What is the point of sharing knowledge? I would argue that knowledge sharing is not an end in itself, but rather a means to the goal of driving innovation.

And I would rather Sonos keep their secrets secret. The legal jeopardy of accidentally stumbling onto one of their patents far outweighs the utility of having their amazing innovations become publicly usable in 20 years (when they will no doubt be beyond useless, if they were ever even that useful to begin with)

How many innovators are stifled by the esistence of patents vs. innovators who are successful because of wisdom gained from 20 year old expired patents?

Look at the clapper. It was a good idea. The people who held the patent did not know how to make a good clapper. We had 20 years of poorly made clappers (or no clappers). Then the patent expired. Was there a rush of new clappers coming to market fueled by the wisdom contained in the clapper patent? Not even close. This is a market failure.

Traffic lights are good things. They can really make traffic more efficient when they are tuned correctly. When they are not, you get lines of cars stuck behind long red lights with no traffic going through on the green side. I feel like our technology patents are basically incredibly badly tuned traffic lights, that are actually making traffic worse.

Sure some companies don't use their patents except against patent trolls. But this just highlights my point that patents are used as weapons (offensively, and sometimes defensively). If patents did not exist, they wouldn't be needed to defend against offensive patents.

It's like saying we need guns to defend ourselves in a dangerous world full of guns. It might be hard or impossible to get rid of the all the guns. But patents are a social/legal construct. They are easy to get rid of if we decide we don't want them.

The whole point of patents is to drive innovation. What we see in 99%? of patent disputes is the exact opposite. It's companies rushing to patent obvious ideas that are constantly becoming technologically feasible with the march of progress.

Maybe the world of smart speakers would look a little different had it not been for Sonos. Maybe smart speakers would have taken a little longer to mature. But maybe smart speakers would have matured even faster if it were not for the hurdles presented by litigation.

If the US government passed a law saying "There will be no patents granted or honored in the domain of speakers". Would nobody try to innovate new speaker technology because there is no longer any way to block competitors or profit from litigation? Or would everyone just innovate freely understanding that their ideas may be copied and improved and that they may copy and improve the ideas of others. I suspect the latter.

I get that we need patents for things like drugs because of how rigorous and costly it is to research, develop, test, and market new drugs through the FDA. Nobody would be willing to spend the huge upfront cost of drug development if someone else could just produce the same drugs without all those costs.

What is the up front cost of coming up with the idea of "smart speakers"?

What is the up front cost of coming up with the idea of "a phone with round edges"?

What is the up front cost of coming up with the idea of "an online store with a "buy it now" button"?

There is already a "non-obvious" clause in our patent laws. Maybe we should be interpreting it better.

I'm not sure what libertarian stereotypes you think I embody. I am not advocating privatizing fire departments. I'm not advocating private property rights as the solution to environmental problems. I am in favor of carbon taxes. I support universal single payer healthcare. I am supporting socialists for the 2020 election.

So far the only thing all these "unrecoverable libertarians" have in common is not being impressed by your amazing signature puzzle.

I played a long for a little bit to be courteous. You seemed to be really proud of it. But there are limits to my patience.

Part of being an adult if being able to maintain respectful discourse. I don't think I'm the one that needs to grow up.

First of all, "e.g." indicates one or more examples of what was described before. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list of every possibility of what was described before.

Second of all, if you are not a drug addict who is buying drugs at the expense of eating food, then what I said does not apply to you. You would theoretically be capable of handling a cash dividend responsibly (i.e. you wouldn't use it all to buy drugs) and don't need the "special accommodation" I was referring to.

In fact, what I am talking about specifically isn't "everything is drugs". I am talking about assuming the opposite in handing cash to everyone and assuming the majority will use it responsibly, and designing the system around these cases, and *only* have special accommodation for the minority of cases of people who can not be relied upon to use some of their money to buy food (e.g. drug addicts).

Honestly, I've just lost interest in decoding your signature. Sorry.

I don't see the part about not letting people starve as a sort of UBI. I see what we have (e.g. foot stamps, free/low income housing, emergency rooms/forcing insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions, etc) as a sort of social welfare in general, that is specifically not UBI in that it gives you specific things for free or at a discount, not money.

The point of Yang's UBI is not just to prevent starving. Our current system prevents starving. Yangs also prevents starving, but it does so in a way with no string attached. You don't need to prove you are impoverished to receive it. You can spend your time gaining skills, or waiting for a better job to come along. You don't have to waste your time proving you are trying to get a job or can't get a job because of a disability or whatever, and once you get some income, lose your benefits, creating a disincentive to getting income.

UBI actually started as a concept called negative income tax popularized by one of the original heroes of the libertarian movement Milton Friedman. This key difference between negative income tax and other social welfare programs it was competing with was that it tried to put incentives in the right places. (i.e. to try to get people to become free of dependency)

I'm not sure what you are referring to in regards to yangs plan giving people freedom to starve. Yes it doesn't force people to buy food, but no system forces people to eat food. I think it's reasonable to assume that people will buy food and eat it if they are hungry enough. That is not always true, but we should have special accommodation for people who have higher priorities than eating (e.g. like drug addicts).

I like yang. I like UBI. I think UBI is also a good libertarian solution to the problem of welfare. It doesn't create specific subsidies chosen by the government which are vulnerable to corruption (e.g. granting government contracts to well connected people, overcharging, etc) and inefficiencies. Just giving people money allows them to still choose which things they want and preserves markets that allow the best producers to succeed and the worst to fail. It is also good in that it can reduce waste by eliminating a bunch of narrow welfare programs (e.g. you can buy food, pay rent, buy diapers, etc with the money you get, and therefore don't need to receive any further discounts or free things)

I don't think UBI is perfect. I don;t think it will scale well to encompass something as big as healthcare. I think people who discover they (or their children) have cancer should not be trying to stretch their UBI check to cover their catastrophically large medical expenses.

I also don't have a good solution to prevent people from using their UBI checks to buy drugs, aside from providing people the resources to overcome their addictions. That's an area where food stamps and discounts can provide relief from things and exclude drugs/alcohol/cigarettes, etcspecifically.

In general, being a libertarian, I am in favor of not criminalizing things like drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, etc, and allowing people autonomy over their bodies. I don't think it's unreasonable for the state to abstain from subsidizing those things.

I'm actually currently supporting Warren. She is pretty far form being a libertarian, but I don;t feel I have the luxury of voting for a candidate I like in every way. I like her sincere dedication to eliminating corruption (which I view as the biggest problem). I think that will go a long way to solving problems, even if it won't be my preferred market focused solutions.

The signature...

I'm guessing it means you are for meaningful freedom that is no coerced? I'm not sure what you mean by meaningful freedom or coerced freedom. Maybe you can provide examples of what you consider (non-meaningful freedom and coerced freedom)

I know about the difference between free speech and free beer, myself being part of the free/open source software movement. I am not sure how that factors in or what the | signifies (or?), nor do I know why the beer is squared.

I will confess I am a software engineer, and it's hard for me to imagine alternate meanings for these symbols than what I have been inculcated with.

Most of this just flew right over my head. I'll see if I can form a coherent reply anyway.

I liked Ron Paul, because he seemed like he had a lot of integrity. Particularly when he stood up to Guiliani and the whole Republican establishment in regards to 9/11 and the wars, etc. I was already a self-identified libertarian, but pretty turned off by the libertarian party itself nominating Bob Barr. Ron Paul was actually the first candidate from a major party I ever supported and voted for. Do I agree with him on everything? Not by a ling shot, but I liked his passion and unwillingness to compromise with people that I deemed crooked. I'm not really sure what you are referring to in regards to brainwashing.

I saw your signature. I understand the definitions of all the words in it. I don't think I understand the math equation, and I'm pretty good at math.

I did sort of skim this thread before jumping in. So it is very possible that I missed the thing you said that you are referring to (whatever that may be). And going back, I think we are probably more or less on the same page.

Yes the way states award electors is a state decision, and in that respect is not specifically a problem of the electoral college, but rather the state-based nature of our election system in general. Yes there are some states that award electors proportionally, but there is actually very little incentive for an individual state to do this. Whichever party holds majority power in a state has a strong incentive to keep/make that state winner-take-all.

Changing this in a blue state will hurt democrats and changing it in a red state will hurt republicans, and blue states don't want to hurt democrats and red states don't want to hurt republicans. So changing this at the state level seems pretty pointless.

The other way to change it is at the national level, creating a bilateral disarmament scenario rather than unilateral disarmament.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

I would like to point out that I am not a democrat. And yes democrats have serious problems. I would agree that they don't have a lot to offer. But right now in my opinion the republicans not only have *nothing* to offer, they are actually undermining our system of justice for political reasons.

Maybe in an alternate reality the democrats would be protecting the democrat version of a criminal president, and I'd be standing with the republicans trying to fight them. But that's not the world we are living in now. Right now they are the *only* major party not held hostage by Trump.

You can trivialize it all you want to reducing it to "orange man bad", but I really don't want criminals to be above the law because they are president and have the power to appoint the attorney general and nominate supreme court justices to protect him.

I have alternated between being a registered republican, libertarian, and no party preference. I am absolutely sickened by the complete moral cowardice being displayed by the republican party right now. With very few exceptions, I will not vote for anyone with an R in front of their name. As far as I'm concerned, the Republican party has been so tainted by this, that I hope they disintegrate and real conservative party that hasn't abandoned all their values takes it's place.

I didn't mean to suggest that the libertarians you were talking to weren't reputable enough. I think there are versions of libertarianism that are more reasonable than others, and in my experience this is not really corellated to fame.

I'm really not trying to bait you or win an argument.

I've identified as a libertarian since I was 18. I was also part of the whole Ron Paul thing, although I have not been so enthusiastic about Rand. I currently still identify as a libertarian, but my views have evolved a lot.

I am definitely not a person who is going to try to convince anyone to become a mainstream" american libertarian. I do think there are a lot merits to aspects of the libertarian philosophy and I think there are better ways for some of those principles to be implemented than what many other libertarians would typically advocate.

I don't know that I understand "freedom" means in the way in which you expect. I don't value freedom as an end in itself. I see freedom in general as conducive to the goal of fostering a healthy society. If it turns out some freedoms are counterproductive towards that goal, then I don't think those freedoms are worth preserving.

Depending on the context, I don't necessarily disagree with your characterization with libertarian philosophy as childish. What I am saying is that I don't think the philosophy is devoid of merit. I think there is a lot of potential for a more mature version of libertarian philosophy to be successful.

I'll give one quick example of what I am talking about. An issue that I feel libertarians have been particularly weak on is Climate change (if they even concede that it's real). I think the correct solution is a carbon tax. Taxes are not normally advocated by "childish" libertarians as they are often considered theft, but if you look at the issue of carbon emission as a negative externality, then taxation is a an appropriate solution to resolve that. A carbon tax actually corrects markets rather than perverting them, by forcing people to pay the true costs of their actions.

I've only ever heard a few libertarians advocating for a carbon tax, but I think this is the correct libertarian position.

Even when we concede that the state is the best tool to solve a particular problem, there is often still a place to use the power of markets to gain efficiency. For me the importance of freedom is not to be able to opt out of environmental policies I don't agree with, it's about having environmental policies that gain efficiency through incentives and allow people freedom to choose what works best for them.

Here is an episode of the freakonomics podcast that is sort of in the same vein

How Efficient Is Energy Efficiency?