With stuff like phones there's probably plenty of options for mass production of open source hardware modules purchasable from electronic hobbyist stores anonymously with cash which would allow anyone to build their own personal communicator with radio, SIM, wifi, quantum, etc modules.
The issue is that competitive mass production of many independent compatible modules would required a public description of an applied system that everyone can debate and discuss and agree to on technical merits, but people self-censor and don't want to share ideas for such applied systems online because they think some monopolist is going to patent everything in order to arbitrarily halt development for 20 years.
In order to achieve such a cultural shift it might be necessary to reform the religions.
> Previously, you’d be able to go to a store and buy a thing without giving any information
We can still do that, it's called paying with cash. Paper money is the people's money.
> Your examples of loan, licence etc are not like 99% of interactions, and those can be handled as special cases like before
With regards to loans, it is possible for state governments to establish regional public land loan offices to issue equity loans in reference to the production and replacement cost of existent tangible personal property fixed or held on site without monitoring all of the purchases of movable personal property by the borrower to determine credit-worthiness. The borrower just has to prove there is some tangible artifact of personal property which exists, which the loan office can auction if the debt goes bad or write off if the artifact is destroyed.
We just have to mandate the loan offices don't do something stupid, like issue loans against the excess value of real estate attributable land scarcity and resell mortgages to private investors which will resell derivatives, to avoid generating a real estate bubble and the accumulation of $100+ trillion in derivatives. Additionally we'd probably need to replace many regressive taxes with distributive land taxes to ensure that households and cooperatives had cheaper access to land in order to obtain a deed or long term lease granting the security for spatially fixed personal property necessary to qualify for such loans.
Break room and cafeterias can be bugged, company phones and email addresses can be bugged or monitored. With externally controlled neural implants I'm not sure if there is any means of avoidance, the majority of the human race may simply end up as slaves, to provide extra brain matter and creative visual processing cores to a corporate computer network.
I think the only long term solution is to establish or work for a cooperative which does not patent ideas or which only patents ideas defensively to protect the free use of ideas for its members, to establish public banks, to levy distributive taxes on private land and natural resource holders.
If augmented reality leads to neural implants it can potentially lead to an even worse dystopia if the technology is not open source. Limited access to resources may result in the coercion of workers into accepting patented neural implants in order to participate in an idea-based economy in order to accumulate any personal property necessary for survival.
Accepting such implants might then allow direct surveillance of thoughts so that all novel ideas which thinkers come up with are patented by private investors, implants also open up possibility of direct external suggestion to disable the ability of thinkers to consider whether or not they are free.
The highest value of thinkers is freedom of thought. Since thought arises from material conditions and living in a community allows more time for thought by decreasing the time its members spend on basic survival there is always a social \ political \ economic component which must be considered when building better realities to avoid simply accelerating the essential trajectory of a current reality.
A more materialist approach would be to say that it is the artists and authors of such books which are influenced by cosmos and the three body problem is an error detection code for repairing memory errors in collective consciousness to prevent civilizations from repeating unpromising patterns of development which have already been simulated.
> Another layer of federated content publishing doesn't solve any problems.
HTTP is a request-response rather than content broadcast or publish-subscribe protocol. Presumably you could develop a publish-subscribe protocol with low-latency encryption support embedded in protocol layer similar to QUIC.
> if fediverse style apps take off the problem would just move to the most popular nodes on that network.
So suppose the Department of Energy provides a public cloud which people can get a network address to hold files for them similar to how they can get a Post Office box number at the post office. Except when you put a file in your own PO box the PO will make free copies of the file for others on your behalf which are subscribed to your PO box without destroying the original copy.
This would really just create a lower-level protocol or new number system for publish-subscribe content. It would compete with the other ARPAnet protocols such as TCP.
Well this already happened and we're still using it, but it's called ARPAnet.
Instead of building a hypertext website they could finance an ARPA-E program to develop new federated content publishing protocols. Then have the Department of Energy build out and maintain the initial cloud infrastructure as a public utility.
Any user files stored on network slices have the same legal and privacy protections as mail held at the United States Post Office, and people are free to store encrypted files using whatever encryption scheme they want in the same way that they are free to send pages of gibberish through the mail.
If DoE builds out a cloud network then DoD could also lease a portion of the infrastructure for JEDI.
Eh, governments could probably take a supply-side approach and throw money at new ARPAnet protocols for developing federated content publishing networks to grow competing networked application ecosystems without resorting to heavy handed authoritarianism.
> then there is the weaker threshold where these theories rule in that they should be taken as serious explanations for the alleged “advanced technology” demonstrated by UAPs
No, it doesn't really do anything to weaken the threshold.
If humans discover a method of warp travel which is then validated by peer review, this does not do anything to increase the reliability of claims made by the US Air Force concerning the existence and performance characteristics of UAPs.
The reliability of the later claims are limited by the fact that there is no independent observation and verification from non-military sources, and due to the fact that former USAF employees such as Richard Doty have claimed they were hired to fabricate and provide false information to independent UFO researchers as part of a domestic counter-intelligence operation.
If we are concerned with nuance, there's probably at least 2 different conservative arguments.
There is the hyper-libertarian argument which says that if someone arrives at a hospital unconcious, and the hospital bills them the maximum amount they estimate the patient can pay before bankruptcy, so the hospital can maximize initially reported earnings before writing down unpaid debts, that this is somehow a voluntarily market price as long as the hospital is private and not owned by the government, because value is purely subjective and has no relation to cost.
Then there is the other argument which says if hospitals are over-billing people which are under duress, that this is bad and we want to do something about it, but we don't want to immediately nationalize healthcare and ban private health insurance. This second type of conservatism usually focuses on price controls or regulation of monopolies.
With pricing transparency regulations, it's probably possible to implement universal public price negotiation by fining non-elective healthcare providers which bill patients over 100% of their previously published price or 120% of the minimum price published by comparable providers. Then rebate patients the entire amount they were over-billed regardless of their insurance status.
With over-billing rebates there is less need to collect payroll tax to finance social insurance premiums. Need based assistance could be financed from more progressive property taxes on the rich, and the actual price controls could be implemented relatively cheaply by randomly auditing providers to ensure compliance, by allowing patients to manually submit invoices whenever they felt they were over-billed, and by financing rebates to patients entirely from fines on providers.
It's certainly possible that other systems would work better. However if we want to be nuanced there are many different strands of U.S. conservatism. Historically U.S. conservatives subscribed to some form of cost or labor theory of value. The kind of hyper-libertarian conservative movement which says private prices are always fair is probably less than 100 years old.
Price transparency regulations could also be used to implement public price controls or public fines on monopolies engaging in price discrimination.
For instance if a provider billed a patient over 100% of their stated price or over 120% the minimum price for the same item published by comparable providers, there might be some public fine or tax on the biller and rebate to the patient in proportion to the entire amount by which the patient was over-billed regardless of their insurance status.
This would possibly amount to something similar to universal public price negotiation.
But yes the idea of using pricing transparency to suppress over-billing by monopolies could possibly be interpreted as suggesting a rejection of the alternative idea of centrally fixing all consumer facing prices using a public office and then determining all government facing prices from external suppliers providing necessary inputs for the public healthcare system through minimum bid.
With the proposal for continuously increasing maintenance fees on ownership it is necessary to establish some public mechanism for determining the relative value of patents upon which the the maintenance fees are levied.
One possible solution is to require the IP holder to declare the quit price at which they are willing to abandon their claim and permanently release the discovery into the public domain prior to the expiration date of the patent in exchange for a one time payment.
This should reduce legal fees and court costs. If a firm is notified of patent infringement and pending litigation, instead of hiring a lawyer and going to court and halting production, they could instead crowd source the funds to pay the quit price to the patent office. The patent office would then pay the original inventor and place the discovery into the public domain for everyone so that there was no basis for continuing legal action.
When large tech companies have legal disputes, they might find that it is always cheaper to pay the patent office to immediately destroy each other's patent arsenals, which would also release all of the discoveries into the public domain and level the playing field for smaller firms as well.
If someone is willing to pay the quit price to the original inventor there should be no problem with expiring patents which have been issued for less than 1 day. 1 business day would likely work fine as the minimum duration for patents.
> What can the USPTO do with the information, other than just not hand out patents in that area?
They could require the IP holder to declare the price at which they were willing to permanently release the discovery into the public domain in exchange for a one-time payment, and levy an increasing maintenance fee on a % of that price due at the end of each financial quarter.
This may eliminate unnecessary court costs and legal fees and supply chain interruptions resulting from legal disputes, while still ensuring that the original inventors are compensated and that there is an incentive for disclosure.
Suppose a defendant is notified of patent infringement and pending legal action. Instead of hiring a lawyer or halting production they could crowd-source the money to pay the inventor's fee through the patent office. The patent office then forwards the payment to the original inventor, the patent is destroyed, and there is no basis for further legal action.
Large companies may find that it is always cheaper to pay the patent office to permanently destroy each other's patents than it is to go to court, which would also level the playing field for smaller firms and startups as the discoveries would be placed in the public domain.
Well suppose the valuation mechanism for determining the relative value of patents that the escalating fees were levied upon was implemented by requiring IP holders to declare the price at which they were willing to permanently release the discovery into the public domain in exchange for a one-time payment.
The result of such a scheme might be that is nearly always cheaper to pay the patent office to permanently destroy your competitor's patents and release the discovery into the public domain for everyone then it is to hire lawyers to go to court with your competitor in order to obtain a settlement and mutual licensing agreement.
So whenever large tech companies have disputes with each other they might start destroying each other's patent arsenals rather than going to court, which would level the playing field for everyone else. And if a large number of smaller startups were being harassed by a large company they could crowd source the money needed to pay the patent office to destroy the large firm's patents without spending any money on lawyers or legal fees and without having to halt development.
The question should be how do we eliminate unnecessary transaction costs and overheads associated with license negotiations, legal fees, and courts costs, and ensure new public inventions can be immediately manufactured by a large number of domestic firms before they are knocked off by foreign manufacturers uninterested in obtaining licenses, while still compensating the original inventor?
A possible solution is to require the patent filers to declare the price at which they are willing to permanently release the invention into the public domain in exchange for a one time payment. Then if someone is sued for IP violation the defendant can crowd-source the inventor's fee and pay it through the patent office to have the the patent destroyed immediately without hiring lawyers or halt production.
The IP registrar could then levy a quarterly maintenance tax on the quit price filed by the IP holder to prevent the inventor's fee from being set infinitely high.
> I'd think a more reasonable approach could be, you have a patent for 15 years (or whatever arbitrary number is reasonable) or until the patent holder makes some multiple dollar amount from things that use whatever is patented.
The problem with patents is that they are national laws. A 15 year patent on a fusion reactor can be ignored by manufacturers in other countries after waiting 1 day without obtaining a license. Then domestic manufacturers are saddled with legal fees and court costs for decades.
A better reform would be to require the patent filers to declare the quit price at which they are willing to immediately release the discovery into the public domain in exchange for a one time payment. Then if an inventor patents a fusion reactor, and other countries begin manufacturing it immediately while ignoring the patent, domestic manufacturers could crowd source the money to pay the quit price to the inventor to have the patent office destroy the patent after 1 day as well.
> You could also add a minimum number of years (obviously less than the max mentioned above) so companies have some protection across various metrics.
As long as the original inventor gets a cash reward why is a minimum time necessary? If the patent is destroyed one day after being filed the inventor still has the original copy of everything they built and cash reward, they just don't have a monopoly on the ability to make additional copies, and neither does anyone else.
> The first kind of magic, which we shall call “Human”, is driven by the desire to extend one's power over the world, while simultaneously minimizing one's dependence on the world ... The second kind of magic, which we shall call “Elvish”, is driven by the desire to extend one's understanding of the world, while simultaneously minimizing one's intentional interference with the ways of the world.
Both of these ideas seem based on the assumption that consciousness is separate from the material conditions which give rise to it. The classical philosophy of the stoics, that humans are the means by which the universe observes and understands itself, seems to resolve the dilemma.
If we subscribe to the philosophy that humans are both part of the natural world and are interested in understanding the natural world, this might lead us to conclude it is in our interest to pursue capital intensive advanced research projects such as building orbital telescopes or high energy super colliders to probe the deeper mysteries of the universe.
If that is the case, then it is self-evident that we also need to possess a large mastery over the environment in order to understand the environment, to pursue progress towards such ends in a sustainable and resilient manner. Household, industrial capital, shared infrastructure, and common environmental stocks have a physical cost of maintaining and replacing. A low surplus society which is incapable of generating a net product or economic surplus above the cost of maintaining itself or keeping its population from starving is not going to be able to sustainably fund such advanced projects.
So understanding the environment requires interacting with the environment and shaping it in a manner which maximizes our ability for future understanding.
> I think that there are not enough jobs at the moment for the western people. So we create them, and handout "fake" rewards for them.
What nonsense is this? The purpose of work is to generate material wealth, so that the population and civilization can survive at a high standard of living, without the system collapsing.
> Since we haven't yet found a stable social solution for people not working and having purpose
The historical solution advocated by earlier U.S. politicians and economists was to maximize long-run wages by investing in agricultural productivity that had the potential to raise the net-product at the margin of cultivation, then to eliminate land speculation to bring the margin of cultivation to cities, then to give the unemployed free land.
With stuff like phones there's probably plenty of options for mass production of open source hardware modules purchasable from electronic hobbyist stores anonymously with cash which would allow anyone to build their own personal communicator with radio, SIM, wifi, quantum, etc modules.
The issue is that competitive mass production of many independent compatible modules would required a public description of an applied system that everyone can debate and discuss and agree to on technical merits, but people self-censor and don't want to share ideas for such applied systems online because they think some monopolist is going to patent everything in order to arbitrarily halt development for 20 years.
In order to achieve such a cultural shift it might be necessary to reform the religions.