I finally listened to the This American Life on software patents. Now I understand what Nathan Myhrvold is doing,

It's very similar to what John Boehner did to the US economy, only Myhrvoid is doing it in tech.

Also Myrvold has raised $5 billion and has only made $2 billion so far in settlements and judgements. His VCs no doubt expect a 10x return or greater. You can do the math. He's got to extract at least another $48 billion. He's just getting started. That ultimately has to chill the investment environment in tech.

Here's a list of his investors.

BTW, I said during the hostage crisis, that either Boehner loses or the United States loses. As it turns out, he didn't lose. We lost as did the creditors of the United States. The ones who bought our AAA debt and ended up with AA+ debt. And who knows where it's headed from here.

It's a good argument whether we should care what S&P says after what we learned about them in the subprime meltdown of 2008. But the truth is we downgraded our own debt. It doesn't take much imagination to see how a creditor of the US would feel. We just debated whether we would deliberately default.

I know how my creditors at Living Videotext would have reacted if they knew we were doing that (we never did). Quite a few times we had trouble paying our bills, but we worked with creditors and always let them know where they stood. We never considered not paying our bills when we had the means to.

That's what's so fucked up about what the US govt did (net-net, doesn't matter who's to blame). We openly debated whether we were going to stiff our creditors, when we had the means not to. That's a real confidence buster. We're super-lucky we don't have any competition in the reserve currency business, or we'd be melting down now, even given that we supposedly averted the default.

We're like a football team that has the ball and runs in the wrong direction, into our own endzone.

Anyway, when it comes to blame there's no doubt who is to blame. Boehner could have taken one for Uncle Sam. He would have lost his job as Speaker, that's pretty clear, but there were enough Democratic and Republican votes to pass the debt ceiling without any of the monkey business.

Just as Nathan Myhrvold is already worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and in no way needs the money he's going to make from his patent protection business.

I try not to make moral arguments, but in the case of Myrvold and Boehner, you can't avoid it.

These guys are so perfectly evil and on such a huge scale, it's as if they were out of a DC Comic. Like Lex Luthor or The Joker.

Where is our Man of Steel?

PS: Thanks to Chris Sacca for having the guts to talk with TAL. He was the only one from Silicon Valley who did.

 8/6/2011; 3:49:00 PM.   .