like many very elderly people

Though he was in his 90s and had Alzheimers, she was 65. You might be shocked to find that most people her age are not only living independently, but still working full-time. Most of us can even drive to the supermarket, then find our own ways back home.

Stand up, or get out of the way.

Cowards.

I cannot fully concur with your analysis since you omitted “asshole.”

And while we’re here, let’s talk about jury nullification.

They are so owned it’s pathetic.

If there’s a hell, all Trump supporters are going there.

And well over 30,000 lies so far.

No, just with the Ghosts of Advance Compliance.

Bunch of pompous placeholders.

Sales taxes are state/city level taxes

Many other countries have them at the national level too.

Your ISP can still see IP addresses you connect to, they forward all your traffic.

No they can’t. The ISP cannot see any traffic that goes to or from you while you are connected to the VPN, only that you are sending encrypted packets to/from the IP of the VPN itself. It’s the VPN that then sends your requests on to the site you want to see, and routes the reply from the site back to you.

DNS requests are a separate attack vector, but VPNs almost all offer a means of protecting those from scrutiny as well, and as you say, DNS over https/TLS is also resistant to snooping.

There are some more esoteric ways of spying on your traffic, but the likelihood of any of it being used against you is remote unless you are on the shitlist of a major corporation or government.

Ad blocking does more for less cost than getting a VPN will ever do

Ad blocking mitigates a different risk, which is that trackers on pages you visit will report your behavior to aggregators who sell that data. By all means, use an adblocker. Maybe two. But also be aware that some adblockers sell your data to advertisers (e.g., Adblock Plus: Ublock Origin appears to be less problematic). Or, if you’re a bit more technical, you can set up your network so that known data-collection output isn’t sent. There are even lists of known snoopware endpoints you can subscribe to so you can more easily block them. But the ingenuity of the data collectors is extreme, and it’s a continuing struggle.

Another potential source of leakage is your browser fingerprint (there are sites that’ll tell you how unique your profile is-- the answer is generally “enough to identify you.” There are extensions that can conceal that too.

They want this to happen, to open the NW Passage.

“They” being Putin.

I wonder if they’ll come down and burn the White House again. Don’t piss off the Canadians.

After the apocalypse, one of the few surviving humans will find a stepdown station with a fried squirrel in it.

Main land Europe from Portugal to Turkey is one big network.

The connection between the Iberian peninsula and the rest of Europe isn’t all that high-capacity. That’s been a known weakness in the grid for a long time.

I’ve also seen resports from credible sources discounting that possibility. So it’s probably wise not to jump to conclusions.

It would depend on where it was solar noon at the time the CME hit. But there haven’t been any massive CMEs (Carrington size) anyway, so whatever the cause was, it had nothing to do with solar activity.

That’s not the way a grid would fail during a Carrington event: you’d see big induced voltages along an east-west line. What happened in this case were fluctuations without any notable geographical alignment.

Anyway you can always check space weather at https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/specialist-forecasts/space-weather

I give this UK Met Office link because the US center, NOAA SWPC, may be subject to attack by MAGA fanatics. The US and the UK are the only western countries with 24/7 space weather operations centers. There’s another one in China but (not surprisingly) their area of interest for geographic impacts is China.

There’s only medium space weather activity at the moment, which is about as quiet as things get at this active phase of the solar cycle.

I’d say that we’re still in the nobody knows stage on what the cause of the grid outage is, though the two main theories are a cyber-attack or anomalous thermal fluctuations causing instability in long transmission lines. It’s probably best to withhold judgement until people who know what they’re doing have looked into it more.

The Great Char-Siu Mine of Chengdu.