It’s the wording of the 22nd amendment that makes this a possible outcome (emphasis added):

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice

It could have said “no person shall serve as president for more than two terms” or similar wording, but it does not. I agree with you that conservative justices are likely to use this interpretation.

10%.

• Chance he runs for vice president and wins, with the presidential candidate resigning promptly: 5%
• Chance he cancels or significantly delays election: 3%
• Chance he successfully refuses to leave office after election using force: 2%

Here are all the ways that doesn’t happen:

• Chance he dies of natural causes: 70% - it’s about one in three per year for a man in his early 80s, which would give us 1-0.66^4 = 81% for four years, but he has access to the best possible medical care
• Chance he runs for vice president and wins, with the presidential candidate promising to resign promptly, and is betrayed: 10%
• Chance he attempts to cancel or delay the election and fails: 10%
• Chance he refuses to leave office after election and is removed: 10%

These things have a less than 1% chance:

• Constitutional amendment
• Supreme court allows him to run for a third term in violation of the unambiguous text of the constitution

If you’re getting ads for an adblocker, it might be time to get an adblocker (but not that one).

That may be viable for some combinations of finances and lifestyle, but credit scores are used in interactions that don’t involve borrowing money. I’m inclined to believer they shouldn’t be, but I don’t make the rules.

From what I can tell, Bluesky is both decentralized and federated in terms of the protocol and software, but in a practical sense, trying to run the whole thing independently doesn’t seem quite there yet.

The things that are easy to do are use a domain name as an identifier and host your own personal data server. Owning your own data is nice in theory, but being able to take it with you isn’t that valuable when there’s nowhere to go.

Choosing an instance has gotta be culled.

The trouble with that is having many instances is the core trait that makes it a federated system.

There are certainly ways to de-emphasize that step during onboarding; an onboarding site that picks an instance from a curated set of general-purpose instances would be a good way. Bad ways include joinmastodon.org making mastodon.social the default, and join-lemmy.org asking a couple questions and presenting a list.

Anything that requires manufacturer permission to unlock is untrustworthy.

instances have no native ability to crawl other instances for communities or content

That’s not quite true. They don’t do it automatically or routinely, but a user can cause a server to read a post from another server by putting its URL into the search box. This can be useful for an end user to manually address a federation glitch.

Here’s a concrete example. I was trying to post a comment via lemmy.world, but lemmy.world sits behind Cloudflare, and Cloudflare flagged its content as potentially malicious. I then posted that comment via my own Mastodon server, but push federation to lemmy.world also failed, for the same reason. I could, however cause lemmy.world to pull the comment using the search.

Correct. Each server that shows the post to its users stores a copy of the post. It does not necessarily store attached media (IIRC Mastodon usually does and Lemmy usually hotlinks media).

They don’t duplicate the database in a technical sense, but when things go right, they each have a copy of the same post and comment text, and the same votes.

Zero. It seems like software is increasingly expecting to be deployed in a container though, so that probably won’t last forever.

I don’t know where you live, but it is not normal for prospective employers to ask for your medical history most places, and is legally questionable if not outright banned under the anti-discrimination laws of many countries.

Can you think of anything that happened in the past month or so, perhaps involving US politics, that might have a tendency to radicalize people?

I’m surprised so many criminals are picking these niche services that haven’t had their security verified by trustworthy third parties. That’s just asking for trouble.