topleveldomain's comments

Thanks for this response.

How about requiring patent-holders to show progress on their invention every X years, so that inventors can't just sit on an old and important patent they own?

Or, a more ground-up restructuring: what if owning a patent didn't give you full ownership of the technology, but just X% of profit made from it for X years after filing?

With this setup, you could further incentivize progress by granting an additional X% to the first one able to bring the technology to market.

The data shows a downward trend in interstate conflicts, colonial conflicts, and per capita battle deaths since the 40's. Civil conflicts peaked in the early 90's, but nukes aren't a factor in those.

Source: https://files.prio.org/publication_files/prio/Gates,%20Nyg%C...

"War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations."

I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigger deterrent of war - at least among the developed countries of the world: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the world saw the atom bomb's capability for destruction, the motivation to avoid war increased significantly (to put it lightly).

Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."

But if someone steals your credit card and buys $10,000 worth of stuff, you're probably getting that money back.