It seems you misunderstand the goal of goverment.

This is your opinion of what you want governments to be, not what they actually are.

What is the point of not researching and having bigger budget, if it can’t buy thing that did not get created?

What a lot of negatives and hypotheticals. All solved by getting a return on investment and having that money to do more things with, including research.

And then on goverment level there is no such thing as copyright or patent.

I’d like to introduce you to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which is an intergovernmental organisation that does precisely what you say doesn’t exist.

They STILL need to put in money to create their own product.

Sure, but the cost to duplicate the product is tiny compared to researching, developing then creating a production run for it. And this fake normally severely impacts the profits for the inventor.

But now we’re just repeating the same arguments.

You appear to want to completely burn down a system you don’t understand because of some examples of misuse. For example, as there are slumlords, should we make all property free? Or should we solve the underlying problem (of massive capital flows to the rich?)

You also have no idea how to read and understand a patent. The way they are written is horrendously verbose and highly confusing, but so are medical research papers or legal case summaries, and for the similar reasons: these are highly technical documents that have to follow common law (i.e. a long history of legal decisions taken in IP disputes).

The real problem in the US IMHO has been the constant defunding of the patent office that has allowed a large number of very poor patents to be filed. The problems you are screaming about largely go to that root cause.

But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water - you have no idea how bad that would be for everybody but the mega corporations.

Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products,

And cheaply, because the research and productisation has been done by somebody else - this is an argument for patents

plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product,

Not true. One major issue is that many competitors literally copy the product exactly. Fake products wreck the original company

even if it’s a copy they still need to make it work,

That is 100x easier when you have a working product to clone

They’ll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share… This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there’s no patents…

The point is exactly that the fake product undercuts the original by a huge amount (they had no investment to pay off).

If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,…), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.

I agree that the government model makes sense for a lot of areas and products. But note that a government won’t invest millions or billions in developing a product if another country immediately fakes the product and prevents the government from collecting back the taxes it spent on the research.

As I discuss above there are lots of criticisms to the current IP laws - adjustment is 1000x better than abolishing a system that has driven research and development for several hundred years

All evidence points to the opposite of your conclusion.

In places where IP laws are weak or non-existent, very little fundamental or expensive research is done by companies - because the result is immediately cloned by 100 competitors. In medicine, companies will not research and develop new drugs to market unless they can get a return on the investment. Even in places with strong IP laws, development of drugs that can’t produce a return in the limited monopoly window is simply not done (eg with a small number of patients or when 1 course of a drug will permanently cure the patient), so many diseases do not have treatments.

In countries where there is strong IP laws, innovation jumps because innovating creates new things that people/companies can sell for profit. A personal area of interest is development of small-arms - every single advance from muskets to modern weapons is documented in patents in the US and Europe; the rate of innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries was incredible - and that is via patents and profit in the free market.

Now, we can have a productive argument about state sponsored research - but unless the state undertakes all research in an economy (which would be staggering overreach), we need IP laws.

We can also discuss patents on software (which IMHO are not needed because companies do fundamental research without patent laws like in the UK).

We can also discuss what is the appropriate time that copyright should remain - the Disney law in the US is a ridiculous overreach. It was 25 years or until the death of the author/artist - that worked very well for centuries.

You don’t need government promises of monopoly rights to create innovation in the marketplace, competition drives innovation.

More importantly: How is it hovering 20’ in the air? And, with the bomber’s shadow, where is the separate and distinct sun that is shining only on the bomber?

I agree that the end is not unguessable, but it’s pure wish fulfillment, and it’s not earned by the characters involved.

I agree, completely unearned. My headcanon has the movie end quite differently and more satisfactorily (but I won’t give spoilers).

It was a surprisingly good drama, but I felt the ending was a bit formulaic.

The Catholic/Papal setting is technically central to the film, and provides amazing visuals, but, like many good films, the movie is centred on interesting characters and their personal struggles. The movie could be rewritten to place it in any organisation and it would still be great. I say this not to downplay the religious angle, but to highlight that you don’t have to be Catholic to enjoy it.

Having said that, the lead actors’ performances are amazing and work wonderfully together.

In the UK there were a number of cancer clusters of rare cancers and then the speculation started. One idea was that all the cases were near electric substations, but again, there are a lot of people who live or work near those. In the end, I think it was decided it was just chance.

One way of visualising this that they showed on the program was to scatter a handful of M&Ms or dried beans or similar on a tabletop. When you scatter, there’s a very high probability that several end up very close together just by chance - and there we have our cancer ‘cluster’.

Not so much hide the ship as make it extremely difficult to spit direction of travel and range-find. Skills very much required to place feet on stair-treads.

Proof that vaccination makes you a zombie

It might well be, but I’m a member of this community, not that one, and have no interest in learning its rules. Sorry to be negative, but I’m happy discussing things here

The explanation is not actually correct, and misses a key mechanism in genetics.

A major observation about evolution is that it’s completely improbable that a new gene for something could appear in the genome by random mutation (this is the famous watchmaker argument, or the hurricane in a scrapyard making a 747). So how do new genes come about?

One mechanism is by gene duplication - this occurs by accident during DNA replication for example by an error in recombination. Basically a chunk of DNA that may include one or more genes ends up duplicated in an offspring so the offspring has 2 copies of one or more genes.

Because this duplicate gene creates a protein that already exists in the genetic plan, it probably won’t be too bad for the child, and so the offspring survive and may produce offspring of its own, ‘fixing’ this duplication in the population

Now mutation and selection can go to work and push one copy of the gene one way and the other in a different way, creating two different genes. Offspring carrying this new gene gain a selective benefit and so the gene becomes positively selected for and animals without the gene disappear from the gene pool.

This process occurs a lot, which is why we have families of hormones such as the steroids which handle both stress (eg adrenalin) and muscle growth (anabolic steroids) and immune system suppression (corticosteroids like prednisone) and sex steroids (estrogen, testosterone) - very different things but very similar chemically and genetically. It also explains why steroids in one family often have side effects such as weight gain, mood alteration and affecting sex drive.

Another example is the colour receptor in the retina of the eye. Fish, lizards and birds all have 4 colour receptors leading to fantastic colour definition from near infrared to low ultra-violet. Mammals lost two genes and in general can only see in 2 colours, red and blue.

Apes however duplicated the red receptor gene and the copy has gone through a few million years of mutation and selection that has drifted it up to detect green - humans see in red, green and blue. Our colour vision is possible only because of a gene duplication.

It’s a corollary of the other famous expression that science advances one funeral at a time. This came from Max Planck and predates Clarke:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.

Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97

Here’s one that I enjoyed and covers a critical period of modern East Asian history: “The Gate” by François Bizot.

It’s him recounting how he travelled to Cambodia and was captured by the Khmer Rouge. He survived … just … By forming a relationship with Comrade Duch who

as the Chairman of Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp, and head of the Santebal, Kang Kek Iew was responsible for the interrogation and torture of thousands of individuals, and was convicted for the execution of at least 12,272 individuals, including women and children [Wikipedia]

While he covers the history of the Khmer Rouge period, his writing is highly empathic and discusses the suffering of himself and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens at the hands of other ordinary citizens and how could this possibly happen. It’s a highly emotional book.

Best of luck with your reading!

No toilet rules me - my alone time is ungovernable!

But the last thing I need is a spring loaded giant fish, especially in my toilet.

Yes!

But the covid situation is way worse than you think. The government stimulus was really helpful to the poor and middle class, but they spent all that money.

And who profited from that? The asset owners. Covid stimulus essentially was a direct transfer from the government to company owners and house rentals. These rich guys then used it to buy other assets such as more houses, equities and businesses. That’s why the stock market went up - your money went straight into it.

It’s suggested that the term “Achilles’ heel”, meaning a seemingly insignificant point of fatal weakness, comes from exactly your observation of the Dendra Panoply, an armour of exactly the same period as Achilles and the Trojan War.

That is a very profound point you’ve just made - it made me think.

While I think you’re 99% correct, I think there is a serious counterpoint to:

A difference in beliefs … can be addressed through the inspection and sharing of evidence

This can only be true if both hold values that make logic/reason matter more than emotion or nihilism/postmodernism.

Some people have fallen into the trap of emotionally rejecting other people’s arguments and denying what are self-evident facts (if you accept realism is basically true). By denying a shared reality, it is near impossible to jointly reason in the space of beliefs about reality.

Sadly this is important because the right has spent about 40 years denying basic truths (like trickle-down economics doesn’t work and children dressed as cats have litter-boxes in liberal schools). In the last 10 years or so they have developed a complete alternate reality on the Internet, and the single most important facts in this reality are that mainstream media is lying, there is a giant conspiracy controlling the governments and science and that the best way to find the truth is to do your own research.

Yeah, but let’s consider what happens:

• Tariff applied
• Prices go up
• Supermarket trolleyfull becomes more expensive
• People have less money to buy other things
• Companies sell less
• Company profits fall
• Stock valuation drops
• GDP falls

That’s why the Dow Jones and S&P are lower - this shrinks company profits and US GDP.