I just use the VC feature of games, meet people and from there join a discord server with them. It’s better to think of discord as mimicing friend groups, rather than gaming communities.

If you want to use Privacy, you can reprogram a magnetic stripe to work with privacy cards, you’ll just need a new card for each merchant.

It’s a different type of plastic because it doesn’t need to be structural. Plastic bottles use PET, cans use a variety but I’m commonly seeing BPA.

The main carriers offer prepaid plans, and there is no postpaid plan that doesn’t throttle speeds after you go over a certain amount when the towers a busy.

Most people get suckered into signing a contract and using a “postpaid” plan, where you get the service for a month and then pay for it. That requires a credit check and credit reporting, since you get the service before payment. You don’t have to give out your SSN if you sign up for “prepaid” cell phone plans, which offer less discounts and benefits but are generally cheaper for the service they provide. The only catch is you pay for the month before you use it, but this makes canceling as easy as stopping payment.

The world itself is anarchistic. Each counties has its rules but international politics have no governing body (the UN doesn’t really rule over every state, just serve to mediate discussion). The country with the biggest stick would probably be the US, but they haven’t conquered Canada or Mexico, let alone everyone else. Other players like Russia or China have influence too.

While the US does have a lot of soft power in influencing nations, they certainly aren’t making the rules for other countries and puppeting them.

I mean if someone in Japan wanted to look towards their right-leaning history, the Japanese Empire isn’t too far away, and it aligned with Hitler.