As a foreigner who never travelled to the US, theee are the risks I'm aware-ish of from reading and watching news both in my native tongue and in English, from both American and British news sources, were I to try and travel to the US.

To try and obtain a VISA, I'd need to provide, for the last 'n' years:

* All my social media account handles.
* All my email addresses.
* All my phone numbers.
* And for my active social media accounts, I'd need to set them to public.

I'm not doing any of that, so for that reason alone I wouldn't be trying to get a VISA to begin with. Many researchers and other people similarly wouldn't want to. So any event would, for that reason alone, miss a lot of VIPs.

Now, for those who don't mind doing that, they get to the US and there's the going through customs. There, we learn that:

* My phone, laptop, tablet etc. can be taken and their entire contents copied, for any reason whatsoever.
* They may request me to unlock my chat apps and look into the chat groups I take part in.
* If they find, either in their copy of my storage, or in the groups I chat in, criticisms of US policies, even tame ones, they may decide to refuse entry.

I don't like Trump and I speak negatively of several of his policies, both international and domestic. Ditto for Vance's, Rubio's, Hegseth's, RFK Jr.'s etc. And I talk a lot about those. News sources have shown cases of researchers who were refused entry because of memes. So why would I want to risk that humiliation?

Which is why the EU recommends people visiting the US with any kind of sensitive data to only carry formatted phones, laptops etc. with them, and to download their data from a cloud provider only after they've crossed US customs. The same policy, notice, they recommend to those visiting China.

And then, supposing I do cross customs and I'm in the US, then at some point, being a foreigner and therefore having friends who are also foreigners who live in the US, if I visit them (which I would), I run the risk of running into ICE, who have the legal right to detain me for days despite the fact I'd have a valid VISA, also for any reason whatsoever. Sure, after what might range from hours to days to weeks I would most likely be released. But why would I want the risk, small as it may be, of running into that headache, when I don't need to?

As far as I know, that's how most other countries perceive things. Is it accurate? No idea. But the widespread global opinion is that one only goes to the US if one really, really needs. Otherwise, it's best to avoid it. After all, there are dozens of other destinations with much better reputations on how they treat foreign visitors.

So, what does it feel to try causing in me an emotional reaction, but failing?

Weak trolling.

I use both Microsoft Office and LibreOffice regularly, and I find the later extremely ugly.

My main gripe with it is how white space is used. Every dialog screen, and every document window, has what looks, to me, weird white spacing everywhere, either too much, or too little.

My secondary gripe is with font rendering. For some reason a font that looks fine in MS Office (and that looks exactly the same in all other Windows apps I try it), looks subtly wrong in LibreOffice.

And my third gripe is with its icon packs. More recent versions have had better icons that definitely look more professional compared to the old "fatty" ones, so there's been clear improvement in that regard, but they still feel like they're only 90% there, so still slightly off.

All of that on Windows, evidently. When I used to run the same apps on Linux, LibreOffice looked okay, while apps running on Wine where the ones that looked subtly wrong.

That'd be fine weren't for the fact that Trump declared Anthropic a national security risk "because yes", which means any US company that does business with any company that does business with any company ... that does business with the US government cannot use Anthropic lest they, too, be deemed a national security risk. This includes nVidia. So Trump is basically forcing Anthropic into going bankrupt unless Anthropic obeys.

For the record, that's a classic way in which historical Fascist governments have used to take indirect control of industries they wanted, which evidently over time extended to all of them. "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state", as Mussolini put it.

That was the case until 2024, when Europe didn't have a need to stand against the US as the US was a committed ally of the EU. Since early 2025, alas, the US started progressively standing more and more against the EU, so now the EU sees the urgent need to protect themselves from US political, economic, and military aggression.

Maybe, but maybe not. Anthropic was founded by people who left OpenAI due to ethical concerns, and who were 100% willing to remain a non-profit, after the unethical camp overcame them. If there's anyone in the industry who might stick to "no, we won't compromise on our ethics no matter what", it's them.

If they do remain ethical no matter what, what that might result from that is unclear. If the US government goes nuclear on them, classifying them as a fake "security risk" to force them to lose major clients as punishment, I can see, as one option, them moving to Europe, which is way more focused on ethics than the US, and currently lacks a major AI player, and then letting the US government munch on the slow realization the US lost the current best AI tech stack to the very same future major geopolitical adversary they've decided to construct just because.

Well, the idea behind these ultra-expensive schools is to have one's kids become childhood friends with the children of billionaires, and then continue that friendship in ultra-expensive universities, so that all that investment pays off in the form of one's kids becoming billionaires themselves, or at the very least members of the inner circle of billionaires. That is, one isn't paying for good education, but for good networking. So viewing these $70k/year as anything other than a financial investment is a serious judgment error.

And yes, that's valid for poor folk who end up admitted into ultra-expensive universities. They entire purpose of those is networking. Going to parties with billionaire teen friends and getting a far from perfect GPA pays off orders of magnitude more than not going to those parties and getting a perfect GPA, with the sole exception of those who want to follow an academic career, in which case, sure, focus on the GPA. Otherwise, focus on making rich friends. Those are the ones who get you high-paying jobs.

Also, yes, I'm being sarcastic. That doesn't mean this isn't true. It shouldn't be like this. Alas, it is.

Let me get this straight: you googled for "disinformation board", copied the first two links that appeared in the search results, and pasted them, without having actually opened them and read them, right? Because, yeah, I just wasted about 15 minutes of my time reading two fluff pieces showing a grand total of exactly zero censorship, which is likely five times more time than you spent sending those useless googled results. The second of which, for the record, having been a link to a video from within an article, so I had to look for the link to the actual article to actually read that piece of garbage.

But that's my fault, really, as I thought, once again, that maybe, just maybe, perchance, a once-in-a-lifetime possibility, a pseudo-conservative might have made an accusation that, for once, miraculously, wasn't a mere confession.

Shame on me for my naivete.

Don't worry. He will use the same cooling technology developed for Hyperlo... wait!

PS: Ops! Seven, not five!

f) That the former president was trying to implement government censorship;

g) And that he was trying to censor you, specifically.

My, oh, my!

Wow. Have you taken your Paranoid Personality Disorder medication recently? I count not three, not four, but five paranoid hallucinations:

a) That there was "uncontrolled illegal immigration";

b) That there's something called "trans ideology" that tries to "mutilate and sterilize" kids;

c) That these shadowy figures are after your kids, specifically;

d) That they're trying to "criminalize" religions;

e) And that they're going after your religion, specifically.

Whew! It must be hard to live under such intense fantasies!

Hope you get better!

Indeed. Back in the day monopolies were hard to develop. Not impossible, but much harder than today, and presumably States would be able to deal with them if and when one sloooowly started arising.

Things changed by the end of 19th, start of the 20th century, thanks to the telegraph and to railway transportation (itself cartelized). This resulted, during the 1920s, in similar levels of despair are currently washing over poor- and middle-class America, which is when anti-monopoly became a very popular topic and ended up approved into law. But it didn't get into the Constitution proper, so it was all dismantled started from the late 1970s onwards, resulting in a repeat of widespread, omnipresent levels of despair now, a mere century later.

Hopefully this time around, after things become much worse, the proper solution gets enshrined Constitutionally so as to avoid another repeat around the 2120s.

Except that I'm not American. Regardless, you didn't provide the law he broke. Or the judicial case. I'd be quite interested in taking the PDFs listing all the evidence and the prosecutors' and defense arguments before the clearly unbiased judges, then getting it all through a LLM do try and understand what it was about. Care to provide any of it?

What law did he break? The unwritten one that forbids publicly saying a government proposal is stupid "or else...", and has a minimum and a maximum term of whatever the Great Leader decides on the spot?