creator that gets to decide then wouldn't they be able to prevent some patent troll firm from copying someone else's work in an effort to be first to file.  Could the author or creator then just tell the patent troll firm that the invention is really a work of art and that in copying the invention the patent troll has thereby violated the copyrights belonging to the original author/creator?  I think these are all good questions, but anyone reading this should keep in mind the fact that I'm no lawyer and I'm really unsure how such ideas as I have presented here would play out in any real court presided over by a real human judge.  

The misguidance of charities funding medical research

By Glen Wallace

In a Minneapolis Star Tribune article, hope is presented that activating a naturally occurring molecule found in cancer cells called p53 will provide hope that a cure for a wide range of cancers could be found.  The p53 molecule is inducing the desired result in cancer cells of a phenomena known as apoptosis, or programmed cell death.  A number of herbs have shown promise in inducing apoptosis but pharmaceutical companies are not interested in whole herbs because whole herbs cannot be patented.  If something cannot be patented then the drug company has no hope of reaping the monopoly profits from the drug once it is brought to market.  And the only reason a drug company is going to manufacture and sell a drug is if it is going to be profitable for the drug company. 

While there are many charities that are non-profit trying to raise money to find cures for cancer there is no such thing as a non-profit drug company that sells a cancer treatment.  Think about it -- where does a patient not in a research trial that is receiving drug treatment for cancer get those drugs from?  The patient buys those drugs from a for-profit drug company that decided it is in their best financial interests to sell those drug to patients.  But the non-profit charities continue to make the assumption that first, the drug companies will only look at the treatments with the best potential for a cure, and second, if a cure is found then the drug companies will automatically manufacture and sell the cure to patients.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  First, drug companies only spend money researching what they can hope to make a profit from and second, even if the research is very promising they will not manufacture and sell any drug at all, no matter how promising it is for the patient, if the drug company concludes they will not profit from the drug.  And in a mainstream medical setting,  if a drug is not being sold, then the patient will not  receive the drug. 

So when a charity says they are raising money for a cure, even if they have the best of intentions, what they really are doing is raising money to help the drug companies find their next money maker.  As a result, we can only hope and pray that a cure for cancer is found that is more profitable than the current chemotherapy treatment model -- because given how our current medical system is set up, that is our only hope for a cure in the FDA and AMA approved mainstream medical world.

Or, we can stop making the unsafe assumption that there is this great synergistic relationship between capitalism and good medicine.  If anyone in medicine were to step back and look at the medical field as a whole and apply just a little of the same scrutiny to the whole paradigm that they do to individual treatments, they would quickly discover that the current capitalistic model of medicine is inherently flawed.  A complete paradigm shift is needed where it will be the drug companies that have to hope and pray that the next treatment or cure will be profitable for them because the new system will put the patient rather than profits first.  But creating such a paradigm shift will not be easy.  There are many very powerful interests, including multinational pharmaceutical corporations, that are vested in maintaining the capitalism and medicine synergy illusion within the public consciousness.  But that illusion can be broken by persistently educating and spreading memes about the truth of the current flawed medical research and treatment paradigm.  The current system does not exist due to any law of physics but was rather created by fallible humans and as such we humans can change it for the better.  

Does ice formation violate the coservation of energy law?

When water freezes to form ice the volume of water increases with a large amount of force.  The force of the expanding water can even be enough sometimes to crack solid rock.  That force being exerted over time can be expressed as energy being expended.  But the problem is that in the freezing process the heat energy is flowing outside of the water rather than into it.  Therefore, I'm left wondering where does the water get the energy to expand against resistance when the known energy contained in it is being transferred somewhere other than the water that is expanding in the form of ice?  As the ice crystals are forming, are they tapping into some form of zero point energy that the ice crystals use to power their formation that is capable of pushing things like solid rock around?  After all, crystals are used as part of radio reception in some of the old school non-digital receivers.  If you wanted to get some extra frequencies with your police scanner radio, you used to have to get a new crystal that would enable you to get a particular range of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum.  So I'm wondering is, as the ice crystal forms, during that brief period between water as a liquid and as a solid, is the crystal able to tune into and receive some special ZPE frequency that the ice uses to fuel its efforts to expand.  And once the ice is fully formed does the ice crystals then lose the tuning for those ZPE frequencies?  Or another tantalizing possibility is that the ice crystal is still tuning into those free energy frequencies, but are no longer being leveraged by the water molecules to expand ... but perhaps the ice crystal could still be used in combination with some radio receiver circuitry to tap into the ZPE.

Patents as an Invention Impediment

Has the existence of patent protection become more of an impediment to creativity and innovation than an incentive?  The impediments that patents create include the writing of the application, the filing costs, researching of infringement possibilities and the defense against infringement charges or prosecution of others infringing on ones own patents.   Anyone who has gone through the whole patent creation process knows that the above impediments are considerable.  As a result, one wonders how much brain power has either been spent on dealing with the impediments or been discouraged by them.   I believe that brain power being spent dealing with patents is brain power being diverted from the constructive activity of inventing and towards the nonconstructive legal activities involved in the patent creation and maintenance process.  It may be claimed that patent protection is necessary in order to justify the expenses inherent in the invention processes that could only be recouped if the invention as intellectual property is protected from being used by competitors.   To some extent I think those claims are exaggerated insofar as it is not so easy both for a competitor to learn how to use the new invention and also to cover the costs of the equipment and tools needed to construct the new invention.  But if it is very easy to copy the invention then one might wonder why the patent protection is deserved since the ease of copying would tend to indicate a certain degree of obviousness.  But even if we take as a given that in the business world patent protection is needed to justify the invention costs, then perhaps we should forgo relying on the business world for the creation of new inventions to the extent that we as as society currently do.  Perhaps we could veer more towards having a government centered invention generation setup.  Many of the inventions that we currently take for  granted have there origins in the government whether it was originally created for peacetime purposes such as was done for the moonshot operation by NASA or the myriad of inventions created for military purposes.  The university system, while it currently does enjoy the income from the many patents it generates,  would still presumably be able to continue to create inventions as a function of academic research but not for the purpose of profits but for the purpose that colleges and universities were themselves originally created for; research and education.  I also think there is something singularly enjoyable about the creative process itself that lends itself to motivating individuals to engage in process of creation without the carrot of money being dangled before them.  I don't think one of the greatest inventors of all time, Nikola Tesla, was just speaking for himself when he stated about the inventing process:   "I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything."  If what Mr Tesla says is generally true, then it seems all a society would need to do to foster invention would be to provide inventors with the tools and equipment they need to build their creations along with the food, water and shelter they would also need for basic sustenance and then merely let them alone to 'have at it' with their inventions.  If we take as a given that society both wants and needs these new inventions then maybe society would also be willing to provide the resources needed to build and foster invention creation centers or cottages.  And once the invention is complete to the inventors and societies satisfaction, it would then be released to the community to be freely used by individuals, businesses or other organizations as they see fit.  Imagine what a boon to the creative process it would be if we no longer had to be burdened by the tedium of searching for prior patents to determine if our own invention is infringing on someone else's patent and then if it does incorporate another patent, then having to negotiate an agreement with the other patent holder.  Or imagine not having to deal with patent trolls anymore that engage in the practice of sitting on patents just for the sole purpose of extorting money out of alleged infringers even though the trolls never intend to even ever manufacture a product based on those patents they are trying to 'protect.'  I think, from a perspective of an inventor, a world free from patents starts to appear more and more pleasant in terms of both the invention process itself and the ability of any given invention to have a positive impact on the world that it interacts with.

Systemic Unfair Hiring Paradigm in the Business World

There seems to be a problem with how our economic system is set up to set up to select employees.  If we think of the system that employers use to hire new workers as a machine that selects some item to serve a purpose, can we think of that selection machine as a useful device in good working order or should it be declared either broken or a very poorly designed Rube Goldberg type device?  I tend to think the later is the case.  The primary problem is there is an overemphasis on skills, particularly the skill to market oneself, that have little to nothing to do with the job the worker is being hired to perform.  In researching job hunting skills,  one will hear about the great importance of things like social networking, getting the word out, dressing for success, it's not what you know it's who you know.  One might start to think that every job around was some type of sales or marketing job.   And yet we continue along with the assumption that it is the job searcher that needs to change and improve when maybe it is the overall economic system that needs to change.  While for purely practical purposes it might be a good idea for any given job searcher to emphasize self marketing skills and learn how to be a good sales person even if their desired field is not sales,  I don't think the problem of our malfunctioning macroeconomic hiring system that the business world has set up and generally accepted as the norm is being addressed nearly enough.  The business world does not seem very good at questioning its assumptions, generally speaking.  While one would think that a business would gravitate to what would be the most economically viable route, finding workers based on their ability to perform the work in a manner to provides the greatest profit for the business, that doesn't seem to be the case.  Instead, the human nature of being a social creature first and foremost gets in the way of logical, cerebral route needed to navigate through to reach the destination of an optimally performing business.  That is, people tend to bring on board and hire those people that they like, or are attracted to, or want to be around in a social sense.  Since it is people, rather than a machine making the final hiring decision, the social human filter factor gets in the way of and takes precedence over the logical algorithmic decider of what is best for the business in terms of human capital.  If we take as a given that there is a problem, and we can't count on the business world fixing it themselves, the question arises of how can it be fixed?  Of course the first option that springs to mind, is the intervention of the government.  While there is usually objection and resistance to more government interference in the operations of private business, what those in the business world need to keep in mind is that they do not operate in a vacuum,  but instead exist in a system that government has set up as the referee and rule making body in the world of business as a game.  While in a small stakes playground game, the players themselves can be counted on set the rules and ref themselves, once the stakes increase on the scale of the business world, the players themselves can no longer be counted on to ref themselves and set the rules.  Rather the players desire and count on a system of government intervention and rule making so that each business player knows how they can win the game of business against their opponents.   We the people that make up 'The Government' have set up this game not because we think there is some moral right that the game be played at all, but rather that the game is beneficial to society as a whole.  So when there is some breakdown in game that makes it both unfair in some respect and also to run less than optimally in how the game benefits the greater society, then it is incumbent on the rule-makers; the people, the government, to change or tweak the rules in order to fix the problem.    There are already laws that protect certain classes of people from discrimination in hiring.  I believe in those laws is a recognition that a flaw exists in the human social nature that inclines people to hire others like oneself.  What may be needed is merely an application of the general principle that justified the creation of anti-discrimination hiring laws, towards all forms of discrimination other than merit for the job being applied for.