Never had one. If you get tested prior to each new partner, and require the same from them, it’s remarkably easy to avoid, as long as you don’t participate in hook-up culture.

We know that cops can break encryption on your phone

Depends on the phone. Cops have not managed to break the latest iPhone encryption yet, and I believe that some of the more recent Android is also currently unbroken. Regardless - if you don’t use a smartphone for doing questionable shit, there’s nothing to break. This is why burner handsets exist.

get everything from your social media account

Not if you don’t have one. And even if you do–a smart assassin isn’t going to post anything that’s remotely close to linking your real life to committing a murder.

track your payment methods for your ebike get away

Not if you steal it. Which is reportedly what happened. An even easier trick is to buy a used bicycle with cash off at your destination; you’ve already spent $1000 on a pistol with a threaded barrel, and about $2000 on the printer to print a silencer (because you sure as fuck aren’t buying a Dead Air Sandman and getting on an ATF list, right?, the printed silencer won’t last long, but it doesn’t have to), so what’s another $500 for a used bike, and $200 for a good lock and chain so that it doesn’t get ripped off while you’re whacking a CEO?

Pro-tip: .45ACP is always subsonic, although a silencer will never make a gunshot silent by any stretch of the imagination. Best case scenario for anything other than .22LR is that it’s going to be quiet enough that you won’t destroy your hearing if you pop off a shot in a small room.

to the CVS you bought your prepaid card with cash at

…Which is 500 miles from where you live.

they can use gait identification to ID you

Easy to fool just by putting a rock in a shoe. Also an exceptionally questionable (e.g. psuedoscience) method of identification, much like bite analysis.

use thermal vision drones to find you in some field.

First, they have to know who and where you are in order to even be searching for you in that field. Second, thermal is not nearly as useful as you’d think. A piece of carboard, a mylar blanket, even a sheet of glass will entirely block it. It’s not even going to be able to see through moderately heavy brush or tree cover.

I’ll buck the trend here.

Yes, I want him prosecuted. I want every single piece of evidence the cops have put out in public, and I want the public to see exactly how they traced him and caught him. I want people to see just how insidious the surveillance state is, and I want them to understand what kind of lengths they’ll need to go to in order to avoid getting caught the next time.

Hey, I’m against condoms. They suck, and don’t feel very good for anyone. That’s why I got sterilized, and when I was dating I got tested regularly and insisted on the same from my partner(s).

To build on this - casings and bullets are more likely to be useful because the marks left on them by the lands/grooves (for the bullet) or the chamber, extractor, and bolt face (for the casing) are likely to be consistent with the criminal’s firearm. However, this assumes that the criminal is caught first, and the gun they used was both recovered, and can be linked to them. (either circumstantially or by forensic evidence).

I suspect that, if you replaced the barrel and extractor immediately after committing a murder, it would be very difficult to link the firearm to the murder, particularly if it was an exceptionally common firearm. Although you’d want to buy the parts with cash, so that the purchase couldn’t be linked to you…

freeze drying is not the ultimate food preservation method.

Ultimate? No. But it’s part of a suite of food preservation tools. Without watching the video–YouTube is doing that annoying thing where it requires sign-in–I can say that you need to be able to use multiple food preservation techniques. You should learn to do canning as well, and you really need an effective vacuum sealer (that can use heavy-duty mylar, versus specialty plastic bags) in order to effectively preserve freeze dried foods, and those mylar packages need to also be sealed in containers away from pests that might chew through the bags.

Freezing food, by itself, is only useful as long as you have electricity. If you’re entirely off-grid, and have over-capacity solar system, that might be good enough, if you have a LOT of freezer space. The least expensive freezers I can find are around $25 ft^3; costs decrease slightly when you’re talking about large walk-in freezers, but that requires a building that can accept a walk-in installation, and $25,000 for a 1000ft^3 freezer is more than most people can afford.

Drying foods in general is decent, and high sugar content–fruits in particular–can lasts decades if they’re vacuum packed with oxygen absorbers. Even though dried foods will have some moisture content, the sugars act as a preservative and prevent the growth of bacteria. (Sugar curing meat is definite a real thing, much like salt curing; more on this in a sec.)

Canning is good for some things, but certain things can not be safely canned, and canning is slooooooooooow. It also requires a botttle/ring/seal for each and every thing that you can; seals are not reusable.

Dry goods don’t need to be freeze-dried; you can vacuum seal most of them with oxygen absorbers and desiccants, and be fine. Things like flour can mostly be put in large buckets with gamma seal lids and be okay for years at a time. White rice stores wonderfully for the long term, as do dried beans. (However!, dried beans must be soaked prior to cooking, the soaking water discarded prior to cooking, and can not safely be eaten raw. Cooked canned beans are a better choice for anything other than very long term storage.) Brown rice has a high fat content relative to white rice, and has a bad tendency to spoil, as do nuts of all varieties; I haven’t tried vacuum sealing them with oxygen absorbers and desiccants to see if that preserves them for longer than a few years.

Meats can be preserved by curing. This is, however, a very exacting process, and it not recommended unless you know what you’re doing. It requires a temperature and moisture controlled container and a few weeks of time, and fucking it up means that you kill yourself with bacterial contamination.

Freeze drying works for complete meals where you can’t freeze things, and you want food that’s going to be ready-to-go, either rehydrated or dry. Yes, you can eat freeze dried things without reconstituting them, although it’s not terribly pleasant in some/many cases. If you, for instance, made a stock-pot full of red beans and rice, freeze drying would be the ideal way of preserving it and making it shelf-stable.

Per my original comment - that was because each time my spouse started smoking again, and was pushing cigarettes on me. If I hadn’t been married to them, then I would have stayed quit the very first time I stopped. Each time we quit smoking, they would secretly start smoking again almost immediately, and would then start pushing me to re-start after a couple of months. Once the divorce was in progress and we had limited contact, it was fairly straightforward.

It would probably be super hard to quit heroin if you were married to your dealer.

Dubya at least had a face of ‘compassionate’ conservatism, and believed in the rule of law. Yeah, he bent the law a lot, but he never outright broke it. He was incompetent–or, he was at least not up to the task of being a president–but not apparently malicious.

Pity that SCOTUS stepped in with the Florida recount, since it was eventually found that Gore should have won. I wonder where we’d be on climate change now if Gore had won? Oh well Florida, enjoy your flooding and hurricanes.

He allowed American Surveillance with Patriot Act I and II.

People at the time were begging for that. There were a very, very few civil libertarians that realized just how dangerous those acts would be, but the people, as a whole, were really behind them. Just like the people went in gung-ho for the start of GWoT.

He is essentially the ripple effect of everything we’re dealing with today and Trump is merely the symptom of that.

I’d put that at the feet of Reagan first. Reagan was the one that cozied up to the ‘moral majority’, which was based in racism and misogyny, what with Bob Jones University being forced to desegregate. That’s where the birth of the alt-right (which I guess is now just mainstream Republicans) happened.

But again - how would they know that someone was undocumented? If someone started new social media accounts when they arrived, and bought a new phone/started new service, then what do they have that’s going to reasonably demonstrate that they’re undocumented? Particularly if they buy a pay-as-you-go phone, which doesn’t require any kind of ID to buy and activate?

Absolutely.

But the loss of the manufacturing base, and the subsequent decrease in number of people covered by labor unions, has been one of the single largest factors that’s harmed the middle class. It’s not the only thing, but a manufacturing base ends up being a pretty important part.

tariffs very rarely ever benefit the country establishing the tariff.

Well. It depends.

If tariffs are sustained, then it can make sense to establish domestic companies that can supply the goods that were previously being outsourced. In that respect, over the long term–and I’m talking, like 20-30+ years–it could be positive. One of the things that made the US economy strong in the 60s was the fact that we had strong labor, and strong manufacturing; outsourcing our manufacturing has harmed labor and the middle class.

But that’s all very long-term stuff. It’s taken us 40 years to get to where we are now, and bringing manufacturing, and strong unions, back can easily take just as long. In the short term, it’s going to be super-bad for the working poor and the middle class.

Cigarettes, cigars, and pipes still smell wonderful to me, and if was free and wasn’t going to kill me, I’d absolutely start again. But I haven’t had any real cravings or dreams about smoking since about four months after I quit.

Benzo withdrawal will kill you, but goddamn is it hard to kill yourself with benzodiazepines… You’d think that something with a deadly withdrawal would also be easy to OD on, but no.

I’m pretty sure I know what I smoked.

I quit because I started coughing up dark brown shit every morning; I always had some kind of congestion in my throat. I decided that I didn’t want to do that anymore, so I stopped.

nicotine is the hardest drug to quit.

Wild. I’ve quit smoking multiple times, and thought the first week or so was unpleasant each time, but not awful. Each time I started up again it was because my ex-spouse started smoking again and was pushing cigarettes on me. Since the divorce a decade ago, I haven’t had a cigarette. And that was after about fifteen years of smoking around a pack and a half a day.

I know that quitting drinking all at once can straight up kill you, if you’re a hardcore alcoholic; I’ve known a few people that had the shakes every time they were sober.

Third, divorce. You will find out who your real friends are when you get divorced.

When my ex- and I were going through a divorce, they didn’t want me to say anything publicly at all. They were insistent that it wasn’t anyone else’s business, and since I was trying to make the process as painless as possible, I assumed that this was a good-faith request.

I was wrong.

I was being silent, and they were telling everyone a load of horseshit about me, and bad-mouthing me in public to every single one of our mutual friends. I lost all but one of our mutual friends; my silence was assumed to be an admission of guilt.

VPN works just fine, as long as you can set your location. I know this because some sites are blocked in my area, and I can get to them when I change my location in my VPN.

For Tor to work, you have to reduce your security settings, and allow javascript; that’s not generally a good idea when you’re using Tor. Even when you do that, the network is slow enough that videos don’t seem to complete loading. (I just checked.)

TLA agencies would have no problem with a cover identity to “prove” who they are. Your average citizen is going to have a hard time buying a slightly used social security number that they can use to get an ID that will pass KYC laws.