Paul Graham has literally got two patents for the exact same thing. 'Somebody hit submit twice' indeed.
Patents should be examined by people knowledgeable in the field and have a strict process for being granted.
And there should be a much higher activation energy required for taking someone to court for violating a patent.
They are also now some very overworked individuals. They have only hours to review patents in a diverse set of topics. There is only so much research they can do - a patent written by a master claims writer, no matter how frivolous, is very difficult to reject outright.
If you want to improve patents in the US, you can start by asking your congressperson to increase funding to the USPTO.
"Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications. Become a community reviewer and improve the quality of patents."
Yeah I agree - I want to dig deeper when people say "patents are evil".... By this they could mean the current system needs to be tweaked, right through to totally abandoning the concept.