This is going to depend on the specifics of your story, but a supernova happens when a star runs out of easily fused fuel (hydrogen, helium).

If you want to prevent the supernova entirely and return the star to “normal,” that means removing all the heavy elements from a stellar core and adding lighter elements. I’m no scientist (or author), but turning back the clock like that is beyond my imagination.

Absorbing the energy for use in other applications? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so…maybe? You can probably hand wave that way. It won’t be 100% efficient, and whatever tech that’s absorbing that energy has to be able to contain a star. This one has at least some hypothetical support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

A Type III civilization is able to capture all the energy emitted by its galaxy, and every object within it, such as every star, black hole, etc.

It reminds me of the Ringworld novels. I won’t rehash the entire plot, but basically an artificial structure is built that requires a material the author calls “scrith” that is essentially impossible with known physics, but a clever author can write around it well enough that it doesn’t get too much attention for its “magic” properties.

Oddly specific.

How about systematic dismantling of environmental protections and trust in public health systems instead?

Because the answer is likely over half a million deaths on his hands:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2021/02/11/report-trump-associated-with-461000-deaths-in-2018-others-deserve-blame-though/

Sure. It contains proteins in the mucin family, which will have some, eh, “nutritional” value. Plus whatever is caught up in it. It’s mostly water, though, so not much.

The county lines were likely drawn 100-200 years ago. The method will vary by state, but is usually either in a grid or following some geographical features. Where people live probably wasn’t directly taken into account.

Cities lines are drawn as needed, and as cities expand, it just depends on where the population growth is. For mature towns/cities, they may be butted up against adjacent towns, so expansion is driven by whichever people are otherwise “unclaimed.”

But why do cities expand in the first place? Money, prestige (which brings more money), adding services to under-served residents, etc. The question they’re asking when it comes time to grow the borders is, ‘will this bring in more money than it costs in a reasonable amount of time?’ It can be expensive to add services in some areas if they’re expanding water/sewer/police/fire/electric/etc, but the additional tax revenues may be worth it.

Sketchy Chinese data brokers: 👎
Sketchy US data brokers:👍

Signed, Congress.

Because that’s the way they’ve done it since 1987, and the CEO doesn’t like change.

Disclaimer: I’ve never run a Mastodon or similar server, so the software may have more privacy built in, but potentially the issue would be account setup information that could be associated with public posts. Email addresses, IP address logs, etc. Those would be critical in matching public “anonymous” speech with real-world identifiable information.