It’s impossible to tell anymore. There was a time when we could have assumed it was a bit. Now we have mentally incompetent people running our government and encouraging their followers to be delusional.

If you show the person at the border your paper, and they still won’t let you in, it doesn’t matter that you have the paper. It is just that simple. It’s illegal, but when the people who are supposed to be enforcing the laws are the ones breaking them, there isn’t any real recourse short of a popular uprising.

It will always be safer to store sensitive information in a system that you control than in a system that someone else controls. KeePass is easy to setup, it’s easy to use, and it provides excellent protection.

I’m getting a T-Deck, but I don’t feel too bad about using Bluetooth on a phone, as long as everything else is disabled. It isn’t hard to track, but it will be a distant third after cell and Wifi in terms of what the authorities will be tracking. Not ideal, but an acceptable compromise for now.

That much cuteness certainly deserves treats.

I don’t think your keys affect your interactions with the default public channel, although I could be wrong.

What I would do is perform a factory reset on the radio and set it back up from scratch. It doesn’t take that long to do and it should eliminate any configuration problems that have crept in from multiple updates.

We got some Meshtastic radios that we use for protests (as well as for protests). They solve most of the problems quite neatly.

It sounds like you may actually have a compromised key. There are going to be a fair number of those around, because of the “bug” (really more of an oversight) in the pre-2.6.11 firmware. I had to get new keys on one of my radios too. Just make sure you’re running 2.6.11 or later before you generate new keys.

My microwave can boil a single cup of water faster than my kettle. My kettle can boil four cups of water a lot faster than my microwave. It all depends on the microwave and kettle (and the voltage available).

But you should definitely update your firmware, as meh suggested. All versions from 2.6.11 on can recognize and warn you about potentially compromised keys.

That can also happen if you change the name of your device. It will still be advertising a key that other radios recognize from earlier, but with the wrong name.

In some ways it’s kind of nice to have them clarify which parts of the government are completely corrupt and willing to lie shamelessly for Trump.

I live in the US and I heat my tea water in an electric kettle. It probably isn’t as fast as yours, but it is still close to microwave speed. And I can heat up enough for several cups of tea and have it keep the rest hot. I usually drink more than one at a sitting.

If you live in a place where there are still old lead pipes in the system, which almost everyone in the US does, you should start pushing your city representatives to get it fixed. It’s a major hazard in all sorts of ways.

I live in one of the very few cities in the US that replaced all of its lead pipes a couple of decades ago.

I want an Alef Model A so badly!

That is thicker than I’d want on my phone, but I love the idea. And it’s a great indicator of things to come. I’d like to see it combined with the Meshtastic radio that fits inside a Zippo.

AI is already replacing significant parts of the technical workforce. The key is that it doesn’t have to successfully replace them. It just has to convince the sociopaths in the C-suites that they can pretend it will so they can layoff masses of employees. That will allow them to collect obscenely large bonuses, sell their stock at a huge profit, and move on to destroying the next round of businesses. Fortunately, the only people this will hurt are, well, us.

People are notoriously bad at correlating data. They personally experience a very limited number of data points, misremember half of them, then draw whatever conclusions they are predisposed to believe.

I know this perfectly well, but it still happens to me too. The difference is that people with a little less self-awareness find it easy to firmly convince themselves that their distorted perceptions represent absolute truth.

There are also areas where the data is open to broad interpretation. For example, the numbers for unemployment have looked surprisingly good for quite a while now. That’s because they don’t account for either the large number of people who have given up on looking or on the downgrading of many of the jobs from middle-class-breadwinner to minimum-wage-without-benefits. The numbers don’t look bad, but the numbers are a drastic oversimplification of the real situation. Similar questions about “the economy” are based on the assumption that what’s good for giant corporations is good for the average citizen, which has not been true for at least the last few decades.

The MAGA Cult strongly encourages people to lie to themselves, but that isn’t really necessary in a lot of cases.

As long as it’s comfortable to wear I don’t see anything wrong with the size. It looks great!

I’m reading Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series. They fit modern fantasy into a British police procedural framework. What makes them exceptional are the characterizations, plus the wit and snark of the dialog. They are both good stories and a lot of fun to read.