Yes, although it does make it easier to put the screws to them on the idea that they clearly don't have the budget to go through that data for "legit" reasons, either, so why collect it in the first place?

You seem to be overestimating antigen specificity in pathogens, if they were that hyperspecifc they couldn't spread.

True that in a fallen civilization an EV is not going to be useful for long, but also true that fuel transport is going to be more easily disrupted than electricity generation. You could do the latter with livestock in a wheel if you really wanted to.

If your power is out and you're running stuff off an extension cord why would you worry about the lights? A flashlight or lantern will do good enough and the batteries in either are as likely to leak from getting old as actually run out of power with LED bulbs.

Yeah, they're even one of the two countries that has the last known samples of smallpox.

I'm not sure targeting specific ethnicities would work well at all (ye olde genetic bottleneck means all humans are fairly inbred compared to other mammals), although I am at times surprised no one has tried and accidentally collapsed civilization, yet.

Any of these chat apps are going to be mildly frustrating once you cram all the desired features inside and run it securely in a cloud

Yeah with as much debt as is tied up in the thing the accompanying recession is going to be painful but may as well rip the bandaid off at this point

It's nice for reading fiction and can download the book free from the library. For reference books then paper is certainly more amenable to flags and slowly accreting a desk surface while you recompile your sources. Searching local electronic document stores is something LLMs have gotten pretty slick at, though, so I suppose doing it with paper will become a more rarified skill.

I was flummoxed when my wife, who has a standalone Office license because she works for a tiny startup, was having trouble with an Excel formula. I asked her to click on the tooltip for the formula Help box to figure out what was wrong with the syntax, and the help screen said "This Version is No Longer in Support" which, while true, was infuriating because there's no reason that the Excel function help index needs to be live content rather than a KB of text in the installer. Their business side support will likely continue (in the US at least) for some time because of the cost and complexity of replacing it all but every choice to lock in that market gets more and more hostile to smalltime users.

Either of those would be better than a wipe but might be vulnerable to scanning a full device backup. You could probably use something akin to Enterprise MDM sandboxes, too, so you can allude to a document retention timer expiration when they try to nail you for destruction of the evidence.

I think it is more the famous quote: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him," Cardinal Richelieu. Applied to your phone there's far more than six lines to trawl and disingenuously piece together a narrative of ones' choosing from.

Dusting yourself with reactive nanoparticles does seem likely to backfire in exciting ways

Interesting! Not heard of those here in the midwest, although I know the orchards that I'll visit are open about spraying their trees with pesticides despite otherwise having organic vegetables.

Around here we have lots of apple orchards and, similarly, apple varieties, and when the kids were small they asked about why there was only one kind of bananas but several kinds of many other fruits so we learned about where they are grown and how they are imported (and supposed that some places in the world likely only have one kind of apple imported). It is interesting to see the pacific banana photo, we've been able to get plantains here more easily lately than in the recent past but even those aren't near that bright.