How would you feel about patenting language? I.e. If you speak with certain words or certain patterns then you have to pay a royalty (only for 2 to 5 years).
First off, I think that's a false equivalency, as patenting is about ideas (in a platonic sense), not about instances of ideas (which is what copyrighting is).
Secondly, we already have that in limited forms with trademarks and copyrights.
Thirdly, I think the concept of intellectual property is one of the most brilliant social innovations in the past 500 years, as it aligns incentives to innovate (why would I innovate if someone will just steal my work?).
>it aligns incentives to innovate (why would I innovate if someone will just steal my work?)
it was true 200 years ago. It stopped being true about 100+ years ago. Whether somebody innovates or not became unimportant, as a bunch of other people would still innovate the same thing. Just look at airplanes innovation back then - multiple people were doing it simultaneously, and the fact that Wright brothers got patent actually slowed down airplane innovation in US for couple of decades after that.
You get penalized for undercutting someone else's work, because there's no good way to tell wether you truly had an independent idea, or whether you're just ripping them off. You can read and share ideas from a patent all you want, so it's very different from freedom of speech.
I get they both are "addictive" given the broad sense of the term. Yes, your brain gets a little reward with each refresh. But I don't think it's fair to compare the addictive nature of social media to heroin. (Let alone their impact on people's lives. But even putting that aside.)
Do you really think social media and heroin should be regulated at all similarly?
Yeah social media is more like alcohol. Feels good in the moment, leaves a hangover if you stay away for any meaningful amount of time, is completely legal and generates a lot of profits and tax revenue. We all know it's bad for us and society at large, yet most of us can't stop using it. Can lubricate social relations but also potentiates abuse.
There is more than twice spam as there is legitimate email (source: ran a corporate email server). However, so far most spam is automatically detected.
In the near future, It's likely that this is no longer going to be the case and in the moment that most of your email is spam you are going to stop trusting everything you receive.
Even right now inside corps people already (should?) distrust and double checks everything that comes from another domain.
Obviously people didn’t quit email. But I also don’t “engage” with email with anything near the intensity that I used to. 20 years ago…? One of the hottest romcoms ever, was built around our feverish engagement with email: “You’ve got Mail!” Can you imagine that being a pitch for a romcom next year? They’d laugh you out of the room. Because while people still use email, they don’t engage with it the way they used to.
I think this sense of disengagement is what the author is trying to metaphorically capture with the idea of “logging off”. It might just be my family and peer groups, but I do sense this in general. The internet and its various “social” constructs feel more and more like they’ve crossed that line in dating relationships where the other person becomes “clingy/needy” and it starts to grow wearisome and cringy. I think that causes people to quietly disengage.
I can't help but wonder how we will ensure official government/legal->user communication is legitimate in the face of software that can dodge spam filters at a whim. Is it back to letters for us?
I don't know. Chess is aka "solved"(when compared to human performance) yet chess is still fun. Music, Art, Social interactions, and Sports will all be here long after the machines have taken the mundane tasks.
As expected. As interest rates rise more capital that would otherwise be allocated on businesses, real estate, stocks, etcetera is redirected into safer and now more attractive bets like bonds and interest rates tied instruments
People have been "delusional" in a sense since the late 90's when inflation slowed to a crawl and everyone got used to stable prices. If inflation had been ~1% higher over these last decades, prices wouldn't be far off from where they are now and people wouldn't have flipped out so dramatically over the sudden adjustment.
Similarly, I find myself laughing when people describe this as a high-rate environment. Or when they blame the relatively brief Covid ZIRP for wide ills. The ZIRP of the 2010s is still confusing people.
There are 35 year olds now that were only just graduating college in 2009 (I'd argue before then most people are largely oblivious to economics) and don't know anything other than ZIRP plus the pandemic.
Unrelated to this exactly, but on perception: There was some sort of tax break that was going to be repealed around 2014 or 2015 that had been in place for around 10 years, and I got into a conversation with someone who didn't understand why so many were against it. Honestly I thought it was pretty obvious: Roughly school to retirement is 40-50 years, so for around 20-25% of the workforce that repeal wasn't a return to normal, it was a straight tax increase. They were actually surprised and had never considered that viewpoint before.
