I opted against taking a burner phone—a move that some legal experts had advised, in the press—believing it would provoke suspicion, and simply decided to give my phone and social media a superficial clean.

But C.B.P. had prepared for me well before my arrival. They did not need to identify me at LAX as someone worthy of investigation: they had evidently decided that weeks before. […] In either case, a U.S. government officer must have read my work and decided that I was not fit to enter the country. Because Officer Martinez had apparently read all of my material so long ago, he didn’t even know that I had taken all this material down. What this means is that, by the time a foreigner cleans his social media in preparation for a trip to the U.S., as much of our news media has been urging us to do, it may already be too late.

This had nothing to do with recovering any data from the phone. The information was already known to them.

inb4 microplastics found in paracetamol

I just never got used to it. I grew up drinking club soda or sparkling mineral water. Also milk, I would drink liters of milk a day for a time, but no water. Flat water just doesn’t do it for me. If it’s ice cold, it’s ok, but I never think “I feel like I’d like some water now”.

They were behind white genocide in South Africa

During the communist regime in Romania there was a ban on abortion and the state encouraged people to have lots of kids (sound familiar?). This lead to A LOT of kids in orphanages and not enough resources to properly care for them. Conditions were atrocious, to say the least.

But, that lead to a lot of research data by following the lives of kids who got adopted from those orphanages. It was determined that 4 month old was the cut-off point from where kids can still recover from traumatic experiences. Kids adopted younger than that did fine, but kids adopted after that age were affected for the rest of their lives. The fact that they didn’t actually remember things consciously did not matter.

I never owned a 486 either. My first upgrade after the 286 was a Pentium.

Also worth reading the books he co-wrote with Stephen Baxter.

The first book is ok, but the rest of the series is pretty meh. Still bought and read them all as a Pratchett fan, but I wouldn’t recommend them to others. If you want to expand past the Discworld series, Good Omens is a much better recommendation. Also Nation is a really good book too.

It happened about a month ago or more, along with a number of other tattooed Venezuelans.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/20/deported-because-of-his-tattoos-has-the-us-targeted-venezuelans-for-their-body-art

Not sure what that distinction would look like. But it should look more honest.

Just look at all MMOs. Everybody knows the game will only last as long as the servers are alive and that all you’re downloading is a game client. Even if it’s a one time purchase and no subscription (e.g. Elder Scrolls Online), its very clear you’re only buying access to the game (usually part of the game content, other parts cost extra), not the game itself.

To be fair, all shower heads I have ever bought came with clear instructions on removing the flow restrictor.

You can replace “science” with pretty much anything and that title will still be accurate.

It’s not about the screenshots, I’m just amazed with how you’re playing a different game every day. I can’t put down a game until I 100% it.

I don’t get how people do this. I obsessively play a single game until I exhaust everything possible to do in that game. Only then I move on to the next game. In 243 days I would probably have screenshots of 2 games total.

Their story is that she was already deported before they got the order.

My vacuum would pass that test… why is a Tesla worse at this?

Maybe the two vampire hands were the problem.

I ignore any calls that are not from my contacts. If it’s important they’ll leave a message. I have DND on at night. Calls and messages from my wife have separate sounds and exception from DND.

Samsung galaxy has the same feature (at least on the S25, I don’t recall if I had it on the S10)

that allow one to throw an object to capture a monster

Like throwing a net to catch a fish?

Ok, that’s absurd. I thought it makes sense to change the name for people in the US if that’s the official name in the US (according to the USGS data, which has always been the official source for this info). But translating the US name into other languages that already have a name for it makes no sense.