Well, I finally found an online computer game that suits my personality: NewsFutures.

NewsFutures is just one of many Prediction Markets available online. They come in a variety of flavors, focusing more on sports, Hollywood gossip, financial news, etc. I’m curious about The Popular Science Predictions Exchange, where you can examine the likelihood of questions such as “Will a blood test for breast cancer be released in the U.S. by the end of March?” (presently 50.75%), “Will the Western U.S. suffer a catastrophic water crisis by 2010?” (66.25%), and that question haunting so many of us: “Will a team of androids beat the human World Cup champs at a game of soccer by 2050?” (48% likely).

Whatever their subject matter, these things all have about the same format. You “buy” (usually using a pretend currency) shares that will pay (usually 100 units) if some future event happens, and will be worthless if the event doesn’t happen as specified. In some elections on some markets, shares will pay out the amount of the percentage popular vote of a particular candidate or party… so, if you “buy” a share in candidate X for 50 units, and that candidate earns 52% of the popular vote, you net 2 units.

Exciting, huh?

Well, yes, to some people, including me. The thing is that from that very simple setup, you see extremely accurate predictions. There’s a big debate amongst academics over whether these markets are actually better at predicting elections than polls are. I’m not in a position to even have an opinion on that question, but considering that polling is extremely complex and expensive, it’s remarkable to me that a simple web site and a bunch of self-selecting participants from around the world can even be close in accuracy, let alone possibly better.

Who doesn’t want to know the future? There are many events on which I certainly do want to know, and the upcoming US presidential election is one. Although, I guess it’s more fair to say I want to have a sense of the relative likelihood. So, this is a big draw to me. It also puts an element of fun into listening to news reports and polling data. So, contrary to so many computer games, this one actually encourages me to pay more attention to the news.

I picked NewsFutures mostly because I liked their mix of solid rational approach and usability for average users. Some sites I found I couldn’t even figure out how to sign up, which I take as some kind of indication that they are there only for some “in crowd”. Also, I didn’t want to bet real money, at least not at first (the Iowa Electronic Markets is actually a legal place to play with a small amount of real money). Finally, NewsFutures focuses on news, broadly defined. I’m much more interested in political news than I am in things like sports scores and Hollywood gossip, but you can buy shares in those things too on NewsFutures.

But, who would spend any amount of time playing such a game for fake money? Well, those of us who think it’s fun, of course. And those of us who want to feel like they have a sense of how viable (or not) certain political candidates (or whatever) are… or at least find out if we really do have a good sense of such things or not.

NewsFutures presently claims 19,323 players. I’m presently ranked number 3,340. This is pretty funny, actually, because I’m definitely not in a position where I’d think I’d be above the 80th percentile of players. Almost all of my 12,419 “exchange dollars” (abbreviated “X$”) were given to me through the sites’ program by which people with net worth less than X$20,000 can just get “free X$”, X$1000-X$1500 per day. So, in other words, over 80% of those 19,000 players don’t even bother to play often enough to get all the free fake money they are entitled to. On the other hand, everyone on their “top 1000″ board has over X$30,000, so more than 5% of players have played enough (and well enough) to earn a 50% or greater return on their free money.

By the way, the real leaders have WAY more than the rest of us (the present leader presently has a net worth of X$55,697,715). I’m almost positive that most of these earning are coming from “faster moving” markets than these elections. Sporting events are very popular, including trading on outcomes during games! Imagine, there are probably as many NBA games to bet on this week as there will be elections to bet on throughout all of next year! So, I doubt I’ll be among the real leaders at any point.

But I’m fine with that. I like the game I’m playing. I like playing by a very precise set of rules on a bunch of precisely defined outcomes of interest to me. I’ll be curious to see how my status as an NPR junkie stands up to a test.

My biggest complaint is that I’d like there to be way more things to bet on. We’ve got a lot of very important decisions to make regarding the future. To take one example, environmentalism has largely shifted not to environmental problems of the present but to potential problems of the future. I hear countless people making and denying predictions of future events, but I hear very little accounting for how well people have predicted things. I think it’s a good challenge for the information age to keep track of such things, and, with a bit of clever work, fortune telling might start to become more science than pseudo-science.

I got curious about how the whole Radiohead thing had played out when I heard mention of it on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning. Turns out the band is not presently releasing statistics about it. An independent market research company called comScore, though, released this report on how the downloads have played out. They say that 1.2 million people visited the site, a “significant percentage of visitors ultimately downloading the album” (how’s that for market data?). They were willing to be much more precise with the percentages than the totals, though, saying that about 38% of the people who downloaded the album paid something (40% of US downloaders), and the average voluntary payment was $6 ($8.05 for US downloaders).

Anyway, Radiohead released this statement in response:

“In response to purely speculative figures announced in the press regarding the number of downloads and the price paid for the album, the group’s representatives would like to remind people that… it is impossible for outside organisations to have accurate figures on sales. However, they can confirm that the figures quoted by the company comScore Inc are wholly inaccurate and in no way reflect definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project.”

If by “accurate” they mean “exactly correct”, then I agree. However, comScore is being quite open about their methodology and their approach seems sound to me. Good statisticians can be surprisingly accurate, and the band’s unwillingness to publish the statistics themselves don’t inspire me with confidence that comScore is “wholly inaccurate”. Just how far off does one need to be to count as “wholly inaccurate”, anyway? So, needless to say, I don’t know, but if I had to bet, I’d bet that comScore’s data are not far off the mark (I’ll say +- 5%).

Wired’s blog post on the matter seems to miss the “significant percentage of visitors” part of comScore’s report and thus estimates with faulty reasoning that the band netted $2.7 million from the stunt. Without knowing just what this “significant percentage” is, even approximately, then I do think it’s fair to say that estimates of the total are “purely speculative”. However, I’ll go out on a limb and bet that the band netted over $1 million in the first month of the ordeal. I’ll also stand by my previous prediction that over the course of their experiment they will serve up over a million downloads and gross 2-5 million dollars. That, of course, was and is wild speculation. But comScores numbers are similar. A small but very well-known group of people have access to the real answers, and I challenge them to go public with them. But, they know everyone wants to know, and I suspect they like the attention of keeping the secret. It’s certainly their right to do so, but I think it’s kind of lame.

I heard Robert Kuttner interviewed on Fresh Air today, promoting his new book The Squandering of America. Just hearing the title already had me incredulous, and now I’m thinking it’s finally time that I follow suit to Kynthia’s outing of herself and myself as being more libertarian than most of our close friends, and perhaps more Libertarian than Democrat.

That’s a huge topic, though, so I’ll focus on just this interview. Um, America has not been squandered. I suppose Mr. Kuttner thinks it is in the process of being squandered, and I certainly welcome the presentation of his case. But, it’s amazing to me that he presents this case as if it were stating the obvious, rather than an extraordinary claim.

Actually, in the remarkably long excerpt from the book that’s on the Fresh Air page, he talks about squandered standing in the world because of the Bush administration’s dreadful foreign policy, and the squandering of our environment. There are strong cases to be made in these areas, and I (and many libertarians (I’m being very intentional about my capitalization here, by the way)) likely agree with many of his points in these areas. But, as he says, that’s not what his book is about:

“To write about all the ways in which the promise of America is being squandered would require more than one book. This book is about one large dimension: the connection between a precarious economy and a diminished politics.”

Just how precarious is the economy? Well, of course, we’ll only know if/when it collapses. Of course, we’d have to agree that it had collapsed (even Kuttner said in the interview that there wasn’t going to be another great depression, but he did have the courage (sarcasm intended) to predict that we would have a recession sometime soon). And even then, we’ll speculate about why it collapsed. So, it’s really hard to say just how precarious it is.

But, of course, the thing all the lefties are citing right now as why free markets are patently bad is the “subprime mortgage crisis.” Perhaps there is a crisis going on, but I really disagree with the way people like Kuttner and Gretchen Morgenson (also recently interviewed on Fresh Air about the “subprime mortgage crisis”) characterize it. Here’s my take:

• Interest rates (2002-2005ish) were low
• Some financial hotshots started experimenting with new ways to lend people money
• They went looking for people to lend money to
• Countless middle-to-upper-class people already had mortgages they liked, so they turned to people of lower income and poorer credit ratings (hence “subprime”)
• A few years later the adjustable rate mortgages are adjusting way up, and the lower-income borrowers can’t afford their mortgage payments anymore. So, there are record numbers of foreclosures.

I suspect that just about everyone agrees with that characterization of things. So, who are the victims of this crisis? The obvious sympathy would go to the borrowers who are facing foreclosure. While my heart definitely goes out to them, these are people who, almost by definition, had no hope of getting a home loan before this bubble. So, it will be difficult for them, and I do not mean to belittle their situation. But in the end, they will end up renting, just like they were before.

This is a good time to distinguish here a related but different practice, the one commonly called predatory lending. To the degree that borrowers were defrauded by people using criminal or unethically misleading methods, they are extremely worthy of protection under the law. Free markets depend on the rule of law, and any libertarian will tell you that fraud should be considered an extremely serious crime.

But, I don’t think that predatory lending accounts for the majority of this “crisis”. I don’t even think it’s that big a chunk. Most of these borrowers were riding a wave of excitement that they might be able to own a home, and the lenders were doing all of their legal and ethical disclosures trying to find potential sources of revenue.

The victims of this crisis are the lenders. But, unlike so many cases, blaming the victim here is entirely appropriate. These companies knew they were dealing with subprime borrowers… how could they forget? The entire practice was known as “subprime lending”. And they did it. A LOT! They literally bet billions of dollars on people they wouldn’t have lent money to just a few years earlier. And, a substantial number of those bets are failing. And, they’re losing money, executives are getting fired, they’re scrambling to keep things running, banks are pooling funds to prepare themselves to bail each other out if necessary. Definitely sounds like a crisis. But my heart does not go out to them. They are reaping their rotten harvest. The fact that none of them are going to end up hungry or homeless does not, of course, make me feel any more pity.

Now, people like Kuttner and Morgenson look at all this and say “you see? if we had more regulation we could prevent crises like this!” They are probably right. But this is where a free-market type says that the market is correcting itself. The people who made bad bets are the ones in crisis.

It’s interesting to compare this all with the other recent “bubble”, which was of course the “dot com bubble”. Morgenson referenced this while she was criticizing Alan Greenspan saying that he “never met a bubble he didn’t like”. Brother. Obviously he didn’t LIKE them (does “irrational exuberance” sound like praise to you?), he just believed that the proper solution was to let the people making bad bets lose. Kuttner and Morgenson would clearly prefer that the bad bets not be placed in the first place. The question in my mind is, which is better: a society where you can make whatever bet you want, but you have to pay for your bad bets; or a society where the government limits the bets you can make?

Who were the “victims” of the Dot Com crash? Mostly people who had invested heavily in dot coms. And actually, it was mostly people who invested heavily late in the game. A friend once joked that if he had a time machine he might tell people not to buy tech stocks during the craze. I said “Are you crazy? The correct message is “sell your tech stocks before March of 2000!” If you bought a NASDAQ index fund on January 1 1999 and sold a year later, you would have made very roughly 100% annual return. But if you bought on January 1 2000 and sold a year later, you’d be very disappointed. By the beginning of 2000, everyone knew this was a bubble. That was a high risk, and people who made it might have lost a lot. Meanwhile, after countless companies folded and a terrorist attack that destroyed one of the most important financial centers in the world, the US experienced a mild recession. Sure, a lot of dot com millionaires were no longer millionaires, but this was not a broad crisis. Indeed, service industries boomed during this period, I suspect many of the lowest-wage workers felt the boom but the bust not nearly so much.

So, coming back to the present, the housing bubble is bursting. Yes, some low-income people are losing their homes, and this is definitely sad. But, they didn’t die, they have some major cleaning up to do, and hopefully they’ll be back to try again someday soon. Meanwhile — and I can’t believe no one talks about this — a substantial number of these subprime loans are not going to fail. That means that a huge number of people who in the 1990s would have been entirely unable to get a home loan will be home owners for the rest of their lives. They should be careful about their mortgage, they should work on negotiating with their lender if they are in trouble (banks hate foreclosing, I believe the financial advisors I’m hearing that are encouraging people to call their lenders and work on restructuring their loans if they are in trouble). Those who succeed should proudly enjoy the home that they have earned the right to call their own. Meanwhile, many of us in the middle class are paying unbelievably low interest rates on our mortgages, locked in when rates were so low. And of course, most of our houses are worth much much more today than when we bought, even in cases where the price has dropped a bit recently.

According to the census bureau, (and this graph in wikipedia) in 1970 the home-ownership rate in the US was just over 64%. From 1985-1994, it was never more than half a percentage point away from 64%. The most recent reported number is 68.2%. That’s down from a year ago, and I bet it will fall more from here. But, I bet it will not be down below 64% again for a long long time. So, amazingly (sarcasm again intended) home ownership will have increased substantially during this “crisis”.

In short, the people who made good bets are doing well. The people who made bad bets are suffering. The left in America reads this as a reason to regulate this process. The free-marketeers are saying “well, the moral of the story is: make good bets, stay away from bad ones.” As to which way things work better, we’ll never know for sure. But I’m with the free-marketeers.

Wow, is this the new thing? Yes, I guess it is, the thing they call  reverse 911. Now I get it.

10:55pm: the phone rings. I figured only a close friend would call so late, I answer:

“This is the Bloomington Police Department”

WOAH! Well, they weren’t after me for any reason, it was a recorded voice, saying they wanted help finding some dangerous man on the loose. I remember some of the description, but I can’t give his name or anything (that was part of the recording). And, worse, I figured there’d be some website you could go to to, say, check the facts again, maybe see a mug shot… Well, if there is, I can’t find it. Seems pretty lame.

Does seem like something is afoot though. I found these two newsy clips about IU police having acquired such a system. I swear this said Bloomington Police, though, and I don’t know why IU police would call out here. On the other hand, the place they said this guy was last sighted was nowhere near my house, so… who knows.

Anyway, a sign of the time, my first reverse 911 call. I wonder how long before I feel ashamed that I didn’t know what it was. :)

Some of you will know I’m not just saying “I thought of it first” when I say that I’ve long thought that a gratuity-based system could be the answer to the woes of the music industry in the era of digital music (the rest of you will just have to take my word for it… or not believe me… I don’t care). The basic question is “how will artists get compensated if music can be downloaded online?” and my proposed answer is “what if it became part of our culture that you paid artists whose music you enjoy?” We voluntarily give money to our waitstaff, often even when we don’t appreciate their service. Why not try something similar with musicians? The worst that can happen is that people don’t choose to pay and we’re right back where we started. Well, that’s a particular point of view. If you’re the RIAA, the worst thing that can happen is the dissolution of your industry.

Anyway, I thought a lot about how to try to make this a reality, but let go of the idea mid-2005 when I found out that it’d been tried before. And that Amazon and Paypal were both flirting with the idea as well. But obviously, it hasn’t really gotten any traction. And the RIAA continues to rule the land of music (with a big, huge, clumsy iron fist, I might add).

Well, now a fresh counterattack from Radiohead, a band that many friends of mine love but that I’ve never taken to, largely for lack of trying. Go to their site, and name your price (as little as one Brittish Penny) and (after October 10) you’re able to download the album. Some see this move as a publicity stunt. I doubt it. I think it’s more them being fed up with Big Label mentality and searching for something new. I predict that their fans will eat it up, I bet they serve up over a million downloads and gross 2-5 million dollars. But of course, even if I’m right, it cannot be denied that they already have a huge fan base, and that most bands would just be penniless voices in the wilderness if they tried this. There’s still a role for someone like the Big Labels. But whoever it is will have to start by acknowledging that the rules of the game have totally changed. The RIAA seems about as likely to do that as they are to start selling wax cylinders again.

So, kudos to Radiohead, I’m tempted to go buy their album just as a sign of support, even though I’ve never been a big fan. But I’m sure feeling like something of a fan at the moment.

I don’t have air conditioning. I’m not a big fan of AC, and it’s expensive and uses a great deal of energy. But it does get hot in the summers here in Indiana. For years I’ve done just fine with the heat, but I always knew I was cheating a bit because my workplaces were all air conditioned, so during the worst heat of the day I was in cool comfort.

Well, now that I work at home, that equation changes. I’ve been musing all summer about how I would deal with the bad heat if/when it comes. Up until this week, nothing was a big deal. I never felt challenged. Simple use of window fans kept things quite comfortable, especially for the casual attire that is appropriate in no workplace other than the home workplace.

But, I knew it would get more difficult, and this week is presenting the first challenge. So far, so good. I got a lot of work done today without feeling very uncomfortable at any point. But I’m using just about every trick I can think of:

• I have a couple of indoor/outdoor thermometers, and although their accuracy is questionable I still base my approach on the simple question: is it warmer inside or outside?
• At night when it’s cooler outside, I run my exhaust fan with doors configured so that only my main living area gets the benefit.
• Once it gets warmer outside in the morning, I close all the windows and doors. I keep fans running inside for the evaporative effect, but no fresh air until evening.

So, no magic there, not even anything very clever. And the result? Well it’s been relatively consistent that I can be ten degrees (F) cooler inside at the hottest point of the day outside (see thermometer above). What’s funny after that is that the temperature starts dropping outside, but inside continues to warm up (it’s still warmer outside, right?). So, the worst part of the day is actually the very early evening.

Perhaps more impressive than the 10 degree difference is the range… outside temperature range today was over 20 degrees (25 degrees by my thermometers), but my inside range was under ten degrees. So, the house definitely has a moderating effect. It’d be nicer if I succeeded at getting the overnight low inside. I’ll keep trying.

The last little behavior modification is taking showers late in the day… Nothing like a cold shower to help one feel cooler. And then, there’s the return of the “swimming pool”, which is what my friend Ann called her invention of leaving cold water in a bathtub for when she was ready to relax and cool off.

So, that’s it, I’m feeling good about it. Of course, my ace in the hole is that if it ever gets too much, I’ll just take my laptop to some air conditioned Wifi hot spot and work there. I figure there should be fewer than 10 Bad Heat Days(TM) per year.  I’d say three so far.  Stay tuned!

In my email this morning, from Amazon.com:

As someone who has purchased “The Road Less Traveled” or other books on religion and spirituality from Amazon.com, you might be interested to know about these new inspirational books…

Woah! I haven’t purchased “The Road Less Traveled”. I didn’t even know it was about religion at all. I have purchased several books about atheism and religion from the point of view of atheists. So apparently that put me in a category to receive notices about religious books. So I received this list of suggestions, which all sound pretty Protestant at first blush:

• Faith and Inspiration
• Transformation Journal
• Writing Tides: Finding Grace and Growth Through Writing
• Vessel of Peace: A Guide for Pilgrims of the Spirit
• Film & Religion: An Introduction
• A Doubter’s Guide to Heaven: Walking a Path from Doubt to Trust
• The Eight Blessings: Rediscovering the Beatitudes
• Strong Was Her Faith: Women of the New Testament
• Soul Tending
• Soul Shakers: Inspiring Stories from a Presidential Speechwriter

Of course I don’t really think that Amazon’s computers are trying to convert me, but the thought has to enter your mind when you order books about atheism and are told “you might also be interested in A Doubter’s Guide to Heaven: Walking a Path from Doubt to Trust“. Presumably people who ordered the Qur’ān were put into the same “interested in books about religion” category, I could imagine some of them might be much more offended than I am (I mostly think it’s funny). If I were Amazon, I’d be a bit more careful about this.

Pri and I are getting ready for our vacation (very exciting). Yesterday we went to Campmor.com to do see if there was any camping equipment we should get before we go. There was. But one thing I thought of was a new filter for my water filtration system. (The language is confusing… both the high-tech piece of paper and the thing you insert it into are commonly called “filter”. I’ll call the paper “the filter” and the rest of it “the system”.)

Well, from everything I can tell, they no longer manufacture filters that go into my system. Rendering it essentially useless. This is distressing, since I guess I’ll now just throw away this perfectly functional product. At first, though, I thought that it was also unfortunate that I’d need to buy a new system, rather than just the inexpensive filters.

Well, apparently they also no longer make inexpensive filters. Looking at water filters and systems at REI and at Campmor it seems that the systems now cost only slightly more than their filters. For instance, I ended up ordering the Katadyn Hiker for $50. It’s filter is apparently good for about 200 gallons. If I’m worried that that won’t be enough, I can buy a replacement “cartridge” for it for about $40.

It seems, then, that the same thing has happened to these backwoods products as what happened to InkJet printers: the price of the systems has come down, with the manufacturers hoping to make their money on selling the filters. My joke about printers is: “Don’t think of it as buying a printer, think of it as buying an inkjet cartidge subscription”. For me, in the case of the filters, I can’t imagine paying $40 for the filter when I could pay $50 for a whole new unit. But, whatever the case, it seems lame to me. Maybe I don’t understand the economics of it… it’s perfectly possible that the 0.2 micron filters are more expensive to manufacture than the totally macro plastic casing pumps. So, maybe it makes sense. But, I’m more inclined to go with the other idea. If so, they might be pushing it too far. My brand loyalty is not going to be very strong if I can switch to another system for only $10 more than staying with the one I’m buying.

Would love to hear more about this if anyone out there knows anything…

In another obvious example of people stealing ideas from my blog, the US Supreme Court today released a decision which says, in short, “a lot of patents these days are STUPID“. I heard it on NPR’s headlines at 6pm ET, but nothing more about it all evening (including on Marketplace, which I am taking as a signal that the opinion must have been released late in the day). Hopefully it’ll get more coverage tomorrow. Many of the articles I found about it were pretty lame, but I liked this one at Forbes and this one at the LA Times. I even indulged and went to the actual Court opinion which was actually pretty readable and contained a remarkable amount of information about the history of gas pedals.

Yes, gas pedals. The basic issue here was a gas pedal that can be positioned to suit the driver’s preference. But that’s not the patent. The pedal does not pull a cable that opens the throttle mechanically, but rather an electonic signal was sent to open the throttle. But that’s not the patent either. The patent concerned the placement of the sensor. Specifically, moving it from the footpad (as was already presented in a 1995 patent) to the arm of the pedal. One is tempted to think that I must just be misunderstanding, because surely a patent would not be issued for moving a sensor from one part of the pedal arm to another. But, this comment from Justice Stephen Breyer in November (during the arguments of the case) really makes me think I’ve got it correct:

Is the Teleflex invention like moving a garage door sensor from the lower hinge to an upper hinge?

Well, the court voted unanimously that this patent should be considered invalid. In fact, they ruled that the entire basis by which it was awarded was flawed. The opinion part of The Opinion begins as follows: “We begin by rejecting the rigid approach of the Court of Appeals.” The Court ruled that a test known as the “TSM test” was incorrectly being used as the One True Test of an invention’s obviousness. The Court’s ruling today saying that while the TSM test can be helpful, “[h]elpful insights […] need not become rigid and mandatory formulas.” The opinion is being read, then, as to call into question any patent that was awarded on a similar application of this test. The NPR snippet I heard claimed that the number of affected patents would be in the hundreds of thousands. I jumped up and down with glee when I heard that.

A few more choice quotes from the Opinion:

The question is not whether the combination was obvious to the patentee but whether the combination was obvious to a person with ordinary skill in the art. … [F]amiliar items may have obvious uses beyond their primary purposes, and in many cases a person of ordinary skill will be able to fit the teachings of multiple patents together like pieces of a puzzle. … A person of ordinary skill is also a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton.

And finally, this summary

[T]he results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws. Were it otherwise patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts.

After that statement, The Opinion goes on to cite the exact same section of the US constitution that I cited in my last post on this blog! Those damn pirates on the Supreme Court have plagerized my intellectual property!!

Ok, to close more seriously: a saw a woman today wearing a T-shirt that said something like “The first thing we’d do is kill all of the lawyers.” Lawyers get blamed for much. Rich capitalists get blamed for much too. It’s obviously not the case that all lawyers and all rich people are pure good, and I’m not going to claim anything like that. But I think lawyers and rich people get blamed for lots of things that are really the problems of our laws. If we have laws that allow governmentally enforced monopolies to be granted for matters as simple as where on a pedal arm a sensor is placed, then the capitalists are going to try to get the monopolies and the lawyers are going to try to keep them safe. Now, other lawyers working for other capitalists will sometimes challenge those monopolies, and I’m thrilled with today’s news about such a case. But I can’t blame the lawyers or the capitalists for the fight. They are just doing what is natural in the face of bad intellectual property law. If the government didn’t issue these stupid patents in the first place, the capitalists and their lawyers wouldn’t look so stupid trying to uphold them. But of course, it’s much more fun to blame lawyers and rich people for our problems than to talk about copyright and patent law. Whatever the case, hopefully today’s ruling will knock some sense into the United States Patent and Trademark Office, or at least bolster the courage of private parties to refuse to pay royalties to holders of dumb patents.

We all have our issues that we care about, I suppose. But I don’t know why more people aren’t up in arms with me about the United States’ ludicrous intellectual property laws. Well, Marketplace tonight slapped this thorn in my side with this story about patents that have been awarded for innovative ways to save on taxes. People who study the tax laws carefully enough to find loopholes to help their clients to pay less into the Federal Government’s coffers are then protected by that same Government by anyone who wants to do the same thing without paying the first person to do it. Or, the first person to successfully register a patent claim on it. Disgusting.

The Federal Government’s claim to legitimacy in protecting intellectual property is rooted in this clause from Article 1, section 8 of the constitution: “The Congress shall have power … [t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” I’d be willing to bet that throughout the history of our nation, no one has ever referred to tax experts as “authors” or “inventors” in natural conversation. More importantly, deciphering tax law is neither science nor useful art. I could go on and on. It’s just bad.

Really, I’m pretty much opposed to all business process patents. And all software patents. I’m skeptical of traditional patents for inventions of hardware, but they sure don’t offend me the same way. This is bad. There’s apparently some legislative effort to stop issuing such patents. I realize it may not be a matter of life and death for anyone, but when many people are offended by the mere fact of someone being rich, I think more attention is due to ways in which people get rich, especially when they rely on help from governments and curtail the freedom of others.

ugh