If it didn't mean something else, sure. But the people who are misunderstanding it would just as easily get your point with other terminology - there's no reason to use it for their sakes. If you're misusing begs the question there are simpler and more useful things to say.
"Raises a point" or "prompts a question" for instance don't have the baggage to confuse people AND are more likely to actually mean - word for word, not colloquially - what you want to say.
Of course, I wouldn't use beg the question for its original meaning either because I think describing the circular logic involved would be clearer than simply using a name for it. Rather than say "you're guilty of affirming the consequent", just say "A doesn't imply B, and you sure they're connected?"
I hadn't heard of the APT-tax, thanks. It seems like the best of the simplified tax codes I've seen.
I agree that the interstate commerce clause and a few other things are being abused to turn the federal government into exactly what it isn't supposed to be. It might not seem like much, but having laws come from the "right" level of government would make the system much less constrictive - people could have all the different laws they wanted, let's say for some stupid no-alcohol on Sunday rule, in their state, without having to screw with everyone else's laws.
Is it really hard to stop political parties? Or, rather, them forcing each other to vote the party line? It seems like a simple conflict of interest. Doesn't their oath include something about representing their constituents over all other interests?
Then we just require all elected officials to wear a collar-cam 24/7. Police (in some areas) do while at work. Post the footage directly on WikiLeaks...
Right. But you'd be liable for speeding tickets that you'd gotten while driving the car, right?
They distributed the app, and even if not knowingly and thus have certain obligations to the customers. Not guilt for the stolen car, but a few hoops to jump through to let the legitimate owner get what they need.
I block everything on that list (well, except frames because nobody uses them and I'm not sure how you'd do it anyways, and DIVs of course) and browsing IS much nicer.
Years ago I thought I'd never have javascript default to on because everything it was used for was bad for me, the user, except where the site specifically required these abilities.
Now, more and more sites are realizing that they really need to fallback to text mode cleanly to reach huge segments of the market so they're getting more usable without javascript. In giving their users a way to access their content without javascript they've had to stop doing the annoying things or all their customers would have simply chosen the nicer interface. Now for many sites, and more all the time, there's no reason to block any features (except maybe banners) to have a productive browsing experience.
At this rate y'all are almost welcome back on my porch. It's an odd feeling.
If you use "begs the question" to mean "raises the question" everyone will understand what you meant
Actually, no. When I first heard it I thought it was incoherence, I didn't recognize it actually meant anything.
If you want to be understood you need to say something direct like "But if that is so, isn't it incompatible with this evidence here?"
So as long as you're borrowing a phrase, why refuse to use it properly? If you don't mean what it means, stop using it. It's awkward and antiquated, it's not like you're using it because you think it's clearer or anything. Simply say what you're trying to say and make everyone's life easier.
things such as language that are not subject to objective standards.
Pfft, not at all. Tomato/Tomahto, sure, but if you point to a dog and say "financial derivative" it's more likely brain damage than useful new language.
The signal-to-noise ratio is an objective measure of the usefulness of your speech. With sloppy language (even if this example is commonly shared) you'd have more problems conveying a complex idea.
No, the point was you dodging the label of manipulative. If you were honest you'd have said "Yes, but while my word choice is designed to manipulate someone I believe it is for the better." Or at least not flat-out denied it.
And firefighters was 50% of your examples, it's hardly cherry-picked.
You have a point - in general - about not using gender-specific words where they aren't warranted. But I didn't see anyone disagree with you over that. The disagreement was over the actual gender-neutrality of firefighting.
Where we're using a more accurate word, I'm all for this. For air-hosts the term steward is (I think) seen as gender neutral, and the job is easily doable by either gender, so it's needlessly confusing to say stewardess - it implies it can only be done by women. This is one we should try to correct. As does policeman, because police-work tends to be more social than physical - the gun provides the strength. Police officer is more accurate.
But as long as firefighting is a male dominated job, often by having requirements the average woman can't train to meet, and fireman is the more common term, it seems pointless and a bit incorrect to socially engineer a different term. Newspeak much?
I think it'd be best to give children an idea of which industries are dominated by which gender (and race, age group, etc) - not to imply that they should be that way, simply that they are. Perhaps even explicitly that they shouldn't, or at least needn't be. You'd want photos of firefighters in gear to give an example of why you literally can't do this at home. They'd obviously contain more men than women under the gear, and the reasons for the gender disparity would either be clear or could be discussed.
That way a young girl wanting to be a firefighter would know she'd need (and probably he too, in a world that had these) an exo-skeleton rig or other device that would overcome potentially fatal human limitations - much like SCBA are required now (and are much of the reason for the require to be able to carry so much). Perhaps she'd see the real money was in robotics and obsolete the entire thing...
I'm for updating language to reflect reality, not to obfuscate it. That you lump fireman with policeman suggested you felt otherwise.
It's really easy to say that in hindsight, ten years later.
Oh come on. I get the same reality denial from Bushies saying that while Iraq is a bad idea now, how could we have known then!?
Ummm, perhaps by listing to me, on Slashdot, saying exactly that, back then. If that's not good enough, how about the heads of major business, famous professors, etc, who said exactly the same thing?
But if it has no inventiveness, how come nobody else was doing it, and how come it made Amazon a lot of money?
I'm scoffing at your dis-ingeniousness here.
Patents are for technical advancement. If there's no technology to help them develop and no gain to be had from seeing how they did it, there's absolutely no reason to bribe them to release their methods.
Are you really claiming other people were standing around saying, "gosh, this technique is really obvious
Yes, for the very same reasons I am right now. This is how web purchasing MUST work. Their only innovation is a bit of UI.
and will make a lot of money. Let's not do it."
No, as soon as they saw that customers would want it they rushed to do it, and could have reproduced it in an hour without help, if not for the patent.
As a tip, both English and Arabic have been around far more than 20 years. Your analogy is irrelevant.
No, it isn't. Would you be okay with paying for everything you use, or not?
20 years is just some number we're currently at. You should know as well as I do that many influential IP-lobbyists strongly advocate infinite patents. Eventually, as with copyrights, the terms will grow further out of control.
Yeah. And before they invented that chair-back, there were no chairbacks. I'm imagining a world before the first patent, and it's a world with very little innovation.
Funny how a world with stools ripe for the modification, with tools made for modifying furniture, could be considered to have so little innovation. Do you think everyone just carved the same stool, in the same fashion?
Specifically, it's a world where "inventors" are either enormously wealthy already and invent to pass the time, or are patronized by enormously wealthy people.
Your history is seriously out of whack. Tying economic advancement to patents ignores the obvious causes - expanding markets, economic and social stability, more highly-skilled workers, etc.
There was a world full of invention before the early 1700s when modern patents got their start. The peasant who invented the plow did so without the promise of extortion to motivate them.
It's incredibly presumptuous to assume that his patent was obvious (was he a genius?)
That's not a condemnation of the patent system, that's a condemnation of allowing patents that are obvious.
No, it's very definitely a condemnation of the patent SYSTEM, whereby patents are assumed to be innovative if a clerk, by necessity unskilled in the field, can't prove otherwise.
The system quite deliberately errors in favor of allowing unreasonable patents and letting the courts sort out the mess, at great expense to the real innovators.
Saying, "abolish the patent system, because the patent Examiners are overworked" is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
No, I'm saying abolish the patent system because it doesn't and couldn't work.
This is just one example of a specific way the idea is flawed, by dumping the entire cost of dealing with trolls on the actual inventors the system is supposed to reward.
Patents are almost guaranteed to be useless when it comes to helping further development.
... or not. How can you say that after you just recognized that patents create problems to
Yeah, your interpretation of the law is probably correct, but the issue at hand is one of whether the 13-year old in question should have been punished.
Not if a charge would stick if he were railroaded into court and treated as an adult, but if it would be a good idea to subject him to detention.
some kind of alien, subjective morality which is totally false in modern times
I see, and my alien subjective morality would be okay in pre-modern times? Or not, and you're just saying silly shit for effect. Yeah, that's it.
attorneys don't actually make laws
No, but apparently they troll the net recommending lawsuits where they aren't needed or appropriate.
Of course you're just pissy because I don't see a need for lawyers. If you could actually find a flaw in what I said you'd have jumped on it.
You've chosen one word because you feel the other is manipulative and now you're dishonestly asking him to explain what he means when he suggests you're begin manipulative.
You obviously know what he means, but feel that your manipulation is justified because of the better world you feel it will produce.
He has a very valid point - more men than women are firefighters, not because of the term but because strength (until perhaps the near future) is important for the job. By choosing the less common but gender neutral term for this profession you are misleading girls(/everyone) to think that the job is as gender-neutral as doctoring, or retail sales, and manipulating them to feel that it should be.
It'd be nice if you were more up-front about your motives, or seemed to realize the means you'd justify.
But whatever the outcome, it's still incorrect usage and you'll look stupid to people who understand. Wouldn't you like to know before you made a fool of yourself, even if everyone else was doing it?
And even then it'd only help them - leaving every other institute in the world out in the cold, despite showing that the patented technique clearly didn't deserve a patent.
We shouldn't legislate charity, it gets done badly.
Similarly, we shouldn't legislate patents and hope they help your institution more than the trolls (which is totally unreasonable - trolls are optimized to benefit from patents and never risk anything). Your initial instincts are right, we should throw them out entirely.
If you need support, ultimately you need to appeal to the people. While you may short-circuit this by begging government it's less sure in the long run, and it's not morally justified to beg a thief who steals from me to steal for you as well.
My biggest barrier to donating to an institution like yours is that very patent portfolio. I know you've used it to the max, demanding what the market will bear, not what might be justified for your work on that patent. And justified that behavior by abuses against you in the patent field. Your lawyers are going to be just as vicious as any, and thus you're as much an enemy as they. If you didn't do such things, ideally simply for ideological reasons, but even if simply because patents didn't exist, I'd be a lot more likely to support you.
I doubt the patent aggressor in the story feels differently from your institution...
The solution here is not to allow monopoly rights at all. If there is a desperate desire to divert money towards specific fields or specific holders of certain papers, then just outright pay them from whatever public purse whose politicos they control, and leave the actual economy and business of getting jobs done alone.
You're exactly right.
Patents and other IPR seems like a good idea to some because their costs are not accounted for, but there is no macroeconomic difference between the privatized taxation rights of IPR and taxing and having the state pay out for per-patent use.
And again.
Except of course the lack of economic friction these laws cause which would probably double the economy overnight if we got rid of them.
No it can't, not successfully. It doesn't defend you against trolls because it only helps against those who fear your patents. It also is very spotty protection, you can have invented your method and patented it yet fall victim to a totally unforeseen patent in another area. You'd own your method yet be unable to use it except at the whims of a company that doesn't care if you go bankrupt, it'll just hold the next guy hostage too.
It's fake security sold by lawyers, the only ones who profit from patents.
Even if the [patent] owners were [killed] the patents would still exist and someone else would try to profit from them.
That's probably too violent, but of the two solutions is the only one that prevents the criminal from switching fields to writing abusive EULAs or whatever else lawyers who've decided to perform a job openly hostile to their fellow man do. Real-estate fraud? Run for office?
There are a lot of social actions between band-aiding anything the sociopaths pick at and shooting them though. For one, simple public shame and ridicule.
It's important though to remember to treat the problem, the sociopaths who will feed on their fellows, not whatever loopholes they're using.
It's yet another case where the basic idea was sound but the implementation is lacking.
It's another idea that came from the right place - the goal of encouraging inventors, but the basic idea is crap. Monopolies are always abusive, and the government doesn't have the moral right to deny one inventor the right to their own invention in favor of another, theoretically-earlier inventor.
If we wanted to reward helping innovation we'd take the tax money the patent system costs us and give it out to the people most responsible for the tech that's helped the world the most in each last ten years. That way you're not trying to guess if something is worthy, you're rewarding it when it has already proven to be.
Funny, I ignored the subject because I always do (nobody tends to use them here, unlike at k5) and was about to ask if there was some USA code-word I missed. Thanks for pointing out "reparations checks", I've heard it in that context but wouldn't have made the connection here. (At least, not having missed the subject.)
They are not. I know of them, but only because professional drivers pointed them out to me. I've never seen mention of them on a sign, in the newspaper, on the driver's test, or anywhere you'd hope people would discuss such things.
Slashdot Mirror
If it didn't mean something else, sure. But the people who are misunderstanding it would just as easily get your point with other terminology - there's no reason to use it for their sakes. If you're misusing begs the question there are simpler and more useful things to say.
"Raises a point" or "prompts a question" for instance don't have the baggage to confuse people AND are more likely to actually mean - word for word, not colloquially - what you want to say.
Of course, I wouldn't use beg the question for its original meaning either because I think describing the circular logic involved would be clearer than simply using a name for it. Rather than say "you're guilty of affirming the consequent", just say "A doesn't imply B, and you sure they're connected?"
I hadn't heard of the APT-tax, thanks. It seems like the best of the simplified tax codes I've seen.
I agree that the interstate commerce clause and a few other things are being abused to turn the federal government into exactly what it isn't supposed to be. It might not seem like much, but having laws come from the "right" level of government would make the system much less constrictive - people could have all the different laws they wanted, let's say for some stupid no-alcohol on Sunday rule, in their state, without having to screw with everyone else's laws.
Is it really hard to stop political parties? Or, rather, them forcing each other to vote the party line? It seems like a simple conflict of interest. Doesn't their oath include something about representing their constituents over all other interests?
Then we just require all elected officials to wear a collar-cam 24/7. Police (in some areas) do while at work. Post the footage directly on WikiLeaks...
The process is proven possible, not that there's a "proven process". That'd be more akin to a well-tested, bug free process.
Why did Amazon feel they had to delete copies of 1984 they'd already sold if they distributors have no liability?
Hate Apple if [...]
Oh yeah, here we go. Any and all criticism or not strictly-positive comments about Apple-anything is hating.
Right. But you'd be liable for speeding tickets that you'd gotten while driving the car, right?
They distributed the app, and even if not knowingly and thus have certain obligations to the customers. Not guilt for the stolen car, but a few hoops to jump through to let the legitimate owner get what they need.
I guess that's what I mean. That thing used to be annoying, now I've forgotten it existed and am using JS on here.
Funny how that works.
I hadn't seen Nuke Anything, I use Aardvark for that sort of thing.
I block everything on that list (well, except frames because nobody uses them and I'm not sure how you'd do it anyways, and DIVs of course) and browsing IS much nicer.
Years ago I thought I'd never have javascript default to on because everything it was used for was bad for me, the user, except where the site specifically required these abilities.
Now, more and more sites are realizing that they really need to fallback to text mode cleanly to reach huge segments of the market so they're getting more usable without javascript. In giving their users a way to access their content without javascript they've had to stop doing the annoying things or all their customers would have simply chosen the nicer interface. Now for many sites, and more all the time, there's no reason to block any features (except maybe banners) to have a productive browsing experience.
At this rate y'all are almost welcome back on my porch. It's an odd feeling.
It's more easily CSSed away, so yes, exactly. That it floats annoyingly is still an abomination worthy of Star Trek 2's ear-bugs.
If you use "begs the question" to mean "raises the question" everyone will understand what you meant
Actually, no. When I first heard it I thought it was incoherence, I didn't recognize it actually meant anything.
If you want to be understood you need to say something direct like "But if that is so, isn't it incompatible with this evidence here?"
So as long as you're borrowing a phrase, why refuse to use it properly? If you don't mean what it means, stop using it. It's awkward and antiquated, it's not like you're using it because you think it's clearer or anything. Simply say what you're trying to say and make everyone's life easier.
things such as language that are not subject to objective standards.
Pfft, not at all. Tomato/Tomahto, sure, but if you point to a dog and say "financial derivative" it's more likely brain damage than useful new language.
The signal-to-noise ratio is an objective measure of the usefulness of your speech. With sloppy language (even if this example is commonly shared) you'd have more problems conveying a complex idea.
No, the point was you dodging the label of manipulative. If you were honest you'd have said "Yes, but while my word choice is designed to manipulate someone I believe it is for the better." Or at least not flat-out denied it.
And firefighters was 50% of your examples, it's hardly cherry-picked.
You have a point - in general - about not using gender-specific words where they aren't warranted. But I didn't see anyone disagree with you over that. The disagreement was over the actual gender-neutrality of firefighting.
Where we're using a more accurate word, I'm all for this. For air-hosts the term steward is (I think) seen as gender neutral, and the job is easily doable by either gender, so it's needlessly confusing to say stewardess - it implies it can only be done by women. This is one we should try to correct. As does policeman, because police-work tends to be more social than physical - the gun provides the strength. Police officer is more accurate.
But as long as firefighting is a male dominated job, often by having requirements the average woman can't train to meet, and fireman is the more common term, it seems pointless and a bit incorrect to socially engineer a different term. Newspeak much?
I think it'd be best to give children an idea of which industries are dominated by which gender (and race, age group, etc) - not to imply that they should be that way, simply that they are. Perhaps even explicitly that they shouldn't, or at least needn't be. You'd want photos of firefighters in gear to give an example of why you literally can't do this at home. They'd obviously contain more men than women under the gear, and the reasons for the gender disparity would either be clear or could be discussed.
That way a young girl wanting to be a firefighter would know she'd need (and probably he too, in a world that had these) an exo-skeleton rig or other device that would overcome potentially fatal human limitations - much like SCBA are required now (and are much of the reason for the require to be able to carry so much). Perhaps she'd see the real money was in robotics and obsolete the entire thing...
I'm for updating language to reflect reality, not to obfuscate it. That you lump fireman with policeman suggested you felt otherwise.
It's really easy to say that in hindsight, ten years later.
Oh come on. I get the same reality denial from Bushies saying that while Iraq is a bad idea now, how could we have known then!?
Ummm, perhaps by listing to me, on Slashdot, saying exactly that, back then. If that's not good enough, how about the heads of major business, famous professors, etc, who said exactly the same thing?
But if it has no inventiveness, how come nobody else was doing it, and how come it made Amazon a lot of money?
I'm scoffing at your dis-ingeniousness here.
Patents are for technical advancement. If there's no technology to help them develop and no gain to be had from seeing how they did it, there's absolutely no reason to bribe them to release their methods.
Are you really claiming other people were standing around saying, "gosh, this technique is really obvious
Yes, for the very same reasons I am right now. This is how web purchasing MUST work. Their only innovation is a bit of UI.
and will make a lot of money. Let's not do it."
No, as soon as they saw that customers would want it they rushed to do it, and could have reproduced it in an hour without help, if not for the patent.
As a tip, both English and Arabic have been around far more than 20 years. Your analogy is irrelevant.
No, it isn't. Would you be okay with paying for everything you use, or not?
20 years is just some number we're currently at. You should know as well as I do that many influential IP-lobbyists strongly advocate infinite patents. Eventually, as with copyrights, the terms will grow further out of control.
Yeah. And before they invented that chair-back, there were no chairbacks. I'm imagining a world before the first patent, and it's a world with very little innovation.
Funny how a world with stools ripe for the modification, with tools made for modifying furniture, could be considered to have so little innovation. Do you think everyone just carved the same stool, in the same fashion?
Specifically, it's a world where "inventors" are either enormously wealthy already and invent to pass the time, or are patronized by enormously wealthy people.
Your history is seriously out of whack. Tying economic advancement to patents ignores the obvious causes - expanding markets, economic and social stability, more highly-skilled workers, etc.
There was a world full of invention before the early 1700s when modern patents got their start. The peasant who invented the plow did so without the promise of extortion to motivate them.
It's incredibly presumptuous to assume that his patent was obvious (was he a genius?)
That's not a condemnation of the patent system, that's a condemnation of allowing patents that are obvious.
No, it's very definitely a condemnation of the patent SYSTEM, whereby patents are assumed to be innovative if a clerk, by necessity unskilled in the field, can't prove otherwise.
The system quite deliberately errors in favor of allowing unreasonable patents and letting the courts sort out the mess, at great expense to the real innovators.
Saying, "abolish the patent system, because the patent Examiners are overworked" is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
No, I'm saying abolish the patent system because it doesn't and couldn't work.
This is just one example of a specific way the idea is flawed, by dumping the entire cost of dealing with trolls on the actual inventors the system is supposed to reward.
Patents are almost guaranteed to be useless when it comes to helping further development.
... or not. How can you say that after you just recognized that patents create problems to
Yeah, your interpretation of the law is probably correct, but the issue at hand is one of whether the 13-year old in question should have been punished.
Not if a charge would stick if he were railroaded into court and treated as an adult, but if it would be a good idea to subject him to detention.
some kind of alien, subjective morality which is totally false in modern times
I see, and my alien subjective morality would be okay in pre-modern times? Or not, and you're just saying silly shit for effect. Yeah, that's it.
attorneys don't actually make laws
No, but apparently they troll the net recommending lawsuits where they aren't needed or appropriate.
Of course you're just pissy because I don't see a need for lawyers. If you could actually find a flaw in what I said you'd have jumped on it.
You've chosen one word because you feel the other is manipulative and now you're dishonestly asking him to explain what he means when he suggests you're begin manipulative.
You obviously know what he means, but feel that your manipulation is justified because of the better world you feel it will produce.
He has a very valid point - more men than women are firefighters, not because of the term but because strength (until perhaps the near future) is important for the job. By choosing the less common but gender neutral term for this profession you are misleading girls(/everyone) to think that the job is as gender-neutral as doctoring, or retail sales, and manipulating them to feel that it should be.
It'd be nice if you were more up-front about your motives, or seemed to realize the means you'd justify.
Because productivity was not lost, productive people weren't playing Pacman - pretty much by definition.
Now, how many net-Scrabble, WoW, facebook, etc hours were spent on Pacman instead - I'd guess somewhere over four million...
Yes, idiots will debate anything.
But whatever the outcome, it's still incorrect usage and you'll look stupid to people who understand. Wouldn't you like to know before you made a fool of yourself, even if everyone else was doing it?
And even then it'd only help them - leaving every other institute in the world out in the cold, despite showing that the patented technique clearly didn't deserve a patent.
What a drag on progress.
If you're prevented from using your idea, stolen is at least as accurate as describing copyright violations using nautical pejoratives.
In lay terms, patent law IS theft. It makes what should be yours, theirs.
We shouldn't legislate charity, it gets done badly.
Similarly, we shouldn't legislate patents and hope they help your institution more than the trolls (which is totally unreasonable - trolls are optimized to benefit from patents and never risk anything). Your initial instincts are right, we should throw them out entirely.
If you need support, ultimately you need to appeal to the people. While you may short-circuit this by begging government it's less sure in the long run, and it's not morally justified to beg a thief who steals from me to steal for you as well.
My biggest barrier to donating to an institution like yours is that very patent portfolio. I know you've used it to the max, demanding what the market will bear, not what might be justified for your work on that patent. And justified that behavior by abuses against you in the patent field. Your lawyers are going to be just as vicious as any, and thus you're as much an enemy as they. If you didn't do such things, ideally simply for ideological reasons, but even if simply because patents didn't exist, I'd be a lot more likely to support you.
I doubt the patent aggressor in the story feels differently from your institution...
The solution here is not to allow monopoly rights at all. If there is a desperate desire to divert money towards specific fields or specific holders of certain papers, then just outright pay them from whatever public purse whose politicos they control, and leave the actual economy and business of getting jobs done alone.
You're exactly right.
Patents and other IPR seems like a good idea to some because their costs are not accounted for, but there is no macroeconomic difference between the privatized taxation rights of IPR and taxing and having the state pay out for per-patent use.
And again.
Except of course the lack of economic friction these laws cause which would probably double the economy overnight if we got rid of them.
No it can't, not successfully. It doesn't defend you against trolls because it only helps against those who fear your patents. It also is very spotty protection, you can have invented your method and patented it yet fall victim to a totally unforeseen patent in another area. You'd own your method yet be unable to use it except at the whims of a company that doesn't care if you go bankrupt, it'll just hold the next guy hostage too.
It's fake security sold by lawyers, the only ones who profit from patents.
Patent reform, only real solution.
To one specific problem, yes.
Even if the [patent] owners were [killed] the patents would still exist and someone else would try to profit from them.
That's probably too violent, but of the two solutions is the only one that prevents the criminal from switching fields to writing abusive EULAs or whatever else lawyers who've decided to perform a job openly hostile to their fellow man do. Real-estate fraud? Run for office?
There are a lot of social actions between band-aiding anything the sociopaths pick at and shooting them though. For one, simple public shame and ridicule.
It's important though to remember to treat the problem, the sociopaths who will feed on their fellows, not whatever loopholes they're using.
Good idea. The problem with the medical field is the FDA/etc. You need a field without mandatory product testing, but which people still panic about.
Security maybe?
Let me know where you end up, you've got business instincts I want to keep my eye on - I don't know if to invest in or avoid.
On second thought, homeopathic "remedies" are legal so you're fine.
It's yet another case where the basic idea was sound but the implementation is lacking.
It's another idea that came from the right place - the goal of encouraging inventors, but the basic idea is crap. Monopolies are always abusive, and the government doesn't have the moral right to deny one inventor the right to their own invention in favor of another, theoretically-earlier inventor.
If we wanted to reward helping innovation we'd take the tax money the patent system costs us and give it out to the people most responsible for the tech that's helped the world the most in each last ten years. That way you're not trying to guess if something is worthy, you're rewarding it when it has already proven to be.
Funny, I ignored the subject because I always do (nobody tends to use them here, unlike at k5) and was about to ask if there was some USA code-word I missed. Thanks for pointing out "reparations checks", I've heard it in that context but wouldn't have made the connection here. (At least, not having missed the subject.)
They are not. I know of them, but only because professional drivers pointed them out to me. I've never seen mention of them on a sign, in the newspaper, on the driver's test, or anywhere you'd hope people would discuss such things.