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.