Generally I think the way out of this mess it to start to publish every little invention (however obvious it might seem). Then hopefully over time there will be

Generally I think the way out of this mess it to start to publish every little invention (however obvious it might seem). Then hopefully over time there will be no more room for obvious patents. There's actually an industry that does exactly that. You can pay a small fee to insert pretty much anything you want into a compendium that gets published periodically and put on file with the Library of Congress. And, big tech companies used to have their own disclosure journals for this purpose -- Xerox Disclosure Journal and IBM Technical Disclosure Journal come to mind.