[HN Gopher] Was Germany's 19th century industrial expansion due ...
___________________________________________________________________
Was Germany's 19th century industrial expansion due to an absence
of copyright?
Author : _Microft
Score : 238 points
Date : 2021-09-18 10:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spiegel.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spiegel.de)
| [deleted]
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| What I have heard is that Germany was kind of what China is
| today. First they produced cheap copies of the high tech coming
| out of places like the UK. Eventually they established quality
| standards (the TUV, an organisation ensuring quality of products,
| still exists today), and eventually "Made in Germany" even became
| a marker of quality.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Yes the requirement for "made in Germany" was invented in the
| UK to protect the UK products from cheap knock offs from
| Germany. A similar thing happened with Japanese car makers
| initially, and more recently Korean ones, it seems to be a
| pattern that to get up to a certain level one has to copy the
| superior products of another country and after requiring
| sufficient knowledge one can surpass them.
| sprafa wrote:
| You should read the book "How Asia Works" which makes the
| persuasive argument that's the case with every single rising
| industrial power. They are always considered "cheap knock
| offs" until they start producing stuff that's higher quality.
| Happened with Japan too.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| "Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret
| History of Capitalism" is another one.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| Given the size and diversity of their industrial consumer
| output, I doubt they will achieve an average of 'marker of
| quality' for quite a while. Phones are probably these highest
| quality consumer goods produced in china at the moment.
| bserge wrote:
| Try most electronics.
|
| Their problem is that "made in China" has a negative
| connotation and they produce a lot of cheap stuff, which
| inevitably breaks or doesn't work properly so people just go
| "damn Chinese shit".
|
| It seems they're getting to the point where the cheapest
| stuff is made in other countries.
|
| Have to wonder what happens when the world runs out of
| cheaper countries to outsource to.
| plmu wrote:
| I can only assume that, just like "made in germany" in the
| 19th century, after a while the "made in china" will
| transform from a sign of inferior, into a sign of superior
| quality. I think we're already seeing that.
|
| Also, the increased assertiveness also led to military
| agression (2 world wars). China seems to be copying that
| too, alas.
| bserge wrote:
| Likely, "made in Japan" had the same journey (also I'll
| always remember that scene in Back to the Future).
| mlinksva wrote:
| Love seeing discussions of Eckhard Hoffner's comparative work on
| English and German copyright history. This Spiegel article has
| probably given it the most visibility. Hoffner has written
| extensively on the history of books and copyright, all in German
| (which I do not read). https://www.fatto.de/wiki/ and
| https://twitter.com/EckhardHoeffner are their site and twitter.
|
| I think https://archive.org/details/102026Band2 is the relevant
| book.
|
| For how copyright restricts learning in other parts of the world
| now, I like
| https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol92/iss1/7...
| zeristor wrote:
| I have wondered that with so much knowledge freely available on
| the web, via YouTube, and via sci-hub too should we expect to a
| large increase in new ideas and quickening of pace of the world?
|
| Some knowledge could be quite esoteric, and whilst books would
| help, experience, exposure, and mentoring onemight might expect
| to be more important.
|
| Also I would have thought one would have to have a lot of
| experience to discern what is right, wrong, or not relevant, more
| of an issue if you have a huge amount of information available.
|
| Perhaps the key thing would be works like the academic review
| papers that survery an area of knowledge and look to integrate it
| together.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > Also I would have thought one would have to have a lot of
| experience to discern what is right, wrong, or not relevant,
| more of an issue if you have a huge amount of information
| available.
|
| Agreed, have you heard of a new open acces project by the
| scientist Alex Freeman, called Octopus? I'm super excited about
| it:
|
| _" The overall idea behind the new platform, which I called
| Octopus, is to break the standard unit of publication up into
| eight smaller stages or pieces. These include formulated
| scientific problems, hypotheses, methods and protocols, data,
| analysis, interpretation, and real-world applications. The
| eighth piece is reviews where people share their comments about
| the other stages, but it's also treated as a publication itself
| because it is a constructive piece of collaboration.
| Researchers will be able to revisit their publications to
| acknowledge others' comments or suggestions and even include
| some of the useful reviewers as authors, with the old version
| remaining available so that readers can track the evolution of
| ideas.
|
| The formulated scientific problem automatically becomes the
| beginning of a chain, and all the other pieces are vertically
| linked upward. If you have a great hypothesis, you can publish
| that and link it straight up to the problem that it is trying
| to address. And if you've collected some small amount of data,
| you can publish that, linking it directly up to the protocol
| that you followed. It will also be possible to create
| horizontal links between publications; maybe somebody has come
| up with an amazing algorithm whilst studying starling flocking
| behavior and somebody else working on oil pipelines has decided
| to use it.
|
| Octopus will thus allow researchers to publish in much smaller
| author groups, and that can make the system much more
| accountable and meritocratic. If, say, you're an applied
| statistician, at the moment you're very rarely a first author
| on anything. But with Octopus, statisticians can do analyses of
| anybody else's data and get credit for it as the author of that
| publication. Octopus will also be made language-agnostic
| through automatic translation to lower language barriers and
| broaden access."_
|
| https://www.science.org/careers/2018/11/meet-octopus-new-vis...
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Another solid argument for serious copyright reform.
|
| It's not only 19th Century Germany that's demonstrated that ready
| access to information by many is one of the best ways to develop
| a country but it's been paralleled by China who has only paid lip
| service to copyright for decades. That's been demonstrated over
| and over in recent years.
|
| I'd go as far as to say that if the US doesn't seriously reform
| copyright and patent law it'll not only fall behind China but
| will fall so far behind that in decades to come it'll become just
| an also-ran.
|
| Look at it this way, when quality textbooks can cost anything
| upwards of $200 - $300 due to controlled monopolistic markets
| then many are deprived of access to the information they contain.
| I'd even put myself in that class, I can't afford books at that
| price and I know many others can't either.
|
| I'm not against reasonable copyright and patent law but what we
| have now is not reasonable by a long shot. As I see it, these
| laws are only benefiting a few and they're having a
| disproportionate negative effect on the economics and wellbeing
| of the country.
|
| Incidentally, one of the worst aspects of these laws is how
| easily they allow opportunistic people/organizations to lockup
| information that was once in the public domain by artifice and
| subterfuge.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers
| -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply
| without fear of punishment -- breathing down their necks.
| Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated
| approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of
| publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for
| their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the
| masses.
|
| Not only that but there would be incentive for every printer to
| print everything they could get their hands on, in quantities
| enough to saturate the markets, with the quickest to act at
| scale gaining the market share advantage.
|
| Knowing people, this could give an exponentially unfair
| disadvantage to cultures which restricted this type of activity
| beyond a certain extent.
|
| >The prospect of a wide readership motivated scientists in
| particular to publish the results of their research. In
| Hoffner's analysis, "a completely new form of imparting
| knowledge established itself. Essentially the only method for
| disseminating new knowledge that people of that period had
| known was verbal instruction from a master or scholar at a
| university. Now, suddenly, a multitude of high-level treatises
| circulated throughout the country.
|
| It was like they got the "information superhighway" of the
| horse-and-buggy era exclusively without parallel, and new
| scientific data (always controversial in some way) was heavily
| involved consuming significant bandwidth, plus an ever-
| increasing multitude of users rapidly consuming information &
| new sources arising (so things could go viral) like never
| before. Maybe even allowing for some deeper kind of echo
| chamber to have more widespread resoundment.
|
| It would also seem like any division between the well-informed
| and the badly-misinformed could be magnified.
|
| What could go wrong?
|
| Then when copyrights did become established, the flow of new
| scientific information was badly choked so people just had to
| make do with the old stuff. Still that might be a more informed
| (or misinformed as the case may be) position than others who
| had never had any period of information freedom at all.
| FabHK wrote:
| I've first studied in Germany, then later UK and US. The prices
| of textbooks in the latter two shocked me.
|
| In Germany, as a general rule, you didn't need to buy any
| textbooks. The professor would lecture, the exercises were
| handed out printed and were fully self-contained (not "Exercise
| 12.3 on page 114"), and there were any number of relevant books
| available in the library. If the professor sold his own book,
| people in class would get a "Horerschein" and get it at a
| further discount from the already low price (say $20 instead of
| $30). Student clubs would sell "scripts" containing the lecture
| material, summaries, and formulae.
|
| A 2006 article [1] suggests US students need to spend around
| $1000 per annum for text books. (The article compares the text
| book market to the prescription drug market.) In Germany, $1000
| covers tuition including the "Semesterticket" (pass for the
| entire public transit system, state wide), and probably all the
| books you need.
|
| I mean, if even The Economist complains about textbook prices
| [2], then you know there's a problem.
|
| [1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497025.pdf
|
| [2] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2014/08/16/why-
| textb...
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Right. The cost of textbooks is outrageous and any scheme
| that can reduce their cost should be tried.
|
| The most objectionable and outrageous trick major publishers
| do is to regularly bring out new editions wherein they
| deliberately change the the chapter and exercise numbers,
| this then almost renders older editions useless for any
| student who has one cannot easily follow what's going on.
| When the teacher says go to exercise number '123' and their
| book says '89' an inordinate amount of time is wasted chasing
| up fellow students with newer books to help identity it.
|
| This not only seriously disadvantages poorer less well off
| students but also it's wasteful on resources as older books
| are just dumped as the consequence and become landfill.
|
| In my opinion, publishers who are caught doing this ought to
| be blackballed by universities, educational institutions,
| etc. in that they not recommend those textbooks for their
| courses.
| agumonkey wrote:
| > to lockup information that was once in the public domain by
| artifice and subterfuge.
|
| could you give examples, I'd love to read more about that
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Easy to find examples, here one that gained notoriety ad some
| kindergartens were sued:
|
| https://www.bestlawyers.com/article/can-i-sing-happy-
| birthda...
| kragen wrote:
| _Happy Birthday_ is probably the best-known example.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| There are many instances and they take many forms. It's a
| subject too big to do full justice here so I'll give a few
| instances/headings to start things off.
|
| - Treaties between nations that either extended copyright law
| or force the nation with the most liberal copyright laws into
| doing a back flip over copyright liberalization.
|
| - Changing copyright law as in the US where stuff in the
| public domain went back into copyright (complicated, read
| Wiki, etc.) This was the result of corporate lobbying.
|
| - The recent scouring of stuff that was effectively in the
| public domain and clearly reclassifing it into a copyrighted
| domain. For example manufacturer service manuals that were
| once made readily available were withdrawn, or restricted to
| authoritized service personnel only, or were reissued after
| being heavily redacted. This is part of the _Right to Repair_
| argument in that an unstated right to repair had always been
| in existence but when manufacturers withdrew once freely
| available information about products we now have to fight for
| a new right that not long ago no one would ever have thought
| as a right.
|
| - Copyright owners lobbying government to tighten/change the
| law on ophan works - those ones where there's no known
| copyright owner so they would have less competition. If I
| recall about 70% of all works fall into this category. BTW,
| there's a lot more to this than I'm mentioning here.
|
| - Iteas and stuff that's been common practice and thus not
| documented gatherered up and put into the private (now-
| copyrighted) domain by unscrupulous carpetbaggers.
|
| - Programmers using public domain information, modifying it
| in trivial ways then claiming copyright over it. Obfuscation
| through copmliation makes it difficult to unravel these
| tricks.
|
| There's much more, here's a link I've just found that adds a
| few more: https://blog.kitware.com/stealing-from-the-public-
| domain/
| beebeepka wrote:
| Regarding textbook pricing.
|
| I once ran into a person that said no one should be able to
| educate themselves/be educated for free.
|
| Guy was American. One of the weirdest things I've heard my
| entire life. Imagine having people with similar mindset running
| the show
| anovikov wrote:
| He has a point. Crackdown on the higher education is coming
| because there is artificial, and needless, high demand for it
| - resulting in high prices and most people getting it just
| wasting years of their lives, additionally getting in debt.
| Much fewer people need to get higher education. It won't be
| much different if it was free: main thing is people wasting
| their time + becoming upset and angry at the society,
| perceiving themselves as the 'intellectual elite' that isn't
| getting 'valued' enough and unable to get jobs matching their
| qualifications. Because yeah, those jobs don't exist: society
| needs builders and plumbers, not masters of English
| literature and Sociology.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| You don't need any school to be a Plumber, or Builder.
|
| You don't even a vocational degree to do those either.
|
| You start working be it a union, or non-union, and take a
| test later on if you want a license. (In California)
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" You don't need any school to be a Plumber, or
| Builder"_
|
| Well, I'd certainly not let anyone with no schooling work
| on my home, especially so if they cannot read or write.
|
| How the hell would they read instructions or building
| regulations?
| silvestrov wrote:
| > resulting in high prices
|
| only in the US.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _w#st#ng their time_
|
| Education is to build the person. It is to build a society
| of more refined members, which means, to reduce the
| collective damages that come from ignorance. It is both
| personal elevation and social duty.
|
| The cancer of ignorance is fought also so that people are
| able to do their own job, the cognitive structure of which
| does not just stand up on its own isolated supports. Only
| hours ago I had to find myself in front of somebody who
| could not do his job owing to underdevelopment.
| anovikov wrote:
| What is the purpose of "society with refined members"
| when majority of these members need to do thinking-free,
| menial jobs? It only builds up discontent. Result is that
| the government needs more violence applied against people
| to keep them in check, or the society blows up in
| endless, unfixable conflict where people just ask for the
| impossible and won't settle on less than that. Especially
| in a democratic society where applying violence may be
| impossible or hard to push through (catch-22 of people
| having to vote for it), it can simply end the country -
| any country.
|
| This is how Soviet Union ended. "Workers and peasants"
| were 100% OK with Communism. It's the educated masses who
| were too educated and did jobs that did not justify their
| qualification, and lived in deep poverty, ended it.
| kergonath wrote:
| > What is the purpose of "society with refined members"
| when majority of these members need to do thinking-free,
| menial jobs?
|
| Enough culture to recognise a demagogue when they see
| one? Enough basic scientific knowledge to avoid falling
| into wellness scams and understand how climate change
| works? In a democracy, a well-educated people is
| absolutely required. You don't _need_ to apply all of
| your knowledge in your daily work; it does not mean
| acquiring it was a waste of time.
|
| > This is how Soviet Union ended. "Workers and peasants"
| were 100% OK with Communism. It's the educated masses who
| were too educated and did jobs that did not justify their
| qualification, and lived in deep poverty, ended it.
|
| The problem with the Soviet Union was not too much
| education. It is also a strange example to pick when
| arguing about democracies.
| anovikov wrote:
| In a democracy, people who don't depend on the
| government, but other way around, are absolutely
| required. It doesn't matter if they are much educated or
| not - when they vote with their money, NOT for "free"
| money they get from government, everyone gets very
| rational. And universal higher education doesn't help
| with that.
|
| And Soviet Union is a good example because a democracy
| would fare worse in same conditions. Soviets could apply
| unlimited violence to keep people in check, democratic
| government can't do that.
| kergonath wrote:
| It's the same argument that was used to restrict voting
| to landowners. It's a fallacy. Lots of people are
| careless or misguided even with their money and there is
| no indication that rich people, who are those that can
| afford unsubsidised higher education, are better at
| running a country than poorer ones. And even if that were
| not the case, you don't spend public money like a family
| budget.
|
| I am not quite sure how rewriting history somehow
| validates your argument. The USSR was in a very specific
| situation and you'll never know how a democracy would
| have fared. In all likelihood, a democracy would not have
| ended up in that specific situation anyway.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _What is the purpose of "society with refined members"_
|
| To enable democracy, which depends on a population
| endowed with well developed judgement to work properly.
|
| And to enable society, which depends on counting a large
| amount of members the individual will trust,
| professionally and personally, to be hold as a value
| triggering synergy.
|
| So, to enable widespread civilization, which is required
| to achieve the basicmost goal of a liveable environment.
|
| Cultivation is one of the tentative ways to increase
| civilization. Education shapes the person; the impacts
| from the environment may be random in gain or loss, while
| education comes out of a positively progressive effort.
| It shapes your neighbours and the professionals you rely
| on.
| kwere wrote:
| >It only builds up discontent
|
| as it should, we humans arent here to do menial task but
| to solve problems both personal and societal and MAYBE we
| should give more value to people as factor of production?
| estaseuropano wrote:
| I think you need to realise that people don't exist just
| for others. Why would you want to stop someone from
| pursuing their passion for literature or philosophy? Why
| does everybody need to maximize their utility for society?
| Yes we need plumbers, but why not allow a young person to
| study literature for three years and then become a plumber?
| Plenty go this or a similar route.
|
| In my view the world you (want to) live in looks bleak and
| sad.
| mmarq wrote:
| > Much fewer people need to get higher education.
|
| I really don't see any reasonable scenario where this could
| be true.
|
| > main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset
| and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the
| 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough
|
| If one believes that having a degree (which is 30% of the
| population) makes them part of the elite (which is 1% of
| the population), they should have spent more time in high
| school studying statistics. People with a degree don't see
| themselves as "the elite".
| mucholove wrote:
| There is absolutely no problem getting a higher degree--say
| in literature--and also becoming a plumber.
|
| You can study history and become a bricklayer.
|
| What is definitely wrong and abhorrent is the expectation
| that:
|
| 1) one is worthy of a so called "white collar" job
|
| 2) that a college degree requires full-time study and a
| campus.
|
| May I also note that there are such a thing as higher
| trades--for example, engineering, architecture, medicine
| and law.
|
| You are not studying some abstract concept when you study
| the above 4. You are preparing yourself to take an exam and
| be qualified to practice a trade.
|
| The rest of the degrees? Open them up. Wish all of us would
| study minimum history and had awareness of different
| structures of government. To me, its so sad that Americans
| can't place the specialness of their country in context and
| protect that which makes it unique in this world--jury
| duty. A plumber, a bricklayer and a cook need to know that
| as well as everyone else.
| jdasdf wrote:
| > There is absolutely no problem getting a higher degree
| --say in literature--and also becoming a plumber.
|
| There is when you're not the one paying for it.
| mucholove wrote:
| So I largely agree with you.
|
| A university or college degree for topics such as
| literature, history, gender studies, etc should not be
| available to you until you have done been certified in a
| trade (be that bricklaying, medicine, law or engineering)
|
| This is why I highlighted that these sorts of degrees
| don't need to be done on a campus, full-time unless
| you're willing to pay for that or have been deemed worthy
| of a scholarship AFTER having completed a vocation.
|
| I do think it would be quite awesome to have these
| available for free again after having achieved skills
| that are very valuable in the workplace. Kind of like
| going to a museum or the way Jews can go on a birthright
| trip.
| vasco wrote:
| You seem to be under an illusion that most people would
| attend university for fun if given the chance, whereas
| coming from a country with free university degrees -
| isn't the case at all.
| freeflight wrote:
| The bottleneck in countries with "free university
| degrees" is not the cost of university, it's the cost
| financing your live while studying.
|
| For young people with no real financial obligations
| that's somewhat easy to accomplish.
|
| For people in the midst of their lifes, working a regular
| job, taking care of a family, it can be very difficult to
| juggle all these obligations at once.
|
| Because even when university is "free" it still requires
| you to invest time.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" Because even when university is "free" it still
| requires you to invest time."_
|
| That's ever so true. I've been to university over several
| periods earlier in my life. The first time there were
| fees but they were manageable by most students (as the
| Government provided reasonably heavy subsidiaries). By
| the next time the government had changed and a more
| enlightened one came in and made all fees (except student
| union fees) free.
|
| This was great for a time until work commitments forced
| me to stop before I'd finished. Then a little later
| another government reversed it all and it even went much
| further - the new fee structure went from free to like
| $50,000 or even double that for some degrees. Thus, my
| lack of time caught me out big-time.
|
| That said, had I had the slightest notion what was going
| to happen then I'd definitely have managed to find the
| time. That's for certain! (I'd not learned the old addage
| don't put off until tomorrow what one can do today.)
| mucholove wrote:
| Illusion like that I am not.
|
| USA: If you're rich and not particularly interested in
| the topics, you to to college to meet people.
|
| Some Euro: I've met many a person who continues to
| "study" to keep the numerous benefits.
|
| Many people just don't care. That dosen't stop me from
| saying my idealistic, and unlikely idea after a word like
| "should".
| vasco wrote:
| Yeah that's true, I was a bit harsh.
| bserge wrote:
| It's not just about the jobs, there are things to learn in
| anything you choose and the connections you make can be
| great.
|
| There's always going to be people who complain about it,
| yeah. A small minority, though.
| mjreacher wrote:
| > society needs builders and plumbers, not masters of
| English literature and Sociology.
|
| There's no reason why someone can't be both. Universities
| weren't originally designed to be job centers, that's what
| vocational education was for. This is also one of the
| problems that I see with the current system is that
| universities are just seen as a way to get a job rather
| than to be educated. The issue of people feeling shit about
| wasting their time or whatever also stems from this issue -
| they came to university to get an easy job afterwards, not
| to learn, and this belief is misleading.
| barrenko wrote:
| Yea, it's also that plumbers subsidize it.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _"...society needs builders and plumbers, not masters of
| English literature and Sociology. "_
|
| Society needs both but I'm in full agreement that in recent
| decades that the trades, woodworking, etc. have been
| terribly denigrated and they need to be restituted to their
| former position in society. Even with modern equipment
| that's taken much of the menial work away we still need
| people with the skills to use those machines properly.
|
| Also, we need creative people who are best skilled with
| working with their hands. We cannot lose sight of the fact
| that many are most suited working this way and to force
| them into doing a desk job is both unfair on them and on
| society generally. By saying this I'm not implying that
| they're any less intelligent - in fact I know some very
| smart and intelligent trades people who I'd trust with
| almost any work with training.
|
| _I say this as person who has been a professional /desk
| worker for most of my working life but also as one who also
| had the privilege to be trained in metalwork and woodwork
| and for a time working in those trades. I understand that
| mentality, and there's absolutely nothing wrong or
| demeaning about it._
| WalterBright wrote:
| Last week I decided to fix my rusty toolbox. I ground off
| the rust and repainted it.
|
| It looks terrible now.
|
| Evidently, there is something to craftsmanship :-)
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" craftsmanship"_
|
| Inspiration 10%, practice 90%. You're just a bit rusty -
| out of practice. ;-)
| jhgb wrote:
| It's all the D instead of Rust. This needed a Rust
| expert, clearly.
| [deleted]
| hilbert42 wrote:
| So if I put my chemical hat on and suggested that a
| solution using a solution of HOOC-COOH/C2H2O4 would help
| shift the rust then I'd be in the wrong ballpark. Right?
|
| Like the Mikado, maybe we need a little list of society
| offenders who've perverted the language with stolen
| nouns. As the Mikado would claim, to not only steal nouns
| for illicit purposes but to _then_ morph them into proper
| nouns is the most heinous of crimes - a crime that could
| only be committed by those with absolutely no
| imagination. As wasted space, they are deserving nothing
| less than the axe!
|
| ;-)
| kragen wrote:
| Wouldn't most other organic acids work better than
| oxalic? Also, be less toxic?
| tester756 wrote:
| >main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset
| and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the
| 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough and
| unable to get jobs matching their qualifications
|
| Wouldn't higher edu degree becoming "common" invalidate it?
| anovikov wrote:
| That's the thing. It has become too common already to
| give people any actual benefit: it was a way to stand out
| and it no longer is.
| nosianu wrote:
| No benefit? They have a much better education.
|
| > _it was a way to stand out and it no longer is_
|
| Education is only good if you stand out? What a
| discussion.
| tester756 wrote:
| how about partying whole college, extending childhood?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I advised a friend to skip the "weeder" classes in
| college and take the "honors" version. The reason was the
| profs in the weeders were only there because they had to
| be there, and the same with the students.
|
| In the honors classes, the students were there because
| they wanted to learn, and the profs were there because
| they wanted to teach.
|
| He tried both, and discovered that while he had to work a
| lot harder in the honors class, it was a lot more fun
| being in that environment.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I know. I've heard exactly the same myself. It's a mindset
| that I think I've figured out after hearing it on multiple
| occasions but it makes no sense for a society to think this
| way, nor does it in anyway benefit the country.
| msg3 wrote:
| I think there are far more examples of developing countries
| ignoring copyright - the US didn't recognise foreign copyrights
| until the 1890s.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _"...the US didn 't recognise foreign copyrights until the
| 1890s."_
|
| That's very true, and it's only in recent decades that the US
| has been a signatory to the Berne Convention, however that's
| not true for patents. In the late 1800s New Britain,
| Connecticut was known as the Patent Capital of the world
| because so many patents were issued to those in the vicinity.
|
| _BTW, you 're right about other countries ignoring copyright
| but I only mentioned China because of its huge impact,
| essentially it's the quintessential example._
| kragen wrote:
| It's even more true for patents: not only did the US not
| enforce foreign patents before the 01890s, it didn't
| enforce them after the 01890s either, and still doesn't
| today. Neither do any other countries. The PCT doesn't work
| like the Berne Convention.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Those who've signed it are supposedly bound by its
| framework. Alternatively, they wheel the fact out when it
| suits them/it's to their advantage in trade negotiations,
| etc.
| kragen wrote:
| Yes, and PCT compliance is actually fairly common, but
| its framework does not commit them to enforce foreign
| patents; rather the contrary.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> In the late 1800s New Britain, Connecticut was known as
| the Patent Capital of the world because so many patents
| were issued to those in the vicinity._
|
| Which probably had more to do with the US officially
| endorsing patent theft and even paying out premiums to
| people who brought them stolen technology/knowledge.
|
| Not because the US was so respecting of other countries
| patents, quite the opposite was actually the case [0].
|
| [0] https://apnews.com/article/north-america-us-news-ap-
| top-news...
| jollybean wrote:
| The comparison between a 'catch up' and 'leading economy' isn't
| very apt.
|
| The best thing a 'catch up' economy can do is copy other,
| better companies from abroad.
|
| But once you have to 'lead' in a sector, it's a lot harder if
| you can't recoup your investments.
|
| China is leading in 5G and 6G patents for this reason.
| manmal wrote:
| > Publishers in England exploited their monopoly shamelessly. New
| discoveries were generally published in limited editions of at
| most 750 copies and sold at a price that often exceeded the
| weekly salary of an educated worker.
|
| This reminds me very much of our modern paywalls. It's such a
| shame that people like Alexandra Elbakyan have to risk so much in
| order to even the playing field just slightly.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" at a price that often exceeded the weekly salary of an
| educated worker"_
|
| Right, paywalls to knowledge are a disaster for any country
| that's trying to maintain an educated society/workforce and one
| of the great outcomes of what Elbakyan has done is to alert the
| world to the problem. We owe her a great gratitude.
|
| As I mentioned in my post the situation with with the price of
| books isn't that much different now to what it was in the UK in
| the 19th C. except that in rich countries a person can buy
| about two specialist textbooks for a week's salary. Of course
| that doesn't apply to those in less well developed countries,
| if anything at $300 per book they're worse off in this modern
| world than English citizens were back in the 19th C.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _except that in rich countries a person can buy about two
| specialist textbooks for a week 's salary_
|
| One has to remember that salary != disposable income. Perhaps
| especially in developed countries, most people spend more
| than 3/4th of their monthly salary on necessities such as
| food, rent, clothing, maintenance and healthcare. "A week's
| salary" is a couple months of saving up money, and buying a
| textbook for it means deferring other purchases like new
| (used) car, or vacation, or home appliance, etc.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Right, no disagreement. No matter how one looks at it a
| $300 textbook isn't small change for most people anywhere
| and it's going to be worse for those in poor countries. In
| some ways it's easy to understand why some countries are
| dragging their feet when it comes to enforcing copyright.
|
| Incidentally, the $300 I used may even be conservative,
| recently I was pricing specialist textbooks and one was
| over $500. If I'd bought the three books that I wanted it
| would have come to just under $1200. Instead, I managed to
| borrow one from a colleague and I'm trying to get the
| others on interlibrary loan but that's not yet been
| possible.
| [deleted]
| roenxi wrote:
| There are arguments in favour of IP law, but it is difficult to
| escape from the fact - intentional outcome, really - that it puts
| barriers in front of people making the most sensible decision
| based on the current state of knowledge.
|
| The more time passes, the more advantages accrue to open source
| software. It has been a true privilege to watch as the concept
| went from lunatic rantings to such an obvious pillar of the
| software industry that people in a workplace have to justify and
| argue for why they can't just run postgres on linux.
|
| We've seen it a few times now - if a society wants to actually
| make progress they loosen IP restrictions. Fast progress happens
| when people are free to make good decisions.
| plmu wrote:
| And the arguments in favour are often based on feelings and/or
| the vested interests of the current owners of "intelectual
| property". I think that basically it is immoral to prevent the
| progress of global useful knowledge of science and engineering.
|
| If there are reasons to do so, they should be very strong and
| well proven, and be applied with utmost caution.
|
| Today, it seems rather that IP law is blindly extended and
| strengthened besed upon fake arguments. The real argument is
| just protecting vested interests and locking out competition
| and innovation.
|
| This excludes trademark law, which is not really IP but more to
| protect buyers against fakes and inferior copies. Therefore
| that can be necessary and useful, if not pushed too far.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Loose IP restrictions are a good policy when you are playing
| "catch-up" and basically need to implement a bunch of things
| already developed by someone else.
|
| For an advanced country that actually has to create new things,
| the cost:benefits shifts in favour of more IP then the earlier
| stage. It's still possible to have too much restriction though,
| I think the copyright duration is ridiculous for example.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > For an advanced country that actually has to create new
| things, the cost:benefits shifts in favour of more IP then
| the earlier stage.
|
| This is a myth; a very destructive myth.
|
| To quote professor Mazzucato:
|
| _"According to conventional wisdom, innovation is best left
| to the dynamic entrepreneurs of the private sector, and
| government should get out of the way. But what if all this
| was wrong? What if, from Silicon Valley to medical
| breakthroughs, the public sector has been the boldest and
| most valuable risk-taker of all?
|
| [Mazzucato] comprehensively debunks the myth of a lumbering,
| bureaucratic state versus a dynamic, innovative private
| sector. In a series of case studies--from IT, biotech,
| nanotech to today's emerging green tech -- Professor
| Mazzucato shows that the opposite is true: the private sector
| only finds the courage to invest after an entrepreneurial
| state has made the high-risk investments. In an intensely
| researched chapter, she reveals that every technology that
| makes the iPhone so 'smart' was government funded: the
| Internet, GPS, its touch-screen display and the voice-
| activated Siri.
|
| Mazzucato also controversially argues that in the history of
| modern capitalism the State has not only fixed market
| failures, but has also actively shaped and created markets.
| In doing so, it sometimes wins and sometimes fails. Yet by
| not admitting the State's role in such active risk taking,
| and pretending that the state only cheers on the side-lines
| while the private sector roars, we have ended up creating an
| 'innovation system' whereby the public sector socializes
| risks, while rewards are privatized."_ [1]
|
| Also, what is your definition for 'advanced country'? Are you
| talking about global north countries like the US, UK etc.?
|
| What you likely see as making up an 'advanced country' I see
| as global north imperialist institutions designed for
| gatekeeping and withholding important knowledge; and denying
| all of the working class access to our inheritance - a
| process that Ha-Joon Chang calls 'kicking away the ladder'
| [2].
|
| > It's still possible to have too much restriction though, I
| think the copyright duration is ridiculous for example.
|
| If you're only critiquing copyright - and not patents, trade
| secrets and others - what do you personally see as the
| redeemable parts of those other forms of IP (and the systems
| used to enforce them)?
|
| We're in an age where instantaneous digital planetary
| replication and transmission technologies could give birth to
| an enormous collaborative web of cooperation, at an
| incredible near-zero marginal cost; which would enable the
| working class to get on the same page globally (and stay
| there) in order to further develop technologies in a
| beautiful mutually-beneficial dance (described more by people
| like Steele [3], as well as many socialist/marxist
| researchers [4]).
|
| Why is it, according to you, beneficial to continue to have
| the private-property enforcing capitalist state hand out
| monopolies to profit-seeking entities/capitalist firms, which
| gives them 'ownership' over decontextualized/siloed
| scientific knowledge and technology and allows them to
| prosecute other humans for using this (or 'their')
| commoditized knowledge? In the end all knowledge is derivable
| and re-derivable, which is why many discoveries in the past
| were made in tandem in different (unconnected) places around
| the world [5]. Many forget this.
|
| Scientific discoveries are essentially 'built into' the
| universe, and I believe they emerge at the right time for us
| to tackle the biggest challenges of our times (now climate
| change + 6th mass extinction event). Back on topic: does this
| mean those who make new discoveries are lone geniuses? No,
| not even close; they build on the things left by behind by
| those who came before. Yet unfortunately the capitalist lone
| genius myth is the predominant (and harmful) story of our
| time. [6]
|
| What bottlenecks do you see for an emergent open, universally
| accessible, scientific commons-centered world? A world that
| doesn't allow the commodification and monopolization of our
| shared inheritance?
|
| I think humanity has been waiting for patterns to emerge that
| allow for radically participative, distributed and open
| collective sense-making systems. I believe that the
| organizational patterns that help to remedy the current
| collective challenges have finally started to emerge in the
| form of http://valueflo.ws and holochain. I'm talking about
| intricate distributed systems that do a much better job of
| meeting the high level of variety in our world, and which
| allow us to govern our global commons without compromising on
| individual agency, as today's systems do.
|
| Our world today is divided in two: the working class and the
| propertied class. The propertied class unfairly dominate by
| 1.) having created knowledge hierarchies by setting up
| harmful artificial-scarcity -enabling systems of law - in
| effect weaponing knowledge, as well as 2.) having created
| undemocratic and private systems and symbols for measuring
| and communicating/expressing wealth, in the form of a.)
| siloed capitalist resource measuring systems (through
| capitalist Enterprise Resource Planning software that
| obscures economic human relations), and b.) centrally
| controlled and centrally issued currencies instead of mutual
| credit systems and protocols that allow mutual issuance and
| evolution (hence why I linked to Valueflo.ws, since it uses
| the Resources-Events-Agents ontology).
|
| In other words: so far, today's systems are violent capital-
| enabling straightjackets because we have not been able to
| "encode as much variety as exists in the system it wants to
| control" (the system I'm referring to here being our global
| interconnected civilization) [7]. The cybernetic concept
| described above is called Ashby's 'law of requisite variety'
| which I first learned about through Eric Harris-Braun, one of
| the people who stumbled on this novel pattern for fully
| distributed protocols now known as holochain, which "combines
| ideas from BitTorrent and Git, along with cryptographic
| signatures, peer validation, and gossip.".
|
| [1] https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-
| state
|
| [2] https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb
|
| [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-
| insight/2014/j...
|
| [4] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
|
| [6] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/04/166593/techs-
| end...
|
| [7] https://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2007/12/07/id-58
| jollybean wrote:
| This is a not-very-coherent ideological tirade against
| capitalism, and you haven't addressed the issue of IP
| protections value or not directly.
| beckman466 wrote:
| Sure, yet maybe consider posting some of your arguments
| which challenge or refute the arguments I shared instead
| of labeling it as an "ideological tirade" and offering
| very little substance in your comment?
|
| > you haven't addressed the issue of IP protections value
| or not directly.
|
| What value do you believe they offer? And for who?
| djbebs wrote:
| Do the benefits actually change though? Or does the country
| now have established industries and companies with the power
| to influence the political process in order to cement their
| position against new entrants via IP laws?
| HPsquared wrote:
| All of these factors exist, but their relative importance
| and value is situational.
|
| Loosening IP restrictions would have first-order benefits
| to a lot of people who could now do things with existing IP
| that were previously impossible.
|
| The downsides would be delayed and second-order: a
| significant portion of people, who currently invest in
| developing IP with the expectation of "owning" the
| resulting product, would reduce their level of investment.
| Why invest in R&D if you can just wait for someone else to
| find a successful idea and then copy them?
|
| Why spend a billion dollars testing a drug if its market
| price is immediately dropped to generic level by cheap
| manufacturers? The only option left is secrecy, which is
| worse for society than patents.
| kongin wrote:
| The interest on the British dye patents was paid in German
| poison gas.
|
| If the UK had not strangled that sector of their economy the
| Germans would have never gotten the industrial know how to
| make a thousand tons of chlorine a month in 1915.
| dude4you wrote:
| More about the progressive thinking if Frederick the great. Afaik
| the fist steam engine in mainland Europe was deployed in Prussia.
| JuettnerDistrib wrote:
| > mainland Europe
|
| First time I here that phrase! A testament to the rise of
| China? The proper term is _continental_ Europe.
|
| Digging a bit further, Wikipedia's[0] article is titled
| "Continental Europe", but says "mainland" is also used.
|
| Time to speculate: for the British speaking English, the "main"
| land are the British Isles, so they prefer the term
| "continental".
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe
| WalterBright wrote:
| One reason colonial America prospered was they ignored British
| patents in setting up the textile industry.
|
| Minimizing the friction for reuse is a central theme of the D
| programming language - we use the Boost license:
|
| https://www.boost.org/users/license.html
|
| In particular, it does not require attribution in the generated
| binaries, nor does it require any patent licensing, nor does it
| prevent any use for profit, nor come with any agenda whatsoever.
|
| I would have simply made it Public Domain, but PD is not
| recognized in some countries. So Boost is the next best thing.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| "The German proliferation of knowledge created a curious
| situation that hardly anyone is likely to have noticed at the
| time. Sigismund Hermbstadt, for example, a chemistry and pharmacy
| professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the
| oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his "Principles of
| Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author Mary
| Shelley did for her horror novel "Frankenstein," which is still
| famous today."
| hasmanean wrote:
| TIL there are "principles" in leather tanning?
| zhdc1 wrote:
| Leather tanning is, apparently, a fairly complex subject (I
| have a pair of full-grain boots going on a decade plus of
| consistent wearing, and others that haven't lasted anywhere
| as close as long).
| bserge wrote:
| You are basically chemically altering the structure of a
| material.
|
| It's like treating steel - much harder than you'd think and
| yes, there are principles.
| hamburgerwah wrote:
| If the US was nuked into oblivion the only things remaining would
| be cockroaches and intellectual property attorneys. I don't know
| why I repeated myself just there.
| bullen wrote:
| "Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a
| copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into
| small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law
| throughout the empire."
|
| Compared to:
|
| "First Congress implemented the copyright provision of the US
| Constitution in 1790"
|
| Copyright abolished by 2070?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think the notion of proliferation of broadly available
| technical knowledge is correct, but I'm not entirely convinced
| whether literature in particular was so relevant.
|
| In _How Asia Works_ , a great book on industrial expansion in
| Asia, Studwell notes that when Taiwan was moderately prosperous
| and dominated by industry half of the workforce could not even
| read. What really benefited East-Asia was a grey-collar culture,
| a national, egalitarian educational system and corporatism rather
| than a white-collar, classist and academic culture more common in
| say, England.
|
| This is something you also find in Germany. The education system
| was designed to be broad. Schools were universal and focused on
| practical knowledge, with few ivory towers. Knowledge was
| historically and is still spread around between institutes
| (Frauenhofer say), firms, and industry-friendly universities,
| dispersed and practical rather than concentrated, theoretic and
| elitist.
|
| This Prussian style system which is really where most German
| institutions come from also was quite literally copied by a lot
| of now industrial powerhouses in Asia.
| baybal2 wrote:
| A tidbit: English bureaucratic system was in part copied from
| pre-1905 China, through East India Company.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Copying the best parts of a proven system while dropping the
| worst parts" is a good method of achieving progress.
|
| To a degree, most modern programming languages do just that -
| inspire themselves in ye olde K&R C of the 1970s heavily, but
| dropping the parts that made the code unsafe or impractical.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| And we still call government bureaucrats 'Mandarins' for that
| reason. Especially, 'Whitehall Mandarins', Whitehall being
| the area of London where several government ministeries are
| based.
| ben_w wrote:
| Linguistic curiosities abound.
|
| "Mandarin" also being the name of a particular type of
| orange (fruit) because of the Chinese connection. The Dutch
| word for the fruit being "sinaasappel" -- Modification of
| earlier "Chinas-appel" (close enough to English to guess)
| -- https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sinaasappel
|
| However, the Orange Order in Northern Ireland is named
| after the Dutch King William of Orange, whose title "Prince
| of Orange" derives from a principality in southern France
| -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Orange -- but
| this in turn is probably etymologically derived from the
| Gaulish ar-aus(i)o- ('temple, cheek':
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange,_Vaucluse) while the
| fruit and colour come from the Arabic naranj (nrnj) which
| is probably close to the original name for the fruit in
| Asia.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| And it was re-exported too. Singapore particularly has
| developed from the english bureaucracy of the mid 20th C (as
| well as the earlier Chinese system) and has retained a very
| strong 'public service' while this has been dismantled in a
| lot of English-speaking world in the late 20th C
| cycomanic wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. The pillar of the Humbold University
| system is holistic learning and research with freedom from
| "practical" constrains and political interference. In
| particular it is a model of general education beyond just
| vocational training.
|
| I also note that in addition to the Fraunhofer institutes which
| as you rightly say have a applied f9cus there are also the Max
| Planck Institutes with a much more fundamental focus. In fact I
| would argue that research in Germany is much more fundamentals
| focused than in many other countries.
| Ajef wrote:
| As far as I know the Universities are generally more research
| focused in comparison the the "Fachhochschulen". However
| according to [1] there are simply more Fachhochschulen than
| universities in Germany - obviously this doesn't say anything
| about their cumulative size in comparison to each other.
|
| [1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/247238/umf
| rag...
| cycomanic wrote:
| The Fachhochschulen are an interesting case. Generally they
| cwn not grant PhDs and are doing quite limited (if any)
| research. I think this changed a bit in recent years and
| they are doing more research.
|
| That said, they don't really relate to the topic of the
| article as they would not have had any influence on the
| German industrialisation, considering that they only exist
| since the 1960s.
| FabHK wrote:
| Sure, there is the tradition of the purely academic Humboldt
| University in Germany, but there is also a long tradition of
| vocational training mixed with some theoretical schooling
| ("Ausbildung"). So there are definitely both strands, and to
| put fundamental scientific achievements into practice, the
| second one might matter more.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I don't think so, plumbers, bricklayers etc. are not the
| ones putting fundamental scientific achievements into
| practice. That's engineers and other scientists. That
| doesn't mean the German system of separating vocational
| training and university training is not useful. However it
| does actually the opposite of what the original post
| hypothized, it separates vocational training from
| universities. Unlike in many other countries, universities
| in Germany do not do vocational training in general.
| _Microft wrote:
| There are also _Fachhochschulen_ , "universities of
| applied sciences", that cover the middle ground between
| vocational and academic training.
| jonwachob91 wrote:
| >>>Studwell notes that when Taiwan was moderately prosperous
| and dominated by industry half of the workforce could not even
| read. What really benefited East-Asia was a grey-collar
| culture, a national, egalitarian educational system and
| corporatism rather than a white-collar, classist and academic
| culture more common in say, England.
|
| The rise of industrialization in the states was driven by an
| educated work force from England that was low on supplies and
| materials, so they immigrated to the USA which had an abundance
| of supplies and materials.
|
| When the English workers that were educated in various
| industrialization techniques setup in the USA, Americans got
| apprenticeship jobs under the educated English workers and
| learned.
|
| Your observation about England being white-collar, classist and
| academic culture may be true to a general extent, but they were
| the first industrialized nation and then spread that
| industrialization knowledge through firms, trade, and related
| institutions. England did not rely on a classist ivory tower
| culture to operate their industrial sector nor to spread that
| knowledge.
| lwkl wrote:
| I don't live in Germany but one of it's German speaking
| neighbors and we have also have a so called dual education
| system.
|
| In tertiary education there are multiple tracks you can choose
| the more academically focused universities, more industry
| focused universities of applied sciences and higher
| certificates in the profession you learned (my father for
| example got a master painter certification, which allowed him
| to train apprentices and taught him a lot of the skills to run
| his own business).
|
| But what's more important the school system starts splitting
| people up into workers and academics as soon as they start
| their secondary education: - The kids that perform better in
| school go to the "Gymnasium" which leads them to get a high
| school degree (Abitur or Matura) which allows entry to
| universities focused on academics. - The kids that perform
| worse go to a junior high school and start an apprenticeship
| and go to vocational school after finishing junior high. The
| academically stronger kids also have the option to get a high
| school degree at vocational school that allows them to enter a
| university of applied science (Fachabitur or Berufsmaturitat).
|
| Of course there are ways to change between the two tracks but
| most people follow one of the given paths. And I'd say even the
| more "ivory-tower" universities at least in STEM are really
| industry focused with companies having a big presence on
| campuses.
| oblio wrote:
| That system sounds super harsh, though. I think it splits the
| tracks when you're 10. I know plenty of folks who didn't know
| what they wanted to do even when they were 20, how are you
| supposed to do that when you're 10?
| def_true_false wrote:
| In reality it's mostly decided by parents, provided they
| are willing to spend resources to make sure their kids pass
| the tests.
| neuronic wrote:
| Yes and what does that mean? That the system puts a
| disadvantge on people with difficult backgrounds.
|
| I have non-academic parents and the system sure as hell
| made me understand that very well at a young age. The
| folks with attorneys and doctors as parents had it way
| easier...
|
| It took a lot of additional energy to be able to go to
| "Gymnasium" in Bavaria. In the state of Mecklenburg-
| Vorpommern, were I was born, this was much easier though.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > It took a lot of additional energy to be able to go to
| "Gymnasium" in Bavaria. In the state of Mecklenburg-
| Vorpommern, were I was born, this was much easier though.
|
| This is one of the very few aspects that
| socialist/Eastern Bloc countries actually did better than
| the capitalist Western ones. Working-class kids had a
| fairly equal opportunity at getting into the same schools
| as the rich kids.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I doubt that German parents put in a lot of resources for
| 7-10 year olds to pass tests. I guess private language
| classes can be a thing. But if it's anything similar to
| Hungary, kids with bad performance can also get extra
| afternoon help from the actual school teachers for free
| and kids of working parents can stay in school until
| later in the afternoon, working on homework under
| supervision etc.
|
| In my experience academic competition is way less
| cutthroat than what I hear from the US, India, China etc.
| namenotrequired wrote:
| You don't choose. It's decided for you based on your
| ability.
|
| Edit: not disagreeing that it's harsh, just wanted to
| clarify that point.
| oblio wrote:
| That's even worse. I can't imagine what you're able to do
| at 10 has that high of an impact on your abilities the
| rest of your life.
| FredPret wrote:
| It gets worse than that. Some of your life outcomes are
| determined by your genes and by your pre-ten-year-old
| lifestyle
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| And with increasing understanding of epigenetics, even
| the lifestyle choices, and crises, of one's grandparents
| could potentially influence life outcomes.
| oblio wrote:
| Yeah, but we're talking about school systems here.
| slightwinder wrote:
| It's not the rest of their life, just until they do it
| better. This is just the simple path. There are a dozen
| different paths in Germany's education-system.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It might be a cultural-ideological reason that you think
| this way. Not every place in the world has those same
| assumptions and taboos. There are more blank slateist
| cultures where the only polite thing is to assume that
| any child can become anything. In other places people
| take it for granted that there are differences in
| abilities, talents, aptitudes, personalities that are
| fairly clear by age 10. In the US, this topic is too
| similar to how racists talk about blacks, so the whole
| thing is taboo. In places where the topic of innate
| talent does not have racial connotations (more
| homogeneous countries), people more readily accept it.
| oblio wrote:
| If you think modern Germany is homogeneous, well... :-)
| Texaner wrote:
| If you think parent ever said then then we'll... :-)
| orbifold wrote:
| I wasn't surprised at all as a ten year old who got a
| recommendation for gymnasium and who didn't. It is a
| _recommendation_ by the way, parents can chose to enter
| their kids in whatever they wish to. This leads to kids
| with high income / social economic status entering
| gymnasium and struggling mightily and kids from worker
| families who might make it not going to gymnasium.
| seth123456 wrote:
| That is not entirely true.
|
| At least in Germany it depends on the state you are in.
| The teachers make their recommendation, not entirely
| based on your grades in school, but also based on your
| general approach to learning and understanding as they
| got to observe you for a few years. Depending on the
| German state, this recommendation is binding, but in some
| of the states the final decision is with your parents.
| jollybean wrote:
| 'based on ability'.
|
| Or rather, academic test scores, which will be perfectly
| correlated with parents financial status, status and
| employment.
|
| There's no doubt that a highly conscientious and
| thoughtful trades-person could raise children to compete
| with the bankers kids, but it's just so much harder.
|
| So you end up with an institutionalized classism.
|
| That said, the same thing ends up happening in the US/UK,
| probably by more systematic than institutionalized
| mechanism.
|
| The dark truth is that in some ways if functions better,
| because broadly speaking highly conscientious parents
| raise highly conscientious kids, but it also makes things
| more stringent and unfair.
|
| (Germany:) " Children from rural areas, pupils from lower
| socio-economic backgrounds and boys in general have a
| significantly lower probability of being selected to the
| most academic school track even when their ability is
| similar to that of their urban and better socially placed
| counterparts." [1]
|
| The other thing is that Anglo culture is just more open.
|
| PISA testing shows that when accounting for economic
| factors, immigrants to US/UK/Can etc. perform just as
| well as local kids. (i.e. immigrants are poorer, but they
| do just as well as those with same economic background)
|
| On the Continent, immigrants fare considerably poorer,
| especially in Germany and ironically the worst in Finland
| which otherwise has one of the top education systems in
| the world. [2] (See page 28)
|
| A lot of this might be a function of language: English is
| something many migrants might already speak whereas
| German and Finnish are that much harder to pick up.
|
| That said from the rest of the PISA paper it doesn't seem
| that Continental Schools stick out that much otherwise
| and Germany did successfully make some 'big reforms' in
| 2000 that seemed to move the needle overall, though this
| could also be a function of unification leap forward.
|
| As far as copyright in 19th century - I wonder if the
| UK's lack of progress in publishing was also a function
| of super classiest social hierarchy where they didn't see
| a point in that much education for the plebes?
|
| As for 'modern lessons' I think this analysis applies
| mostly to 'knowledge' more so than much else. I don't
| think progress is hampered because 'Thor' is copyright
| and by and large, information is mostly accessible. I
| think this analogue might apply to the current issue of
| copyright of Scientific papers, but not much else.
|
| [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242221851_In
| equalit...
|
| [2] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&sourc
| e=web&c...
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Correlation is not causation. Testing objective ability
| (as opposed to essays and extracurricular engagement and
| volunteering) is the best thing for talented but poor
| kids. The alternative is cultural class markers that
| Anglo-style "holistic" testing selects for. That's much
| harder for a working class kid to acquire, compared to
| learning math and physics well. Saying this as someone
| with peasant and working class ancestors who could never
| set me (or my parents) up with all the fancy credentials
| and cultural experiences that my richer classmates had
| (foreign vacations, sailing, skiing, horse riding
| competitions, networking in high society etc). But I
| could study in school and could pass the objective tests.
| jollybean wrote:
| The causation between wealth/status etc. and test scores
| is fairly well established.
|
| I also provided you with scientific evidence that the
| 'scoring' German approach systematically underrepresented
| those otherwise equally capable, which is further
| evidence of that.
|
| Finally, the fact that migrant children perform so much
| more poorly in Germany compared to US/UK, while indirect,
| does provide more evidence for the pile.
|
| 'Test Scores' are not 'the best thing' for poor kids by a
| mile - they are merely an 'outlet valve' for some special
| kids from special families.
|
| I remember being at the home with a woman who married a
| Latino migrant in California. She was a cleaner. I asked
| the teenage children 'what university they were going to'
| and they balked, they literally had not given it a
| thought. In their 'family / lifestyle / education /
| community' - University was for 'rich people'. The
| daughter was helping out part time with the mom at the
| cleaning company, I'm pretty certain she will grow up to
| be a cleaner and that's that.
|
| What's 'best' for kids are good schools, good teachers,
| good mentorship, quality peers, and some semblance
| stability at home i.e. parents with stable jobs, not in
| jail, not evicted or homeless, not caught up in the drug
| world. Only with those things do 'tests' start to have
| some kind of meaning.
| [deleted]
| Haga wrote:
| Which is mostly decided by the class of your parents
| nkmnz wrote:
| This is not correct. It depends on the Bundesland (state)
| you live in. Some have mandatory assignments to a type of
| secondary schools, in others it's up to the parents.
|
| That said, switching from one type to another during
| secondary education is far from impossible, but also not
| always easy and smooth - it depends a lot on the school
| you leave and the school you enter. On the other hand,
| it's very easy to start an academic education when you
| have finished your vocational training. More than one
| third of college students don't have the ,,Abitur"
| (graduated from Gymnasium)
| Ajef wrote:
| Being german, I think it's pretty harsh too.. I developed a
| little slower in school and just got lucky that the school
| I was in basically took everyone that passed the grade into
| the path towards higher education. From my understanding
| yes your grades matter a lot but it's also up to your
| parents which school they want to send you to.
|
| The development in recent years has been that a larger part
| of the population is finishing their "Abitur", which is the
| high school diploma equivilant, allowing them to apply to
| universities.
|
| Often they don't feel like universities are the right place
| for them though and they apply to apprenticeships, which
| makes it harder for people who ended school after tenth
| grade to get apprenticeships. At least in certain fields
| like lab assistents, IT workers and some others. In other
| fields such carpentry, plumbers, ... I don't think the
| Abitur impacts the application process much and can even be
| seen as a negative.
| hef19898 wrote:
| It is, also quite unjust when social background is
| concerned. Germany has it black on White from the PISA
| studies.
| tremon wrote:
| The model in NL is that the tracks aren't fixed, and most
| schools offer all tracks (or a subset) in the same
| building, so switching tracks doesn't necessarily mean
| losing friends. We also have 4 secondary education tracks,
| not two; in ascending order:
|
| - VMBO-praktijk (applied vocational education, 4 years)
|
| - VMBO-theoretisch (theoretic vocational education, 4
| years)
|
| - HAVO (general high-school education, 5 years)
|
| - VWO (university-prep high-school education, 6 years)
|
| Also, the specialization doesn't happen until they're 14,
| and students are free to switch if they meet the grades. If
| they get sufficient marks across the board, they can
| "upgrade" to the next track, or if they'd have to repeat
| the current year they can sometimes choose to downgrade a
| track instead.
|
| Finally, students can re-enroll in the higher track after
| graduation as well (starting from the penultimate year).
| It's not uncommon for someone to complete their VMBO-T
| track first, then re-enter the HAVO track and get a HAVO
| certification in six years instead of the nominal five (or
| complete the VWO track in 7 years that way). As said, not
| everyone learns at the same pace and I think this setup
| gives many students lost of opportunities for a good
| outcome.
| siva7 wrote:
| The system you described about early splitting is criticised
| widely - from UN, EU and most german parties - and has
| nothing to do with the success of the german dual education
| system as one could think by reading that description. Though
| to be fair, many reforms have been taken and it's not anymore
| that harsh like the german educational system used to be in
| the past century.
| neuronic wrote:
| I went through it and did the "optimal" track up to and
| including a Master degree.
|
| Today, almost everyone does Abitur and a Bachelor's
| degree... tbh you are regarded as pretty simple if you
| didnt finish at least a Bachelor and given our traditional
| dual system of diploma and trades it's really sad to
| observe this... We actually have a solid and proven system
| for people to learn the trades (Ausbildung) after secondary
| education. Master craftsmen like electricians have
| potential to earn WAY more than many of the snobby
| academics and will have insane job security. But "society"
| (read: industry) conditions people that a Bachelor is
| _necessary_. Got a Bachelor degree in whatever? Welcome to
| your new job as secretary, here is your EUR30k /year pre
| tax (with some plumber laughing in the background).
|
| The meaning of the Bachelor degree has been watered down to
| nothing in the last 20 years. It sounds arrogant, but I
| really do know students in university who are incapable of
| composing a sensible German sentence that is logically
| conistent and grammatically correct. As if there was zero
| academic requirements to enter. Germany has a "numerus
| clausus" (required minimum grade)for many popular fields
| but Abitur grades are not comparable at all across federal
| states. 1.0 in Bavaria (actually hard) means something
| entirely different than in Hamburg (quite achievable) but
| students from both will be treated equal when chosen for
| university.
|
| It's almost impossible to fail Abitur and the Bachelor's
| unless you make your own life unnecessarily hard or have
| some pretty bad luck in life. "Street smart" people will
| easily get a Bachelor degree because cheating is easy and
| expectations are minimal - unless you decide to do
| engineering at RWTH Aachen or TUM (which are amazing
| programs) in whcih case you'd actually be doing something
| mildly demanding.
|
| When Germany switched from its diploma system to a more
| "internationally standardized" Bachelor/Master model it
| destroyed a successful model of education in an attempt to
| be more comparable on an international scale. Back in the
| day, people in the US or Asia wouldn't immediately know
| what degree "Dipl. Ing." corresponded to and how you'd
| translate that but I will defend my opinion to death that
| those degree programs were better at actually producing
| capable people.
|
| Industry just wants to produce work drones and modern
| universities are their partners in crime. Actual academics
| start after the Bachelor when the simpletons and bored
| people have left.
| danvonk wrote:
| I'm currently finishing off my Bachelor at one of those
| universities with amazing programmes. However, I really
| don't see how you can claim that Germany has destroyed
| its system when really all they have done is kept it and
| instead give you a Bsc after the 3rd year and a Msc after
| the 5th year. Courses are still 100% exam based, with
| those exams often having 50%+ failure rates. In fact, at
| least for my subject, the bachelor is universally
| considered harder because of the challenging
| 'Grundstudium'.
| panick21 wrote:
| Germany actually has a very high % of people going to
| Gymnasium. In Switzerland, a far lower % of people are going
| to the Gymnasium. I think in German its almost 80% of people,
| in Switzerland its below 30%. At least these are the numbers
| I remember form a decade or so ago.
|
| People in the comments call this system harsh, but what they
| fail to understand is that is not that you get a lane with 10
| and that's your lane for ever. In Switzerland you can not go
| to Gymnasium but if you feel like it after the normal Sek
| (Secondary School, that is 3 years rather then 6) you can
| still do a short Gymnasium and get the same degree, its just
| that you lose 1 year.
|
| You can also do the 3 years in Secondary, then do the
| Apprenticeship, for example in my case 4 years of school and
| working in IT (in my case software development) and during
| that you can complete almost the same degree you get in
| gymnasium. That degree will allow you to get into 'technical
| university' and you earn a batchlor. You can also do this
| degree while working.
|
| Or if you really want to go to a full university like ETH
| Zurich, you can do 1 extra year of school after.
|
| So the different lanes have a lot of intersections and ways
| you can go from one to the other. If you are slow at
| developing you don't go to the gymnasium but you can earn
| that same degree later in multiple ways if you discover.
| dahart wrote:
| > I think in German it's almost 80% of people, in
| Switzerland its below 30%
|
| This doesn't seem supported by any data I can find.
|
| "In 2009/10 there were 3,094 gymnasia in Germany, with c.
| 2,475,000 students (about 28 percent of all precollegiate
| students during that period)"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(Germany)
|
| A similar measure that's a bit more comparable and easier
| to find data is rates of tertiary education. https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
|
| If you look at the 4-year degree chart, Switzerland's
| graduation rate is 49% while Germany's is 28% for the year
| 2015. That would be unlikely if Germany's per-capita
| attendance for Gymnasium was more than twice that of
| Switzerland's.
| panick21 wrote:
| Maybe it is lower then I thought. I can't seem to find
| Swiss data, 28% could be in line with Switzerland.
|
| Not sure where my number come from, honestly the last
| time I was interest in this was when I was in school.
|
| The OECD, I don't know how it is calculated.
| gmathews wrote:
| The paper's author, Hoffner, names the fragmented German states
| as the reason IP claims (in this case copyright) was so difficult
| to enforce.
|
| Now we have international trade agreements enforcing IP in most
| places. Could this effect partially explain China's rise in tech?
| They ignored IP for ages.
|
| I mean it's certainly easier to innovate when you're not looking
| over your shoulder or stopping to ask IP lawyers if they think
| you've breached anything in trivial parts of your tech.
| inciampati wrote:
| It might, but it needs to be weighed against the active
| suppression of information flow into the country. I collaborate
| with researchers in China. They all report that, to search for
| an access scientific and technical work, they must use a VPN.
| To make a broad generalization for the sake of argument: in
| China there are often excellent implementations of contemporary
| technical ideas. In contrast, there is little true innovation.
| To me this suggests that communication and interaction are also
| important parts of the development of societies. The current
| Chinese model would seem to draw on both the pattern of control
| by an elite hierarchy seen in 19th c England and the liberal
| copyright situation of the German states of the same period.
| stkdump wrote:
| They are still playing catch up in many areas. Wait a few
| more decades, and they are sure to also innovate. Probably
| China will open up, just like they opened up economically,
| when it suited them.
| kleiba wrote:
| Copyright is a mechanism that directly serves only a few, where -
| in its absence - a lot more people could benefit. There are, of
| course, valid justifications for the existence of copyright. Like
| so often in politics, the difficult question is how to balance
| interests - and (like so often in politics), it's debatable
| whether the status quo has achieved at least something _near_ a
| fair balance.
| imtringued wrote:
| If it's really that simple then it would explain why North
| America was considered the land of the free. The farmers that
| lived there didn't have to bow down to existing land owners they
| owned their own land.
|
| In that sense Germans didn't have to bow down to existing
| intellectual property owners.
| bserge wrote:
| They do now heh
| deltron3030 wrote:
| The printing press (1500s), bible distribution and gained
| literacy was the main reason I think, it created a knowledge
| culture earlier than elsewhere, basically an offline web.
|
| The industry in Germany has strong protestant and prussian roots.
| Families with a protestant background got wealthier earlier when
| more land and resources were up for grabs, kinda like digital
| entrepreneurs in the 90s or early 2000s.
|
| I think it's quite comparable to computers, Silicon Valley and
| the internet these days, and why it's dominated by US companies.
| COGlory wrote:
| I have two reasons for supporting FOSS:
|
| 1) I should control all the software that runs on computers I own
|
| 2) Access to information is always preferable in all situations
|
| This article really jogged me on the second one. The caveat is
| that there wasn't much beyond correlation proving it. But
| regardless, I think it's a really cool example of why access to
| information is so important.
|
| What's tougher is drawing the line to connect access to
| information and direct benefit to the person giving up copyright.
| Presumably, most of Germany benefited from industrialization?
| Torwald wrote:
| What do you mean with "access to information" in regards to
| FOSS? That you can examine the algorithm to see how it's done
| or somethng else?
| gego wrote:
| ...only years late but better late than never... there is a lot
| of research, eh by Giesecke or Eisenstein, that is decades old..
| the question has already been answered multiple times... and has
| been ignored as often... yes!
|
| The weak copyright protections especially in contrast to GB,
| where there were strict and centralized rules in early modern
| Europe is a first indicator, this only intensified in the later
| centuries leading to piracy making information affordable - thus
| preparing a whole population for industrial production...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-19 23:02 UTC)