I would argue that if his IP was protected he would sit on a temporary monpoly and only a handful of car manufacturers that directly license the wipers from him directly could build them. Instead every car manufacturer build them benefiting everyone.
Developing IP is expensive but protecting it is even more expensive. Imagine a company invents a cancer curing drug but it cost them 10 billion dollars in R&D. They get their patent but then their competitor spends another 10 billion dollars in R&D to make their own cancer cure that doesn't infringe the previous patent.
I think we should have a patent system where when a company creates a patent and it sets the price of the patent to the cost of the R&D (plus some profit) and all buyers will own the patent collectively. The cost is evenly divided across all buyers. Initially the first company that buys the patent pays 10 billion dollars covering the R&D costs. If a competitor buys the patent they will only have to pay 5 billion dollars which then are used to reimburse the first buyer so both only have to pay 5 billion dollars. The third pays 3.33 billion dollars which again are redistributed across the previous buyers. And so on.
Isn't active investing a zero sum game? Imagine a market with only two people and an average ROI of 7%. If then somebody has a 10% ROI through active investing then it follows that other one who also invests actively only gets a 4% ROI%.
With passive investing you invest in a stock because you think the company's value will grow in the future. They are building a new factory or entering a new market, etc... The added value will be represented by a higher stock price which you can sell to obtain your investment returns.
>The social function of active management, in a capitalist society, is that it seeks to direct capital to its most productive end, facilitating sustainable job creation and a rise in the aggregate standard of living.
What if an actively managed fund gives me a 10% return but a 4% fee and a passively managed fund gives me a 8% return but only a 1% fee? Wouldn't the passively managed fund be the most productive from the investors point of view?
How does receiving the assets of your parents after their death affect social mobility? By the time your parents die you are usually 50 years old which means your social environment is a far bigger factor. During the time the parents are alive the children benefit from their support directly, no inheritance needed. Even a 100% inheritance tax is not going to solve that.
What a lot of people seem to think is that an inheritance is undeserved because the person receiving it didn't do anything to earn it. Obviously the parents earned this through their income and decided to not spend everything and give what remained of their wealth to their children. Even if the parents merely received their wealth from another inheritance they still had to decide to not spend more than they add to the inheritance, otherwise it would dry up over multiple generations.
Why do we even care about billionaires anyway? Why should I care e.g. that Bill Gates' networth is $78 billion? Why not care about the people at the bottom? Why not give them the things they truly need like financial security instead of letting them worry that if they earn too much their income drops. Either you're poor and heavily depend on welfare or you earn enough to not need welfare in the first place. There is no middle ground and the gap between the two is very large.
Generally living organisms become bipedal when they have another use for their legs other than walking. See birds. In our case it was the usage of tools.
[X] site loads instantly
[X] doesn't download dozens of frameworks or ads
[X] puts focus on content rather than appearance
You're right the LWN site is utter trash. It's 2016, why aren't they embarrassed of their own incompetence? What comes next? Are they going to tell me to read a book?