This World and Me

A notable cultural difference between the United States and Germany—which I had heard about and later confirmed when I visited Germany in the summer of 2016—is in our attitude towards flags. In the United States, flags are everywhere: in our schools, in our government buildings, in our post offices, sometimes displayed across people's houses. The Washington Monument ( pictured ) in Washington, D.C., has no less than 50 U.S. flags surrounding it, one for each U.S. state. In Germany, on the other hand, you will rarely ever see the black, red, and gold of the German flag in your everyday life. The Germans are much warier than Americans of excessive expressions of national pride—particularly because of their dark history with nationalism. Aside from major sporting events (where the Germans will go all out in support of their national team, flags included), I did not encounter in Germany nearly the same level of ubiquity that the American flag seems to enjoy here in the United States. ...

One sunny day in 2018, I was walking home from class at UC Berkeley when I received a notification on my phone that almost made me trip on the sidewalk in surprise: it was a news article announcing that a federal judge had decided that the entirety of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (often shortened to just "the Affordable Care Act" or "ACA" or "Obamacare") was unconstitutional. How could this have happened? The Supreme Court of the United States had previously upheld the constitutionality of the ACA in 2012 in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius , 567 U.S. 519 (often abbreviated to NFIB ), so it was unthinkable to me that some federal district judge six years later could decide otherwise. I was wrong. The Affordable Care Act is a complex piece of legislation that includes a plethora of different healthcare reforms. In my view, there are three key elements of the Act: Firstly, it required individual insuran...

On the night of Tuesday, November 8, 2016, I published a brief post onto this blog called " Dead-Killing News " that contained only a 24-word quote from William Shakespeare's play Richard III . At the time, I was taking an Intro to Shakespeare class while dual-enrolled as a high-school senior at The Ohio State University. The quote contains the remarks of Elizabeth Woodville , who was the queen consort of England from 1464 to 1470, reacting to the news that the morally corrupt Duke of Gloucester would be crowned the next king of England. The post was my reaction to the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States. On Saturday, November 7, 2020, five days after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, major news networks projected that Joseph R. Biden, Jr., will be the 46th President of the United States. Accordingly, on that day I considered submitting a post to this blog that would simply quote the last four lines of Shakespeare's Richard III a...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020) The evening of Friday, September 18, 2020, began normally. I attended my virtual class on the history of German literature and had just finished dinner when my phone vibrated, indicating a new message from a friend. It was one of my roommates, who had just sent the following message to a group chat: "Wtf". For a moment, there was an air of confusion; my roommate wasn't sure if what he had just read on the Internet was accurate, and none of us were sure what he was talking about. Then, a few seconds later, the fog of doubt cleared away as my roommate sent three small yet devastating words: "RBG passed away". In her eulogy of a late colleague , Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recounted how Justice Antonin Scalia was once asked how he and Ginsburg could be friends, given their nearly diametrical opposite opinions on the law. Scalia had answered: "I attack ideas. I don’t attack people." Her remarkable friendships with even those...

If there is anything that the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, it is that we depend on reliable, high-speed access to the Internet as an essential utility to our lives, not unlike electricity and water. But even as millions of Americans have been forced to work from home or study from home, there are still millions of Americans who lack reliable access to the Internet, particularly in rural areas. The problem has been difficult to quantify because different studies have employed different measurement tactics, some of which are rather questionable. According to Ars Technica , a study conducted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) indicated that "21.3 million Americans live in areas without access to fixed broadband with 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds". However, this is widely considered to be a gross underestimation because the FCC "counts an entire census block as served even if only one home in the census block can get service". Ars Technica re...

Several hundred years ago, writing was rare. Given the high cost of printing, as well as the cost of even learning how to read and write, only privileged members of society were literate. This gave rise to an interesting cultural difference: when a person issues an authoritative order, it meant a great deal more when the order was delivered in writing , as opposed to being delivered through speech. Mere speech was transient, and in any case, the recipient of the order could deny that it was ever delivered. On the other hand, a written order—also known as a writ —was much more difficult to deny, as it carried with it a permanence and air of high authority. In the old Kingdom of England, there was a special class of writs reserved to high authorities (usually one of the King's courts), and some of these writs have continued to be promulgated today in countries beyond England, including the United States. In fact, you may have heard of at least some of them. They are the six prerogat...

Members of Congress, I have the high privilege and the distinct honor of presenting to you the President of the United States. This is the customary introduction said by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives at the beginning of the president's annual State of the Union message to Congress. The tradition goes back several presidencies and has occurred regardless of party alignment. In the 2007 State of the Union address (skip to 12:25 in the linked video), Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat (who is the current speaker as of February 2020), introduced President George W. Bush, a Republican, with these words, and Bush famously responded by saying (and followed with unanimous standing ovation), "Tonight, I have the high privilege and distinct honor of my own, as the first president to begin the State of the Union message with these words: Madame Speaker." Traditionally, the applause and standing ovation that follows this introduction is performed out of respect ...

Although I am a computer science major in my undergraduate studies here at UC Berkeley, I have had it in the back of my mind since middle school that someday I might attend law school. In the past, I have discussed various decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States on this blog. You can find a few of them if you go through the posts I've tagged with the label "law" . The majority of Supreme Court cases are actually quite boring; most are decided unanimously and concern areas of the law that will rarely interfere with one's everyday activities. In this series of posts I would like to visit a few miscellaneous Supreme Court cases that I have stumbled across that I have found quite captivating. The first one I'll do is McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (1995). As I'll explain later, although the case does not concern technology law, its relevance today extends to technology. I became curious about McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission when I rea...

In this post, I will provide an illustration for why humans are said to have fundamental rights, especially in a democratic society. I came up with this thought experiment when I was at fencing practice one day in my junior year of high school. At the time, I had been taking AP US Government and Politics. In order to understand the illustration, I have to explain a little bit of how fencing works. In fencing, there are three different weapons you can choose to fence: foil, epee, and saber. Although many fencing rules are shared among all three weapons, each weapon has specific rules that differentiate it from other weapons. At the time, my fencing club primarily consisted of foil and saber; our epee program was still quite young and did not have as many fencers at the time. In fencing, the field of play is called a "strip" (or a "piste"), since it is long compared to its width (14 meters by about 2 meters). Our club at the time had eight strips, and our foil and s...