You are now an American citizen, so you should have the rights the rest of us have. You should be fine. They haven’t gotten around to threatening to denaturalize people yet. When they do, they will concentrate first on people from countries they don’t like, that used old policies they have since rescinded. And they will have to use more due process than they are using on these non-citizens.

The one thing I would be cautious of, though, is the state of your cell phone. They are very thin-skinned when it comes to criticism lately, and may decide to look through your phone’s social media to decide if you are insufficiently loyal. They have broad powers to do that when you re-enter the country. As a US citizen they cannot deny you entry, but they can still make your life difficult on entry. And this group doesn’t exactly pay attention to laws, do they?

At minimum, you might want to shut down your cell phone before getting off the plane. Explain it by saying it is a long flight, and you wanted to save your battery for arrival. If they confiscate a phone and try to dump all its data, they are more limited if the phone has just rebooted. They would basically need the PIN to do anything. If you want to go further, you can also log out of all of your social media accounts and remove their apps before the flight, so they even if they force you to divulge the PIN they won’t find your social media history.

That may all be too paranoid, but we live in stupid times.

Assuming you are in the US, you can sue over anything you want to. But there is a cost to that, and your management company may be banking on that cost being higher than your rent.

Also, if you have all the documents, you should be able to read those and learn what stipulations there are if the lease terminates and you are a month-to-month situation. It could be that you needed to give them more notice. They could have buried it in the fine print. It would suck to pay a lawyer money only to be told “yup, they can do it”, and now you are out more money.

If I had to guess, it’s probably because his family was able to lawyer up quickly (either because they could afford it, or knew someone who would work the case for free). Courts can’t act here unless someone files a case over it. There might be other people with valid legal cases to challenge their detention, but if they can’t get their hands on timely legal advice they’re just screwed.

Yes, that would be a bad idea. It shouldn’t be a bad idea. But right now, it would be.

Then again, you are probably in for Domestic Terrorism charges for simply protesting against the Car of the People. It’s up to you whether you want to dial it all up to 11.

You have to pick a leader somehow. In authoritarianism, the leader is often the one who can take over by force, and can maintain that force over time (even across generations, for hereditary systems). While it’s possible for someone who takes over that way to be benelovent towards their people, it’s far more likely they will be violent and overbearing, because that’s how they got the gig in the first place.

And after a few generations, the one in charge won’t have any memory of how their ancestor came to power in the first place, and just take it for granted that they ought to rule. So now you have a leader who is violent and overbearing, only because that’s how their parent taught them to be, not out of any real experience accumulating power.

Actually, this is good news, because they were able to fulfill all those redemptions. It means they were not doing shady things with all those deposits.

Because when the telephone system first was developed, all you had were dial phones, which could only send numbers 1 through 0 (10). So every call needed to be addressible using only numbers.

AT&T came up with the numbering system in the 40s…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Numbering_Plan

When the State licenses things like that, it’s usually because whatever activity is being licensed utilizes shared resources, and the State has an interest in making sure those resources are used in the common interest.

Radio licenses are essential because the RF spectrum is a common resource. The State wants to make sure that certain frequencies are only used for certain purposes, and that those who use them have the proper training.

Some communities use pet licensing as a tool to make sure all pets are properly vaccinated, to reduce the spread of rabies (which really is a horrible way to go…)

Hunting and fish licenses are a way to help control the overall wild animal population, and make sure they are not overharvested and preserve rhe availability for future seasons.

It is a real department, sort of. Trump used Legislation that was intended for an Obama Era “US Digital Service” and rebranded it “US DOGE Service”. He didn’t even need to change the acronym, although it is now a nested acronym.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_DOGE_Service

They do, in fact, overstep their legal boundaries quite often. But the administration simply fires anyone in any other department who gets in the way until they get an acquiescent administrator who lets them grab the department by the pussy.

I plan on complaining about it on the Internet. That’ll show 'em!

I know a lot of people with their own domain names and email servers. From a privacy perspective, it is better because you know nobody is reading your emails. Your email address is a method to track regardless. But free email services are only free because they scrape your emails to figure out which ads to send. If you run your own mail server, you know no one is snooping.

The real issue is that you need to be fastidious about security, because your servers are exposed to the broader Internet and there are a lot of bad actors. You not only have to make sure your server doesn’t get hacked, but you also need to make sure the mail server application can’t act like an open relay. Spammers use misconfigured mail servers all the time to send tons of spam messages using someone else’s bandwidth.

And once your mail server is used as a spam relay, it might get IP blocked from major email providers, and I bet that is a pain to get resolved.

So it’s only worth it if you know what you are doing.

$4.69 at Wegmans

I went to Beijing several years ago on business. By a total coincidence, it happened to be just after the Golden Week festival, which is a national holiday and businesses were closed. I expected quite a bit of smog, but when I arrived everything seemed clear. My Chinese host took me out to see the Great Wall, and it was breathtaking, and also crystal clear. I was wondering if the dirty air I had heard so much about was a myth.

But then the work week started, and as the week went on and the factories started up again, I noticed that the air was getting dirtier. My Chinese host took me to see the Forbidden City at the end of the week, which was also extremely beautiful, but already the air was so thick that I couldn’t see the landscape anymore, only the buildings in front of me.

Nature does a good job at cleaning the local air itself, but when we spew so much crap in it Nature can’t keep up. So, yeah, smog happens because of constant pollution.

New Mexico has an actual constitution, as well as three whole branches of government, who have the official say on what is called. The Gulf of Mexico just has some fish and oil rigs.

I have been playing this all night, thanks. I did beat it once so far, now I’m trying to clear the board