Lawrence D'Oliveiro <
ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
The original concept was called “letters patent”. These were Government-
granted monopolies in particular industries (e.g. salt extraction from
seawater, or the manufacturer of gold leaf); if anybody else tried to set
up in competition with you, the legitimate monopoly holder, the Government
would send its goons round to give them a hiding.
>
When it became clear the system was outdated, instead of getting rid of it
completely, the idea was changed so that you needed to come up with some
kind of “invention” to get a “patent”, which gave you a monopoly on the
rights to that “invention”.
>
Though oddly, the concept of “invention” needs to be narrowly defined. For
example, Einstein couldn’t get a patent on his groundbreaking General
Theory of Relativity, but microchips exploiting General Relativity to
accurately determine your position in space and time can indeed be
patented. Was the underlying enabling theory too “inventive” to be
patented, perhaps?
False Profits: Reviving the Corporation's Public Purpose
https://www.uclalawreview.org/false-profits-reviving-the-corporations-public-purpose/I Origins of the Corporation. Although the corporate structure dates
back as far as the Greek and Roman Empires, characteristics of the
modern corporation began to appear in England in the mid-thirteenth
century.[4] "Merchant guilds" were loose organizations of merchants
"governed through a council somewhat akin to a board of directors," and
organized to "achieve a common purpose"[5] that was public in
nature. Indeed, merchant guilds registered with the state and were
approved only if they were "serving national purposes."[6]
... snip ...
... however there has been significant pressure to give corporate
charters to entities operating in self-interest ... followed by
extending constitutional "people" rights to corporations. The supreme
court was scammed into extending 14th amendment rights to corporations
(with faux claims that was what the original authors had intended).
https://www.amazon.com/We-Corporations-American-Businesses-Rights-ebook/dp/B01M64LRDJ/pgxiv/loc74-78: Between 1868, when the amendment was ratified, and 1912,
when a scholar set out to identify every Fourteenth Amendment case heard
by the Supreme Court, the justices decided 28 cases dealing with the
rights of African Americans--and an astonishing 312 cases dealing with
the rights of corporations.
The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future
https://www.amazon.com/Price-Inequality-Divided-Society-Endangers-ebook/dp/B007MKCQ30/pg35/loc1169-73: In business school we teach students how to recognize,
and create, barriers to competition -- including barriers to entry --
that help ensure that profits won't be eroded. Indeed, as we shall
shortly see, some of the most important innovations in business in the
last three decades have centered not on making the economy more
efficient but on how better to ensure monopoly power or how better to
circumvent government regulations intended to align social returns and
private rewards
How Economists Turned Corporations into Predators
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/10/economists-turned-corporations-predators.htmlSince the 1980s, business schools have touted "agency theory," a
controversial set of ideas meant to explain how corporations best
operate. Proponents say that you run a business with the goal of
channeling money to shareholders instead of, say, creating great
products or making any efforts at socially responsible actions such as
taking account of climate change.
A Short History Of Corporations
https://newint.org/features/2002/07/05/historyAfter Independence, American corporations, like the British companies
before them, were chartered to perform specific public functions -
digging canals, building bridges. Their charters lasted between 10 and
40 years, often requiring the termination of the corporation on
completion of a specific task, setting limits on commercial interests
and prohibiting any corporate participation in the political process.
... a residual of that is current law that can't use funds/payments from
government contracts for lobbying. After the turn of the century there
was huge upswing in private equity buying up beltway bandits and
government contractors, PE owners then transfer every cent possible to
their own pockets, which can be used to hire prominent politicians that
can lobby congress (including "contributions") to give contracts to
their owned companies (resulting in huge increase in gov. outsourcing to
private companies) ... can snowball since gov. agencies aren't allowed
to lobby (contributing to claims that congress is most corrupt
institution on earth)
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/10/barbarians-capitol-private-equity-public-enemy/"Lou Gerstner, former ceo of ibm, now heads the Carlyle Group, a
Washington-based global private equity firm whose 2006 revenues of $87
billion were just a few billion below ibm's. Carlyle has boasted George
H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and former Secretary of State James Baker III
on its employee roster."
... also promoting the "Success of Failure" culture (especially in the
military/intelligence-industrial complex)
http://www.govexec.com/excellence/management-matters/2007/04/the-success-of-failure/24107/-- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Re: The joy of FORTRAN