⁸I don’t know what data they have at hand to work with, the following is mainly guesswork / how I would do it:

As far as I know, US authorities have quite liberal access to data stored by US companies (due to the cloud act even if the data isn’t originally stored in the US), especially in case the data is about non-citizens where some of their protection laws don’t hold. Most social media accounts are tied to phone numbers and/or email addresses.

If I was in their place, I’d have a relatively small database with all (or at least all non-US) phone numbers used for social media accounts, with the email addresses tied to those accounts. If a visa-applicant applies and I get their phone number (email address),

1. I’d query a list of all accounts for that number (email) to get the associated emails (numbers).
2. With those new emails (numbers) I’d repeat step 1

If you call the office or enter your number in your application, they might get some accounts. If you associated an email address to that account, they might get additional different accounts by that email. If those different accounts have a different phone number associated to them, they use that new phone number to get more accounts. rinse, repeat.

[Edit: This process would be completely automated, of course. Not manual.]

The consequence of being caught lying might be to get your visa revoked / denied once you are already in the US at the airport, which would be highly inconvenient. Or, if they get suspicious, find something else, and get annoyed, maybe it could even be punished? I don’t know.

You could maintain a separate phone with a separate phone number and separate email addresses for accounts you want to keep secret. Or maybe get a fresh phone number / email address just for the trip. But that’s quite a bit of effort to maintain consistently.

1. It’s not a visa but an ESTA. The visa is still granted on the fly on entry.
2. The U.S. require the same the other way around, only the one granted by the EU is $10 cheaper and valid for 3 years instead of 2, so still U.S. citizens get an advantage
3. EU citizens (like all other non-immigrants) have to, as far as I understand, disclose all their social media accounts when applying for a US visa

Sources for (3):

For VISA applications, https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Enhanced Vetting/CA - FAQs on Social Media Collection - 6-4-2019 (v.2).pdf should apply.

What if applicants participate in multiple online platforms? Are they being asked to list all of their handles, or only one?

Applicants must provide all identifiers used for all listed platforms.

I reached that document via https://www.ustraveldocs.com/de/de-gen-faq.asp#qlistgen21 (“Apply for a U.S. Visa in Germany”) and didn’t find any hint for exemptions for German citizens or E U citizens, so I assume it applies. (But I might still be wrong.)

Since it’s not Twitter anymore, we should replace “tweeting” by “Xcreting”. (It’s not mine, saw it on Reddit, but I think the idea deserves more exposure!)

I live on 7 acres of mostly heavily wooded land

Well, the activists target SUVs in the middle of Hamburg. That’s not really a comparable situation. I agree it would suck if you visit a big city and get targeted there, but I would hope the activists can decide between a polished up city-only SUV and an actual working-vehicle and act accordingly.

Well, if they want to go shopping right now, chances are for this one trip they’ll take their spouses smaller car, public transport or maybe even walk. If SUVs become generally unreliable (because you never know if you have air in your tires when you need it), people will look for something more reliable. They’ll bitch about it, they won’t act out of conviction or so, but who cares.

They target SUVs and alike. In what area do you live that a much more affordable and less gasoline consuming car wouldn’t work for you?

That is why I like this targeted actions over the gluing themselves to the road ones. This is targeted to people destroying the climate. I don’t think there is any good reason to drive an SUV or a sports-car in a city, and it is actively harmful. To pick up your equivalence: Feminists fight misogyny and inconvenience those guys actively showing it without necessarily alienating average guys.

Only “they” is actually “us”. We voted those clowns into office. We knew (or should have known, the information was available) better at least since the 1970s.

Controversial opinion of an atheist:

Most religion is incitement to hate-crimes. While I think Sweden has probably bigger Christian societies and should probably rather burn bibles, the guy burning the Quran is an Iraqi, and therefore choosing the Quran is understandable. Afaik, he protested against his own former repression by Muslim religion whe still lived in Iraq.

Religion is notoriously used to reduce other people’s freedom. Be it fundamental Christians e.g. in the US or Poland denying healthcare to pregnant women, be it the atrocities committed by the “moral police” in Iran, be it other religions killing people for their sexuality. I support the idea that religious law should be limited to followers of that religion, and no person should be forced in any way to follow or keeps following any religion. Those are fundamental human rights principles in my eyes.

Not at all, the old, chunky office printers you get for cheap work even without any special driver or so, just postscript. (You might get better quality for pictures with the original driver, but for simple letters it just works.)

Edit: Where HP really sucks is the consumer market.

I had a Brother printer, the costs were prohibitive. For over a decade now buy discarded office laserjet printers, chunky as hell, but for 100€ you get tens of thousands of pages out of them. And for those 100€, often a duplex unit is included. Am currently on my 2nd printer over 15 years.

Sounds like “screen”? (I never heard about tmux until today, I work a lot with Linux on a daily base, maintaining servers etc. I use screen a lot.)

He’s consolidated the military under the MoD umbrella,

Has he? He lost capable military leaders from Wagner, and those forced to fight alongside Russian troops fight now alongside troops which bombed them before. I hardly imagine there is much trust or comrades between Russian military and Wagner troops.

his comradery with Lukashenko likely improved,

It strengthened Lukashenko.

the West is admitting that Ukraine is running out of ammo (thus the cluster ammunition)

… which has nothing to do with the attempted coup

and he (or rather Lukashenko) has a strong private army close to the Ukrainian border, about 90km from Kiev

It really depends if that army still fights for Putin. The smear-campaign against Prigozhin wouldn’t make sense in this scenario.

Putin looks like messing about, trying to make the best of the situation, with no clear plan. He looks weak, and maybe worse, plan-less.

They could just charge for-profit companies instead.

How? The whole point of the GPL is that they can’t.

Well, most animals are plant-based…

As an example, in Germany, the age of retirement is now 67 (actually it’s 65.7, but will be gradually increased until 2029 to reach 67. So, for anyone born after 1964, it is 67.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_in_Europe

President, specifically. The prime minister of Ireland is also openly gay (I think he has a husband), and Elio di Rupo was the first openly gay prime minister in the EU, Belgium to be specific.

I think the Ryzen CPU just gives more bang for the buck, as well considering purchase price as energy consumption. That’s not Linux related, but I think Linux users generally tend to care less about “market leader”, sometimes even as far as consciously supporting the underdog.

Fully agree! Let’s focus on posts complaining about posts complaining about users complaining about Reddit instead ;-)

They are trained to give answers which sound convincing on a first glance, for simple questions in most fields that strongly correlates with the correct answer. So, asking something simple on a topic I have no clue has a high likelihood to yield the answer I’m looking for.

The problem is, if I have no clue, the only way to know if I exceeded the “really simple” ralm is by trying the answer and failing, because chatgpt has no concept of verifying it’s own answers or identifying its own limitations, or even to “learn” from it’s mistakes, as such.

I do know some very similar humans, though: Very assertive, selling guesses and opinions as facts, overestimating themselves, never backing down. ChatGPT might replace tech-CEOs or politicians 😁