To squabble internally or externally is the question

Correctly describing a problem is well known to be a pre-requisite activity to resolving the problem. This post is an effort to do that.

And since it involves people, there are those who resist correct solutions, and thus strive to obscure the problem. And the need for drama makes the people-stuff not just super-complicated but also can get overly dynamic.

Apparently often through history rulers have struggled with the problem of how to keep their population from getting too squabbling amongst each other, and have utilized the mechanism of arranging war. War seems to get all the squabbling brothers to stop beating up on each other, to instead be working alongside each other to repel imagined invaders by going over and beating up on the neighbors, thus requiring the population to shift from internal squabbling to cooperative interaction against external foes.

It is not just the continuing sectarian violence in the middle-eastern countries that show the problem. It seems a worldwide problem, and apparently has existed throughout history. The Roman Empire used "bread and circus" to mollify its many subjects far and wide. The brutal coliseum violence sports perhaps another type for those closer to home. Here in the US, the sports teams traveling to each others' towns sports arenas to do mock battle between football teams, for example, has long been needed to satisfy some urges among people; not just for the players, but also for the men in the stadium whooping it up rooting for their home team, but also for their women who get into the excitement too, although probably with somewhat different urges involved that also excite the men.

I have often associated it all with my conjectured basic need for "drama," but there may be another force active in the craving for team assaults with each other, on the soccer field or with tanks and airplanes on the battlefield.

America is winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think the population is getting restless and there is much stirring of internal squabbling long seething and suppressed in the need to unite to confront the external foe.

The media's focus on the NSA as the villain has recently kept it from doing the part of its job to monitor the many groups of "organized stalkers" operating in America. Thus as it is said "when the cat's away the mice will play" and the organized-stalkers seem to be getting ready to more publicly make the daring moves that satisfy their egos and cover their own misdoings.

Allowing myself only a brief bit of anger at people choosing to squabble and group-assault instead of being responsible to their world and constructive for their civilization, I write this blog post. But I doubt that it will be allowed to be heard, as there are some heavy-duty public opinion spin-masters getting into the game, I sense.

Some kinds of people prefer to engage in games or serious conflicts so as to demonstrate who is superior; another kind of people prefer to engage in building things as their teamwork activity.

The conflict-craving types seem to be needing more visibility in recent times, bread-and-circus not enough for them anymore. The focus on the lone high achiever, predominant such as up through the 1950's in America, has been beaten back by the urge for the teams to take the forefront. The schoolyard bullies that gather their following by setting the example of beating up on the lone high achiever, gets tamed a bit as less violent techniques to stay at the front of a group's attention. When this kind of activity gets controlled in a corporation to have a management chain to produce a fine product or service, it seems about an optimum activity for teams.

However, as America's business-political mode has changed enormously since the 1950's, too often businesses teams will discover that they are more interested in making money than in making a fine product for the consumer. Investors who only look at the bottom-line return on their investment, and do not care what means are used to make that maximum money, increasingly business has found that it is far more efficient to seek out and overwhelm upcoming competition and destroy it, than to invest in better internal R&D to make better products for the customers.

Tripping up the rivals is hardly new, as a means to "win." Spot someone else's fine work being completed, is arranged to be destroyed leaving only one's lesser accomplishment the remaining finest thing. However, although sometimes like the stadiums full of howling fans, where the tripping up of the "other people" is publicly accepted and even required as part of the sport, in business dealings it is generally more frowned upon; therefore using more subtle techniques need to be employed. Those who engage in this kind of thing can be lumped into a general category of "organized stalkers."

These organized-stalkers apparently enjoy the companionship and adventure involved, as motivation, providing membership belonging and status in these semi-secret sub-organizations, that seem to be quite common and hardly new.

With the internet's fairly open communications, some of those who have discovered the increasingly unlikely occurrence of specific kinds of events as they go about their daily life, if they are lucky they learn about this organized-stalker phenomenon which apparently is now stalking them. To hide the originating source of the command to stalk particular individuals, there is said to be a "list" passed around among the many groups of organized-stalkers, and once a person is on that "list" it is a lifelong thing, no way to get off the list. (The implied threat of getting put on that list probably also keeps their members in line, fearing what would happen to them if they choose to not do some particularly nefarious dirty-work for the organized-stalkers.)

One kind of person that finds themselves as apparently on that "list" is the potentially innovative but now unemployed engineer, who might come up with an idea for a technology that could compete with some corporation's products and thus reduce their profits for their investors. Keeping those loose-cannon engineers down in the trenches by increasingly obvious organized-stalking and concurrent intrusion into their residences to do document theft, and by spreading nasty rumors among the people the engineer might connect with like neighbors, are said to be common protocols for the organized-stalkers.

I suppose it must be big fun for the members of the organized-stalker vigillanties in their fantasies of the monsters they are united in harassing, to be great heroes among the teams; quite unaware of what they are actually doing to their targets, that ultimately will come around to lower the standard of living for everybody including the organized-stalkers themselves. No matter; the fun and drama of team belonging and fantasied doing drama, is going on. Staying in the herd is a place of safety even among wild mammal groups, and driving out some member, normally a male, feeds the predators and thus protects those who are in the herd for awhile longer. These instincts still lurk among humans, and sometimes find expression, such as in the teams of organized-stalkers.

So at this point, I somewhat suspect that America is once again at that tipping point where focus against a common "enemy" outside the country, fades away enough so that the possible need for those stalked engineers to get re-hired to produce means to succeed against the nation-external enemy, becomes much less than the urge to snuff out the potentially business-disruptive innovative engineers and scientists, and so the long-prepared triumphant dramas of accusatory courtroom or scared run street chases, gets the go signal.

Part of this nearly overwhelmingly complex people-stuff, is the mode among ostensibly dignified members of society and corporations, to "get something on" the others, and this apparently enables some people to feel secure in their jobs, with the implied threat of the misdoings of those other dignitaries being revealed, if the job is lost. I was quite surprised when I learned about this phenomenon many decades ago. The "getting something on" can also be deliberately arranged by such groups too, even if there is no real adequately severe mistake or misdoing having been done by the individual. The need for a high-achieving Asperger to be accepted in the apparently fun things the groups are doing, often gets them put in the position of being deliberately "left holding the bag" to take the blame for the mischief of the group, the Asperger unable to comprehend all of what is going on among people. Someone who has stumbled into "knowing too much" is at high risk for being such a target, even if not wanting to be involved. Thus there is this mass of all the things "gotten on" each other, as part of the seething people-stuff stewing.

Now, is the declaring of war or doing the equivalent, to punish some outside nation, worth doing to prevent the nation-internal fracas from getting really nasty? Hardly seems fair to me, even though I too have long been one of those technological mavericks potentially too business-disruptive with better technologies than the existing corporations employ, and thus would likely would go down in one of the first internal skirmishes. Although that does not appeal to me at all, the sacrificing of thousands of foreigners in a distracting war, is just not a rightful thing to do to prevent it.

PFIITTA people factor in impedance to technological adoption

Sometimes the greatest blocks to achieving a technology-enabled goal, is not so much the technical details, but instead, the "people details." I have somewhat frivolously given this a name here: "people factor in impedance to technological adoption" or PFIITTA as its acronym.

Most of my efforts have been for solving the technical details, particularly related to space transportation within the Earth-Moon system, sometimes alluding to that also automatically helping access and utilize points further out in the solar system.

Occasionally, I have commented on the people-problems that I was encountering, but quickly dismissing them as obviously erratic and irresponsible and surely would go away in time, like the various bullies that occasionally harmed me as I grew up.

However, even though I at times completed an integrated technical design that ought to achieve a goal long stated by others, instead of thanks, I got snubbing, derision and outright hostility at times. But mostly there was the lack of helpfulness or appreciation on their part.

This greatly impeded the achievement of their stated goals, such as establishing a spacefaring society, with space access for every human being, in the near future.

So, this writing is an effort to identify the "people factors" that were involved, to bring it out into the open, so that those with goal achievement intent, can find ways to resolve those problems that otherwise apparently will impede the achievement of large scale mutual goals.

I will also strive to provide some suggestions as to solution of the problem, much as I have usually done re technical problems.

I experienced the "people problem" re adopting technical solutions to widespread needs, even in my career as a hands-on person in electronics development work. Co-workers advised me to not bother writing up my innovative ideas even when they were explicitly invited by an employer, because they would be ignored, and worse, if the boss did not round-file your idea, he would change the name of the originator to be his own name instead of yours; I was advised that management was that way. I went ahead and with great difficulty and on my own time I wrote up some of my innovative ideas for products that seemed in line with the company's field of interest, and eventually I found that the warnings by my co-worker were essentially correct.

The corollary to this kind of problem, is the saying that if one wants one's idea to be passed up the chain of command, up the org chart up to where people could take action on the idea, that one would have to convince one's boss that it was his idea, not yours. Only then would the idea have a chance of coming into physically-expressed reality.

Analyzing the possible causes of this phenomenon, might provide some insight about one's future "people problems" before they happen, and maybe find ways to solve them.

Such as the corollary's solution to the problem of the boss either trashing your idea right there or else erasing your name and putting his name on it, was to instead propose the idea to one's boss in a way to convince him that it was his idea, and thus he would strive to move it up the management chain to possible actualization.

This was not true for all bosses in my long career; but too often it was an invisible roadblock to consideration and adoption of one's ideas.

So, what causes this phenomenon? I will hypothesize some possible factors:

1. Managers tend to have the overarching goal of "climbing up the ladder" to higher level management levels, with correspondingly higher pay and rewards. To do that, he needs to show that he is better than others, so that when evaluations happen, or slots open up in the next higher level of the management chain, that oneself will have shown to be better than peers, and most definitely better than subordinates. There may even be a fear of managers at every level, of a subordinate looking better and therefore taking one's job. "Creativity" is a factor in evaluation sheets. So someone suggesting an idea to help the company in some way, scores higher in the "creativity" category. If a subordinate comes up with an idea, if it got passed up the management chain, that subordinate might get a higher "creativity " score than oneself, an intolerable thing to happen. Solution is to make the idea disappear. Or better yet, if it looks like an especially good idea, to delete the subordinate's name from the idea, putting one's own name on it, and pass it up to one's superior. (Who might do the same thing, by the way.)

2. Ideas, unless required as part of one's performance of one's duties, are a wild-card in the game of management. Perceived as an unexpected factor, appearing out of nowhere, seemingly. Management needs to constantly work to get all the ducks in a row, so they can get knocked down predictably, so as to get the management job done well. An idea for doing something different, could cause a big wrinkle in all that work that one has done, making life less predictable, more work to manage. Who wants that, wants more trouble to deal with? The common phrase for this is "don't rock the boat." A new idea thus is seen as something that could "rock the boat" causing havoc. To this mentality, all useful ideas only come from the very top management, anyway, and they appear in the form of instructions for doing one's management job. Anything else is not worth thinking about, and could even upset things.

3. Competing businesses often utilize specific technological territorial claims; thus there can be a phenomenon of a potential new technology design appearing on the scene, as competing with one's own bread-and-butter technology-based business success. It risks getting into the "whose is better" ring, forced to duke it out in the customer purchase arena if not done previously in other more controllable business games. So it is better to keep one's eye out for potential rival technologies which might interfere with the one on which you have staked your fame and fortune upon. And when spotted, set up ways to prevent its success. This might be called "the trolley salesman in the automobile showroom" effect, TSITAS.

One's advertising system can be used for this. Make the same claim as your potential rival makes, such as "establishing a highway to space" or "space travel for all people". Then put on the usual dog-and-pony show, carnival show, dazzling the public with what the established business have achieved, and people will forget the original attractive claims, or else just assume it will come up eventually; after all, look how competent these folks are. This can be done by establishing enthusiast groups based on these mottos like "highways to space" even though they only are only using rocket launch vehicles, and they are hiding potential access to space by structural means. Their bread and butter comes from rockets now and in the near future; one's fame and fortune depends on their popularity. That is the deciding factor, rather than the actual establishment of highways to space or space access for everybody. Related is creating a periodic big convention claiming those goals, but in all the dazzling hoopla, if anyone happens to wander in with the real technology for making a highway to space enabling all people to reach space, rapicly enabling a spacefaring society, the person is not treated well and definitely is not allowed to speak to the convention or otherwise communicate the innovative idea. The innovator is simply ignored out of existence, while he naively is thinking the organization really is for the purpose of establishing "highways to space" and "apace travel for everybody." If there is a lot of wealth available from established businesses based on doing things the old established, but can't do the full job, way, this is a working technique to block the potential competition until it starves to death. And when that has happened, one can then have already prepared "evidence" that one's own business has rights to the concept and exclusive control of it and therefore decides when it will be utilized: after one's current business has dried up. The customer then has no option but to buy into the business-as-usual produced wares. And all the investors, and managers, can rest easier, life is good.

The risk of some technological innovative idea being produced by the grunts down on the floor who are hands-on familiar with the real world, coming up with a better way of doing things, is usually dealt with by use of the "Employment Agreement" form needing signing as a pre-condition for getting a job. This form ostensibly is a declaration that the employee won't steal the company's technological ideas and go start his own company with them. (In my long career, I recall only one co-worker who actually sought to steal others' ideas, but that was just part of the person's mastery of deceit and he became the confidant of management through that trickery.) In practice, since the "Employment Agreement" declares that all of the employee's ideas on any subject, related to the performance of the job or not, are automatically property of the employer; and that the employer is under no obligation to acknowledge them or develop anything from those ideas, the ideas of the employees are essentially dead in the water from the start. Thus the practice of "Yankee ingenuity" is ruined. This saves the corporate much trouble dealing with new ideas that might make waves in their carefully laid plans for getting top management's goals done. Since the employee who came up with the idea has no way to put the idea into practice, why bother being innovative. This "Employee Agreement" ruse has been standard practice for many decades here in the US, even in states which have made laws against it; the employee would have to sue the employer per that law, and what chance can the employee, usually underpaid and no extra cash on hand, to afford a lawyer to combat the high paid lawyers of the company, and what chance does that employee have of retaining his job, either. Nope, it is a well-laid business security plan shared by most technological-based corporations, and it works.

It does, however, heavily undercut the potentials of the country to create innovative new products. As America is currently finding out, in the form of financial big problems.

Continuing this polite hindsight exploration of PFIITTA, the next level of PFIITTA occurs when the company has a Reduction-In-Force, laying off employees. (Quite possibly as a result of suppressing innovation in their ranks, thus falling behind in technological opportunities to expand their business base.) Or employees retire. After some time period up to a couple of years in the case of management folks, the former employee is no longer bound by the signing of the employment-agreement. Only a few folks tend to be innovative; they have been identified during their time of employment, so the next level of blockage of possibly schedule-upsetting or rival technologies from happening, is after awhile, to hire private investigators to covertly gain access to the residences of the targeted former employees, and remove all legal-level proof that they are coming up with innovative ideas; the PIs don't know which ideas might be claimed by their hiring folks, so they just grab everything. This usually takes the form of just stealing all copies, hard and soft, of the first page of all correspondence that has been done with others regarding the person's innovative new ideas. Thus the person cannot provide proof of originality and therefore cannot get patent protection, and without a patent, no one will invest in the idea's creation. Problem solved: no potential competition can get a start.

And, to further make it hard for the innovative type person to gain help in making his ideas come into reality, is to get folks to carry on a grass-roots level of character assassination against the targeted people. This can spread like wildfire in a gossipy community; driving the person to leave and finding somewhere else to live, he will find that all his neighbors and even churchgoers of his religion, have already been "warned" about the foul dangerous character of the newly arrived person in their community; they may even excitingly have been enlisted in "catching" the bad person doing something bad. Needless to say, this makes it very hard for the innovator to get new friends and support for creating innovations. "Character references" are hard to come by, too, even to get another job, of any kind, to pay the bills. It works.

PFIITTA happens.

Deeper even than these business-protection games, is another factor, familiarly described in a song, that goes "anything you can do, I/we can do better." Is is part of the "whose better" factor. If someone's innovative technological idea looks like it will reduce the income from one's own lush abundant income, then potential helpers for that potential technology, can get pulled away to look at what seem to be similar but better ideas, well organized and more likely to be successful. Perhaps even saying they are the innovators of the ideas that were stolen by the PIs from former employee's residences and storage sites. For example, when the hoop-type highly efficient electrically powered transportation structure broke free and finally got formal publication, the old Earth Space Elevator concept was revived out of nowhere proclaiming that a tether material had been found and was in mass production in Japan, and Space elevators were ready to build, right no, put your money right here. It totally took attention away from the hoop-type transportation structure, which had its origins in figuring out how to get around the strength-to-density problem of the Earth Space Elevator structural access to space from the ground. Since no such material was in actual existence, after awhile it kind of faded away, but the hoop type transportation structure was still being silenced by all possible means, at the same time. That suggests that the real motives are not easily apparent; the intent may well be to block large scale near future use of earth orbital space, limited by the feeble means of using conventional launch vehicles - and that also protects the energy wealth baron's empires, by preventing near-future large scale energy supply by the long-proposed Solar Power Satellites in GEO, that are uneconomical if one only has rockets to put them in place and maintain them.

No one likes their income to get reduced.

There may even be pressure to resume the long inhibited nuclear powered launch vehicle technology, in a desperate effort to gain larger scale space access from the ground. The tether Space Elevator and the hoop Space Escalator are the only potential rivals to that technology; so pitting them against each other may block either one, until nukes are apparently acceptable. This is not to say that using the stockpile of nuclear weapon material up by using it as fuel for launch vehicles is a bad idea, mis-useable as it could become; it is merely pointing out possible factors in the blockage of access to orbital space in large scale commercial quantities in the near future by any other means.

One's motives need to be examined, for what one does. The proclaimed motives we make may not be the real ones; not necessarily deliberately, but simply as a response to the overall ongoing scenario. And "motives" is plural: there sometimes are several ongoing motives and some of them might clash. Can get complex. But determining one's own actual motives - plural - is a start at shaping up and getting effective. One does not necessarily tell others what these motives are, all the time, however. Some of them may well clash with motives of others: butting-horns from the start simply wastes time and effort and opportunity. So taking it a bit easy, if the scenario requires it, is wise. But losing sight of one's own motives in all the action, can be a step in the wrong direction, becoming part of the PFIITTA instead of the solution.

Is patent law doing what it was intended to do?

Patents were intended to protect the one who had struggled to create something new and achieved it, from the horde of copycats.

Copycats, from the bully sitting next to you as a schoolkid - who passed his tests by copying your answers, and you had better not try to hide your answers - could start from where the innovator left off, and without that life resource being used up in struggling to create the innovative thing in the first place, they could run with the idea and make their fortune with it, never compensating the actual originator who made it possible to exist.

It is an ancient problem. It was generally ignored; the upper crust tending to be formed of bullies who had no interest in supporting those who had been ripped off. So the innovators, who had found a way to make something new, would do their best to hide their secret means from the prying eyes of others; so as to protect their business making and selling their innovative thing. But when those innovators grew old and passed away, the special goodie that they had made and sold, vanished from the market and no one else knew how to make it anymore; and so everyone had to do without that special something from then on.

That was something that got the attention of the bullies who ran things, when they got deprived a bit, that way.

So a compromise was set up, where the innovator would be granted a limited time to exclusively make and sell his/her innovation-based product, if they would disclose how to create the innovation. I think it was seventeen years, in which it belonged to the innovator; thereafter it was free for all to copy.

The rulers of the land thought they had wisely solved the problem, providing for everybody's needs by issuing patents. And, it all sounds reasonable: 17 years of protection for your idea, your answer on the school desk test; then it is given away for free. The copycats could still make their fortunes by making the innovator's thing, except they had to wait some years to do it. And the snoops did not need to spy to steal the innovator's ideas anymore; it was all there, disclosed in the patent.

But instead of peace and prosperity resulting, there were fights over who would get the patent. Innovations have to be built out of the things already available, and so the search for new ideas for innovations went on being done by multiple people, often times. The early days of electronics often involved many quite angry disputes over who came up with an idea first, for example.

And all our innovative ideas are built on a vast legacy given by others of the past. Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Newton, Einstein, Jobs, and millions of others, put much of their lives into making the bricks out of which we now build our innovations. They are gone now, and best we can do is give a blanket silent mental thanks to their lives and their gifts to us, with which we strive to build anew, much as they did in their time.

Yet without the promise of a patent protecting you, there was little use in doing the long involved work of finding a way to create a new and useful thing, since the copycats, who often were also tough bullies - or hired them - stalkers & assaulters, would just grab away any success one had.

Nowadays, The start of Apple Computer by a couple of guys in a home garage, could not create the personal computer line that many of us so cherish. There simply are too many folks incredibly skillfully snooping and able to invade one's workspace while you are gone shopping, to keep anything secret and documented long enough to get a patent to protect the innovative thing. Huge corporations with almost endless deep pockets can hire industrial spies, to make sure nothing happens to challenge the huge corporation's business technological base, their "intellectual territory." Protects their investors; what else do you want?

Another way the huge corporations protect their existing intellectual property technological base, is by making sure that no one comes up with something better. This is done by requiring workers in technological fields, to sign an "employment agreement" that not only keeps them from stealing the company's intellectual property - the "employment agreement's" apparent intent - but also steals any and all ideas about anything that the employee might suddenly think of on or off the job. Those hands-on workers are the ones most likely to come up with lateral field ideas for innovation, since they are fascinated by the potentials of innovation, and are ever matching up their background knowledge with whatever they encounter in life, on or off the job. And so they are the ones most likely to come up with the really innovative new approaches. To prevent them from leaving and starting their own company based on their own innovative idea, the "employment agreement" forbids them from doing that. Thus, the nation is deprived of countless advances that would have solved problems and made life more bountiful. But it protects the various big employer's profit bottom line. The employee, who most likely is living with little surplus income from the job, cannot get patent protection from his/her innovative idea, which has nothing to do with their job or what they have seen others do on the job there. The employer claims ownership of all such ideas for innovation, but has no interest whatsoever in developing or making the new thing available to customers; so the idea is just dead, right there.

So, is the patent system achieving what it was intended to do? Imperfectly, at best.

The gaining of patents has merely become a game tool among businesses, patents mere pawns in their monopoly business games.

Gone is its original intent, to protect the innovative folks from predators.

Yet for sure, some businesses will hire a bunch of engineers to strive to produce a management-defined specific innovative thing; and that specific innovative thing deserves a patent's protection in the classical sense.

Yet the original intent of the patent system, to prevent loss of innovative product knowledge, and eventually make it fully available to all, by granting the originator exclusive right to produce the products utilizing that innovation but for a specific limited time only, has resulted in not only the "patent agreement" technique for suppressing innovation, but also the widespread "industrial espionage" against the backyard home inventors, making sure nothing becomes patentable by them, and thus unable to get financing for making their new product; the innovation dies right there, and thus all the consumers lose what might have been, as a result.

America has come a long way since the U S Patent system was set up. Could there be a major revision devised, so as to both reward innovation, yet also make such innovation immediately available to all?

This is something worth thinking about.

Some things seem headed a bit in that direction already. Open-source software, for one. Creative Commons licensing, for another. Yet these do not reward the innovators; they merely are some means for enabling some innovations not to just die due to strangulation by the intellectual-property-territory tools of big business, who would simply have grabbed any loose ideas and patent them as if they had done the work - sometimes patenting just to prevent others from utilizing the ideas. Copycats have free use of the innovative ideas, but now they need to acknowledge their sources for the ideas their products are based upon. At least the originators get their name mentioned, even if no other reward. And, that often is enough thanks.

Yet, sometimes an innovative idea is taken and run with, by a talented person skilled in actualizing such innovations, and squeezing hordes of money out of it, by them knowing how to manipulate the system. That kind of skill and effort surely deserves reward for making new product available to the consumer. They sometimes become billionaires over such doings.

And I wonder, how fair is it that they are billionaires due to their excellent business skills having achieved; yet the original innovative concepts on which their fortunes were based, get only Creative Commons names mentioned, but those innovators may be living in poverty.

This does not lure people to do the work of coming up with innovative ideas for solving problems or enabling new opportunities in our lives.

Maybe the system needs some new inspection, and wisdom applied, to match the world as it is now.

Pondering what has gone wrong in this country and why

Pondering what has gone wrong in this country, increasingly so in the past decade or so, America seems to have been carved up into territories by businesses that do not have the responsibility to fulfill all the needs of their territories, but only have the responsibility to their investors to derive the most profit from the territory. Considering the principle of products being market-driven, how can a product be utilized if it is not made available to the consumer, and adequately so? The consumer can vote for a product only by buying or not buying it; and cannot vote for a product that the business does not provide, yet is in its exclusive business territory.

This also assumes that the advertising industry has made the knowledge of the availability of the product to the potential consumer, of course.

To keep daily life manageable by businesses, there are many ways that big business can suppress technologies from being available to the consumer, as part of business games, such as patenting a process yet not utilizing the process to produce products; with the patent, nobody else can produce the related products either. And a business very likely will do that if the alternate technology would not bring as much profit as the existing product line; the consumer loses, and the principle of being market-driven fails.

There are also other ways for businesses to claim territories of various types too; each territory is merely a claim to reap profit in the territory but has no responsibility to economically make available all that is needed by consumers regarding that territory.

Corporations are of course managed, and management is about control, toward predefined goals. Those goals frequently center around some particular product widget or other resource within the business territory. The management team prepares a plan of action with an efficient path toward market; anything, including new ideas, could derail the whole management plan, and so ideas are stopped in their tracks to prevent disruption of the management plan toward the predefined goal.

Businesses, especially large powerful ones, seem to consider the business as a valuable asset to be protected including their particular technological concept base defining their products or services; and that includes fending off upcoming technologies that might provide a superior cost-effective way for the consumer base to achieve what they want; and thus control & suppression of upcoming technologies is a protective mechanism for business. Staying aware of what is upcoming among the ideas from which new technologies arise is part of the business game.

The technological folks that the businessmen hire to do the technological part of the business, often have a lifetime fascination with the technology arena and the broader potentials of what can be done; and tend to have personal interests in advancing the technological arena's capabilities. But those same technological types of people, such as scientists, engineers and technicians, need to have a job working for a business somewhere and that means they are under the control of businessmen, corporations, who have the different above-mentioned profit and control interests as their motives, instead of the pure advancement of a technological field.

Thus the need for the "employment agreement" signing with the employer, as a condition of the technical types having a job so they can pay their bills etc, which (unfortunately for the rest of the nation) enables the aggregate corporate system to control the ideas that would possibly upset the business as usual requirements of easy effective management; or worse yet for the concretized business, having a superior product available to the consumer based on the new inspiration of some maverick technical type person. The technical types naively assume the corporate employer ought to be overjoyed and grateful for the new idea that enables new products and services, at least until the first run-in with management who does not want anything to change their laboriously prepared plans of action they had created to fulfill their job, and would be terrified at the thought of some new idea for a technology that would put them out of business. Any employee with ideas about the technology arena which is quite interesting to them, who does not want to just let their ideas die due to blockage by their stubborn employers, has to go work for some other employer, which involves the resume and contacting prior employer and thus the blacklisting passes on in the career very likely preventing getting a job anymore, even in a totally different field, a daunting prospect for the technical type folks.

In other words, one way long used by big business to suppress such disruptive alternate potentially useful products even though needed by the consumer, is through the employment system, where to have a job, particularly as a technical employee such as engineer or technician, the employee must sign an "employment agreement" to get a job, and that agreement is that the employee will not produce any creative idea other than those directed by the employer to be created in fulfillment of the specific job, if any; thus if a creative idea spontaneously comes up for the employee, whether or not the idea is related in the slightest to the field of interest of the employer, it must be given over free of charge to the employer, and the employer has no responsibility to evaluate or develop the idea, but only has the power to prevent anybody else from using the idea either.

And they typically exercise that power, perhaps as a gentleman's agreement among all corporations, to prevent wild cards from happening their lush business game jobs. There may also be an elitism ego kind of thing involved, since highly paid management is boss and any techie type who claims to have a way seen as interfering with management's control of things via some new idea, needs to be disciplined to get back in line or get kicked out of work, to prove who is boss there.

The requirement to sign the "employment agreement" as a condition of employment pretends to protect the corporation from having its ideas stolen by the employees, yet the corporation is already set up to utilize any actual job-created idea to create those products, so how could an employee compete with that by going off on his own to make a competing business, in the rare case of a really new idea that the company wants to use as developed in the course of employment? The ones who are actually stealing such ideas are instead the employers in the vast majority of instances; and their robbing is not just of the innovative techie employee but also of the American consumer in general who are thus deprived of new opportunities enabled by the potential products and services. This situation has been going on for at lest the past 40 years, in my experience, and the nation's increasing lack of technical leadership reflects it.

Since most really new ideas occur to the individual almost at random times about things they have long wondered about, and rarely apply to what they are employed to produce, this has long heavily suppressed the creativity of the technical people of our country, and thus blocking the products the country sometimes so desperately needs. The "employment agreement" is not only deeply unethical but is formally illegal in many states other than applies to what they are utilizing on the job now for their business; but to free up the idea, the employee would have to have the money to hire a lawyer etc to fight the huge lawyer resources of the employer, and also likely lose their job in the process, and so it is lots easier and wiser to just let the idea die right there; thus depriving the nation of the potential products that would have been enabled by those ideas.

The electoral system that enables the American people to elect people for power & control, cannot similarly choose wiser corporate business managers who have the needs of the nation in mind as their guiding principles, instead merely of the highest dividends paid to their investors as their sole guide. The system just does not work that way, unfortunately. Even corporations who are lavishly fed by government contracts, typically see it only as a means of getting income and are not interested in advancing the field other than specifically doing exactly what they are paid to do. This effect is not limited to just aerospace, either.

Even the celebrated first moon landing that happened 40 years ago in the Apollo Project, would not have happened if it had not been perceived as part of providing for the common defense - the Cold War was ongoing and the fear was that the Russians were going to build missile bases on the Moon aimed at the US; so we had to be able to get there first to control the Moon situation. The placard was left on the lunar lander stating that "we came in peace for all mankind" but we would not have done the expensive trip if it were for that. Private business management would not have done such a project on their own, even to save the nation, since their guide is the easiest profit dollar, not the product's usefulness itself. And usually the easiest profit dollar means suppressing unasked-for innovative ideas so as to keep business-as-usual ongoing; and the "Employment Agreement" condition for employment provides the tool and justification for doing that, to the loss of everybody else.

These are huge problems that block the use of the supposed native creativity of the nation, the fabled "Yankee Ingenuity" that is needed to get things going again. So, guess how this is going to play out, most likely?

The "Employment Agreement" that actually is to kill technological innovation in America

Although I endeavor to keep my posts fairly clear-headed and understandingly descriptive of the various sides of issues involved, my long standing irritation and frustration about the mechanisms whereby corporate business typically suppresses all technological ideas except those towards its specific products and then only if in total control of by those specific businessmen, this is a post where I have not first completely leveled my frustration and irritation at what I see as a major wrong-doing by the many large technical-oriented corporations which I worked for in my career in electronics; and no doubt the same thing occurs in most, if not all other large corporations in this country. And to be fair and balanced, indeed there are concerns that are probably valid for the corporations too, but the result is the over-reacting by the more powerful in the contest; and in the case of corporate business vs an impoverished individual, guess who is the more powerful.

Back in the Eighties I even wrote up what seemed to be a fair way to deal with the problem, but I could find no way to get it to the attention of people; even corporate management would be unable to evaluate it objectively as it put them in as the villains for the most part; and anyway they were too powerful to need to make any concessions. It did seem a potential solution; and indeed, if extended far enough, could supplant the now effectively rather useless patent system. Perhaps later I will add to this blog a resurrected version of that suggested solution.

For now, I am composing and posting what I see as the various aspects of a major problem in America; one that has not gone away simply by ignoring it; and I have seen it in a lot of instances over the past four decades and more.

Probably another reason that I have not written extensively on this major problem which the US faces, is that I would face more corporate-political wrath, and currently there is much rule by a run-amok business culture led by only the blinding guiding vision of maximum profits for the least effort... not to mention some egotistical elitism often involved in the mix. And corporate business can be ruthless toward the individual. (Another subject that comes to mind once again now is that of "Does might make right?" but I'm not going there now; one ultra-complex problem at a time please, if possible; even if they are somewhat interrelated.) So, here goes:

Contrary to an old adage, the world does not beat a path to one's door to buy your technological creative goodie from you; although you might return home some day and find it gone from your file cabinets and erased from your computer files; and more amazingly, though it may take years, eventually the last bits even gone missing from your bank safe deposit box (such as when banks buy each other out and physically move the bank with its safe deposit boxes; or, one gets foggy-minded unrelentingly about making the payment for the safe deposit box on time and rush to the bank to find they have drilled out your lock even though somehow they had ignored that you had finally made the payment on time.) These things have indeed happened to me; and "they" would no doubt now smugly say "prove it."

"Industrial espionage" is routinely and almost openly practiced among corporations, to find out what their competitors are up to, so as to help guide their own business plans; thus sicing the operators on an unemployed individual unprotected out there, is duck soup to those operators, masters of the arts of secretive snoop and deception.

Also, average people nowadays seem to require advertising sales pitches and some store to buy at; otherwise, there is nothing of interest to them. And, to businessmen, apparently they think that potentially competitive concepts must be suppressed, hidden and destroyed, so that they themselves will be able to continue to thrive.

It takes a large group to physically manifest and get a new thing to market; so it is reasonable for an idea-person to seek to get into good terms with a corporate business in hopes of figuring out how to communicate one's great ideas to the leaders of the business, and surely they would see the value and welcome one into the fold as one who helps guide what the corporate business does. Or so my naive Aspie mentality thought, rather stubbornly believing in the eventual wisdom and integrity of guiding businesspeople, corporation after corporation showed my that that image of business management was quite wrong, not just in the first unlucky try but in the other jobs with other companies too. Anyway, I also had to earn a living at the same time, so working in some lowly position (such as an engineering technician) for a corporation so as to have the opportunity to show them one's creative ability through ideas for new products for them so as to make things better for everybody, amazingly got automatically virtually destroyed when walking in through their door, when the so-called "Employment Agreement" had to be signed as a condition of employment, a legal document that declares that all of the employee's ideas and inventions of any kind whatsoever freely belong only to the employer (and the employer had no responsibility toward the creative ideas or to the employee, for their objective evaluation and development and marketing; the ideas were simply owned automatically and shelved, out of reach now by anybody.) Sign it or don't work; no work thus no way to pay bills or buy groceries. So, sign and hope they have better sense in reality. Nope; it generally was found to be a "casting pearls before swine" type result. (but not always; a few recognized and acknowledged my talent along the way, very rarely.) Lots of my concepts and ideas got ignored or rejected, and rarely did they later acknowledge that many years later the very thing I had earlier offered, was made into working reality by someone else, who additionally gave no credit to me. The company people were totally absorbed on the track on which they started, and to them the "employment agreement document" was just to ensure no one stole their pre-loaded company goodies. It all maintained the illusion that the company personnel, particularly management, were the only ones capable of improving the company's output, thus guaranteeing security in their jobs. Don't rock the boat, it is hard enough for them to keep all their ducks in a row.

So at this point, I can see a consistent pattern that ought to be noticed by Americans if they are going to fix the big mess we are no longer just potentially in; the mess is shouted on the front pages of the news nowadays. It is possible that the greatest cause of the collapse of America's innovative capacity, quite possibly the root cause of the "sick economy" recession ongoing, has been the unobvious so-called "Employment Agreement" required of most corporate technical workers. This "Employment Agreement" is a condition of employment at nearly all corporations, and stifles the grass roots of innovation, the people who are actually involved in the creation of technologies, unlike most manager mentalities, who are the ones directing what can be done by the technical types. The technical type workers, having to work for some corporation for a living, have all their rights to their spontaneous innovative ideas taken away from them automatically by their employers as a condition of employment; and the employers do not even need to take any action to develop those ideas they have forced away from their employees. Thus the stimulus for ideas for spontaneous inventions, the starting point for all great innovations as well as small ones, is crushed, and the technical types know it from when they have to start to work. Some states had passed laws against corporations to prevent them from controlling employees innovative ideas unless done as part of the paid assigned job; but the big corporations failed to obey the law, saying the employee would have to fight the company in court, and employees are there to earn a paycheck and have no money for lawyers and a big court battle over each little idea. Thus, the situation remained the same.

By crushing the baseline of innovation of Yankee Ingenuity, and having done it for probably half a century in America, the spirit of innovation has been crushed out of Americans.

The psychology of why corporations have done this is likely that managers do not understand spontaneous innovation, and see it as only interruptions to their planned out paths of bringing their predetermined products to market, is what the managers are paid for; and to make the implication that the employees will be stealing the company's ideas, makes them smug and covers up the theft the corporation is doing of the employees ideas, and the corporation has the money and power to control what happens. (I recall only meeting one employee who was such an idea-thief; and he was such a master of social deception that he e weaseled himself into the good graces of top management, while crushing the careers of the other employees from whom he had stolen their ideas.)

It is a real mess; and only America as America can fix it, since the corporations won't fix it because they see spontaneous innovation as something the managers rarely can do (and sometimes egotistically reinforce that attitude by using the word 'creative" in context to imply the meaning of "creative" is equal to "lying"); and they must keep their top esteem to keep their plush lives, managing to keep a steady-as-she-goes business as usual mode; that is their job. No wild cards of spontaneous inventions are allowed to foul up the nicely planned ultimate achievement of the company's original goals. But all the time, all the baseline innovations that the technical employees have as their nature, are getting told "NO!" at the instant of their birth.

Thus the only innovations that come to reality are those necessary to produce the originally-foresee goal product of the company. And, often that goal product is designed to make the company the most profit, not to provide the customer with the best product for the money, so even innovations the employees have are not welcome even if they relate directly to the job they are to do, blocked because it would be a disruption to the course of action laid out by management.

Is there a way to fix the problem, even if there were a way to get the corporate management to actually comply? That is a subject for some of the best of Yankee Ingenuity, if any sparks of it can be found still alive and functional. Possibly it can be declared (and fully somehow enforce) that all such "employment agreements" are absolutely null and void, and that the corporation is quite able to protect the innovations that it has actually employed and paid to be developed, through their virtual franchises in the field. Also, somehow every employee would need to be made fully aware of the new freedom thus given, which had long been crushed out of them, along with the awareness to not use company resources toward innovative ideas other than the minor costs of holding onto the idea until one can get to where the idea can be fully written to be remembered; ideas usually happen at any hour anywhere, unrelated to what is being done at the moment, and thus can also sometimes occur when on paid time at work; an idea often has to be jotted down at the instant of conception, ans the integration into a solution which the back of the mind has been working on, soon gets overwritten by ongoing attentions to teh tasks at hand. So those few moments are merely a "break time activity" to jot down the spontaneous inspiration for innovation.

Benevolent corporations could then find way to be a partner to employees in their innovative spirit renewed, as a company benefit, with invitations for the employer to be a partner in the development of the new inventions that would spontaneously start happening. But, it may take a long time for people to allow their creative spark to grow back into life again, even if it has not been stamped out completely.

And so then, with the grass roots innovator types having their hands now untied, eventually America can be grow to be the great innovator once again, something desperately needed to pull us out of the recession. Even if management then finds there are a few more things to do, so as to make a tiny space for the innovations' births and not strangle their growth; meantime keep on getting the corporate job done, even that might be done better with the employees no longer being so frustrated, and with renewed belief in a good working relationship with the corporation and its management staff, no longer feeling so much in a master-slave mode ruled by blind tyrants; but instead now as mutual cooperators understanding the special skills of each kind of person, whether manager or technical producer, all are needed to make it all happen. And those new sparks of spontaneous innovation of all kinds, can again have a chance at life, and some will become the new creations America needs to survive and thrive, originally totally unguessed by management.