Unless you get to check all of them, you're very likely affected with confirmation bias. The ones that somehow have control even though they don't have a time limit will function fine, and your spotting would peg them in the limited time group. I do think they'd be the exception, but I know such exceptions exist.

Oh cool, good plan, we now blame it all on the native Americans! ;-)

Read about Bucha. As another comment says, the invader doesn't get the benefit of the doubt. Then read again about Bucha. Perhaps about Mariupol. Thank you.

"... I'm also not really left handed..."

Look at it from the pool side, all the EV need a total amount of power, which comes from the grid. How that power moves from generation to distribution to the cars doesn't really matter, the capacity needs to be there, in total, for the total. These superchargers just mean there's a way to reduce a wait of several hours on a 11kW 3 phase 16A 230V (yeah 400V if you want to call it that) to mere minutes for those who want that.

Now as for whether the power is available, in case the EVs are displacing ICE cars, most certainly, since the electricity grid needs to supply about as much power to refineries to create gas per 100km driven as EVs need to drive 100km.

Absolutely agreed! I was just about to herald the year of Linux on the Apple desktop! After parsing properly, I'm now sad. Today could have been such a great day...

It's not really a caste if about 40% or more do gymnasium, the highest level. And yes, there's 6 years of primary school in between.

... the government requires people to register to get a mobile phone to ensure they can be tracked.

True for smartphones, though not per se, they have to be on for tracking. The original reason was to be able to prevent harassment.

Mod parent up!

Whenever (less and less, a few times a year nowadays) I get a call that my Windows machine is having a problem, I go: "yeah, right, I noticed, I'm happy you're contacting me to help - you know, I have to order flowers for my mom,... Do you get your parents something when you visit? And do they know what you do for the money to afford that?"

It's at that point that they either start shouting or hang up. Either way, it's mission accomplished for me.

I do the same (Nextcloud, VPN, etcetera) with a dynamic IP, it just doesn't change often with all three providers I've had in the last 2 decades, once a year or less. I do have a rented URL of which I point a subdomain (dynamic.URL) to my home IP at every change. Obviously I have a way to find out my home IP whenever it changes whilst away and I can get into my VPN through IP instead of URL connecting. Lots of informed former colleagues used and swore by dyndns. Hope this helps.

No. That only encrypts while in transit so others cannot listen in. Whoever owns the DNS server still can log all information about the requests once it gets to their server.

Thank you for your extensive answer!

Aside: As an American, I think it's very sad that people lump the US and Russia together in this way. I think it's even sadder that I can't honestly argue that they're wrong.

Well, I didn't actually intend to imply that the USA is to be grouped with Russia in that sense, just that there are 3 big ones, traditionally, the USA, Russia and China. Sadly, indeed, USA doesn't have the standing it once had. What can I say, I'm sorry for your loss.... Which is the Western World's loss, actually.

It sort of started to become apparent (to me) with the Patriot Act, but the 90s story of Phil Zimmerman was already a clear sign of things to come.

(snip explanation)...

If you are a personal target of interest of any national security agency, you're screwed.

Now that wasn't quite the level of protection the original discussion was about. It does help a lot to realise which way methods should go for those in that case. Though anything digital, connected, and powered on is to stay away from at that point.

It's definitely silly to, for example, fire up a VPN before connecting to your bank while at a coffee shop or an airport

Yeah, I just use it (VPN services) for shifting, but I've got my phone connected to my home VPN all the time, just for access to my home stuff though.

Because Russia and the US are incapable of compromising or suborning providers from elsewhere?

No, because Russia and the USA are inherently corrupted or corruptible. I could have mentioned China, but who in their right mind would use a Chinese VPN and expect any kind of functionality... My not mentioning others doesn't mean I endorse them per se. But indeed I don't think it's as easy for the USA government to get into Proton as it is to get into an American VPN service.

... they don't address the fact that you're still routing all of your traffic through someone else's server -- a server that tends to concentrate lots of potentially interesting traffic in one place, making it a much higher priority target than your typical ISP.

Okay, now I'm curious, so as a pro, please enlighten me what good their getting my true IP address does them, it's not like they can look into https data, right? Or do you just mean, it's a privacy issue if they can observe which servers one connects with?

I hope you do know Fail2ban and that you can use it on your system.

.... they're just as likely to be a massive security and privacy risk. The problem is that they concentrate all of the traffic you'd most like to keep secret in one server, and depending on exactly how the system works, may require installing software on your local machine with ~root permissions. If the operator is malicious, this is a really dangerous combination.

So, use non Russian and non US providers.
Use open source clients / systems like OpenVPN.
Use a VM or separate device (raspi etc) to connect to the VPN service.
Install OpenWRT or something similar onto your router (and maintain it), to avoid becoming part of such botnets. Bonus: you can use the router to connect to the VPN service.