"Playmakers". Nice!

Cute solution!

There is a long list of things that could go wrong, one of the worst being various cases of 'goal subordination'. E.g., middle managers can fight with, hold back, or retaliate against the receptionist, i.e., the employee acting as 'CEO' of their work.

So, have everyone declare in public of what they are the 'CEO'! NICE! Now when a middle manager starts to cause trouble, the receptionist can stand their ground and say that they are just doing the work of which they are the accepted CEO.

Of course, there could be some conflicts in the declarations!

How well the receptionist's decisions work out on performance, time, effort, money, etc., many people will see. Employees who make good decisions rise.

Nice!

Since the phones are of interest to nearly everyone, it can help if the receptionist builds consensus for the proposed solution.

Of course, might have an 'empire builder' who deliberately makes decisions to spend more money, hire more staff, get more power than necessary, use the power to throttle others, etc. For small decisions, give a person rope enough to hang themselves. For large decisions, may need some reviews. More generally, need people with a good track record of making good decisions and not building empires, etc., and developing such people, e.g., the receptionist who rose to manage the office, is part of the goal.

That former receptionist built some career success with a track record, credibility, and responsibility -- praise, approval, acceptance in the desirable group, and both emotional and financial security (E. Fromm) -- and may be reluctant to blow this situation on low quality work, silly empire building, goal subordination, arrogance, etc. and, thus, be a trusted, valued employee. Nice. The CEO needs to notice this situation and provide the praise, etc.

E.g., once I had a mad rush project and had to make some decisions quickly. One piece of equipment was maybe optional but seemed like a good idea; since there was no time to be sure, I guessed and got the item. Later circumstances meant that didn't need the item so returned it. Then one manager started to criticize me for getting the item to begin with.

Easy answer: My project overall was very successful (for the Board and literally saved the company, now famous). I acted as 'CEO' of that work. The main issue, as 'CEO', was that the project was on time and successful for the very important goals. That little item of equipment was a nit and close to irrelevant, "straining over gnats and forgetting elephants", and the CEO needs to let it be known that such destructive, 'Monday morning' nit picking at the significant accomplishments of others is not good.

As employees such as the receptionist do well, they will get attacked from above, below, and the sides, and the CEO has to anticipate, detect, and deflect such attacks and defend the employee doing well or risk having that employee not try such a project again. E.g., if the CEO hears person A is saying something bad about person B, then the CEO may conclude that there is more wrong with A than B.

You wrote:

"Do you think one of those big companies would buy you out if they could 'independently' invent the technology and take it over?"

Mostly they can't "independently invent": Reasons are organizational, technical, etc. E.g., a CEO might sponsor novel work, and otherwise the management chain just will not. Even the 'research group' won't.

Problem's fundamental, needs too much 'field crossing'.

You wrote:

"The biggest gold mine in the world is the United States Patent and Trademark Office database."

I have some favorite 'gold mines' -- class notes from my favorite Ph.D. courses, etc. Patents? Never heard of anyone who got anything; 99 44/100% mud and gravel where all the gold is just 'prior art' anyway.

'Prior art'? Uh, there's a big reason the US supports math, physical science, and engineering so well in the 24 or so top research universities: Can't get ahead of it.

For software, I prefer just trade secret protection: If it's on a server, then everyone else should f'get about it. If ship it, then have a license agreement not to decompile, etc. It it's visible as in a user interface, then that's not obscure enough for any legal protection. Same for 'business processes'.

If someone else wants to reinvent the 'secret sauce' in my server side code, then 'go for it, guys; lots of luck -- you'll need it'. For essentially anyone in CS or 'infotech', you'll be "digging in the wrong place", way wrong place.

For your devotion to the USPTO, where did you get that really strong funny stuff Legal Nonsense Magic Love Potion No. 9? Consider going cold turkey.

Thanks.

I followed your URLs, and more. I had some ideas.

Like you said, now I'm ready for a shower!

With regret, I better keep writing software.

But, as I write, what should I watch out for? Or, I don't understand Anatomy of a Software Patent Troll Attack 101.

Or when a Web site goes live, what do the trolls do?

Or suppose deep inside my server side code there is code for a faster way to do operation x or some code for math y to do better at solving problem z, now, what can a troll do, force any random Web site to lift their skirts, drop their panties, submit to a pelvic exam, and print out all their code and documentation, 'secret sauce' and all?

Or are the trolls just limited to attacking what they see in the user interface?

If they can only attack my user interface, then I'll keep it dirt simple, keep out anything novel until there's revenue enough to fight trolls, and keep it easy to change in case of an attack.

I did a keyword search on trolls and didn't see anything that looked threatening; I saw nothing like the Union Square post. I have a high end lawyer, but to get his answer in this might cost me as much as another server. Also, maybe other readers would like to know.

This basic idea of machines doing all the work and people all unemployed must be really easy to think of since I've thought of it for years with this thread the most I've gotten about it from others!

So, for a one inch step toward more detail, we want humans managing computers, managing computers, ..., managing computers doing the work.

But we have a LONG way to go. To see some of this, let's use a scenario I worked up over 10 years ago to take a half baby step toward a little more reality:

Consider a couple with both working 80 hours a week at $10 a hour with two children. So, they gross about $80 K a year and spend it all.

(1) So, with machines doing so much of the work, suppose we get a factor of 10 in productivity in value per person-hour. A factor of 10 is pretty big, but done in the past, so let's assume it. Then they can have one parent stay home with the children and make a better home, have the other parent cut back to 40 hours a week, gross $200 K, and spend nearly all of it.

(2) Another factor of 10, $2 M a year, and they can have a much nicer house, a vacation home, a small boat in a boat house, private schools for the children, better cars, clothes, furnishings, toys, some vacations, some savings, etc.

(3) With another factor of 10, they gross $20 M a year, have still nicer housing, boats, vacations, private tutors for the kids, save a lot of money, retire relatively early.

(4) Another factor of 10, $200 M a year, retire after a few years of work.

(5) Another factor of 10, $2 B a year, contribute resources to art and science, e.g., exploration of the universe. So, send a lot of machines to Mars until it looks really safe there with lots of reliable resources for a return flight and then send some humans.

So, that's five factors of 10, a factor of 100,000 which means that can do in 1/50 of an hour, 1 minute 12 seconds, the work that now takes 2000 hours, that is, a year at 40 hours a week. So, we have a LONG way to go and all along the way uses for the productivity.

And, if a significant fraction of the population has such consumption, then there will be some natural resource 'strains' and shortages meaning that the next factor of 10 will be more difficult meaning that there is still more work to do.

And there's still more to it than that!

Back to work!

Brad,

For a good essay on the situation and data, you get a A. There were lots of places you could have gotten off track but did not. Good.

Generally to the readers, I would advise: When using data and statistics, be clear about what you are trying to conclude. Instead, too often people just toss out the mean, median, other percentiles, confidence intervals, etc. as if the point were to rise from sea, fall from the sky, etc. which it rarely does.

In particular, yes, if have a random variable, then necessarily it has a distribution. My advice: Mostly f'get about the distribution. Certainly don't ask if it's Gaussian or log-normal. In particular, just talking about the distribution will make no useful truth rise from the sea.

Yes, as in S. Gould, what you are more likely interested in is the conditional distribution given what additional, relevant data you have, and that can be much different. E.g., what is the conditional distribution of first round funding amounts given that the project was in IT instead of biotech? The distribution, expectation, percentiles are not something 'immutable' and typically change a lot given more information. E.g., in 'Wall Street', the conditional expectation of what the steel company was worth changed a lot given that Sir Raider was flying his Gulfstream to PA.

Here are some cases where can talk about a distribution:

(1) An 'arrival process' with 'stationary, independent' increments will be a Poisson process with independent, identically distributed (iid) times between arrivals with exponential distribution. Nice. Qualitative assumptions, often can check just intuitively, with precise quantitative consequences. See Erhan Cinlar's 'Introduction'.

Possible application: What is the probability a small package cargo airplane will be too heavy? Assume number of packages does not affect the distribution of the package weights; use Poisson for the number and historical data for the weights.

(2) Under mild assumptions, the average of n iid random variables converges to the mean with probability 1 -- strong law of large numbers. E.g., in betting, in the long run what you get per play is the mean. Nicest proof from the martingale convergence theorem (Leo Breiman, 'Probability'). Yes, should realize that the rate of convergence does have to do with the population of 'black swans'.

(3) Under mild assumptions, the distribution of the sum of n iid random variables divided by the square root of n converges to a Gaussian distribution. Central limit theorem (check Lindeberg-Feller). Black swans are again relevant but notice the Berry-Essen bound.

For answering some questions, (1)-(3) can be useful.

For the VC data, some candidate questions:

(1) Is the whole world of finance drying up with growth stopping and all of us going to hell? Not yet.

(2) If an entrepreneur has a good project, can it still get funded? Likely.

I just checked my math and physics books and, yup, I didn't forget; instead, "The Daily Kos" is not in there, I'm pretty sure. Hilbert space and Maxwell's equations I see, but not Kos. Should I check again? I don't think my college girlfriend (I was in college; she was 4 years younger; she understood some things not about calculus) would know either, or about Rand!

No, I looked at something in Kos once, found that they made some serious error in fact, made a note, gave up, and didn't go back. Besides, they seemed to have some hot political agenda, "about what, I have no idea"!

On people, I got much more from E. Fromm than E. lit.

I'm out of my depth here: Below they are discussing Vonnegut, and all I know about him was from the Dangerfield movie 'Back to School'! Since I was once a prof in an MBA program, the B-school part of that movie was terrific, right on target. The Sally Kellerman's English prof's soaring ecstasy over 'writers' is part of why I was glad when required English classes were done!

What's wrong with the beer party?

Well, strictly, the most I suggested wrong was that it was "sophomoric"!

I was a sophomore once! I didn't think that either the English class or the beer parties got very far and preferred making progress with mathematics, physics, and my girlfriend! If the English class had actually had any decent understanding of people, emotions, women, and love, then I would have made much faster progress with my girlfriend!

I liked the interview as an exercise. There was a time when I would not have been able to have guessed just what was driving Rand (or Wallace). Of course, can't make such diagnoses from only the interview, BUT: From seeing enough in people begin to see some patterns. Then, from the interview, pick what appears to be a very likely pattern and make the diagnosis!

Sophomoric. Belongs in an all night beer party of English majors at a liberal arts college.

Rand has lots of brain cells firing, but the main cause appears to be trying obsessively and emotionally, with disastrously poor insight and judgment, to get some security from some anxieties from something scary in her background.

Wallace reveals much more of his thinking than I have seen before, shows that he is an idiot, that has swallowed some super-simple Upper West Side sophomoric nonsense too common in the MSM now. Should never take seriously the 'thinking' of a newsie!

Rand in some Russian romantic style uses too many terms with special and apparently obscure but omitted definitions.

Both set up straw men to knock them down.

Their foundations for the status quo are too extreme; can support the status quo much more simply and much less provocatively.