The problem with buying pets on a whim is twofold.
The animal gets abandoned. They never pick up the necessary skills to survive on their own in the wild, they die miserably by starvation or exposure.
The breeders see the high demand (especially after something like ninja turtles or finding nemo) and breed animals excessively, when demand dies off thousands of excess pets that no longer sell are abandoned or euthanized.
If you're even half competent, you could (not recommended) actually do some basic electrical work at home and come out of it alive and well after a few youtube videos and some reasonable precautions. I can't same the same about mushroom foraging.
Even if we massively downgraded the US military, reduced the air force, navy, army, marines and put them exactly on par with the Russians in terms of technology, manpower and equipment , took away all allies, we removed the vast gun ownership by the general population.
The US still has one massively unassailable advantage.
Geography.
The nearest major naval base to the US is about 5000 miles. By sea, thats more than a week's worth of travel going full steam. Which realistically is the only way to bring the absolutely massive amounts of troops and supplies needed to invade the US, given that most of Russia's transport aircraft can't even fly that distance when loaded.
So after a week of travelling by sea, and having given plenty of time for the US to mobilize its forces and prepare a defense, you now have to somehow make a contested landing with what's left of the navy that didn't already get sunk on the way over. What's left of that landing now has to fight in heavily built up areas, of which either coast is going to be a nightmare but LA would be the worse of the two given the large open spaces where snipers positioned in tall buildings could pin down entire companies and call in air and artillery strikes as needed.
New York is going to be no fun either because you essentially have to demolish each building you come across like what we see the Russian army doing to various fronts in Ukraine, the only way they've been able to make gains is to remove ALL defensible positions otherwise your army gets picked off and ambushed as they make their way through the cities.
While all this is being done, your troops need ammunition, fuel, food which is 5000 miles away while the US has everything it needs in its backyard. This invasion is dead in its tracks before they hit central park in NY or Disneyland in LA.
For mushrooms the only good advice is, if you don't know what you are doing, don't go foraging for mushrooms. Rules and guidelines that apply for one region might not work for another. The risk reward never works out if you're inexperienced. You either get a tasty treat or incurable certain death. It's not a great gamble.
There's probably good stuff on SEA, Astrum, PBS Spacetime? even Cool Worlds. To a lesser extent perhaps even John Michael Godier or Isaac Arthur have lots of good information because even though they are Sci-fi channels, they do hard sci-fi, so all based on established science and astronomy.
I'd caveat that with watch reliable well researched channels and not pop-sci or even god forbid pseudoscientific, or pseudo-intellectual channels that seem helpful but are actually BS wrapped in foil.
Any of the PBS science channels are typically good for science.
How money works, Wendover, are great for Economics stuff.
The engineering mindset, practical engineering are great for engineering related stuff.
Not all attackers might want access to the POS system. Some might just want to mess around
Couldn't someone mess with the WiFi or network itself? I'm just figuring someone who doesn't secure the WiFi is someone who's going to leave admin passwords on the default and they'd be able to mess with the network settings just enough to bring the system to a halt.
Have you tried spitting back?