Slashdot

In the recent Slashdot article regarding the upcoming Monsoon lawsuit involving the GPL, I was confronted because of some hypothetical questions regarding the GPL. I'm fairly agreeable with the general concept of copyright as well as the general concept of patents, although in a somewhat confusing stance I have not been sure that there is such a thing as intellectual property, common law and sentiments notwithstanding.

Where I stand is that while ideas in and of themselves aren't really of intrinsic value, the two things that do have value are the people that come up with ideas and what can be done with those ideas. Perhaps the latter is too fine a distinction, but the blueprints to a machine aren't very useful unless you actually build the machine. So, what I think needs to be protected are attribution rights, not the product itself: that is, when a person is the one who came up with the idea, that person should be rewarded as one with the ability to come up with ideas. However, I don't think that means that person should be rewarded for implementing those ideas unless that person actually does implement those ideas.

However, that's sort of background information for the main idea I have here. The interesting issue with "intellectual property" versus real property is that intellectual property is both the thing people are after *and* the instructions to create an exact duplicate of that thing. Take software for example: you want the software to perform some task, but just the aspect of having that software means that you can create an infinite number of 'copies' of that software. Contrast that again to a blueprint: if I have a blueprint, what I want is the thing the blueprint represents. The implementation of the blueprint is what has real value. Well, I take that back - the blueprint does have some value, but it's not nearly the same as the thing that is created. Notably because one can fairly easily create a blueprint from an object.

Hrm. Now that I think about it, maybe a better way is to think about things in terms of wealth rather than value: a blueprint has value, but little wealth; it is only instructional. The thing created by following a blueprint has much more wealth, and so likely also has significant value.

Things like music are a bit more esoteric, as the thing "created" by music instructions is transient: it is a sound wave. However, in the realm of computers, what I want is the sound file, and the sound file is an instruction to create another identical sound file. Software is even more obvious: the source code (or even binaries) are the "tool" but also explicit instructions on how to create a duplicate tool - it's kind of a quine thing. Unlike a drawing for a hammer, which cannot be used effectively as a hammer - it can only be used to make new drawings or make hammers - software is both the instruction and the tool, which is a unique situation - especially since the effort to create instructions is so low.

So...that's an observation about the nature of "intellectual property" but I don't yet know what all the implications of that may be. More on that later...

The recent article on compressed-gas (as in state of matter, not fuel) powered vehicles got me to thinking about "how do you measure how much energy is stored in a compressed tank of gas?"

Incidentally, it's not possible to have a single answer to this, because the answer depends on how you extract the stored energy!

For illustration I looked at a piston that would compress from a volume of 1 cubic meter to 0.1 cubic meters, or expand, and some various situations. I'll save the details and just put in the summary.

If the "starting" pressure is 101325 kPa and temperature is 288.15 K (standard conditions), there are two basic ways to compress.

Adiabatic compression will require 383 kJ of pressure work, and the pressure will rise 25.119 times and the temperature will rise 2.512 times.

Isothermal compression, however, will require only 233 kJ, with a pressure rise of 10.000 times and temperature stays the same (ratio = 1.000). If we let the adiabatically-compressed gas equalize thermally, it will also be at 10.000 pressure ratio and 1.000 temperature ratio. So how much energy is stored in the chamber? If you look at either internal energy or enthalpy, the final states have the same value for both; however, those final states are the same as for the initial condition: internal energy is simply mass*cv*T and enthalpy is internal energy + pressure*volume; so in either case the initial and final conditions have the same internal energy and internal enthalpy (because P*V is constant if temperature is constant). (The disturbing thing is I cannot remember, for the life of me, what state variable captures the stored energy in the compressed cylinder. In both cases, though, the entropy of the compressed gas is lower, so this is likely the state variable which captures the change)

So, how much energy is stored? That's measured by extracting it: Adiabatic expansion will result in 152 kJ of pressure work, while isothermal will result in the same 233 kJ.

Regardless of how we got to the compressed state (10x pressure, same temperature), there are two amounts of work that can be obtained from the cylinder - so which has stored more energy?

Note though that the isothermal case requires heat transfer to and from the environment; in compression there is heat transfer to the environment while in expansion there is transfer from the environment; this means that some of the work done in compression is lost to the environment, so not all of it is "stored" in the compressed gas. When it expands isothermally, some energy is pulled from the environment to increase the available work; essentially the isothermal case "stores" some of the energy in the environment as well as the working cylinder.

Now, the adiabatic case is different; all the energy is stored and is available; the only catch is when the system is allowed to reach thermal equilibrium (for instance, stored for a long time). (Note that if the compression is adiabatic, without any heat transfer, the work available from expansion will also be 383 kJ).

That said, the entire process appears to be 100% efficient storage with a pure isothermal process and about 40% efficient with adiabatic compression, thermal equilibrium, and adiabatic expansion. Real processes will always be somewhere between these bounds, and slightly lower, because of friction and because all compression and expansion processes are neither truly isothermal nor adiabatic.

Interesting to think about either way, though.

There's another article on taxation of virtual goods that caught my eye, this time from cnn.

I have been thinking about this for a while, and I think I finally have a more coherent view of my thoughts on the concept of transaction taxes.

In my mind, the fundamental purpose of a tax should be to provide some public service related to the thing which is taxed. For instance, a gasoline tax to support roads makes sense because gasoline is typically used to drive on a road.

Taking that concept, I would think that a sales (or transaction) tax should be used solely for the purpose of facilitating transactions, or perhaps dealing with instances when transactions have gone bad (for instance, shoplifting, or contract enforcement). That means that if there is no required enforcement, then there should be no need for a tax.

In real life, however, I don't honestly know the purpose of sales tax in my state - I know it accounts for a sizable portion of the state income, but it's not used for facilitation of sales. Incidentally, a sales tax is actually strange because it taxes the transaction only. Technically, if there were two people in my state and they kept selling the same pencil to each other, every sale would be taxed. This is effectively economic disincentive to conduct a transaction, which is actually probably not what people want when it comes to economics.

Now let's take virtual goods. I can somewhat understand taxing "cashing out" of a virtual system, but unless the taxing agency is going to provide some services related to transactions in the virtual marketplace, purely virtual transactions should be beyond the consideration of a taxing entity.

I think the solution here is to really be more active in our local and state governments - use the representation which we fought for to show that "hey, if you don't show us the benefit of having this tax, why should we have it?"

It seems that the point of most governments is "to increase government revenue" rather than improve the standard of living of constituents. While having more social programs may accomplish this, I think it's addressing the wrong issue. Take, for instance, health care costs. Rather than addressing the issues that cause costs to escalate, governments typically just set up a mandatory insurance program where the population at large funds the increasing costs. The best solution would be to address the laws which allow for things like excessive barriers to competition and lawsuits. (Indeed, if the health care market were truly a free market, costs could not be so high because the number of competitors would rise dramatically).

Anyway, that was a bit of a diversion, but I think that involvement in local and state policy will go a long way toward improving things and reducing the unnecessary tax burdens we face. (I say unnecessary because, personally, I don't mind funding basic infrastructure and education through taxes.)

In three of the past four weeks (15 July through 5 August), gasoline production and imports have exceeded supplied product, but in all those weeks the overall stocks of gasoline are reported to have fallen. Granted, the report only breaks down exports into 'crude oil' and 'other products', but unless half the exports are gasoline, the numbers don't add up.

I find this extremely disturbing, because is shows that either the metrics people use are wrong, people ignore the metrics, or both. The other interesting thing is that, despite all the "refinery problems" in the past weeks, actual gasoline production has increased by about 200k bbl/day since the middle of July. Gasoline consumed has only gone up a net 70k bbl/day, and for the week of 5 August, imports plus production averaged about 450k bbl/day higher than consumption! How can stocks decrease when intake exceeds output?

Very disturbing to say the least, and I'll definitely be keeping my eye on the weekly reports to watch the trends of these numbers.

I'm not sure I agree with that statement simply because if you have 10 people working and all making $100, then you hire 5 more at $50, you have employment up 50%, but average wage down 17% (down to $83.33). However, total payroll increased 25% (from $1000 to $1250). I would agree that the average standard of living for all people working is less than it used to be, but the average standard of living for all people, in this example, goes up. Here's why: if you include those 5 extra workers in the picture before they have a job, the average per-capita income for those 15 people is only $66.67. That's 20% lower than the $83.33 if they were hired at a lower wage.

The only way that hiring folks at a lower wage is "bad" is when one considers if they were hired at that lower wage after a period of unemployment from a job that paid much more. If the person getting hired is a "new hire" altogether, than it's a benefit. That's a key piece of missing information from the employment statistics that I have seen. It's also hard to say even on what time scale wage changes matter. For instance, going from any job to no job is horrendous, because it's a 100% decrease in wage. However, once you're at the zero-point, do you compare your new job to the zero point or the point you were at before zero?

I know it's tempting to say "I'm not as well off as I was! argh!" but why can't we turn it around and think "but I'm not as bad off as I could be..."

It's definitely interesting, and to be sure I'm quite thankful for what I have right now.