🚀 go-pugleaf

As usual, I see someone recommending lawyering.  What is so sad is that if it
isn't really "every other" Ph.D. who ends up as a lawyer, would I be
exaggerating if I said one in 5?  One has the pathetic impression of a company
that pays one postdoc $20,000 a year, per every lawyer they are paying $100,000
a year to fight patent battles over his stuff.  And yet we leave it to the
*RELIGIOUS* groups to try to tone down this patent nonsense with the germ of
some common sense concerning just Who might have the intellectual property
rights on 4 billion years of evolution.
   I really can't help but feel that the problem is that our economy is just
hopelessly misdesigned for doing research.  Everyone wants to live longer ---
everyone is willing to pay a fortune for health care --- almost everyone thinks
that biological research is a good thing --- yet somehow, it ends up that we
talk of "overproducing" Ph.D.'s, when the number in question is only a tiny
minority of a society that should be in the process of converting the bulk of
its industries, everything from health care to plastics production, to methods
that require this knowledge.
   One idea, the worst ideologically, but the most readily comprehensible, that
I had suggested as an alternative to the current system, would have been a
mandate that people donate a certain percentage of their income above a
minimum level to research and/or charity foundations, which might then disburse
grant money in a fairly reliable fashion, yet in accordance with the public
choices.  In exchange for this tax, "protection" by copyright and patent would
be ended, and we could all make immediate use of new technology for the
cheapest possible prices.  This is, as I said, not optimal, but it suggests
the sort of radical rethinking we should do, if we wish to see any favorable
settlement out of this whole mess.