In a lot of ways, it follows the same trend of hobbies or necessities being developed by a community of the most devoted (eg ham radio, BBS/forums, electric bicycles) which then get taken/co-opted by investors and salespeople until the community is barely involved at all, and is actively harmed by commercial interests.

In the case of ham radio, commercial radio stations stood on the backs of brilliant engineers at Marconi as well as experimentalists doing odd things that were then refined. Things would be alright, until the commercial entities found that the allocated spectrum for ham radio would be "of better use" for privately-operated communications networks or whatever. Those "high frequency" bands that were considered junk compared to long wave? Taken away and only a narrow slice given back for the experimenters to hone their craft, yet again. As a side note, early wireless networking used the then-junk band of 2.4 GHz, because that's what microwave ovens used. But today, the 2.4 GHz band is probably the most important and congested band in the world, precisely because all manner of consumer and industrial devices around the world use it. Early computer and radio hobbyists were responsible for making that happen.

The rich history of BBS systems led to modern web forums, but then led to things like Facebook groups where it's a requirement to sign-in to read, let alone engage in the discussion. The Fediverse is more aligned to independent web forums (using a common protocol) than it is to a monolithic social media platform.

And then electric bikes. Or initially, motorized bicycles, which were a new concept when brought to the USA from Sweden in the 70s, as a solution to the oil crisis. That trend quickly faded, but left a group of hobbyists dedicated to homebuilt two-wheel mobility within a narrow yet still legal framework to run on the road. Who could have predicted that the advancement of lithium ion cells -- documented well by the flashlight community, btw -- would set off a renewed passion in electric motorized bicycles, which ultimately gave us commercially-produced ebikes with massive uptake? In Germany last year, the number of ebikes sold exceeded the number of acoustic (read: conventional) bicycles. What do these initial hobbyists have now? Mostly burdensome regulations because a small number of shoddily-built commercial ebikes went bang too often. And now a homebuilt ebike is viewed with great suspicion despite not accounting to much of the total population of ebikes at all.

Can you tell what some of my hobbies are? :)

I can only hope that right-to-repair legislation in some US States and the EU will aid the situation, but it might still be a while.

The YouTuber BigClive observed through dismantling many so-called disposable vape pens that they tend to have new, high quality, high amp cells, paired with decent or good charge controllers. He posited that this is to prevent them from going bang in people's faces, which would be quite bad.

Around my area, I still find discarded vape pens in bike lanes or road shoulders, so I'm continuing to collect them. Although I never imagined stringing them together into a battery pack for an ebike haha

My guess is that reading tomes like this is useful as a vocal exercise and can be a way of "getting one's name out" for aspiring vocal talent. After all, what better way to showcase voice work on a resume than to point to examples online? As for the exact tome, it doesn't really matter for this purpose but might as well also contribute to the wealth of human media.

At its very core, an insurance company operates by: 1) pooling policyholder's risks together and 2) collecting premiums from the policyholders based on actuarial data, to pay claims and maybe make a small profit. But looking broader, an insurance market exists when: a) policyholders voluntarily or are obliged to obtain policies, b) insurers are willing and able to accept the risks in exchange for a premium expected to support the insurance pool, and c) the actuarial risks are calculable and prove true, on average.

The loss of any of A, B, or C will substantially impact a healthy insurance market, or can prevent the insurance market from ever getting started. For some examples of market failures, the ongoing California homeowner insurance crisis shows how losing B (starting with insurers refusing to renew policies near the wildland-rural interface) and C (increase in insured losses due to climate change) results in policies becoming unaffordable or impossible to obtain.

As a broader nationwide example, an established business sector that operates wholly without insurance availability is cannabis. A majority of US States have decriminalized marijuana for medical use, and a near-majority have legalized recreational consumption. Yet due to unyielding federal law, no insurer will issue policies for marijuana businesses, to protect from risks that any business would face, such as losses from fire, due to a product recall or product liability, or for liability to employees. These risks are calculable and there's a clear need for such policies -- thus meeting criteria A and C -- but no commercial insurer is willing to issue. Accordingly, the formal market for cannabis business insurance is virtually non-existent in the USA.

With these examples, we can see that the automobile insurance market meets all three criteria for a healthy market, but it's how these criteria are met which is noteworthy. Motorists in the USA are obliged to insure in every state except New Hampshire and Virginia: it is a criminal offense to drive a car without third-party liability insurance, meaning the motorist might spend time in jail. Note: NH and VA won't send a motorist to jail, but they do have administrative penalties for driving without "financial responsibility", which includes insurance or a bond at the DMV.

The exact requirement varies per state, with some requiring very low amounts of coverage and others requiring extra coverage like Personal Injury Protection (PIP, aka no-fault insurance). The point is that criteria A is easily met: motorists want to avoid jail, but also want to avoid the indignity of being sued after having caused a road incident, in addition to protecting their apparently only viable mode of transportation.

Insurers can take into account the overall trends in national risks trends for automobiles (eg new car safety, through the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, IIHS) as well as local or hyper-local risks (eg hail damage in the southeast, property crime in a particular zip code). And as a large country with nearly as many cars as people, many insurers are willing to meet the demand. This satisfies criteria B and C.

So well-organized is the automobile insurance market that you could almost say that it's vertically integrated: the largest nationwide insurers have contracts in place with every dealership network, auto collision chain, new and used parts dealers, as well as automatic data sharing with state DMVs, plus with firms like CarFax that buy information. Despite each state being slightly different, the insurers have overcome and achieved a level of near uniformity that allows an efficient market to exist.

Things are drastically different for the American healthcare system and for American health insurance companies. While most think of their healthcare provider as a national name like Anthem Blue Cross or Kaiser Permanente, the reality is that each state is an island, and sometimes counties in a state are enclaves. Even federal programs like Medicaid and Medicare are subject to state-level non-uniformities. For example, hospitals can be either privately operated (eg religion-affiliated, or for-profit) or run by a public entity (eg county or state), and can exist as a single entity or form part of a regional hospital network. Some entities operate both the insurance pool as well as providing the health care (eg HMOs like Kaiser Permanente) while others dispatch to a list of contracted providers, usually being doctor's own private practices or specialist offices.

With so many disparate entities, and where healthcare is a heavily-regulated activity by each state, the cost of insurable risks -- that is, for routine healthcare services -- is already kinda difficult to compute. Hospitals and doctors go through intense negotiations with insurers to come to an agreement on reimbursement rates, but the reality is that neither has sufficient actuarial data to price based on what can be borne by the market. So they just pass their costs on, whatever those may be, and insurers either accept it into their calculations, or drop the provider.

Suffice it to say, there are fewer pressure to push the total cost of healthcare down, given this reality, and more likely prices will continue to climb. This fails criteria C.

Source

Briefly speaking, it's fairly self explanatory why people would want health insurance, since the alternative is either death or serious health repercussions, paying out-of-pocket rates for service, or going to the ER and being burdened by medical debt that will somehow haunt even after death. Criteria A is present.

As for Criteria B, that was actually resolved as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). During discussions with the drafters, insurers bargained for an obligation for everyone to have insurance (aka the individual mandate, bolstering criteria A), in exchange for an obligation to issue policies for anyone who applies, irrespective of pre-existing health conditions. Thus, Criteria B is present for all ACA-compliant policies in the USA, even though the individual mandate was later legislatively repealed.

So to answer your question directly, the costs for healthcare in the USA continue to spiral so far out of control that it causes distortions in the health insurance market, to everyone's detriment. Specific issues such as open-enrollment periods, employer subsidies, and incomprehensible coverage levels all stem from -- and are attempts to reduce -- costs.

Enrollment periods prevent people from changing plans immediately after obtaining an expensive service, like a major surgery. Employer subsidies exist due to a federal tax quirk decades ago, which has now accidentally become an essential part of the health insurance and health care situation. And coverage levels try to provide tiered plans, so people can still afford minimal coverage for "catastrophic" injuries while others can buy coverage for known, recurring medical needs.

But these are all bandaging the bleeding which is unchecked costs. It would take an act of Congress -- literally -- or of state legislatures to address the structural issues at play. The most prominent solution to nip costs is the bud is to achieve the same near-vertical integration as with automobile insurance. This means a single or very few entities which have contracts in place with every provider (doctors and hospitals), negotiated at once and uniformly, so as to achieve criteria C. The single-payer model -- which Medicare already uses -- is one such solution.

Going further would be the universal healthcare model, which discards the notion of health insurance entirely and creates an obligation for a government department to provide for the health of the citizens, funded by taxes. This means doctors and hospitals work at the behest of the department for the citizenry, or work privately outside the system entirely, with no guarantee of a steady stream of work. Substantial administrative savings would arise, since the number of players has been reduced and thus simplifies things, including the basic act of billing and getting paid for services rendered.

These models could be approached by individual states or by the nation as a whole, but it's unclear where the Overton window for that idea currently is.

I've never seen such a sign, but I'll take a guess what it might be referring to. Here in California, the definition of a freeway does not have anything to do with number of lanes, speed limits, the presence of freight traffic, or any affiliation with the National Highway System. Instead, it is defined in the California Vehicle Code section 332 as:

a highway in respect to which the owners of abutting lands have no right or easement of access to or from their abutting lands or in respect to which such owners have only limited or restricted right or easement of access.

This roughly corresponds to what the Wikipedia describes in its page on "controlled access highways", a term which includes the California and USA federal government's term of freeway or the eastern US states' term of expressway or the British motorway. That is, a road which all ways onto and off of the road are carefully crafted.

There are many roads in California and the United States which will meet the requirements outlined by the Interstate Highway standards, and will look and feel like an interstate freeway, from the signs and lane markings and shoulder sizing.

But none of that matters for the California legal definition of freeway. Indeed, some freeway-looking roads will have signs that say "end freeway" or "start of freeway" with no other visual cues. And this is because the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) has not acquired the property rights from adjacent landowners to prohibit building driveways onto the public right-of-way.

To clarify, a right-of-way is not an individual right like free speech or freedom against unreasonable searches. Rather, it's a legal term referring to a property right, namely a grant of access on/over some piece of property in order to cross it. In the case of public roads, the property right is held by a public entity, and that means the public can use it. Since a right-of-way is a type of property, there are rights implied by a right-of-way. So a right-of-way right. Yeah, lawyers named things badly here. Anyway...

A feature of public rights-of-way is that any adjacent private properties can connect to and travel upon the right-of-way. The rationale -- to oversimplifying things -- is that if the public entity could deny the right -- including to build a driveway -- then a property could end up with zero ways to access it without trespassing, making it impossible to enter or exit, which makes the property near worthless. It is an age-old rule from English Law that rendering property worthless is bad, so private property rights necessarily comes with an implicit ability to connect to adjacent public rights-of-way.

But property rights are a bundle which can be sold separately by their owner. For example, many suburban property owners don't own the rights to minerals underneath the land, since the preceding developers sold that right to someone else. And so the state -- through CalTrans -- or the city or county can buy (often through eminent domain) just that single right from the property owners. Thus, the properties along a road might -- unnoticeable to the naked eye -- not be legally allowed to build a driveway, having shed that legal right away by forced-yet-fully-compensated sale.

To that end, it's possible that a sign warning against illegal driveways is the state's way of preventing future land owners from trying to build such driveways, since those owners would lose in court. If the state has acquired such rights, it's usually because the road is planned to become a freeway or expressway (a limited-access road, in California terminology), or they wish to preserve that possibility early and for cheap. So far as I'm aware, in California the right is only ever acquired for state roads, with the sole exception of the expressways in Santa Clara County, because they planned well ahead in the 60s.

Other states may be similar, by extrapolation.

TL;DR: OP's state might be hedging their bets to build a future freeway, and wants to prevent future legal issues with landowners, since the state knows it would win those cases

But they have also garnered a cult status among young people, who are using them to get around with friends, take their surfboard to the beach and commute to school.

Hmm, it's almost like young people aren't being given other viable transportation options, so they flock to the mode which affords them freedom and flexibility. Should we be surprised then, that the artificial barrier for youths was breached one day, and that day is now?

IMO, the story starts far earlier, with poor government policy failing to provide transport for all. I'm no expert on Australia transport priorities, but whatever they've been doing for the last so-and-so years clearly isn't working for the youth. So it's no surprise that these councils are being caught off-guard, when their negligence finally comes to bear.

I'm not a Rust developer (yet), but I understand its strength in this regard as: Rust is statically memory safe by default, and code which isn't statically memory safe must be declared with the unsafe keyword. Whereas C++ has not deprecated C-style pointers, and so a C engineer can easily write unsafe C code that's valid in a C++ compiler, and no declaration of its unsafeness is readily apparent to trigger an audit.

It's nice and all that C++ pioneered a fair number of memory safety techniques like SBRM, but the debate now is about safety by default, not optional bolt-on safety. All agree that the overall process to achieve correct code is paramount, not just the language constructs.

Oh wow, that might be the shortest-representation IPv6 DNS server I've seen to date: 2620:fe::9

For other people's benefit beyond my own:

RIIR: "Rewrite It In Rust"

OSM can definitely find you a bank near a freeway ramp, but it can also find you a bank near a creek to make an inflatable boat getaway. What it can't do is arrange for decoys to confuse the police while you eacape.

The inflatable boat robber was ultimately caught and sentenced a year later.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm willing to have some fun with this idea.

A cursory review of the relevant California Government Code section 420 -- blaze it! -- provides a description of the California state flag, and also a picture of it. Or it would in the print version of the code. While there doesn't appear to be a specific bit of law which authorizes the state to retain the copyright on the flag, there is case law which disallows the state from retaining copyright for "government documents", with exceptions which wouldn't apply here. So it's reasonable to assume that California doesn't have the copyright on its state flag, with it likely being in the public domain.

This would suggest that Minnesota could indeed use the flag to mean something else, the same way anyone can with public domain material. Now, if this occurs outside of California, that state could not enforce any sort of rules pertaining to how the flag is used. Even within the state, California's authority to control how public domain material -- or more broadly, any material at all -- is circumscribed by the First Amendment in any case. The exception would be for those agencies and subdivisions of the state itself, which it can and does control. See Gov Code section 435, which disallows cities from having confusingly similar flags. The other exception would be uses of the flag which perpetuate fraud or some other related crime, since then it's not the speech being punished but the conduct, which happens to involve a flag-related expression. But neither of these really speak to the flag being used by another sovereign entity within the state.

Supposing for a second -- and this is where we're really departing from reality -- the several states had embassies at each other's state capitals, but without the equivalent protections afforded by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relationships. And by that, I mean each state buys land in other states, without creating sovereignty issues, owning that land as any other individual or corporation could. In such a case, if the Minnesota Embassy in Sacramento were to fly the flag of California as its own, what could California do? If they drafted a law like section 435 that applies to individuals, the First Amendment would present a barrier. If the law applies to out-of-state entities, it might run against the Dormant Commerce Clause, in a very broad interpretation of interstate commerce. If they apply it to all sovereign entities operating within the state -- which would include the Minnesota Embassy, since the State of Minnesota owns it -- then the thorny question of state sovereign immunity in state court would arise.

In a California state court, would the State of Minnesota have sovereign immunity? If instead of Minnesota, it were a foreign country like Scotland, the answer would be a resounding yes. But here is a state vs state issue. The proper venue would be a court with original jurisdiction over states, and there's only one of those: the US Supreme Court.

As to what the state of California would assert as a cause of action? I suppose they could raise a criminal violation of their freshly-drafted law, with the risk of devolving into whether a US State has its own rights of free speech, which other states must respect. Alternatively, they could raise an action in equity, such as a tort (MN's use of the flag is costing CA somehow) or defamation (MN's use of the flag asserts falsehoods about CA).

At this point, we're deep into legal fanfiction and it's time to stop haha. Needless to say, I think the situation in real life would be messy if it were to happen.