Is this correct though, in terms of a confidentiality or non-repudiation guarantee? For a ledger system – blockchain or not – every unit can be traced back through the history, to one or more sources. Yes, multiple transactions can serve to obfuscate the sources, but the real source is within that subset of all possible sources. So unless obfuscation takes place by involving all possible addresses, there’s still going to be some amount of knowledge revealed about the relationship of some source and some destination address.

But I think non-repudiation could be more damaging in a cryptocurrency context. Imagine a corrupt politician that takes a cash bribe. Unless the briber recorded the serial numbers, the politician can plausible repudiate any connection with the briber, because the cash could have come from anywhere else.

Whereas with cryptocurrency, if the briber’s wallet address is ever revealed (eg. by hack, by change of heart, by blackmail, or by cryptographic collapse), then there’s a line which can connect the briber to the politician. They cannot deny that it’s possible to have received the bribe, which is a scandal unto itself. Probably not good enough to convict of a crime, but enough to do political damage.

Ultimately, I’m of the opinion that a ledger system still isn’t as strong on confidentiality as cash, because cash records nothing at all, so there’s nothing to accidentally reveal. To be clear, bribery is a stand-in for any sort of payment that would cause adverse effects if revealed. Other examples include secret child support, for a secret pregnancy, for a secret abortion, or anything else that people don’t want to reveal to the world. The whole point of privacy, I maintain, is to have a choice on what other people get to know.

I’m relying a lot on the background of Sweden from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CsSs0eQKKA

In essence, the USA does not have the same pressures that led Sweden to their current strategy. For that reason alone, duplicating the same strategy in the USA would be a failure to meet the country’s actual threats, use up more cultural and military capital, while also throwing away some of the USA’s natural strengths (eg stable geopolitics in North America, service exports economy, vastly distributed population).

As a reminder, only until fairly recently, the USA military branches met most of their recruitment goals through voluntary enlistment, an approach that succeeded against the backdrop of 1975, when the country was deeply against the draft. What fuels the enlistment pipeline is, rather unfortunately, the poorer class, because military service is a route to a better life. In some ways, the voluntary enlistment benefits are a perverse form of state support.

So the need for a draft is, IMO, wholly inappropriate if voluntary enlistment is still viable. The next question would be whether the USA would find itself overwhelmed by crisis or disaster that it would need the civilian population to help defend the national interest.

And still, I don’t see as being plausibly, because it really shouldn’t ever get to this point: the USA still has (we think) credible nuclear deterrence and power projection. This can, and does, make up for the lack of civil cohesion and, quite frankly, civil apathy for anything beyond putting food on the table. That is to say, a threat would have to seriously infringe on the average American’s daily life before they will do something about it.

If this were seriously part of the national defense, then we’d have already lost the game.

There are a few things that need to be clarified, because they’re all fairly distinct even though they might seem to be doing similar things:

• Copyright: protects the reproducibility of some work. Objective: a time-limited monopoly for the owner to control copies

• Trademark: protects the authenticity of a vendor. Objective: elimination of marketplace confusion; vendors are judged on their merits

• Patent: promotes disclosure of innovations and protects the use or application of an invention. Objective: a time-limited monopoly for the owner to control uses, but must disclose the secrets for how to build it

• Defamation: (USA specific) protects against provably false statements published about someone. Objective: elimination of lies from the marketplace of ideas, but does not affect opinions or public mores

• Right of publicity: protects personal marketability and opportunities. Objective: elimination of labor marketplace confusion; person will be judged on their merits

There are two things which can cut against almost all of these: fair use and parody. Fair use arises commonly in copyright but the logic is the same: in order to discuss something, the thing must be identified. The marketplace of ideas cannot exist if nobody was allowed to screengrab a TERF’s wizard movie or mention why they don’t like a certain cola company. The key is to be minimize the incursion to what is absolutely needed. For example, someone organizing a boycott can indeed use a brand’s logo to refer to that brand.

As for parody, it goes a bit further and will (for comedy or sarcastic intention) assert that the statement is true or the work is authentic. This too is allowed, because – at least in the USA – poking fun at things is a valid (and human) way of discussing things that would otherwise be difficult to say. How it relates to defamation, trademarks, and right of publicity is that a reasonable viewer of the parody must be able to determine that yes, it’s a joke and it’s not actually making that particular point but rather a different one. This is akin to someone nodding their head to say yes but verbally saying “no”: there are enough mixed signals that nobody would take the assertions seriously.

So would someone’s face be “locked out of the arts”? No, not by copyright. But under right of publicity, they could have a claim if the depiction could potentially be confusing. Fortunately, this generally can be cleared up by explicitly identifying who the depicted face belongs to. And also to never try to sell or distribute artwork that rides on that person’s coat-tails.

Since this would be the phone number that you’d rely upon to have continued access to those government services, I wouldn’t skimp on the expense: consider the monthly charge for a domestic phone plan as a cost of citizenship or residency.

Supposing you find and set up an eSIM with a domestic carrier in that country, then one which supports WiFi calling would allow you to receive SMS/MMS from anywhere, provided that your phone also supports WiFi connectivity.

As an aside, WiFi connectivity was greatly useful when I was traveling in Japan, since I’d be back at the hotel with WiFi in the evening, which conveniently overlapped with USA West Coast time, so calls were perfectly natural.

I’m going to try answering the titular question, despite the factual situation being wholly divorced from sanity, through no fault of the OP directly. Unless some new convention on the laws of the sea has been enacted vis-a-vis international waters – which the Strait is – a nation which provides some sort of service over that area is not entitled to remuneration. It would be gratis.

That said, in the very different context of aeronautical navigation, there is indeed precedence for providing a service to an international zone, but this is agreed to by multilateral treaty, not imposed. For this, we look to the massive area of the north Pacific Ocean, for which there is essentially no radar service available. And yet, to enable civil aircraft to fly without colliding with each other at speed, somebody needs to coordinate the flight routes and provide weather information. Through ICAO, the USA is the contracting state that provides such service over the Oakland Oceanic Flight Information Region. This means most of the Pacific Ocean is not USA airspace, but does follow the American procedures for organizing traffic (which follows from ICAO rules but possibly with small tweaks). This is the distinction between “USA airspace” and “USA controlled airspace”. ICAO chose the USA because no other country can realistically perform this service, nor has anyone else put in an offer to ICAO.

To pay for this service, the USA FAA charges overflight fees. Since the FAA is a civil agency, it does not have authority to order a shoot-down of an airline’s jets due to non-payment. Rather, the FAA can collect the owed fees through the American courts, just like anyone else would through a lawsuit for money damages. The FAA could also take adverse regulatory action, such as providing less or no service, subject to minimum obligations required by ICAO. The agency can also choose to cancel or disapprove of flights headed to/from USA airspace. If an airliner flies into the territorial airspace of any country without permission, then the air force would respond, not the civil air regulator.

So what does this have to do with international waters and maritime navigation? The air example shows how an equivalent fee for water passage would have to be implemented, when it concerns international waters. Everyone has to agree to the terms, the fee has to be economically reasonable, the contracting state must have some relationship to the area in question, and an international organization must actually contract with a qualified state to provide said service.

The present action in the Strait meets none of this criteria. So yeah, a ship could try their luck and pass through the Strait without making payment. Maritime and international law would not support the USA’s claims for remuneration, even if adjudicated in an American court.

What is the absolute simplest way to accomplish this?

< gets on soap box>

The absolute simplest way is to use IPv6: on your Debian machine, assign multiple IPv6 addresses, one for each service you want to expose to your LAN. There’s no penalty with having a dozen v6 addresses.

Although you have those addresses, your machine generally uses just a single one for its own outbound and inbound traffic. For each service, you would edit their config so that they bind to a specific IPv6 address. Finally, you would configure an AAAA entry in DNS so that your chosen subdomain will point to the IPv6 address in question.

As an example, suppose you had three different web servers running Nginx, currently on port 80, 8081, and 42069. What you would change is the server config for each server instance, adidng the IPv6 address as part of the “listen” directive. Since each instance is now bound to a different IP address, nginx can now listen to the conventional port 80 and n’ary will the three collide. In other software, the configuration option you’re looking for is the “bind address”. By binding each app to its own IP, it will only respond if you send a request to that IP (or DNS name, which translates to an IP); this conveniently makes debugging really easy.

For a home network, you might have a single /64 IPv6 subnet. But that still means you literally have billions upon billions of addresses to use before you ever run out. And as you’ve recognized, using DNS names to identify services is a lot easier and intuitive than using port numbers. It also neatly avoids the need to memorize IPv6 addresses, because that’s never been necessary: we have DNS.

If your ISP won’t give you IPv6, you can still use locally-assigned private ranges, known as ULA, and this works because your services are contained to your LAN. Best practice is to randomly generate a subnet then use it.

< gets off soap box>

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.

Is that something you’re looking for? As a practical matter, the effort to maintain multiple release branches and backports – compared to the norm of just maintaining a single main branch – is an outsized effort, available to only well-funded FOSS projects, usually by having an industry sponsor that makes it a priority.

I posit that the grand majority of selfhosted FOSS software, by project count, do not have back ported branches. And so production environments will want to set up an offline validation setup to evaluate update, prior to making the switch. Not convenient, sure, but not exactly insurmountable either.

At some point, some amount of responsibility for use of FOSS software must fall upon the users, or else the project is less about creating value by building up the commons for software, and more on the exploitation/abuse of the volunteers.

Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.

By my extremely cursory reading, this stopped being a problem after the v2.0.0 release, when they adopted semantic versioning. According, breaking changes would only occur when the major version number is rolled. And version v3.0.0 was just released 5 days ago, whereas v2.0.0 was released in October 2025.

It may be down to taste, but I view 9 months as being acceptable, given the breadth of features offered and the folks willing to put effort into the project.

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.

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.

Now, as an aside, a major difference in the Fediverse compared to commercial social media networks is that the block functionality here is used for more than just dodging abusers. Precisely because there is no algorithm, blocks and mutes are how users curate what they don’t want to see. This alone does not create a so-called online echo chamber, the same way that most people don’t want to see a steaming pile of poo on their morning walk. People reasonably deserve to have a pleasant experience online. And depending on their life circumstances, this might be a lot better than their IRL situation.

If a Nintendo Wii counts as retro, there’s at least one person hosting a website using one: https://infosec.exchange/@alexhaydock/114377262481451962

But that was (incredibly!) able to run a prebuilt version of NetBSD, which had drivers for the official Wii USB LAN adapter. If instead there’s a piece of hardware that can boot an OS but doesn’t have a network interface device, then SLIP could be useful. Here’s a vape hosting a website: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/

And if still, said retro device has no concept of IP or networking, can it at least speak serial over a 300 baud modem?

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, that’s 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 will take more victims.

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.

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.

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.

With Hollywood and media hyping 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 research-focused University of California (UC) systems remains in the top tier of public American universities, making it extra exclusive, akin to the East Coast’s Ivy League schools.

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.

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.

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.

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 had 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 squared 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 pushing leftward at the axle), the spokes on the right are heavily stretched but the spokes on the left 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 wheels using sheets of steel rather than spokes. This added weight but was necessary.

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. From a purely materials perspective, making the rim match the tire width does not add strength but does add weight, so cars have to accept that penalty but bikes do not.

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 inch 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. All the meanwhile, a motor scooter (eg Vespa) also has small diameter wheels, because they don’t go as fast and urban streets are paved.

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.

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.