Nepotism is usually restricted to familial relations by definition, but networking can work in a very similar way sometimes. I.e. lead to unjustified hiring decisions. I guess the more relevant questions are: was it fair and are you qualified to do the job in practice? Instead of whether it technically falls under nepotism.

An exponent between 1 and 2 would be better than either.

Sounds uniquely american. Is it?

not the end-all be-all like a literary author

I mean they do say publish or perish. But technically you are correct. And there are some teaching-heavy jobs too. Also I don’t really care about the people who are at the top of academia.

I am also not sure how you can look at the deals publishers and journals make with colleges to ecosystem lock students with things like portal codes you can only get by buying the textbook/resources new from the school and think that the loss of IP protection would do anything to the publishers besides remove the cost they pay the authors. It’s already a scam/racket, and that won’t change without legislation making that illegal.

Absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. I guess it depends on the country. Here, a lot of students pirate their books anyway. Personally, I didn’t buy a single book during my bachelors/masters.

EDIT: but I think we’re getting two things confused here, journal publishing and books. Journal articles and conference proceedings is the thing I wanted to concentrate on because that is the weird edge case where the standard IP / author compensation approach doesn’t apply.

Books within academia work mostly in a similar way to other book publishing, and of course people who are currently making money out of that don’t want that to stop. Which doesn’t mean they’d be worse off without IP based publishing in books in the long term either.

I appreciate the comment. Seeing that a system of publishing can work without authors being paid via IP does make a difference. In the short term abolishing IP laws might be bad, but we could replace it with something better, like a UBI, grants for authors, crowdsourcing, and other sources of funding.

And to be clear, we are not living under a UBI. Academics notoriously have to fight over the limited funds that are available to them. Some do need to find other work. Still, nobody is really advocating for an IP-based model. Because it’s not better.

in a IP-less world they would still act the same and use their size to capture the lion’s share of the market.

This one I don’t agree with at all. The journals only exist because they can force people and institutions to pay money to get the articles. They would collapse without IP laws. Their power is already decaying due to Arxiv and sci-hub.

I write scientific articles for a living and i dont give a fuck about some corporation making money off of them. What I do care is whether people can access my articles in other ways too, that’s why they are on Arxiv and ill email them if somebody asks.

If somebody wants to pay for a printed copy or an Elsevier typeset that doesnt concern me in the slightest. And I dont think it would any other author either if they had a decent income like i do from the uni

The first example was a company, and the second example I assume was done under a book deal, so a company.

Good night

IP only protects companies for some reason

IP only protects those who have the means to defend their IP in court, which is rich people and companies.

A big company can take that book, print it and sell it without you seeing a dime

Sure. I don’t think that is theft.

As a consumer, you can download the book, listen to a free audiobook, or print it yourself if you want to. The company only gets money if they somehow make better physical version than what others have access to.

To me this is not at all akin to ownership or theft.

Yeah but you can’t really profit off of that because anybody can print the book. And if there’s no IP, I can just download the book and print it myself. Or read it as a PDF. Or download the IP-free audiobook and listen to that. Even for printed books, competition drives the price to the production costs so very little profit is being made there.

Otherwise big companies would be making big money off of shakespeare and the bible. But that’s not how they make their money, they make their money with IP monopolies instead.

Without IP the company would also get approximately 0 money for selling movies or books. This hypothetical doesn’t make sense.

How can you steal something that you can’t own?

L take

There are studies on this, smoking impairs your driving a lot less than drinking. But it’s not good to drive while high, to be clear…

Bringing a person into existence for your own entertainment is the ultimate form of pointless hedonism

I am against the death penalty out of principle, not practical reasons. It goes fundamentally against rehabilitation, its effect differs from person to person drastically, it’s just weird and vengeful. And making exceptions for edge cases is not good for a justice system.

So what if you do this instead: consistently enforce, say, 10 year prison sentences for murder as a CEO. This kind of stuff would stop overnight. But that doesn’t happen unfortunately.

What does that mean in practice?

Maximizing personal freedom shouldn’t be the only goal, yes. But not letting people choose whether they live or die is minimal personal freedom to me. Or it should be, like the bare minimum.

I am of the complete opposite opinion. Not letting people decide if they want to live or not is the ultimate restriction of personal freedom. I think there should be some kind of process for euthanasia for practical reasons cause most people will eventually feel they want to keep on living, but for those who don’t there should be a right to die.

I don’t really care, both are pretty fucking bad

The language. I dislike rust the game because it interferes with my rust language googling :^)