Haha, your reply beat out mine by only a minute.

This does not agree with what the Social Security Administration has published:

Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?

A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.

For the historical questions, I don’t really have answers, especially where it involves departures from the Western world. I did, however, briefly touch up on Islamic banking, which I’ve always found intriguing as the Islamic faith does not permit charging interest on loans, viewing it as usurious. I’m informed that Christianity also had a similar prohibition on usury, but apparently it fell due to the need to fund the constant wars in Europe.

I’m not really seeing the difference in feudalism except a members only kind of participation with a crony pool of inbreds, not all that different than the billionaires of today.

I think the important distinction insofar as stock markets is that the crony pool of inbreds have access, but so too does the commoner. Well, the middle-class commoner usually. And we’ve seen David-vs-Goliath cases where the commoners put up a decent fight against the inbreds’ institutions; the whole GameStonk fiasco comes to mind. An equivalent economic upset would have been wholly impossible at any point during any feudal period in history.

What are the idealist or futurist potential alternatives between the present and a future where wealth is no longer the primary means of complex social hierarchical display? My premise is that basing hierarchical display on the fundamental means of human survival is barbaric primitivism.

From conversations I’ve had previously, possible answers to that question are presented in the works of Paul Cockshott, author of Towards A New Socialism. I’ve not read it, but friends in Marxist-Leninist parties have mentioned it. The Wikipedia page, however, notes that it’s an economics book, which could be fairly technical and difficult to read. Sort of like how Das Kapital is more-or-less a textbook, in contrast with how Wage Labour And Capital was meant for mass consumption.

Wealth extraction neglects the responsibility of the environment and long term planning.

True. The cost to the environment is not “internalized”, to use the technical term. Hence, it doesn’t need to be paid for, and is thus “free real estate”. Solutions to internalize environmental harm include carbon taxes or cap-and-trade. But the latter is a lukewarm carbon tax because it only looks at the end-result emissions, rather than taxing at the oil well, so to speak.

I’m curious how humanity evolves in a distant post scarcity future but without becoming authoritarian or utopian/dystopian

Might I recommend The Three-Body Problem and the trilogy overall by Liu Cixin? This phenomenal hard scifi work describes a space-faring future where the human species faces a common, external threat. After all, much of today’s progress was yesterday’s scifi. So why not look to scifi to see what tomorrow’s solutions might be. It’s no worse than my crystal ball, which is foggy and in need of repair.

If you’re in the USA, I cannot understate how useful it may be to refer to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’s (BLS) Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), a resource which I believe has no direct comparison:

How can I learn about an occupation that is of interest to me?

The Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) provides information on what workers do; the work environment; education, training, and other qualifications; pay; the job outlook; information on state and area data; similar occupations; and sources of additional information for more than 300 occupational profiles covering about 4 out of 5 jobs in the economy.

As for answering the question, anecdotal conversations I’ve had suggest that the trades (eg glazier, electrician, plumber) in the USA are promising fields, since while the nature of the job might change with different needs, people still require electric wires and piped water. But the OOH could give you more specific outlooks for those specific trades.

I was once told that plumbers can make very serious sums of money, even if they’re only ever installing supply-side piping. That is to say, the plumbing for water supply, as compared to drainage or sewer pipe, which are generally perceived as less appealing.

I’ll take a shot from the hip at this question, but note that I won’t add my customary citations or links.

The stock market is the paragon of property and trusts, contracts, corporations and law, and the capitalist socio-economic system. The very existence of the stock market implies a society that has some or most of these concepts.

For example, for shares to be traded, there generally must exist ownership rights upon the shares, distinct from the ownership rights that the company has of its own property. Or if not outright ownership of a share, then the benefit that a share provides (eg dividends). It also implies a legal system that will enforce these rights and the obligations of the company to its shareholders.

For a tradable company to exist, it must be organized/chartered as an entity distinct from any single person. This is different than the feudal days, when ventures would be undertaken “in right of the King” or some member of the nobility. The feudal method wouldn’t work for modern companies, or else the King/Duke/Count/whatever could stiff the shareholders by just taking all the earnings. The company still needs to be created by legal means, either an Act of Parliament/Congress, by letter patent from the Monarch, or the modern administrative method of applying to the state Secretary of State (USA) or Companies House (UK) as examples.

Even the structure of a for-profit tradeable company – when compared to a state-owned enterprise, a non-profit, a co-op, or an NGO or QUANGO – is a representation of the values inherent to capitalism. A company is obliged to use the shareholders’ funds – which is held by the company but is owed to the shareholders – to extract the greatest return. But this can come in many forms.

Short-term value from buying investments and quickly flipping them (eg corporate home buyers) is different than rent-seeking (eg corporate landlords) and is still different than long-term investments that actively work to build up the value (eg startup incubators, private wealth funds, Islamic banking, transit-owned adjacent property). If a for-profit company doesn’t have a plan to extract a return… they’re in hot water with the shareholders, with penalties like personal liability for malfeasance.

Another way of looking at the stock market is that if you have all the underlying components but don’t yet have a stock market, it would soon appear naturally. That is to say, if the public stock markets were banned overnight, shares would still trade but just under the table and without regulation. But if any critical part underpinning the markets stopped existing, then the market itself would collapse.

History shows numerous examples where breakdowns of the legal system resulted in market mayhem, or when corporate property is expropriated for the Monarch’s wars or personal use, or when funds invested into or paid out of companies is hampered by terrible monetary inflation.

As for what the stock market does, its greatest purpose is to organize investments into ventures. Historically, ventures were things like building a ship to sail to the New World and steal obtain goods to sell at home. Merchant ships were and are still very expensive, so few singular persons could afford it. And even if the could, the failure of the venture could be catastrophic for that person’s finances. Better to spread the risk and the reward amongst lots of people.

What was once the sole domain of the landed gentry and nobility, slowly opened to the nouveau riche during the Industrial Revolution(s), then in turn to everyday people… for better or worse. It’s now almost trivial to buy a share in any particular listed company, but just opening the stock market to everyone would have been chaotic at best. I think it’s NYSE that still has on-floor traders/brokers, but imagine if all shares in that market had to be traded in a single room, with no digital trading. It’s already quite lively on the trading floor today, now add all the trades from middle class Americans on payday. It would become physically impossible.

Likewise, a pure capitalist stock market would permit awful things like bribing journalists to write fake stories to crash a stock, then buy it for cheap. Or pump and dump scams. And would have no “circuit breakers” that halt a share during so-called flash crashes.

I’m reminded of a scene from the ITV show Agatha Christie’s Poirot in the episode “Appointment With Death”, where a wealthy woman is not only murdered but her business empire collapses because the murderer also spooks the markets as a double whammy, causing investors to panic and sell up. The relevant implications here is that despite her company not having changed its financial picture, it got cut up for scrap and thus lost most of its value, rendering the business worthless in the end. Companies are usually valued more as a going-concern, above what all its property put together would amount to. Where does that additional value come from? It’s the prospect of a return from this particular assemblage of resources.

Suffice it to say, the stock market is a lot of things. But I view it as a natural result of certain other prerequisites, meaning we can’t really get rid of it, so instead it should be appropriately regulated.

From an urban planning perspective, there are some caveats to your points:

A new downtown would make a subway very easy and cheap to build, you could cut and cover instead of tunnelling

Cut-and-cover will make shallow underground tunnels cheaper to construct in almost all cases irrespective of building in an old city center or as part of building a new city center from scratch. In fact, older pre-WW2 cities are almost ideal for cut-and-cover because the tunnels can follow the street grid, yielding a tunnel which will be near to already-built destinations, while minimizing costly curves.

Probably the worst scenario for cut-and-cover is when the surface street has unnecessary curves and detours (eg American suburban arterials). So either the tunnel follows the curve and becomes weirdly farther from major destinations, or it’s built in segments using cut-and-cover where possible and digging for the rest.

Cheeeaaap land for huge offices, roads, and even houses

At least in America, where agricultural land at the edges of metropolitan areas is still cheap, the last 70 years do not suggest huge roads, huge offices, and huge house lead to a utopia. Instead, we just get car-dependency and sprawl, as well as dead shopping malls. The benefits of this accrued to the prior generations, who wheeled-and-dealed in speculative suburban house flipping, and saddled cities with sprawling infrastructure that the existing tax base cannot afford.

Green field is just so cheap.

It is, until it isn’t. Greenfield development “would be short term appealing but still expensive when it comes to building everything”. It’s a rare case in America where post-WW2 greenfield housing or commercial developments pay sufficient tax to maintain the municipal services those developments require.

Look at any one municipal utility and it becomes apparent that the costs scale by length or area, but the revenue scales by businesses/households. The math doesn’t suggest we need Singapore-levels of density, but constant sprawling expansion will put American cities on the brink of bankruptcy. As it stands, regressive property tax policies result in dense neighborhoods subsidizing sprawling neighborhood, but with nothing in return except more traffic and wastewater.

Either these cities must be permitted to somehow break away from their failed and costly suburban experiments, or the costs must be internalized upon greenfield development, which might not make it cheap anymore.

The thing to keep in mind is that there exist things which have “circumstantial value”, meaning that the usefulness of something depends on the beholder’s circumstances at some point in time. Such an object can actually have multiple valuations, as compared to goods (which have a single, calculable market value) or sentimental objects (“priceless” to their owner).

To use an easy example, consider a sportsball ticket. Presenting it at the ballfield is redeemable for a seat to watch the game at the time and place written on the ticket. And it can be transferred – despite Ticketmaster’s best efforts – so someone else could enjoy the same. But if the ticket is unused and the game is over, then the ticket is now worthless. Or if the ticket holder doesn’t enjoy watching sportsball, their valuation of the ticket is near nil.

So to start, the coupon book is arguable “worth” $30, $0, or somewhere in between. Not everyone will use every coupon in the book. But if using just one coupon will result in a savings of at least $1, then perhaps the holder would see net-value from that deal. In no circumstance is KFC marking down $30 on their books because they issued coupons that somehow total to $30.

That said, I’m of the opinion that if a donation directly results in me receiving something in return… that’s not a donation. It’s a sale or transaction dressed in the clothes of charity. Plus, KFC sends coupons in the mail for free anyway.

Notwithstanding the possible typo in the title, I think the question is why USA employers would prefer to offer a pension over a 401k, or vice-versa.

For reference, a pension is also known as a defined benefit plan, since an individual has paid into the plan for the minimum amount will be entitled to some known amount of benefit, usually in the form of a fixed stipend for the remainder of their life, and sometimes also health insurance coverage. USA’s Social Security system is also sometimes called the public pension, because it does in-fact pay a stipend in old age and requires a certain amount of payments into the fund during one’s working years.

Whereas a 401k is uncreatively named after the tax code section which authorized its existence, initially being a deferred compensation mechanism – aka a way to spread one’s income over more time, to reduce the personal taxes owed in a given year – and then grew into the tax-advantaged defined contribution plan that it is today. That is, it is a vessel for saving money, encouraged by tax advantages and by employer contributions, if any.

The superficial view is that 401k plans overtook pensions because companies wouldn’t have to contribute much (or anything at all), shifting retirement costs entirely onto workers. But this is ahistorical since initial 401k plans offered extremely generous employer contribution rates, some approaching 15% matching. Of course, the reasoning then was that the tax savings for the company would exceed that, and so it was a way to increase compensation for top talent. In the 80s and 90s was when the 401k was only just taking hold as a fringe benefit, so you had to have a fairly cushy job to have access to a 401k plan.

Another popular viewpoint is that workers prefer 401k plans because it’s more easily inspectable than a massive pension fund, and history has shown how pension funds can be mismanaged into non-existence. This is somewhat true, if US States’ teacher pension funds are any indication, although Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan would be the counterpoint. Also, the 401k plan participants at Enron would have something to complain about, as most of the workers funds were invested in the company itself, delivering a double whammy: no job, and no retirement fund.

So to answer the question directly, it is my opinion that the explosion of 401k plans and participants in such plans – to the point that some US states are enacting automatic 401k plans for workers whose employers don’t offer one – is due to 1) momentum, since more and more employers keep offering them, 2) but more importantly, because brokers and exchanges love managing them.

This is the crux: only employers can legally operate a 401k plan for their employees to participate in. But unless the employer is already a stock trading platform, they are usually ill-equiped to set up an integrated platform that allows workers to choose from a menu of investments which meet the guidelines from the US DOL, plus all other manner of regulatory requirements. Instead, even the largest employers will partner with a financial services company who has expertise on offering a 401k plan, such as Vanguard, Fidelity, Merrill Edge, etc.

Naturally, they’ll take a cut on every trade or somehow get compensated, but because of the volume of 401k investments – most people auto-invest every paycheck – even small percentages add up quickly. And so, just like the explosion of retail investment where ordinary people could try their hand at day-trading, it’s no surprise that brokerages would want to extend their hand to the high volume business of operating 401k plans.

Whereas, how would they make money off a pension fund? Pension funds are multi-billion dollar funds, so they can afford their own brokers to directly buy a whole company in one-shot, with no repeat business.

Although copyright and patents (and trademarks) are lumped together as “intellectual property”, there’s almost nothing which is broadly applicable to them all, and they might as well be considered separately. The only things I can think of – and I’m not a lawyer of any kind – are that: 1) IP protection is mentioned vaguely in the US Constitution, and 2) they all behave as property, in that they can be traded/reassigned. That’s it.

With that out of the way, it’s important to keep in mind that patent rights are probably the strongest in the family of IP, since there’s no equivalent “fair use” (US) or “fair dealing” (UK) allowance that copyright has. A patent is almost like owning an idea, whereas copyright is akin to owning a certain rendition plus a derivative right.

Disney has leaned on copyright to carve for themselves an exclusive market of Disney characters, while also occasionally renewing their older characters (aka derivatives), so that’s why they lobby for longer copyright terms.

Whereas there isn’t really a singular behemoth company whose bread-and-butter business is to churn out patents. Inventing stuff is hard, and so the lack of such a major player means a lack of lobbying to extend patent terms.

To be clear, there are companies who rely almost entirely on patent law for their existence, just like Disney relies on copyright law. But type foundries (companies that make fonts) are just plainly different than Disney. Typefaces (aka fonts) as a design can be granted patents, and then the font files can be granted copyright. But this is a special case, I think.

The point is: no one’s really clamoring for longer parents, and most people would regard a longer exclusive term on “ideas” to be very problematic. Esp if it meant pharmaceutical companies could engage in even more price-gouging, for example.

If you hold a patent, then you have an exclusive right to that invention for a fixed period, which would be 20 years from the filing date in the USA. That would mean Ford could not claim the same or a derivative invention, at least not for the parts which overlap with your patent. So yes, you could sit on your patent and do nothing until it expires, with some caveats.

But as a practical matter, the necessary background research, the application itself, and the defense of a patent just to sit on it would be very expensive, with no apparent revenue stream to pay for it. I haven’t looked up what sort of patent Ford obtained (or maybe they’ve merely started the application) but patents are very long and technical, requiring whole teams of lawyers to draft properly.

For their patent to be valid, they must not overlap with an existing claim, as well as being novel and non-obvious, among other requirements. They would only file a patent to: 1) protect themselves from competition in future, 2) expect that this patent can be monetized by directly implementing it, or licensing it out to others, or becoming a patent troll and extracting nuisance-value settlements, or 3) because they’re already so deep in the Intellectual Property land-grab that they must continue to participate by obtaining outlandish patents. The latter is a form of “publish or perish” and allows them to appear like they’re on the cutting edge of innovation.

A patent can become invalidated if it is not sufficiently defended. This means that if no one even attempts to infringe, then your patent would be fine. But if someone does, then you must file suit or negotiate a license with them, or else they can challenge the validity of your patent. If they win, you’ll lose your exclusive rights and they can implement the invention after all. This is not cheap, and Ford has deep pockets.

I’ll address your question in two parts: 1) is it redundant to store both the IP subnet and its subnet mask, and 2) why doesn’t the router store only the bits necessary to make the routing decision.

Prior to the introduction of CIDR – which came with the “slash” notation, like /8 for the 10.0.0.0 RFC1918 private IPv4 subnet range – subnets would genuinely be any bit arrangement imaginable. The most sensible would be to have contiguous MSBit-justified subnet masks, such as 255.0.0.0. But the standard did not preclude using something unconventional like 255.0.0.1.

For those confused what a 255.0.0.1 subnet mask would do – and to be clear, a lot of software might prove unable to handle this – this is describing a subnet with 2^23 addresses, where the LSBit must match the IP subnet. So if your IP subnet was 10.0.0.0, then only even numbered addresses are part of that subnet. And if the IP subnet is 10.0.0.1, then that only covers odd numbered addresses.

Yes, that means two machines with addresses 10.69.3.3 and 10.69.3.4 aren’t on the same subnet. This would not be allowed when using CIDR, as contiguous set bits are required with CIDR.

So in answer to the first question, CIDR imposed a stricter (and sensible) limit on valid IP subnet/mask combinations, so if CIDR cannot be assumed, then it would be required to store both of the IP subnet and the subnet mask, since mask bits might not be contiguous.

For all modern hardware in the last 15-20 years, CIDR subnets are basically assumed. So this is really a non-issue.

For the second question, the router does in-fact store only the necessary bits to match the routing table entry, at least for hardware appliances. Routers use what’s known as a TCAM memory for routing tables, where the bitwise AND operation can be performed, but with a twist.

Suppose we’re storing a route for 10.0.42.0/24. The subnet size indicates that the first 24 bits must match a prospective destination IP address. And the remaining 8 bits don’t matter. TCAMs can store 1’s and 0’s, but also X’s (aka “don’t cares”) which means those bits don’t have to match. So in this case, the TCAM entry will mirror the route’s first 24 bits, then populate the rest with X’s. And this will precisely match the intended route.

As a practical matter then, the TCAM must still be as wide as the longest possible route, which is 32 bits for IPv4 and 128 bits for IPv6. Yes, I suppose some savings could be made if a CIDR-only TCAM could conserve the X bits, but this makes little difference in practice and it’s generally easier to design the TCAM for max width anyway, even though non-CIDR isn’t supported on most routing hardware anymore.

To start off, I’m sorry to hear that you’re not receiving the healthcare you need. I recognize that these words on a screen aren’t going to solve any concrete problems, but in the interest of a fuller comprehension of the USA healthcare system, I will try to offer an answer/opinion to your question that goes into further depth than simply “capitalism” or “money and profit” or “greed”.

What are my qualifications? Absolutely none, whatsoever. Although I did previously write a well-received answer in this community about the USA health insurance system, which may provide some background for what follows.

In short, the USA healthcare system is a hodge-podge of disparate insurers and government entities (collectively “payers”), and doctors, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, and more government entities (collectively “providers”) overseen by separate authorities in each of the 50 US States, territories, tribes, and certain federal departments (collectively “regulators”). There is virtually no national-scale vertical integration in any sense, meaning that no single or large entity has the viewpoint necessary to thoroughly review the systemic issues in this “system”, nor is there the visionary leadership from within the system to even begin addressing its problems.

It is my opinion that by bolting-on short-term solutions without a solid long-term basis, the nation was slowly led to the present dysfunction, akin to boiling a frog. And this need not be through malice or incompetence, since it can be shown that even the most well-intentioned entities in this sordid and intricate pantomime cannot overcome the pressures which this system creates. Even when there are apparent winners like filthy-rich plastic surgeons or research hospitals brimming with talented expert doctors of their specialty, know that the toll they paid was heavy and worse than it had to be.

That’s not to say you should have pity on all such players in this machine. Rather, I wish to point to what I’ll call “procedural ossification”, as my field of computer science has a term known as “protocol ossification” that originally borrowed the term from orthopedia, or the study of bone deformities. How very fitting for this discussion.

I define procedural ossification as the loss of flexibility in some existing process, such that rather than performing the process in pursuit of a larger goal, the process itself becomes the goal, a mindless, rote machine where the crank is turned and the results come out, even though this wasn’t what was idealized. To some, this will harken to bureaucracy in government, where pushing papers and forms may seem more important that actually solving real, pressing issues.

I posit to you that the USA healthcare system suffers from procedural ossification, as many/most of the players have no choice but to participate as cogs in the machine, and that we’ve now entirely missed the intended goal of providing for the health of people. To be an altruistic player is to be penalized by the crushing weight of practicalities.

What do I base this on? If we look at a simple doctor’s office, maybe somewhere in middle America, we might find the staff composed of a lead doctor – it’s her private practice, after all – some Registered Nurses, administrative staff, a technician, and an office manager. Each of these people have particular tasks to make just this single doctor’s office work. Whether it’s supervising the medical operations (the doctor) or operating/maintaining the X-ray machine (technician) or cutting the checks to pay the building rent (office manager), you do need all these roles to make a functioning, small doctor’s office.

How is this organization funded? In my prior comment about USA health insurance, there was a slide which showed the convoluted money flows from payers to providers, which I’ve included below. What’s missing from this picture is how even with huge injections of money, bad process will lead to bad outcomes.

Source

In an ideal doctor’s office, every patient that walks in would be treated so that their health issues are managed properly, whether that’s fully curing the condition or controlling it to not get any worse. Payment would be conditioned upon the treatment being successful and within standard variances for the cost of such treatment, such as covering all tests to rule out contributing factors, repeat visits to reassess the patient’s condition, and outside collaboration with other doctors to devise a thorough plan.

That’s the ideal, and what we have in the USA is an ossified version of that, horribly contorted and in need of help. Everything done in a doctor’s office is tracked with a “CPT/HCPCS code”, which identifies the type of service rendered. That, in and of itself, could be compatible with the ideal doctor’s office, but the reality is that the codes control payment as hard rules, not considering “reasonable variances” that may have arisen. When you have whole professions dedicated to properly “coding” procedures so an insurer or Medicare will pay reimbursement, that’s when we’ve entirely lost the point and grossly departed from the ideal. The payment tail wags the doctor dog.

To be clear, the coding system is well intentioned. It’s just that its use has been institutionalized into only ever paying out if and only if a specific service was rendered, with zero consideration for whether this actually advanced the patient’s treatment. The coding system provides a wealth of directly-comparable statistical data, if we wanted to use that data to help reform the system. But that hasn’t substantially happened, and when you have fee-for-service (FFS) as the base assumption, of course patient care drops down the priority list. Truly, the acronym is very fitting.

Even if the lead doctor at this hypothetical office wanted to place patient health at the absolute forefront of her practice, she will be without the necessary tools to properly diagnose and treat the patient, if she cannot immediately or later obtain reimbursement for the necessary services rendered. She and her practice would have to absorb costs that a “conforming” doctor’s office would not have, and that puts her at a further disadvantage. She may even run out of money and have to close.

The only major profession that I’m immediately aware of which undertakes unknown costs with regularity, in the hopes of a later full-and-worthwhile reimbursement, is the legal profession. There, it is the norm for personal injury lawyers to take cases on contingency, meaning that the lawyer will eat all the costs if the lawsuit does not ultimately prevail. But if the lawyer succeeds, then they earn a fixed percentage of the settlement or court judgement, typically 15-22%, to compensate for the risk of taking the case on contingency.

What’s particularly notable is that lawyers must have a good eye to only accept cases they can reasonably win, and to decline cases which are marginal or unlikely to cover costs. This heuristic takes time to hone, but a lawyer could start by being conservative with cases accepted. The reason I mention this is because a doctor-patient relationship is not at all as transactional as a lawyer-client relationship. A doctor should not drop a patient because their health issues won’t allow the doctor to recoup costs.

The notion that an altruistic doctor’s office can exist sustainably under the FFS model would require said doctor to discard the final shred of decency that we still have in this dysfunctional system. This is wrong in a laissez-faire viewpoint, wrong in a moral viewpoint, and wrong in a healthcare viewpoint. Everything about this is wrong.

But the most insidious problems are those that perpetuate themselves. And because of all those aforementioned payers, providers, and regulators are merely existing and cannot themselves take the initiative to unwind this mess, it’s going to take more than a nudge from outside to make actual changes.

As I concluded my prior answer on USA health insurance, I noted that Congressional or state-level legislation would be necessary to deal with spiraling costs for healthcare. I believe the same would be required to refocus the nation’s healthcare procedures to put patient care back as the primary objective. This could come in the form of a single-payer model. Or by eschewing insurance pools outright by extending a government obligation to the health of the citizenry, commonly in the form of a universal healthcare system. Costs of the system would become a budgetary line-item so that the health department can focus its energy on care.

To be clear, the costs still have to be borne, but rather than fighting for reimbursement, it could be made into a form of mandatory spending, meaning that they are already authorized to be paid from the Treasury on an ongoing basis. For reference, the federal Medicare health insurance system (for people over 65) is already a mandatory spending obligation. So upgrading Medicare to universal old-people healthcare is not that far of a stretch.

You are correct: even when you have a live body on the stand about to give testimony, it is essential to lay the foundation as to who they are and their legitimacy. Obviously, if they aren’t who they say they are, that’s a huge problem. So the party who called the witness will have done their homework in advance, and the opposing lawyers will have been notified in advance of this witness’s appearance and conduct their own homework.

For when a person is testifying but they aren’t in the room, I understand that there are several requirements that a telepresence system must comply with, both technical and usability. Certainly, someone’s visage or image would be preferable to an audio-only phone call. Presumably, the jury needs to trust this witness to believe them or else it’s rather pointless. Nowadays, with deep fakes and AI, it could possibly become an issue in future if video appearances in court are actually faked, or if the suggestion becomes plausible due to advancements in the technology.

So if we think of the zombie not as a live body but someone whose presence is being facilitated by the necromancer’s abilities, then the necromancer must be quizzed as to the veracity of their abilities, and the court would have to question what limits must be imposed on the testimony to make it admissible.

If it’s anything like the bunk science that courts have previously adopted – bite mark analysis comes to mind – then it only takes one court to permit necromancy and other courts will point to that one case as precedence. This would only be a problem if the necromancy is flawed in some serious way.

I’m not a lawyer, but let’s have some fun with this.

To start, I’m going to have to assume a jurisdiction. I’ll go with California, because Hollywood films have depicted a lot of walking dead, zombies, and whatnot. And also because that’s the jurisdiction I’m most familiar with. I think that such a case where the undead might be a witness would mostly arise in California state courts, since zombies rarely walk/jump/crawl quickly enough to cross state lines from the major population centers of California, which wokld invoke federal jurisdiction.

Now, we need to hone in on the type of case. A murder case where the victim is called as a witness would certainly be very juicy. But the same legal intrigue would arise from a less-interesting inheritance or family law case. We could also go into contracts and see whether or not the presence of an undead counts as an “act of God” but maybe that’s a bit too niche and law-school theoretical.

To really showcase the problems this would pose to the court, we will focus on the undead being witness in a criminal trial, as the standard of proof to convict the defendant would be proof “beyond a reasonable doubt”. As the most stringent category of proof, it necessarily follows that the court must err on the side of the defendant in matters of impartiality. This is because the court is technically an arm of the state, and the prosecution wields all the resources of the state against an individual who stands accused of some criminal act.

As such, for criminal trials, there are certain constitutional rights of the defendant that the court must uphold. The foremost is the right to due process, guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. One of the results from applying due process is that evidence introduced in a criminal trial must not be “unduly prejudicial”. That is, no evidence can be admitted which so irresponsibly causes the jury to render a verdict based on anything but the law.

Often, this rule is invoked to set aside irrelevant evidence which has no bearing on the charges, except maybe to impugn the reputation of the defendant so that the jury thinks they’re a terrible person. Other times, it can be used to exclude relevant but really-bad evidence. The US courts have been through cycles where novel science is used in a prosecution but which later turns out to be bunk and lacking any foundation in reality. It certainly is “evidence” but because it purports to be science when it’s really not, it must be excluded. Psychics are certainly not going to be welcomed witnesses as a subject matter expert.

Finally, the other category for evidence being unduly prejudicial is when the jury – through no fault of their own – would weigh that evidence as being the primary factor, above all else, whether it’s DNA or video evidence. This is more a matter of testimony evidence rather than physical evidence. Imagine a small, devoutly religious town where the local pastor is called to testify about whether the defendant could have committed hit-and-run.

Having a respected community authority figure testify about someone’s potential to commit a crime might be something the jury members would be open to hearing, but the judge might have to weigh whether the fact that the lay witness is a pastor will cause the jury to put too much weight on that testimony, even though the pastor is no more able to weigh someone’s character than some other member of the community. If there are other ways to obtain the same evidence – such as bringing in the defendant’s mother or employer – the judge should not allow the pastor to testify, because it could jeopardize the soundness of the trial and lead to an appeal.

So now we come back to zombies. Would a jury be able to set aside their shock, horror, and awe about a zombie in court that they could focus on being the finder of fact? If a zombie says they’re an eye-witness to a mugging, would their lack of actual eyeballs confuse the jury? Even more confusing would be a zombie that is testifying as an expert witness. Does their subject matter need to be recent? What if the case needs an expert on 17th Century Parisian fashion and the undead is from that era and worked in haute couture? Are there no fashion historians who could provide similar expert opinions?

But supposing we did overcome all that, there might be one form of testimony which – even though very prejudicial – might be allowable for a lay-witness (ie not expert) zombie witness to testify about, and I already mentioned it earlier.

In most jurisdictions and in California, a dying person’s last act which might point to their killer will not necessarily be excluded for being irrelevant or being circumstantial. It is a rebuttable presumption that someone dying has no incentive to lie, and will likely have been the final witness to their own murder.

To that end, it’s entirely plausible that a zombie who died by murder could come to court to testify against their killer. Of course, how long does it take for the dead to become undead? If this takes longer than the statue of limitations allows (note: California has no limits for charging murder), the defendant would walk. Likewise, if the zombie’s testimony is the only shred of evidence for the murder, that’s not likely to convince the jury. Not unless, of course, the details of the testimony match the circumstances of the crime so well that it wasn’t a fluke.

TL;DR: rules of evidence would still apply to the undead, and judges must take care to balance the probative value of evidence with any prejudicial quality it may carry.

(to be abundantly clear, this was a schittpost lol)

Lasers work really well in space for secure sat-to-sat data links, but are a lot less viable on Earth’s surface due to diffraction and weather, nevermind the limits of the visible horizon for any height of a communications tower. For pretty much any scenario where laser comms would be considered, microwave RF links would likely be just as good, cheaper, and more commonly deployed and understood by telecom engineers. The only exception is when absurdly high bandwidths are needed, which is where lasers rule.

But using RF links across thousands of kilometers of oceanic waters? For that, you must construct additional pylons on floating islands to repeat the signal. Otherwise, the only RF signals that could reach land would be too low frequency to carry much bandwidth.

For reference, when the German Aerospace Center (DLR) set the world record in 2016 for free-space optical communications, they achieved 1.72 Tbits/sec over a distance of 10.45 km. Most optical systems observe a bandwidth/distance relationship, where at best, shooting the signal farther means less available bandwidth, or more bandwidth if brought closer. This is a related to the Shannon-Hartley theorem, since the limiting factor is optical noise.

So if 1.72 Tbits/sec at 10 km is the best they achieved in free air in 2016, then that pales in comparison to the undersea fibre cables of 2006, where a section of the SHEFA-2 Scottish-Faroese cable runs unamplified for 390 km and moves 570 Gbits/sec aggregate.

In short, free-space lasers are fast and long-distance. But lasers within fibre cables are much faster and cover even longer distances. They’re not even in the same league.

This page appears to describe the standardized process for registering to vote as an overseas absentee voter: https://www.fvap.gov/citizen-voter/

It states that whether or not you just want to vote for federal offices, the important criteria is to establish your “voting residency”, and then the elections office of that county would send you a ballot for what you’re eligible to vote for. Your last US address appears to be the predominant determinator, even if you have no more ties to it.

I can’t imagine this will be simple to navigate, but I applaud you for seeking to exercise your important civil right to vote. Good luck!

Not the Roman Empire. :)

If you’ll permit me to broaden the question to “why are political subdivisions allowed to sue each other?”, then the answer often is two-fold: 1) political subdivisions are incorporated entities under the law, so they have a right to pursue redress in front of a higher court, and 2) when the higher power is unclear about the division of rights to the subdivisions, then only a court can dispense the issue.

For #1, this is the same power which allows a city, county, municipality, special district, state, and sometimes the federal government to obtain an enforcement order against an individual or company. An example would be an injunction to stop dumping more toxic waste into a river. It should be clear that if a city, county, or state was dumping toxic material into a river, the higher level of government would want to stop that too.

For #2, ambiguity is rife when it comes to poorly drafted legislation or decisions which “passed the buck” far into the future. Historical examples involving borders include the British Partition of India or the Delaware Wedge, the latter which was in dispute for nearly 300 years. You can also find examples in international law, such as whether or not certain islands count as territory for the purpose of extending a country’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

In the Delaware Wedge case, because the matter involved three or four US States, the matter would ultimately have to be adjudicated by a federal court, either directly before the US Supreme Court or through arbitration under the auspices of the court. Alternatively, Congress potentially could have settled the matter forthright, but since the dispute predates the founding the union, Congress probably thought the states would quickly work it out on their own.

Here in California, we see some similar misgivings between the state’s own political subdivisions, with a recent example where a county District Attorney brought suit against the most populous city within that county, alleging that state law was being violated.

As for how a county is allowed to prosecute a state law violation, and why a city can be a target or such prosecution, we need to briefly look at the structure of California governance. Despite what some critics have suggested, California is not a homogenous, unitary state with a singular political and social identity. Rather, it may be one of the most decentralized states in the union, with cities with populations in the low hundreds to the low millions, all coexisting within one set of general state laws.

The state’s primary subdivisions are the counties, which divide all the land into 58 counties. Counties are responsible to citizens within their borders, authorized to write and enforce laws, except that county laws don’t apply within incorporated borders. That is, cities.

In essence, the incorporation of a city creates an enclave within a county, and while the state limits what categories of laws a county may author, cities have much more “home rule” authority. This is what allows the City of Los Angeles (pop. 3.8 million) and Amador City (pop. 200) to have similar powers yet clearly applied much differently. It would be a madhouse in the state Legislature if every city needed custom legislation to enable them to serve their people appropriately. So California just lets the cities do their own thing, within reason.

In terms of enforcement, to prevent overworking the state Attorney General, enforcement of the state’s laws are delegated to the county District Attorneys. These 58 attorneys wield the power of the state within their county borders, such as brokering a plea deal or bringing enforcement lawsuits.

The safeguard is that the state Attorney General can – at any time – take over an ongoing prosecution from the county DA. For example, investigations involving city police misconduct are now by-default taken away from the county DA and investigated by the state AG, because of a historical pattern of police being too cozy with the DA.

In the earlier case where the county sued the city within it, the state AG could have also taken that case away and then drop the matter. But seeing as the case was already slipshod, the AG probably just decided to let it run its course, where a judge would likely dismiss it.

TL;DR: political subdivisions do weird things if no guardrails exist or if no other alternative appeara

From the State Medical Board of Ohio:

On September 8, 2016, House Bill 523, legalized medical marijuana in Ohio.

From a June 2024 AP article:

Recreational pot sales are nearing reality in Ohio … The state Division of Cannabis Control began accepting applications [on 7 June] for new dual licenses that will allow existing medical marijuana dispensaries to also sell nonmedical cannabis.

While states with medical cannabis generally issue regulations for which patients are eligible and which doctors can prescribe, the products themselves are mostly subject to meeting lab tests for containing what they say on the label, and distribution in child-resistant packaging. Otherwise, the same stock for medical cannabis customers is about the same as for recreational cannabis.

Hence, while it might be surprising that a new cannabis dispensary could appear out of nowhere – even without a preceding medical cannabis dispensary at the same location – the wholesaling, backend infrastructure, and vendor network may already have existed, so propping up a storefront would be the relatively easy part.

Oh wow, my comment made it here to c/bestoflemmy. I’m both flattered and also donning my flak helmet lol

I do have two things I want to mention: 1) please don’t form an opinion (good or bad) on the American health care situation solely from a comment from some rando on the Internet. If you’re an American affected by the problems of the health care situation, write to your state and federal representatives, and remind them that you will vote accordingly in November, even if you’re in a state that is ardently one political color or another.

And 2) I wouldn’t necessarily say I wrote an “objective” summary, as a fair number of the links and examples I used reference the ails caused by automobile culture, which has set up such massive-yet-impressive institutions like a well-oiled auto insurance system exactly to continue perpetuating harms upon urban environments, pedestrian and cyclist safety, municipal budgets, and energy security. All this in the pursuit of an out-modded 1960s utopic vision where private automobiles and suburban/exurban single-family homes provide quality of life for the masses. History has shown that this vision has failed, either of its own success (if it ever had any) or because it threw away the natural human settlement pattern proven over centuries.

If you’re an American and are starting to see why maybe automobiles and single-family homes shouldn’t be placed on an undeserved pedestal, have a look at Strong Towns, the people seeking to right-size the automobile’s influence in small and middle America. Not by banishing cars, but by building the conditions for a healthy set of realistic alternatives, to strengthen municipal finances, grow deeper connections amongst the citizenry, and avoid the fate of ghost towns.

They also have a YT channel and are comprised from local chapters, with maybe one near you.