I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries!

Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!

In some places, there is still a social expectation that your mode of dress should be an indication of how seriously you take whatever is going on. People used to get dressed up in suits just to simply go outside. Nobody expects that anymore but some might still expect students to look somewhat put together in a college setting.

Now, I don’t think the professor should have mentioned anything (particularly about your hairy pits, lol). But, they may have been doing you a favor, because they expressed to you directly that they find it objectionable. While that shouldnt have an effect on your grade, professors are only human and this one signaled that they don’t think you take their class seriously based on your mode of dress. How many others think the same way, and are just not telling you?

You are now an American citizen, so you should have the rights the rest of us have. You should be fine. They haven’t gotten around to threatening to denaturalize people yet. When they do, they will concentrate first on people from countries they don’t like, that used old policies they have since rescinded. And they will have to use more due process than they are using on these non-citizens.

The one thing I would be cautious of, though, is the state of your cell phone. They are very thin-skinned when it comes to criticism lately, and may decide to look through your phone’s social media to decide if you are insufficiently loyal. They have broad powers to do that when you re-enter the country. As a US citizen they cannot deny you entry, but they can still make your life difficult on entry. And this group doesn’t exactly pay attention to laws, do they?

At minimum, you might want to shut down your cell phone before getting off the plane. Explain it by saying it is a long flight, and you wanted to save your battery for arrival. If they confiscate a phone and try to dump all its data, they are more limited if the phone has just rebooted. They would basically need the PIN to do anything. If you want to go further, you can also log out of all of your social media accounts and remove their apps before the flight, so they even if they force you to divulge the PIN they won’t find your social media history.

That may all be too paranoid, but we live in stupid times.

Check Elon’s basement

Assuming you are in the US, you can sue over anything you want to. But there is a cost to that, and your management company may be banking on that cost being higher than your rent.

Also, if you have all the documents, you should be able to read those and learn what stipulations there are if the lease terminates and you are a month-to-month situation. It could be that you needed to give them more notice. They could have buried it in the fine print. It would suck to pay a lawyer money only to be told “yup, they can do it”, and now you are out more money.

Ooh. I know this one. Parts of NYC still use a steam heating system that was first designed in the late 1800’s:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system

Since you are a professional who has happened to make it with some level of success, you know firsthand that there are a lot of excellent people who didn’t manage it for one reason or another. (And it’s not always because of lack of talent, they might have just gotten the wrong injury). How did they manage things when they finally came to terms with the fact they wouldn’t make a living doing that? What did they have to fall back on? Are they coaching? Teaching? Selling real estate or insurance?

There is nothing wrong with him chasing his dream, but make sure he has an alternative planned. Make him talk to some of those people, and find his own path. Don’t focus on whether or not he has the talent to make it, but on the fact that even people with all the talent sometimes don’t make it, through no fault of their own. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

If I had to guess, it’s probably because his family was able to lawyer up quickly (either because they could afford it, or knew someone who would work the case for free). Courts can’t act here unless someone files a case over it. There might be other people with valid legal cases to challenge their detention, but if they can’t get their hands on timely legal advice they’re just screwed.

They are trying to push engagement. But not just any engagement. You might think that they would prefer active engagement, when you search for a thing and watch the entire thing. But you are actually more likely to skip ads when you do that.

What they prefer is more passive engagement, when you just accept the best thing the algorithm pushes. Because then you are not only more likely to passively consume ads, but also be served content that they were paid to promote. Which may not be what you want (or may actively push disinformation and bullshit).

TikTok, Shorts, and all the things like that seem to be specifically engineered to exhaust your ability to request more things and let the algorithm take over what you watch next. That’s their endgame.

Yeah, doesn’t mshta run JavaScript locally on Windows? This looks like a way to force you to run their script

I hope that URL isn’t the real one, you don’t want anyone trying it just to see what would happen

Obviously, they also have this up:

https://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/harry-styles-doctor-who-103733.htm

That’s very generous of you, but I would advise against doing this secretly, for a few reasons.

First of all, the information needed to do this (like their loan account number) is considered personal financial information whose disclosure is protected. There is nothing preventing them from giving you the info willingly, but if you try and find it out without their knowledge you may be breaking the law.

Also, technically any gifts between people who aren’t directly related are treated as income by the US government, and there is technically tax owed on it. And yes, paying off a loan would still count as a gift. The threshold to trigger tax on a gift is high ($19k for 2025), but the tax is the liability of the giver, not the receiver. Depending on how big the gift is, you could be inadvertently opening yourself up for scrutiny by the US IRS. But if you are open about the gift and plan it with the recipient ahead of time, you can also do all the required tax planning to make sure you don’t run afoul of the IRS.

I don’t think I need to remind you that the legal climate regarding foreigners in the US on student visas is precarious right now. It would suck if your attempt at a secret gift ended up backfiring and ruining your plans for education in the US.

I know plenty of people with a critical outlook on crypto who have a clue what they are talking about.

I shouldn’t feed the troll, but there is a teachable moment here.

Crypto transactions that are direct on a Blockchain, by design, are immutable. Once they are validated in a block, and future blocks are validated on top of that, it is impossible for any entity to change that history unless they control a majority of the validation power of that network. Yes, even the NSA can’t do it. It’s math.

Yes, if the government wants your crypto, it will get it. But the only way to do that is to obtain your private keys. It cannot reverse a transaction, nor reverse-engineer your private keys from a transaction. Yes, not even the NSA can do it. It’s math.

Governments do have other tools at their disposal. But those tools must center on obtaining the key. They cannot “hack” it any other way.

Well, nothing anyone says is going to convince you, because you’re obviously correct. How silly of me to question you!

No, but if the US government sends money into your bank account, they can just as easily take it back.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/02/12/trump-administration-takes-back-80-million-in-fema-money-from-nycs-bank-accounts-city-alleges-highway-robbery/

Crypto was designed to be a peer-to-peer method for immutable transactions. Crypto transactions are irreversible, even for governments.

I’ve used crypto for legitimate transactions in the past. It bailed me out once, big time, when I had to top up a foreign SIM card while abroad and their website wouldn’t take my US credit card. I found a site selling top-up codes that took crypto and sent some from my phone, and I was back in business. (The site was legit, but even if it turned out to be a scam I knew they could never take anything more than what I sent them because of the way crypto worked.) But this was back when people were still using it to transact.

The worst thing that ever happened to law-abiding people using crypto was when it’s price zoomed up. Because for all those early adopters, every individual transaction now has a considerble capital gain attached. That’s why people don’t spend crypto anymore, because it’s been turned by the market into a Store of Value. (And by developers, but that’s a different thread).

This seems to be all about a technicality involving how these sanctions are applied. Sanctions are meant to be applied to people and the companies they run, and a US court ruled that these sanctions couldn’t be applied to a smart contract because it’s just a bunch of code, and not the property of a sanctioned individual. This ruling was made back in November, they are just getting around now to removing the sanctions. From what I can tell, the sanctions against the people involved in running the service are still in effect.

Yes, that would be a bad idea. It shouldn’t be a bad idea. But right now, it would be.

Then again, you are probably in for Domestic Terrorism charges for simply protesting against the Car of the People. It’s up to you whether you want to dial it all up to 11.

Individual US States are a party to some of these lawsuits, and they have their own duly sworn law enforcement officers. I bet a Federal judge would be able to find NY State Troopers or Massachusetts State Police willing to enforce their orders if there is a judgement in favor of that State in court.