Once I reached the tech industry it was a total 180, ideas are worthless, the heroes are the engineers who can scale them and the founders who can make businesses out of them. But patent law didn’t get the memo, it’s still based on my elementary-school worldview.
Crucially, the inventors in those hero stories were always lone wolf eccentric garage/basement guys. Corporate R&D labs did not appear.
I always wondered what the moral of that story was supposed to be.
Sometimes it was just the ancient version of Squid Game, and people just wanted to hear or tell something entertaining.
Put another way, it says a lot of things, and outlines a lot of problems, but I'm not sure it puts any solutions forth. That's probably a good thing IMO, as any solution presented in a program like that invariably seems trite to me, as it necessarily oversimplifies the problem so the solution proposed can work.
Keep in mind this is a Korean drama, not a western drama. "Late stage capitalism" is an English language/western world concept, not a universal one. (Even the term "late stage capitalism" implies that capitalism is somehow going to end, but commentators never clearly explain what system they think is better or what should replace it. Capitalism IMO is with us for the rest of humanity.)
No, it's a version of such shows that you cannot escape from because of financial pressures on your life, despite likely ending in your death. That is the key - even when given a chance to get out, the overwhelming majority of participants embraces the game, because the alternative (being economically destitute, while lying to friends and family to keep up appearances) is seen as worse than death. It's literally "get rich or die trying".
The final revelations, about the game's origins and the fate of previous winners, add further elements of critique of "the system"; and the story arc of the "good son" is a critique of a (Korean) academic process that, while ostensibly promoting talent, ends up producing sharks.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-16/squid-game-on-netflix...
But here: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/26/squid-g...
“It’s not profound! It’s very simple! I do believe that the overall global economic order is unequal and that around 90% of the people believe that it’s unfair. During the pandemic, poorer countries can’t get their people vaccinated. They’re contracting viruses on the streets and even dying. So I did try to convey a message about modern capitalism. As I said, it’s not profound.”
And here's another one: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/business/economy/squid-ga...
“The stories and the problems of the characters are extremely personalized but also reflect the problems and realities of Korean society,” Hwang Dong-hyuk, the show’s creator, said in an email. He wrote the script as a film in 2008, when many of these trends had become evident, but overhauled it to reflect new worries, including the impact of the coronavirus. (Minyoung Kim, the head of content for the Asia-Pacific region at Netflix, said the company was in talks with Mr. Hwang about producing a second season.)
It's a recurring theme in Korean media eg Parasite and Snowpiercer.
I could pick Atlanta and The Wire and say American media is commonly critical of police. Or turn around and pick CSI and Law & Order and say that American media is commonly supportive of police. It hardly says something about the overall landscape. And thats even picking shows with different directors!
If the bucks following this stategy are the ones that survived, how is this survivorhsip bias rather than a winning strategy?
/s
Or maybe it's that it doesn't pay to be the bully, because eventually you try to bully someone bigger than you.
Bridges are dangerous if you're a little kid, you may want to get your older siblings to back you up.
Disdaining small victories leaves you unprepared for the big ones.
There's always someone bigger.
"Commented [A2]: Whoever wrote this sentence might be the same person who writes patents. It would be helpful in the future to write and speak in plain English. You are dealing with an ordinary court, not a patent examiner.
A few thoughts on patents:
- Don't bother reading anything other than the claims. Ignore everything else (yes, even the diagrams) unless referenced by the claims.
- Yes, they do try to -- and succeed in -- patenting stuff you can pull out of a textbook. One patent was a near cut-and-paste of some stuff on Kalman filters (that one made me pretty mad).
- Any time a patent lawyer makes a reference to a patent's "teachings", punch them in the nose. These things don't teach anyone anything, that's an impolite fiction for a game that's really all about obfuscation. If there was a patent that described how to nail two boards together, you wouldn't walk away from reading that patent with any useful knowledge.
- The very fact that every company in the US will tell you "Please, for the love of Pete, don't go read patents on your own, without permission" again belies that these things are land-grabs that are never designed to advance the state of the art through teaching.
I am not a lawyer. I do not play one on TV.
One reason for the guidance to not read patents is that, at trial, knowingly infringing a patent is much more expensive than unknowingly infringing.
Now, for the reality: I never saw this happen. How would they know you looked at their patent? From your server logs? From the PTO's? Do you think they file discovery on your personal computer? (Just don't send an email about their patent or write anything down about it -- THAT they can track.) Very, very few infringement suits go to trial anyway.
I think the real reason the lawyers tell you this is so they won't have to answer your questions. And because you might misinterpret the claims (not at all a hard thing to do).
If your management and lawyers want to, they can get an official opinion from a lawyer that you're not infringing. That's something you can use.
https://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/garner-transcripts-1.pd...
The interviews go beyond writing style into broader rhetoric, as well as dislikes and pet-peeves.
The language in them is so horribly convoluted that I, the supposed inventor can't make any sense of them. Hell, it took me a while to even figure out which invention maps to which application.
such a missed opportunity. daddy, why are you trying to kill the planet?
Or the kids themselves. Though it would have been pretty hilarious if Captain Planet turned to the "camera" and told the kids honestly: "The toys you play with, including this show's action-figures, were made using the ancient decomposed remains of countless dead plants and animals, in a process every bit as bad as what you see in this show. And recycling isn't going to solve this problem."
https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-sto...
>That family edutainment goal affected a lot of the show’s writing. Pyle didn’t want kids to see their family members as evil, ecologically speaking. “That’s one of the reasons we made the bad guys and their plans so ridiculous,” she explained, “We tried to point the finger at behaviors rather than industries. That way, no child would go home and say, ‘Oh, daddy, you’re in a blah blah business.’ It would be horrible for some child to see their family member as a Captain Planet villain.”
Yes, my student! Feel the power of the dark side!
My kids bring things up sometimes. We have a discussion about them, about our role in society, etc. But a good portion of the time the discussion becomes a lesson in critical thinking and not taking over-simplified idealistic pleas from randos on the Internet at face value.
I don't know if I'm necessarily making a value judgment either way here, but I don't think "get to them through their young kids" should be considered a general-purpose strategy for effecting societal change... and fear of this kind of thing is exactly what breeds mistrust in public education, parents pulling their kids out of sex ed, etc etc.
This would definitely have a negative impact on a child growing up- feeling like I had to worry about my parents' health when I was ~12 definitely did.
maybe here: https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-sto...
I think there's a typo in the blog post ("parent" should be "patent" below):
> Do you ever wonder what parent trolls tell their children they do for a job?
I read a story somewhere that claimed that "Captain Planet" had to be edited to feature cartoonishly evil villains, rather than the mundane day-to-day polluters, because they were worried that kids would ask uncomfortable career questions of their parents in sectors like disposable consumer goods, plastics, petrochemical, cigarettes, etc.