Okay I'll accept that, but then there's a subject/object mismatch between the sentence formation and the logical interpretation except in very limited circumstances.
The only valid use I see for comprise is when an entity can act to form components that aren't necessary for its existence. e.g. "The state comprises eight counties."
Oh good, I should be safe on that one. I use "condiment" in place of both of those.
Since you seem to have an opinion on the subject, I have a separate issue with the usage of comprise. Why is it that "The band comprised a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer" is the preferred form over "A guitarist, bassist and drummer comprise the band"? It seems to me that subject and object are backward in the first. It makes more sense that the components are collectively acting to form the whole rather than the whole (which does not exist before the action) acting to compose itself of the components.
I wasn't really arguing against your point. Rather, I was just pointing out that the comparison on the country level isn't really a fair one. You'd likely get much different, and in my opinion more informative, results if you broke out each state in the US separately.
Comparing the connectivity of the top 50 cities by population would be interesting as well.
I think there's more going on here than just European "socialism" vs. American "capitalism". Demographics, for instance, are wildly different for the US.
Average population and population density for countries 1-15: 34 million and 193/km^2
United States population and population density: 316 million and 34/km^2
Employers:
- Do not hire a person until existing employees are nearly 100% overbooked. No training or ramp-up time in the schedule.
- Want to hire the cheapest person who can barely get the job done
- Do not want to spend money on training or other activities that might increase employee value on the market (even though, in my opinion, that shoudln't be true)
- Do not significantly value sub E-level employees as investments, but rather fungible commodities to broker
- Vastly prefer to lay off people in position who have become expensive and hire H1Bs to replace them to cut payroll costs, essentially creating a glut of people with the same skillset.
But that would cost money and none of those things have (easily measurable) returns to justify the investment. Although, that really means that we have to get smarter about how we estimate cost avoidance and the value of missed opportunities.
Employees, particularly in Tech:
- Tend to focus on job skills over job experience. Skills can be taught to any college hire, and ARE taught in low-cost regions, but tend not to be taught in western schools. Think languages (C), tools, mechanics. Things if you have the proper background and education you can pick up in a month or two. For any non-trivial job however, this is nearly worthless.
- Misapprehend "experience". Experience is not, or should not entirely be how long you've done a particular task. Most tasks can be mastered in well under 5 years. Experience is how many problems you've worked on and solved in your life. It's one thing to learn a solution (i.e. school), it's another thing to learn a problem. The more you've seen and internalized, the better you will be. Instead we interview for how well so-and-so knows how to write python, or how long as he been a python-engineer. Useless. I want to hear what projects he worked on, what solutions he considered and rejected, etc. I don't care what language he did them in, or if he was a cardboard-box folder for 5 years and has the audacity to apply to a plastic tub sealer position without any industry experience!
The employee focus on skills is a direct result of HR keyword filters. A well written resume that details an applicant's exceptional capability and experience will be round filed before a human ever sees it if it doesn't have the right words/phrases.
I don't have a solution for any of this. It's a difficult problem and the tools we've created to address it have already exceeded their usefulness. We need a ground up rethink of how to train, hire and keep valuable employees. Until that happens, we'll all have to just do our best to understand the limitations of the current system and work around them.
I may be mistaken but I think it's probably water that's from a spring on a mountain. You see
The counter-argument to this is that if it is illegal to carry a gun on school campuses, then you must either pay for an armed officer to be on site at all times or accept that a shooter will have several minutes to carry out an attack while the police are on their way.
That same freedom is available to both with the same restrictions. Either license the use of the patented/copyrighted item or find another way to accomplish the same goal.
The biggest differences in that regard seem to be that it may be somewhat easier to work around copyright due to the flexibility of human communication. But there's also a much larger corpus of work to search through to ensure anything you create isn't infringing.
How are they radically different, then? Are they not both a limited monopoly grant on the reproduction of specific implementations of ideas and derivative works thereof?
I guess if you're not willing to actually discuss the issue, we can just agree to disagree without actually understanding each other's arguments. Though that's a rather disappointing outcome.
How so? I obviously disagree on that point, so could you explain your reasoning in more detail? What parts of the laws are so fundamentally different that any comparison is inapplicable?
If there is an obvious difference that I'm not aware of, I could try to come up with a similar argument with copyright directly. I'm just more familiar with the patent side of IP law, so that came to me more naturally.
Thanks for that insightful comment, Dick.
I guess we should make sure to append "in the USA" to every sentence for the sake of clarity. We wouldn't want people coming to a US site to discuss news about the opinions of a US corporation on potential policies of a US government agency to get confused about it being relevant only to those in the USA.
Also, I'm really glad the English language only uses literal interpretations and never relies on context to alter the meaning of words. That could be very confusing.
Why? Both cover the specific implementations of ideas and the effort required to work around either is nontrivial. I don't see a compelling reason to dismiss the analogy out of hand.
The "hysteria" is about a perpetual monopoly on our cultural history. If every piece of art created in our lifetimes is locked down, then we don't have the freedom to create anything new. Everything we do is built upon the ideas of the prior generations that we are exposed to through our culture.
Ultimately, infinite term IP ownership is unsustainable. Our technological and cultural development will stall. Imagine if someone (ie a corporation or estate) still held the patent on the transistor or the lever. Those companies would control the markets for basically every electrical or mechanical device. Do you think we'd even be able to have this discussion? And why wouldn't the same effect occur with copyright once there's nothing left in the public domain to draw from?
E = MC ** 2 +- 3db
