litchralee

@litchralee@sh.itjust.works

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why the water to make the medication work?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Without knowing which medication, there can only be speculation as to why it requires a specific quantity of water. And even then, the best source of authority would be to ask the doctor for the reason.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would it be better to just have a lot of society be underground?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
There are indeed places where large amounts of human activity takes place underground, often being metro systems and their associated retail spaces; Tokyo Station in Japan comes to mind as having an underground mall attached to it.

But the same caveats for underground construction of transportation systems also apply to all other underground structures that humans would like to build. Consider the differences between ground conditions in: the San Francisco Bay Area, Denver, and New York City.

The Bay Area is the outlet for major rivers in northern California, bounded by mountain ranges on virtually all sides. The surface is either a thin covering of soil atop this mountain rock, or is a layer of looser soil or mud, made from the sediments carried in by those rivers. This makes for fantastic agricultural conditions but presents a real risk of liquifaction when there’s an earthquake. While an underground structure wouldn’t fall over – because it’s within the ground – it could certainly lose its supports unless it has piles all the way down to the rock. And that’s only buildable on the narrow shoreline region where there’s sufficient depth before hitting the rock layer.

With Denver, it’s basically all rock, so to build within the rock would require blasting it away and building within the hole, or to build normally then bury the structure in fill, so that it’s below grade.

With NYC, it’s a different story because the ground conditions make it fairly easy to dig tunnels and drive piles, and the bedrock layer beneath Manhattan is strong enough to support the weight of supertall-class skyscrapers. On this point, the New York Fed’s Gold Vault is in the basement in Manhattan, precisely because the volume of gold inside would be a serious strain on any foundation and the geology beneath.

All that said, the surface conditions in some extreme climates may warrant building underground, or avoiding the underground outright. Burying a dwelling in New Mexico would make a lot of sense, due to the hot and dry Southwestern climate. But in Alaska, an underground dwelling would cause melting of the permafrost layer below, resulting in a similar situation to liquefaction. I suppose this can be mitigated, but it would be a monumental effort, akin to Camp Century in Greenland. That project was abandoned due to changing ice geology.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

I generally shy away from downvoting even things I dislike. I don’t want to fall into an echo chamber where all I see are only the things I agree with.

This is not how Lemmy works. If you don’t ever up or down vote anything, and if you have your client hide the up/down votes on all comments and posts, you will still see the same content as someone who prodigiously votes. Votes here are, in the truest possible way, optional.

But for people who do utilize up/down votes, they are a signal. Sometimes they’re a weak signal, sometimes a bad signal, and yet other times might be a strong signal from the community. How to evaluate the signal is a matter of continued debate.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the difference between socialism and communism? Is there one? Or are the terms interchangeable?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

Then there is the modern usage of the terms which seem to vary based on who invokes the[m]

I think the thing to keep in mind is: 1) words evolve over time, and 2) the people using those words might be abbreviating what they actually mean, because they don’t know that there’s another related concept that is named similarly. The best example of the first is how “truck” in the 1910s meant what we now call a “hand truck”, and “car” from that era meant traincar. Whereas in the 2020s, “truck” and “car” both refer to automobiles, and we had to create the backronyns of “hand truck” and “rail car” to avoid confusion.

I don’t think your theoretical understanding of Marxism is wrong – though I’ve not read enough to confirm – but I would hazard against using other people’s wrong definitions and usage guide your own understanding. If you understand the ideology, then it’s a matter of rendering it using the right words; that is, it becomes a communications problem.

For example, Republican politicians will use the term socialism to mean communism and vice versa

I would especially not suggest relying on right-wingers to properly use – let alone understand – left-wing ideology, since their objective is to denigrate leftists through FUD and infantile repetition. Basically, the maxim of “if enough people are ‘talking’ about something, it must be controversial” or “I’m just asking questions bro”, neither of which are anywhere approaching a good-faith discussion on the merits.

Some politicians like Mamdani or Bernie will describe socialism to mean a more humane type of capitalism that has other priorities other than pure profit seeking

How the two use the word “socialism” is almost always understood as a shorthand for what Europeans would call “social democracy”. So it’s definitely on the list of valid implementations of socialism, but is specifically about reforming an openly capitalist system into something more egalitarian. That said, “social democracy” still leaves out a lot of details which need clarification: do Mamdani or Bernie support (re)building the social safety net? Does the state need to also own railroads the same way that they own highways? For the former, there’s the standalone word “welfare state”, but I’m not aware of a compound phrase that means “social democratic welfare state”, if that even describes Bernie or Mamdani at all. I’d certainly love a word that means “social democratic welfare railway state” but nothing has caught on.

I think that should underscore my point: even after resolving exactly which word they might be abbreviating, there aren’t enough short words to succinctly describe any particular ideology. Rather, the words are useful to get a rough idea of a person’s views, but ultimately, every one and every candidate is going to have a slightly different take on certain questions.

Some people use communism to describe an authoritarian system that has no regard for human agency

I personally refer to this definition as “Stalinist communism”, because it does accurately describe how the USSR was operating under Stalin. Essentially, it wrapped a cult-of-personality in the trappings of communist thought, though people like Trotsky pointed out how communism could be done much differently. Obviously, history is quite clear that the Stalinist approach was not adopted as-is by any other country, nor retained in the USSR after Stalin’s death. Indeed, I’ve never come across anyone who genuinely refers to themselves as a Stalinist or who seriously proposes to the adoption of Stalin-style, top-down authoritarian communism. Maybe some right-wing Russians do, but idk. My point is that, like the Republican examples above, Stalin and authoritarian communism is usually only brought up as a “thought terminating answer” rather than to seriously debate the merits of communism, either theoretically or practically.

multiple people will have multiple definitions that most often don’t align with how Marxists describe communism and socialism

Yes, because they’re usually talking past each other about different things. Being able to detect which definition someone means to use is a skill that you can develop for yourself, to have a clearer picture than they do.

I’m primarily writing this comment because I abhor the idea that an idea – it could be anything, from rocket science to theorrtical mathematics – is perceived as being an arena where everyone is just making up stuff, and if that should lead to people becoming turned off the idea of studying it for themselves, that’s a net-negative. No doubt, some countries, politicians, and agencies want to denigrate or prop up their own definitions, but that just makes it easier to identify fake socialists and “communists in name only”.

The merits and failures of socialism and communism deserve to be comprehensively hashed out in the public mind, and it only serves the status quo that this not happen. And the longer the conversation is delayed, the more that the indisputable ails of the status quo take more victims.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the difference between socialism and communism? Is there one? Or are the terms interchangeable?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
There is definitely a difference, and they are not interchangeable. I’ll let other people chime in with a rigorous definition for communism, but at a minimum, it must have abolished the state and social classes entirely. So one could say that communism is at the very end of the road, and the various flavors of socialism are the routes to get there.

Various flavors of socialism? Yes, I’ve written an earlier comment about that, and another one here. In brief, there are many ways to move beyond capitalism.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would a metal gazebo be safe during a lightning storm?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

but electricity will always run the path of least resistance, which will invariably be the metal gazebo if they’re close enough.

Not according to the USA National Weather Service:

The presence of metal makes absolutely no difference on where lightning strikes. Natural objects that are tall and isolated, but are made of little to no metal, like trees and mountains get struck by lightning many times a year.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Despite the USA being somewhat of a political pariah at the moment, it has long been the case that American universities are desirable from an educational perspective and for “clout”. Not to say that TU Delft or anywhere else doesn’t have name recognition, but being a fully English instruction on a continent with few neighbors, it is a very “exotic” destination to go study at.

That Hollywood and media hype up the American collegiate experience (eg red Solo cups, fraternity/sorority life, binge drinking, road tripping for spring break, etc), even some non-research public college systems like the California State University (CSU) system will receive international students, while the reaearch-focused University of California (UC) systems remains in the top tier of public American universities.

From the university’s perspective, they have a commodity they can market to an international audience, so why not charge more? As for why these colleges are behaving like capitalists – especially the public universities – it is because of chronic state underfunding: the USA federal government does not pitch in very much to the universities, except as research grants. And when push comes to shove, state legislators will cut university funding, meaning more has to be paid for by students. Some states even slash school funding and then try to replace it with state lottery proceeds, which means schools are only well-funded when there’s a gambling epidemic…

Now in your case, it should be noted that the University of Southern California (USC) is a private university, that regularly jostles with UCLA (a UC campus) for the highest ranking as a college in southern California. Accordingly, they are priced similarly for international students but not for domestic students: the UC system first-and-foremost must serve its constituent citizens, so to keep tuition low for in-state students, they will raise the price of out-of-state or international students. USC and other private colleges would follow suit, because free extra money.

We haven’t privatized the public universities in the USA, but they’re almost operating as though they already have been, charging as much as the market can bear.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do tires have the width and diameter they do?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

it’s negligible compared to the load carrying provided by the tire pressure.

My comment was in reply to the “always equal” assertion, which it definitely is not. No doubt, it’s a handy rule of thumb but nobody should walk away thinking it is a hard rule of tire physics.

And that’s the gyroscopic effect, not any of the other things that contribute to bicycle stability but don’t depend on wheel size.

Correlation does not prove causation. You assert that bicycle wheels are big because they have more gyroscopic effects. That is a correlation. I assert in my other comment that small wheels would be swallowed by potholes. That is a causal relationship: the wheel must be bigger to deal with real roads AND is something a smaller wheel cannot handle. It is a fact that a big wheel rolls over protrusions and holes that a small wheel would fall into.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't urban/suburban streets and roads use a center storm channel?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
The premise of my question is that it is a false dichotomy: there need not be tension between pedestrian and roadway users if the drainage system spread out the water over a larger area of already-paved surface. Everyone wins!

In a rural area where roads are already narrow, this wouldn’t work and I acknowledged that in the title, limiting the inquiry to urban/suburban. I agree 100% that rural country roads built with ditches are entirely appropriate, cheap, and allow natural absorption into the soil. But urban streets aren’t just souped-up country roads and need to be constructed for the built environment.

Whereas rural areas prioritize land, livestock, and the great outdoors, urban areas prioritize people. And that means pedestrian facilities are non-negotiable in my book.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do tires have the width and diameter they do?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
The TL;DR is that at one point in history, automobile wheels did in-fact use the same construction as bicycles. But the needs of automobiles diverged somewhere in the first half of the 20th Century. And since tires are mounted onto wheels, we need to discuss those first.

I’ve written prior comments here about bicycle wheel/tire fitment and wooden carriage wheel design.

Basically, early horseless carriages used the same wooden wheels that horse-drawn carriages has used for centuries, which have a squared off profile that contacts the ground, sometimes with a steel band – a tyre – to both hold the wheel together and reduce wear on the wheel itself. The only requirements for carriage wheels were to: 1) roll, and 2) bear weight. And using thick wooden spokes, a wagon wheel could achieve those objectives just fine but were really heavy.

When the bicycle was invented in the 1820s, the first iterations used slender variants of wagon wheels, but since 100% of the moving power came from the human rider, this is still unnecessary dead weight to haul around. So bicycle wheels evolved to use very thin spokes, which by the late 19th Century were made of steel in tension, rather than the compressive loads through wood that wagon wheels used. Although steel is heavier than wood, a thin steel spoke has more tensile strength than the same weight of wood has in compression. So overall, it’s a weight savings. Specifically, we say that a bicycle wheel must: 1) roll, 2) bear some weight, and 3) allow for leaning.

The last requirement is crucial for bicycles: they cannot use squared-off carriage wheels, or else leaning the bike will start riding on the edge of the wheel/tire. The solution is simple: round off the contact point so that leaning doesn’t change the profile.

As it turns out, by the 1910s or so, automobiles also realized that wooden wheels were too heavy, and so they also adopted the steel spoked wheel. But they kept the squares off rubber tire, precisely because an automobile does not (normally!) lean during a curve, and instead should be firmly planted on all four wheels. So at this point in history, both automobiles and bicycles are using spoked wheels but just have different shapes for their rubber tires. Great!

But this wouldn’t last: the spoked wheel – which already is a phenomenal structure, essentially being a suspension bridge wrapping upon itself – has one small quirk which bicycles tolerated but automobiles do not. When a spoked wheel is subjected to a straight downward force, the structure distributes the force essentially evenly. But if the force is sideways from the left (ie along the axle), the spokes on the left are heavily stretched but the spokes on the right aren’t. This is uneven loading, that then reverberates from side to side.

This is no issue for bicycles, because they usually lean and so the sideways force is often zero. Sure, a BMX rider can intentionally ride the bike askew, but it’s workable. For an automobile, sideways forces are a regular occurrence, such as during a sharp turn. But also during motorsports where the car is sliding. Spoked wheels can disintegrate when subjected to enough sideways force, which is why cars switched to solid wheels.

Also around this time, cars got very heavy – some would say “land yachts” – and this required making the tire wider to deal with the weight. Since the tire and wheel are the same width in cars, this means wider rims as well. Bicycles have no such issue, because most bicycle tires are “balloon shaped”, and so already are wider than the rim, sometimes almost comically.

In the end, the closest that bicycles and automobiles got was in the early 1900s, and have diverged ever since. Fatbike bicycles and now ebikes pushed the width of tires to some 4+ inches (100+ mm) while touring cars are luxury vehicles meant for long distance, high speed cruising on the Autobahn, and so need wide, high aspect ratio tires.

As for wheel diameter, that’s much simpler to answer: as Jeremy Clarkson noted in the Vietnam Top Gear Special, smaller wheels fall into potholes easier. Bigger wheels roll over them. Automobiles for paved roads use modest diameters, capable of slowly rolling over a 4-6 curb to access a driveway. The same diameter on a bicycle would be the 27-inch (aka 700c) or 29-inch class used for road cycling or mountain biking. Whereas smaller folding bikes used exclusively for last-mile commuting can tolerate smaller wheels, because the benefit doesn’t outweigh the diameter penalty when folding it down.

For overlanding or bouldering, 4x4 automobiles have some enormous tire diameters and even then, they sometimes have to intentionally reduce the air pressure, so the tire can conform to rock surfaces and thus get more traction. But such tires are wholly inappropriate on a roadway at freeway speeds.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't urban/suburban streets and roads use a center storm channel?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I agree with everything up until this point:

If the road were sloping towards drainage at the centre, then floodwater fills the entire road basin before overflowing, and your road is blocked

I’m imagining the scenario of a residential suburban neighborhood, on mostly flat land. With moderate rain and fallen leaves from the Autumn, some storm drains will clog and need manual intervention. If this neighborhood were built with conventional crowning, then the properties unlucky enough to be next to a clogged drain will see some flooding, but other homes in the neighborhood will have no issue.

If instead the entire neighborhood used center gutters with center drains, but spaced the drains closer together so the drains/km is identical to a conventional build, then the same rainfall should cause smaller impacts, because: 1) a single clogged drain will only flood a small patch of the road, until 2) reaching the next open drain, which is closer and thus the flood is a smaller area, and 3) does not disadvantage the unlucky property immediately adjacent to the clog, since the flooding is concentrated at the road center.

In both constructions, the road area is identical, the rainfall is identical, and the storm drain capacity is identical, yet the latter needs only one half the linear gutter distance and can spread out the flood risk across the whole neighborhood. Phrased another way, center gutters should stave off flood damage to any property, until such point that the drainage is simply overloaded and then every property would flood. No more “lucky” or “unlucky” neighbors: either everyone is safe or they all need to evacuate.

That’s the situation in a flat neighborhood, but in a sloped neighborhood, center gutters aren’t any worse: the most critical drains are at the bottom of the neighborhood. If those fail, it’s still game over for those adjacent homes. And that still is the case for side gutters anyway.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do tires have the width and diameter they do?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

The pressure the tire exerts on the road is always equal to the pressure it’s inflated to.

This is merely a convenient approximation for properly-inflated tires carrying a load, not a hard rule rooted borne out during empirical examination. After all, removing a wheel from an automobile and rolling it along clean concrete leaves tire tracks that are full width, yet the tire will not substantially deform at the contact point because 20-30 pounds is not much of a burden. If there’s no deformation, then the contact patch is a line with a tiny area, which would wrongly suggest a ludicrously high tire pressure.

because they have more gyroscopic effect and thus make the bike easier to balance.

While bike wheels do act as gyroscopes – as do all rotating masses without a contra-rotating mass – this is not substantial to bicycle stability. If it were, kick scooters or e-scooters which have substantially smaller wheels but with the same physics as bicycles would be unrideable.

The bicycle has existed for about 200 years, and for most of that time, how it remains stable was an open question in physics until roughly the late 20th Century, when researchers built enough intentionally-bad bicycles to prove what was minimum and sufficient to have a functioning bicycle. This empirically ruled out trail, caster, and gyroscopes as necessary factors. But the most prominent factor that remained necessarily is centrifugal balancing, aka leaning/banking. Turns out, bicycles lean into curves just like airplanes so.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't urban/suburban streets and roads use a center storm channel?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

it becomes more problematic at the center.

This is precisely what I’m trying to understand: what gets more problematic? The driving? The civil engineering? What is the exact complexity that a center drain would introduce?

some one has to go unclog it.

Conventional drains along the curb also need to be unclogged manually, except that the public works dept needs to get people to move their parked cars, which can also hide the problem from being easily noticed in the first place.

either have to shut down both directions or be at risk of being hit from both directions.

From seeing how my town accesses manholes located in the middle of a two-way road, they arrange two heavy trucks in a row, one before and one after the manhole. On a multilane arterial, this is a minor traffic disruption of one lane. On a quiet residential street, people just go around slowly.

with the way roads are constructed, it would be a lot more expensive to design the sewers to either tolerate the loads (imagine a big heavy truck,)

I believe that roads are infact designed with the sewer and storm drain pipes directly below the traffic lanes. See my other comment. A cursory review of my town’s planning documents for a new road extension shows a cross section that has all longitudinal piping underneath the lanes, so that the manholes aren’t installed under sidewalks or the curb. I am open to seeing plans for other jurisdictions that build their pipes differently.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't urban/suburban streets and roads use a center storm channel?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Why would a single clog immediately flood the entire road surface? Sure, the water might accumulate spanwise, but no street is perfectly flat, so water also flows longitudinally along the road. Water would pool until the next drain, no different than a side gutter being clogged. And at least there’s the possible benefit of unclogging the drain by driving directly over the drain.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't urban/suburban streets and roads use a center storm channel?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I would question why road traffic is driving very fast in “heavy rainfall”, but the solution is the same: truncate the gutter before the intersection, so that the intersection itself drains conventionally, into the center gutters on all approaches to the intersection. Alternatively, where it makes sense, use a center drained roundabout.

having a hollow space beneath the part of the road that needs to support the most weight of vehicles

My understanding is that there is only one storm drain pipe underneath a street, somewhere near the center, and each side of the road has laterals that connect to this pipe. There are not two pipes, one for each side of the street directly under the edges of the paved surface. See amwua.org/…/only-rain-should-go-down-the-storm-dr… (relevant image only shows up on desktop mode)
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't urban/suburban streets and roads use a center storm channel?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
This is true. At the same time though, I’ve never seen a pile of leaves remain stationary in the middle of a street for very long, as every passing car or bike inevitably disturbs the leaves. Maybe delivery drivers could be encouraged to drive over the center drains so that piles of leaves are dislodged from around the drains.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't urban/suburban streets and roads use a center storm channel?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I did consider this possiblity, but I figure that such a center drained road would necessarily have excavated more material from the road than a conventional crowned road, so the road itself sits lower than the nearby properties, and lower than a crowned road.

If done like this, the road necessarily has more “storage” capacity during floods than whatever could fit into the shallow side gutters of a crowned road. If the issue instead is clogged drains, then the center drains could be placed 2x more closely than side gutters, such that the total number of storm drains per km is identical.
Why don't urban/suburban streets and roads use a center storm channel?
Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩ | ⁨22⁩ ⁨comments⁩
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has anyone ever actually had their vehicle tabs stolen?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I’ve only ever heard the advice to perforate the vehicle registration sticker from one person, but supposing that it has become normalized advice, I have to imagine that it’s due to the low-effort, not necessarily the extraordinary security that it provides.

In a related situation, I’m often confused at folks who don’t lock their cars when going to the shops, since it’s adding an extra barrier for an opportunistic thief to cross. There’s no question that a motivated thief could just take a brick to the window, but it is indeed low effort to lock the car and if that’s enough to dissuade one theft, then that’s good enough.

It is, after all, quite hard to prove a negative so we can’t really know how much theft it deters. But it is very clear that a perforated registration sticker destroys any value to anyone who would even contemplate stealing it. But as you say, if there were zero such people to begin with, then it can’t really be reduced further.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's gunna to happen when the American Federal Government starts prosecuting people for owning powerful computer hardware and software?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Adding some color to this tidbit of history – because I don’t think the OP’s original question can even be meaningfully answered – one of the rationales for American regulations on exporting cryptography was to maintain a military advantage: if American computers are powerful enough to break weak encryption, but everyone else’s computers cannot break strong encryption, then it is a NOBUS capability that the USA and its allies have.

If having been handed such a capability, the most logical thing to do is to hold onto it for as long as possible, and let the adversary struggle for a few decades to reduce the asymmetry. By the time the 2000s came around, computer capabilities were equalized enough that denying strong encryption stopped making much sense, in addition to being unworkable due to internet distribution.

Which is why the tactic changed: with no more asymmetry, the new logical tactic is to actively contribute to making the strongest possible encryption possible, in collaboration with academics from anywhere and everywhere. This is when NIST started hosting competitions to select the next cryptographic algorithms, where the world’s top cryptographers and researchers would get each other’s work, as a supercharged form of peer-review. And as a result, everyone including friend or foe benefits from those cryptographically secure building blocks, as seen in TLS 1.3 or E2EE secure messaging.

No doubt that the NSA or governments will still be paranoid about protecting their top secrets, but defense in depth means they have other methods to keep stuff secure, such as guarding an air-gapped network with armed soldiers. It’s just that the weakness of encryption is no longer a realistic attack vector in the 21st Century.

Time has advanced, and new challenges arise.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could the Supreme Court overturning Marbury vs Madison be a way to repeal the US Constitution?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

Overturning Marbury would turn the Supreme Court into a court of review, meaning they only apply the law as written.

This is correct as to what SCOTUS can pass final judgement upon. What would be unaffected would be theirs powers in equity, which show up prominently when it comes to preliminary injunctions. So in a world without Marbury, a lawsuit against the federal government challenging the constitutionality of a particular law could not proceed, because SCOTUS (and by extension, all inferior federal courts) wouldn’t be able to rule on that question.

But if instead, a lawsuit challenges whether the federal government followed the procedures defined in law, or if there is ambiguity as to how the law might be interpreted, then SCOTUS would still have the power to intervene while the case progresses – which would typically restore the status quo, but the current SCOTUS seems allergic to that – and then could pass judgement in law on how a statute is read, or in equity on how ambiguity is resolved. Litigants would change their tactics to adapt to this environment.

This is part for core, raw power that the court retains, even without Marbury: it can, at great reputational cost, read a statute that says “no parking on Tuesday” to mean any of: 1) no parking on any Tuesday of any week, 2) no parking on only the Tuesday following the passage of the statute, and then parking is always permitted thereafter, 3) parking of automobiles is banned nationwide, but only in National Parks because of their “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity with a distinct historical tradition”, even when this openly contradicts history.

The power to say what words mean is awe-inducing but also terrifying, one that can maintain good governance but can also turn into an Orwellian double-plus bad nightmare.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can the defendant still be summoned even if they reside overseas beyond the jurisdiction of the crime?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
IANAL. In a jurisdiction such as California, USA, there is a distinction between a criminal summons and a subpoena. The former is when that person is being charged with a crime, and the latter is when they are being ordered to give testimony to a criminal or civil trial. The difference as applied to the OP’s scenario is that some treaties allow for criminal defendants to be extradited to a requesting jurisdiction to stand trial. But I’m not aware of any treaties that permit extradition to give testimony.

Indeed, in the 21st Century, when a person whose testimony would be greatly useful cannot appear in person for a tribunal, for whatever reason, the next best thing is to have them show up via telepresence. It accomplishes the goal of obtaining testimony, but does not imperil the physical or legal safety of the witness. In a civil trial, this is fairly straightforward to arrange, but in a criminal trial, there may be some concerns about the US Constitution’s 6th Amendment, specifically the Confrontation Clause, that requires an opportunity for the accused to examine the witness.

But seeing as the title of the question specifically says “defendant”, we might tackle the question of when someone overseas is charged with a crime. There are a few things that have to be determined, including jurisdiction, venue, and nexus. These are, grossly oversimplifying: the legal authority of a court to hear a case, whether the court is the most appropriate, and whether there is sufficient connection to apply the laws of a particular jurisdiction. Other locales may refer to these concepts differently, but the idea should be much the same.

Jurisdiction must be established over the person in question. That is, a potential defendant must be bound to the orders of the court, or else this is an entirely moot exercise. So obviously, someone physically within the judicial territory (eg California) is probably within the jurisdiction, but notable exceptions include diplomats and federal officers. Likewise, someone who was in the state but fled the authorities already pursuing them (eg fleeing a hit and run by driving into Nevada) did have jurisdiction for the relevant time of the crime, even though they’re not physically still in the state.

Venue is the choice of which court should hear the case. Suppose we’re using the hit and run scenario again, would the case be eligible to be heard in every single country that the motorist passed through while fleeing? Generally no, since the most appropriate venue would be the place where most of the facts occurred, which is usually where the crime occurred. That said, when it becomes impossible to try a defendant at the first choice of venue, the next choice can be used. This sometimes happens because a crime is so notorious that it’ll become impossible to guarantee a fair trial. In California, a trial can be ordered moved to a different county, in this scenario.

But also possible is for a “foreign” court to exercise venue but applying California law. This is unlikely for criminal cases, but possible for civil cases, usually when a contract dispute specifies “the laws of California shall apply”. In such scenario, another state court (or a federal court, whether within California or not) can apply the laws of California and render a verdict under the same principles and precedences that a California trial court would render. This even includes a process for “certifying” a question to the California Supreme Court, for matters where no precedence can be found, in order to get an authoritative answer for what California law says.

Finally, there is nexus, which is more about suitability of bringing the case. After all, certain crimes are still crimes even after fleeing the original place. If the same motorist from earlier flies out of Las Vegas airport directly to Edinburgh, Scotland, it may be possible to extradite them back to California if an extradition treaty is in place, or if the Scottish authorities approve of California’s request to extradite even without a treaty. But in the alternate, the Scottish prosecutors might be able to charge the crime locally, even though it happened in California, and impose a penalty as though the crime occurred in Scotland. But this greatly depends on whether Scots law specifically allows such charges.

In the case that it does, nexus would be what tilts the decision to do the trial under California law in California, or Scots law in Scotland. If the crime turns out to be an attempted murder in furtherance of the Scottish Mafia (??), then a Scots law trial would make more sense. But if it were an attempted murder of ex’s new beau and all events relate to the north coast town of Fort Bragg, then a California trial would make more sense.

There’s already a form of punishment from visa requirements meaning if the defendant has a passport from a “third world” country: their travel movement is restricted making any potential vacations a headache, but that alone doesn’t work if the defendant has a strong passport

I’m not sure if this is a thing in the USA. If someone has fled the jurisdiction, and has not been tried in absentia, then they have not been convicted, merely that they’re still wanted. If anything, the USA would actually be very willing to welcome them to the country in vacation, because the moment they step foot off the airplane, USA jurisdiction comes into full force and that person can be immediately arrested and charged with the crime, assuming the statue of limitations has not run out. And given that many felonies have their statue of limitations tolled (read: paused) when an assailant is beyond the territory, this is a definite risk for someone who might be wanted by state authorities. Per the Full Faith And Credit Clause of the US Constitution, an arrest warrant from any one state has the same effect as though it came from the local state. So sheriff’s deputies at Orlando Airport (which serves Disney World) could not decline a California arrest warrant, if they would have acted on a Florida-issued arrest warrant for the same crime.

The USA does not have the power to invalidate the passport of a non USA Citizen or non USA National, but since USA airports do not have international zones, this effectively might deny that person from being able to transit via the USA, such as wanting to go on vacation from their new home in Scotland to Disneyland Tokyo via Dallas/Fort Worth airport.

the defendant hasn’t even been to the country in person where the crime took place but are considered a suspect due to their interactions with those on the ground who executed the crime in where it occurred.

In California and the USA at large, guilt by association is not a thing. If they have not been to the territory where the crime occurred, the courts are unlikely to have jurisdiction and venue, and it’s a very weak argument for nexus. The exception would be if this person has specifically orchestrated the local crime, directing it so thoroughly beyond a mere tangential connection. There are, frankly, few crimes that will meet this bar, but terrorism, conspiracy, murder-for-hire are a few that come to mind. And even then, the burden on the prosecution will be to prove a specific intent to aid in a crime within this state, as opposed to a lesser intent.

Consider that ransomware attacks do not care about jurisdiction, and whether the victim is in California or Copenhagen doesn’t really change the nature of the crime. Such remotely-operated crimes are usually not charged at a state-level but are done by USA federal prosecutors, for whom extraterritorial jurisdiction is much more commonly applied, especially for computer crimes that are pursued by international consortiums.

But even this would still require finding the assailant, figuring out how to get them to a venue that can apply meaningful jurisdiction, and securing a conviction. Sometimes going into hiding is indeed a viable way to avoid prosecutors, but that’s hardly a way to live life.

TL;DR: it depends
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are all of the Bananas and Oranges in FL from California?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Adding to the other comments, even when certain fruits can indeed be grown in places besides California, there’s also the matter of infrastructure. Not specific to oranges, Pacific Fruit Express (PFE) supplied refrigerated train cars for long-haul distribution of fruits from California’s Central Valley out to the East Coast. Because this was the early 20th Century before mechanical refrigeration was widely available, cooling had to be done using the same approach for centuries: ice.

In this regard, California was blessed with the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where water could be frozen into ice and then transported by rail on the now-Union Pacific transcontinental railroad to Sacramento and then down to the entire Central Valley for keeping food from spoiling during the long journey out east. The fact that these fruit-laden railcars had to go through the mountain pass again meant they could be topped up with more ice, and when the empty train car returned from the East Coast, it could carry ice back down to the Central Valley again. A virtuous cycle.

Basically, fruits not only need to be growable, but also the transportation infrastructure must exist. Sure, Florida also had railroads in the early 1900s but it was not really well connected to the rest of the Eastern Seaboard. As a side note, this is a contributing factor to the Confederacy’s loss in the American Civil War, since different railroad gauges meant they had more difficulty mobilizing by rail, specifically for materiel. Whereas the industrialized North already used standard gauge for their trains. So even if Florida did have standard gauge going into the 1900s, the different rail companies would not necessarily have had good enough relationships to permit trains to do a full run from Florida to the population centers up north. These are all frictions that never plagued the now-Union Pacific, which could run basically effortlessly to Chicago and eastward beyond. And of course, Florida is not known to have ice-making weather.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a small android phone work as a router ?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Technically yes. In fact, that’s exactly what smartphones do when they operate as a wifi hotspot: packets come in from the mobile provider and are IP routed to the Wifi network, and vice versa. Whether this happens using Legacy IPv4 and NAT, or with prefix-delegation on IPv6, it’s still routing.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Let’s also not forget inheritance tax, which directly addresses the problem of hoarding wealth and perpetuating inequities across generations. If supposedly “self-made” people “earned” their billions, then their heirs should have no problems earning their own as well.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
In California, property tax is adjusted annually regardless of which way it goes. But if it goes up, it is capped at 2% per year, due to Prop 13. If the assessed value drops, then the reduction in property tax is not limited.

As public policy, this has been devastating for local funding, being the primary means for funding local school districts in this state. When the education prospects of children are subjected to the whims of the wider economy and/or how hot (or not) the local property market is, this is a recipe for inequity: well-off areas are willing to tax themselves extra (beyond the Prop 13 2% cap) and get good schools for it. But poor areas cannot afford even the existing tax, because property tax is regressive and consumes a larger proportion of poorer household budgets. Meanwhile, the state abdicates its role in funding education, because they believe the locals would vote for more taxes for education, even though it’s plainly obviously a Zip code lottery.

But I digress.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I believe you have the current meta understood, yes.

I know that most people actually get places by having stuff to show off e.g projects, clubs and GOOD GRADES

From what I’ve seen with how my company handles intern applicants, there are at least two different tracks: the first track is indeed people that have GPAs and coursework that is immediately impressive to any recruiter working on commissions. But the second track is where applicants make an impression to our engineers staffing company’s booth when on-site for career fairs.

My take is that engineers have a better gauge for aptitude and generally fitting-in with the company culture, miles above what an external recruiter or a company HR person could ever assess. And fortunately at my company, the process for assessing applicants from either track still ends up before the same interview panel of technical people.

My advice then is that in tandem with a mass approach to resume distribution, also seek out in-person career fair opportunities. These opportunities won’t exist after you’ve left uni, and it’s a good way to both understand a prospective employer and also make a good, in-person impression. And if you do this, do brush up on exactly what those prospective companies work in, and put your most appealing strengths forward first. Even just asking them questions but using correct industry vocab is a differentiator.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Happy cake day btw!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Yes
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Aside from being an open standard, what other benefits are there to RISC-V over x86/ARM?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

Better to use an old architecture whose patents have expired, and implement it on a new, smaller process.

I’m not aware of any examples of an old architecture that was largely reused while ported to a new process, without requiring extensive redesigning of the analog components. Old processor architectures are a product of their day, making assumptions and decisions about the silicon paths that would be wholly invalidated if brought as-is to more-modern processes. It is nowhere near as simple as a copy/paste job of SystemVerilog or RTL.

To invest even one hour of design time to update, say, the 1970s Intel 4004 design (10 micrometer process) into the 2000s (130 nm) would be more expensive than just using RISC-V for free, which has already been fabricated using 22 nm, among other processes.