The fundamental problem is that the monetary systems of the modern world are all designed on the Wile E. Coyote principle. As long as you never look down, the system works.

In the U.S. there is ~$14 trillion in government debt. There exists tens of trillion more in private debt. But only $2 trillion exists in bonafide, actual, real honest-to-goodness dollars (I'm including in that count accounts at the federal reserve, not just paper money).

How is this system sustainable? How can any of this debt ever be repaid? Well, since everyone knows the government can print money, most people do not worry about the government being insolvent. A dollar T-Bill is as good as a dollar green bill, both are backed by the full faith and credit of the USG. If the government needs to, it can always print money to redeem mature treasury debt. Since no one worries about insolvency, most people would rather have treasury bills (or a deposit account or CD backed by TBills) because they pay interest. So the $14 trillion rolls over in perpetuity. In reality, $14 trillion is not really debt, since it is nonsensical to speak of debt that one owes oneself and can negate by printing paper. The $14 trillion is the money supply - T-Bills are just a dividend paying form of money.

However, the situation in Europe is much more sticky. Europe runs the same type of monetary system. There are tens of trillions in Euro denominated debt, but only $1.3 trillion in actual bonafide Euros. However - unlike with the dollar - the countries that created this debt do not have the power to create Euros. So as suddenly as markets lose confidence in the debt, it becomes impossible to roll over the debt and pay it off. There simply are not enough Euros in the world to pay off even a small amount of debt. Every single country in Europe would be insolvent if investors look down and lose confidence. Even Germany could not pay its debt if investors demanded redemption at maturity The European Union government could order the european central bank to print money to buy out the debt, but this creates all sorts of political conflict as it results in transferring real wealth from country A to country B.

So that's why Europe is stuck. It adopted a monetary system that works when the government controls the currency, and adopted it in a situation where governments cannot print money. No one in Europe has the brains or authority to actually refactor and re-architect the system, so they are just muddling around, following the path of least resistance and putting in stop-gap measures.

My own pet solution is on my blog: http://intellectual-detox.com/europes-crisis/ If anybody from the ECB reads Hacker News, I am available for hire as a consultant at the low, low fee of 1 ounce of gold an hour :-)

As a technology founder who later got an MBA, I've found a divide among the technology and business camps on patents and trademarks.

Tech people I know generally agree that patents and copyright stifle innovation. They may once have helped, but no longer.

Business people I know believe patents help create entrepreneurship. They think about it from a founder's perspective (they haven't founded companies themselves) and think patents would help that person establish a foothold against incumbents. They ask, "Without patent protection, how can someone get paid for their creation?"

As I see it, the business people don't have relevant experience. They're talking about a myth that doesn't exist anymore if it ever did. People who innovate and create have relevant experience and know how patents and copyright are used in practice.

At least this judge understands too. I hope his acts catch on.

The more relevant question seems "Without patent protection, how can patent lawyers get paid?" because patent lawyers is what the system creates, at the expense of technological innovation, as I see it anyway.

Craigslist isn't a charity. It is sad that they don't innovate, but it's not the responsibility of the incumbents to make the job of their would-be replacements easier. In fact that's bad business.

It would be nice if Craigslist created a platform that others could build on. Something like Facebook. http://apps.craigslist.org/mapper. I bet people would build things on their data for free even without any way of making money off it.

People have long been worked up over net neutrality.

But what about payment neutrality? It seems like it's just as important, if not more. Why don't we hear enough from people demanding laws that prevent payment processors above a certain size from discriminating based on categories of goods and services?

Why can't we make it illegal for MasterCard and Visa to stop processing payments destined for Wikileaks, or PayPal to stop processing payments to VPN providers? This seems to be to be a clear abuse of monopoly power or at least market share, and there isn't even a whiff of transparent, due process in it.

Double blogspam: three-paragraph summary of a five-paragraph summary of a six-paragraph Economist article.

Incidentally, if you're wondering why this kind of stuff only seems to happen in the brain, in broad terms the answer is this: almost every other cell type in your body has the luxury of committing suicide (technical term: apoptosis) and being replaced by other cells of the same type which are growing and proliferating. For example, if a virus infects one of your intestinal epithelial cells, that cell can trigger it's self-destruct signal pathway (or a cytotoxic T-cell can trigger it externally) and initiate programmed cell death, thereby containing the infection (note that apoptosis functions to effectively demolish the entire contents of the cell, not just tear it apart and release whatever is inside).

In contrast neurons generally do not proliferate much after you're born (there's some debate about this, but even so a particular neutron is valuable because of the connections it has made, which are irreplaceable), so having each neutron kill itself when something goes bad would shortly leave you without a functioning nervous system. So neurons have to resort to more "creative" measures to clean up problems without destroying their entire cell bodies (e.g. autophagy, in which the cell cordons off a part of itself and then digests it). Naturally, these mechanisms are not as effective as demolishing the entire cell, so some problems can arise that neurons can't handle. But they are programmed not to kill themselves under almost any circumstances, so they continue limping along with only partial functionality or none at all.