IMHO if you don’t have a globally-reachable address or forwarded port, you are not really a participant of the internet, you are just a receptacle xD

One service I never see mentioned is OVPN. They have a 1-to-1 feature parity with mullvad and were an easy drop-in replacement when mullvad closed their ports:

• wireguard
• port forwarding
• no usernames/emails/registration, only account numbers
• crypto payments/cash in the mail
• same price as mullvad
• multiple device keys
• multihop
• no bandwidth limits
• setup guides
• status dashboard

I used mullvad for years, sad to see them go, and all my scripts basically worked without any change other than the server addresses/public keys. Only downside is they don’t have as many users so not as many servers. I wish more people would join up so I get more IPs to choose from :D

I know you are just nitpicking on whether the current dictatorship has an official policy to deport American citizens, but I want to clarify, for the benefit of anyone else who might not be aware of this, that the American government has in fact already deported multiple American citizens by mistake. This GAO investation found that while ICE doesn’t keep track of such stats, based on the data that is available it must report that indeed “ICE and CBP took enforcement actions against some U.S. citizens.” The numbers are in the hundreds-arrests-per-year range, and dozens-per-year deportations. There are many interviews in the press with American citizens who say they were illegally detained or deported. Some Americans had to sneak back across the border after being illegally deported. Many Americans sued and won settlements for their illegal deportations, so now it is official court record that such events happened.

This is not just a matter of ambiguity, cases of “who can really know whether that person was a citizen or not”. These are cases where CBP has been clearly negligent, where the victims had been able to procure for display real birth certificates, real passports, and the agents wouldn’t look at them. The court-appointed lawyers would “lose” the documents and claim none were received in front of the judge, or there would not even be court hearings at all, just deportations. When sued later, no one would take responsibility, no one reprimanded, just settlements paid out. Sometimes the CBP would get sued, receive a court judgement affirming that the victim was a citizen who was unlawfully deported, then ignore the judgement and deport them again. This has all already happened… under past administrations. The implication is that the willful negligence under the current one will not get better.

My guess is that no to the first, since I have a 1/3 chance of being in the forked path, vs 1/15 of being in the straight path and my lever being connected.

Suppose you live in a kingdom where everyone is as selfish as you, and you’ve seen on TV many situations exactly like this one where people were tied to the tracks - usually one at a time and occasionally 10 at a time. (The villain has been prolific.) You’ve seen them all follow this logic and choose not to flip their switch, yet out of ~1500 people you have seen in peril this way, ~1000 of them have died. If only their logic had convinced them (and you) otherwise, 1000 of them could have selfishly survived! Doesn’t seem very logical to follow a course of action that kills you more often than its opposite.

(If you don’t want to imagine a kingdom where everyone is selfish, you can imagine one where x% are selfish and (100-x)% are altruistic, or some other mixture maybe with y% of people who flip the lever randomly back and forth and z% who cannot even understand the question. The point is that the paradox still exists.)

Edit: I can see now how in a 100% altruistic kingdom, where you are the only selfish one and you know for sure that everyone else will logically altruistically pull the lever, it makes sense for you to not pull the lever. Presumably there is some population x% split (44% selfish/56% altruistic?) where your selfish decision will have to reverse. Weird to think that your estimate of the selfishness of the rest of the population has a relevance on your decision!