Learn to process the feeling of exhaustion as economically as possible. Meaning, re-frame exhaustion as a normal part of the journey. You really have to push through it, barring mental health concerns, to get stronger and more resilient. You will feel mental exhaustion many times in your life, and it's better to face it early, in less-consequential circumstances, than to try to learn to cope when life is actually bad.
I wonder what happened with those patents. Could a company license them to patent trolls? Otherwise, I don't understand the purpose of spending a lot of resources to come up with a bunch of bs patents.
There's mostly two reasons companies invest in bullshit patents:
1) If you're a big company with lots of resources, and you're losing business to a smaller but faster moving competitor, you sue them for infringing on your bullshit patents. Distract them, drain their precious time and minimal funding, etc. Very effective way for large, slow moving bureaucratic companies to stamp out startup competitors. Doesn't even matter if you win the suit, even if you lose, as long as you can drain their time/energy/$$$ on fighting it, you've won. I you both drain $2 mil on lawyers and 500 hours of employee time, that's nothing for you, but it's crippling for them
2) If you're a smaller company, you really don't have the resources for "offence" (suing others as a strategy), but patents can still be useful for "defence." Basically, if you have your own portfolio of bullshit patents, when someone sues you with one of their BS patents, you counter-sue with one of your BS patents. This often results in both sides settling, giving each other a "licence" to use the patent (that is BS in the first place). And even without settling, it does make you a less attractive target - like if you actually win your countersuit, you could do some legit damage to even a bug company. While if you have no patents, you're an easy target, bigger companies can sue you freely without risk. Patents are actually pretty cheap to get, it probably is worth spending a few hundred thousand dollars getting a handful of patents purely for the defensive value
This use of patents as basically a way to "fight dirty" against competitors, plus full-on patent trolls, is basically the entire software patent industry.
Most software patents are serious, serious bullshit, the stuff that gets patented doesn't remotely resemble truly innovative work, and there's mostly plenty of prior art. But there are no repercussions for patent offices that simply mail it in, and just grant whatever bullshit comes across their desk. In fact, if you're a patent office, granting bullshit patents is good for business! It encourages more patent filing, more revenue for them, and it encourages more lawsuits, more revenue for their friends in the courts.
If you have no experience with software patents, I encourage everyone to go on a patent search site like https://www.lens.org/lens/ , and search for granted patents in your field. They're a bit tough to read at first - the relevant section is the "claims" section, and generally claim 1 is the "base" claim - as long as you violate that, you've violated the patent. Then most of the other claims build on the base claim (though there may be more than one base claim). Read a handful, you'll be shocked at how utterly garbage they are. For example, in my field, there's a good 10 or so granted patents that are simply descriptions of extremely basic versions of Vehicle Routing Problem solvers, all granted in the last decade or so, despite the fact that the published literature on VRP solvers goes back to the 1950s/60s.
There’s also the issue of company valuations being based on the “value of your IP”. Being able to pull out a large number of patents to show your investors can raise the stock price, whether or not the patents are any good.
The referenced tweet: "Your periodic reminder that the government could seize all of American billionaires’ wealth and it wouldn’t be enough to fund its spending for a single year"[1]
I've had this conversation with the "there shouldn't be billionaires" crowd. Their response was almost always "do it anyways." The existence of people with surplus angers people in a deficit, regardless of if destroying that surplus helps. They want to do it out of anger against the system, not to fix the system.
That said, I don't think fixing the system is impossible. There needs to be a balance between preserving the hierarchy of (theoretical) meritocracy, and not letting too much wealth create a flywheel effect that warps economies. I've done some research of different ideas that could turn the wealth distribution curve from exponential to linear, thereby preserving ordering. Mostly these ideas revolve around each person having their own personal currency, with its own exchange rate which is dependent on different graph connectivity factors. In other words, a rich person's "$10" would be worth much less than a poor person's "$10", in terms of real value. I'd like to do more research into this, but I need help.
Sounds a lot like the core idea behind Circles[0]. They've spent a lot of time looking into the economics around such models. I suggest you try connecting to people there, maybe join their forum/chat.
One of the great ironies of life, is that almost everyone is in favor of spending money on the poor or for the sake of equality, when it's not their own money.
Spending other people's money is fantastic, equitable, fair. 20% additional tax on yourself? Cruel, unfair, inequitable.
I'm advocating for a self-balancing money system that maintains a linear curve of wealth distribution. You can still be richer than your peers, but you can't squeeze the bottom of the distribution.
I'd pay 20% extra tax if everyone was paying 20% extra tax and it was for a good reason. Right-wingists wouldn't, and they project this tendency of theirs onto left-wingists to whom it doesn't actually apply.
Evidence: I live in Europe, not the USA, by choice, so I AM paying 20% extra tax and enjoying it.
Yet conservatives give more to charity than progressives [1].
The ideological difference there is that, in general, conservatives and libertarians prefer to minimize confiscation by force, and believe that society is best served by voluntary charities vs authoritarian taxation.
I.e. "I know how to spend my money better than the government, and I know how to help my community better than someone located thousands of miles away that don't know my neighbors or their problems".
The ideological difference is that conservatives and libertarians prefer the same amount of confiscation by force, but prefer it to be directed by billionaires rather than by democracy.
Do you have any evidence of this? Anything at all?
It might be worth taking a minute to understand what they actually believe, you may be surprised to find that even though they aren't part of whatever tribe you're in, that they are very reasonable people who also want the best for everyone.
European tax rates are not very different to American tax rates, they certainly aren't 20pp higher on income tax presuming that's what you mean.
> they project this tendency of theirs onto left-wingists to whom it doesn't actually apply.
Mmmm really. Here's an embarrassing article the Guardian had to write when just days after attacking Tesco for reducing its tax bill, it was discovered that the Guardian Media Group was doing exactly the same thing:
Excuses offered included "The leader was written before journalists knew of the structure of the Emap purchase", "The relationship between the Guardian and GMG is a complicated one" and "the [Scott] trust was established in 1936 to avoid paying double death duties and ensure the continued existence of the paper".
Even Labour controlled local councils have been caught finding clever ways to reduce their tax bill, and they're a part of the government:
A practical use for Apple Vision Pro? Soldiers on a breaching team each with headsets, each seeing a real time overlay of X-ray walls and the locations of the people behind them, as tracked by the drones. I hate that I can visualize this so clearly.
Working at a company and keeping an early morning routine is absolutely brutal to my productivity. I'm a zombie for about 4/5ths of the day, and I start winding up around end of day. Then all night evening and into the night I'm high performing, only to force myself to sleep so I can wake up early again the next day and repeat.
Yes I've tried melatonin, morning full-spectrum light therapy (incl sunlight), nighttime blue light filters, exercise, restricted night diet, alcohol + caffeine + sugar abstinence, and more that I'm sure I forgot about. Morning productivity just doesn't work for me. The world isn't made for night owl workers.
I'm not a morning person either, although by afternoon I'm fully functional.
I recall when I was younger trying to adopt a "early bird gets the worm" routine. Went to sleep at 9 PM, woke up at 5 AM, drank a coffee, went out in the chill of the morning for a vigorous jog, came back into the apartment, drank another coffee ... then went back to bed and slept like a baby until around 9. Going back on the memory lane, school was a nightmare. With it's start at 8 AM and wake up at 6:30, I mostly spent it in a tormented fuzzy stupor.
Now I kinda accepted there's literally nothing I can do to wake up my brain "on the double". Thanks God for WFH, sleep till 9, start work at 10, I'm almost functional. By noon it's all engines running.
It didn’t completely solve it for me, but 10,000 IU of Viyamin D3 early in the morning and making sure I get >100gr of protein per day made a huge difference for me after nothing else did (have tried most on your list).
Being a vegetarian, the 100gr of protein doesn’t happen on its own, the way it does for many carnivores. I have to pay attention to it, or I end up with 30-50 which isn’t sufficient.
If you mean actual carnivores (mostly eat meat, with some other animal products - eggs, dairy...), that may be right. For most people who are omnivorous, >100g protein per day is not as easy to get, especially since most people's meals are carb-heavy.
It doesn't help that general guidance seems float around 45-55g per day.
Some kids need meth (desoxyn for severe ADHD), in fact the kids in that story would have better impulse control on meth. It's not that addictive as long as you follow the posology.
Amphetamines are only really addictive when they are snorted, smoked or injected.
Imagine if they were able to make a model that's your voice but the way that you hear it. That'd be so neat. You could hear how other people hear their own voice and have fun playing with it for an afternoon before moving onto the next shiny new toy.
