Fair enough. But at least if you aren’t a legal citizen, what they’re doing might technically be legal. And you’re probably “just” going to be deported to your home country. If you are a citizen, there may be no ambiguity. There often may simply be nowhere to deport you to except an offshore gulag.

I’m a US citizen by birth. My ancestry in the country goes back to before the revolution. I have citizenship nowhere else. There is nowhere on Earth that I could emigrate and qualify for citizenship by ancestry. Believe me, I’ve checked. There is no country on Earth that they could deport me to that would accept that deportation. If I’m getting rounded up by ICE, it is guaranteed that I’m going that hellhole in El Salvador.

This doesn’t mean that me being sent there is somehow worse than an immigrant being sent there. No one deserves to be sent there. But the fact remains that the vast majority of people being rounded up by ICE are not being sent there. But if ICE comes for me, there is no ambiguity. I have nothing left to lose.

If you are a US citizen being picked up by ICE, you are entirely within your moral rights to resist your detention with lethal force.

How long do you think it will be until he’s laying hands on you?

I’m telling you, don’t mess around with magical tricksters. If you can’t pay OP back, he’ll probably take your soul, your first born child, your name, or some other demonic shit like that. Don’t make a deal with Rumpelstiltskin, he will find a way to collect!

I just try to avoid deals with magical beings of any kind. It never ends well. Thank you, but I’m more than capable of saving for retirement slowly with a regular retirement account. I don’t care what the consequences may or may not be. I don’t fuck around with magic.

I refuse to accept it. I don’t make deals with magical tricksters. Same reason I don’t fuck around with genies. It’s just not worth it man.

Swiss government bonds.

Don’t copy that floppy!

I assume it’s because it’s run entirely off of a single old zip disk drive manufactured in 1998.

Can’t tell you until the statute of limitations expire.

Phineas Gage piercing.

Mississippi Pot Roast.

But they’re shit even for that. Part of tracking Social Security benefits is tracking taxes paid to Social Security. Unlike other forms of ID, like credit cards, SSNs have no check digits or other means of error prevention. Take a valid SSN. Change on of the digits. That new number is also a valid SSN. Any random 9-digit number can be a valid SSN.

What this means is that all it takes to screw up any form with an SSN on it is to have illegible handwriting on a single one of the digits. You make a single easy error on an employment form, and now your SS taxes are registered under the wrong number.

I’m also skeptical of the Social Security Bureau’s stance on insisting it wasn’t intended as a broad identifier. OF COURSE it was going to be used as an identifier! It’s the only single ID number that the federal government gives out to everyone. OF COURSE it’s going to be used for that. Such a number is of such obvious and great utility that of course it was going to be used for broader purposes. If you create something of such obvious utility, you have an obligation to make sure it’s made well.

It also really strains credulity when Social Security has an entire system dedicated to allowing third parties to verify SSNs. It’s literally called The Social Security Verification Service.

If the Social Security Administration really didn’t want SSNs being used for purposes other than Social Security, then they could have easily prevented them for being used for such purposes. Think about how your SSN works with your bank. You apply for a bank account. They ask you your SSN. You tell them. But how do they know that this information is accurate? Your bank contacts Social Security! The bank has a form you sign that gives permission for them to as the Social Security Bureau to confirm your SSN. And the Social Security office happily obliges.

The Social Security Administration doesn’t just tolerate the use of SSNs for third party uses. It actively facilitates such third party uses of SSNs.

Reddit is run by Nazi collaborators.

Can I say Luigi

https://lemmy.world/c/luigimangione

Or who’s to say that “Nicole” even exists?
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

Better yet. Return it with the trunk filled with gasoline.

“Don’t worry, I went ahead and topped off the tank for you.”

Or

“Damn it! I pressed too hard and the touch screen broke!”

Or if driving a cybertruck:

“I wanted to be a good neighbor, so I went ahead and ran it through the car wash. ‘Car wash mode?’ What the hell is that?”

It’s a great idea actually. People buy vehicles for reasons other than practicality. No one is buying a cybertruck because they’re looking for a practical vehicle. It’s all vibes. If people see Tesla dealerships being picketed, they know that there will be a lot of people who judge them harshly for buying a Tesla. And aside from some right wing asshats, no one really wants that kind of heat on them just for buying a damn car. People buy expensive cars because they want to be seen as cool. Protests serve to make Teslas as uncool as possible.

Bold of you to assume they aren’t already cooking the books. Though, I imagine they use some plausible deniability and have some bullshit AI cook the books for them.

It can be done and has been researched. See Project Plowshare.

People who say we can’t build fusion reactors are only partially correct. (And no, I do not mean that we can build tokamaks that are net energy negative.) We can build energy-positive fusion reactors, and we’ve known how to do so since the 1950s.

The idea was that you would build an enormous underground chamber. Then fill it with salt. Then detonate a small hydrogen bomb inside the chamber, instantly boiling the salt. You then run the salt through turbines to generate electricity. You power a city by setting off a nuke every one and awhile.

The results of this work were that yes, it seems possible to build a power plant that runs off of hydrogen bombs. We do in fact know how to build a fusion reactor today. The problem? Simple economics. This method just isn’t cost-competitive with traditional electricity sources.

This should serve as a cautionary tale for those hopeful for the future of fusion or advanced fission concepts. It doesn’t matter if you manage to build a tokamak that returns net energy. Ultimately it’s just a cool science experiment. What DOES matter is if you can do it cheaply. And this is actually why I’m skeptical of fusion as a power source. Even if we do ever manage to make non-bomb fusion plants produce net energy, they would struggle to be cost competitive with renewables+batteries.