From a sentimental point of view, why not both? However:

Define Nazism and how banning it might be alright with the 1st amendment.

There is already a law that compels the AG to release the files. The department is still under republican control. The only thing that will change is that the committees trying to shine some light on the matter have more teeth. Keep in mind though that there may be democrat corpses in Jeffrey’s cupboard and birds of a feather flock together, even among democrats.

They could get to work on stiffening penalties for sexual predators and their helpers. As well as going after those officials who in the past have turned blind eyes towards these cases in spite of evidence. A lot of that is on state level though.

Temper your expectations. This blue wave is great but anything they want to do runs into 47 breakwater until he’s out.

I think “believe” is maybe the wrong word. I’ve dealt with a few medical professionals and I’ve come to the conclusion that they are mostly just like you and me, unsure of what’s going on, but armed with more helpful niche knowledge and the pretense they know everything. They have come up through a process of learning that leans heavily on the scientific method. Shit needs to be verifiable. That is not to say that none of them act on hunches. But these are mostly hunches they have a body of experience for. Many psychological conditions are hard to diagnose. They can’t check the liver stats or x-ray the ankle as an indicator. They also know mental care is underfunded and understaffed in most places. So I don’t think it’s a question of believing these conditions exist, it’s more about weighing a lot of these factors in their heads and the result of that may be that fewer cases get recognised.

Space is very cold. It’s -270something C. The temperature on Earth is much higher. The rays that make it through to our atmosphere bounce off the ground, warming it up from the bottom up. That’s why you need a jacket when you climb up a mountain because it’s getting colder the higher you go. Imagine a mountain higher than anything we have. Eventually, you’ll get to -50 C.

You are straining the credo of this community. Gauging general trust in engineers based on where the most popular PC operating system comes from is simply too simplistic.

Very few people use Microsoft products because they actually like them. They are just the market leader in desktop OSs and do their darnedest to keep people trapped in Office. Their market dominance is no reflection on trust.

None of this applies to all places necessarily:

Large distances in rural areas.

Stranger danger.

Everything is car focused in the US. The famous sentence “It’s 5 minutes on foot, let’s walk there.” has never been uttered.

Public transport may be shit or not suitably safe/reliable to get kids to school.

Big yellow buses have become a default, a cultural cornerstone, and many people rely on it and expect it.

Long traffic jams at schools are the sign of a more affluent population in the district.

I offered an argument

That’s debatable. Thank you for rage baiting with us today.

Stickers can be forged. Checking your papers against a database is a lot more certain. The sticker is just there (or out of date) to justify pulling you over.

EU countries try really hard to register all births with the proper documents that then lead you to get an ID or passport later on in life. Everybody is used to needing an ID, being able to show it upon request, and using it to vote as well. Most people are just fine with all of that.

The US doesn’t follow this logic. For example, a person born earlier the last century in the deep south may not have received a birth certificate. The birth could have just been written into the household bible. So when you require a voter ID and to get that you need a birth certificate, you have eliminated a possible voter. And what if I added this bible practice was done predominantly in African-American communities. There will be other loopholes where people will be required to produce paperwork they can only acquire after a Kafkaesque tour through various administrations. Funny enough a lot of them affecting minority communities first and foremost.

If you want to do a proper voter ID, you need to first convince the people this isn’t government overreach (good luck). And then make sure everybody has an equal chance to get this ID, e.g. by issuing missing birth certificates. The laws that generally want to introduce this do not care about equal chances. They tend to target voters who vote for the other side.

I have no idea if this was Huang on Huang spying, export ban evasion, or a Chinese Trojan horse. And I’m happy about all the negative headlines about so-called AI or the incumbent president.

Still, and at the risk of having to take a long shower after this, I think I have to defend the mad orange. Let’s say there was a big Lockheed Martin deal in the making with Japan or the UK, billions of dollars for weapons and what not. Let’s say their CEO was cozying up to a person allegedly affiliated with an adversary’s intelligence service. And revealing this would endanger the whole deal. I think any president, no matter what party, would try to keep this under wraps. Do something like cancel that special briefing for the CEO so you didn’t do nothing alright. And then hope for the best. If they break this story, the deal is over and LM and all the jobs there are in real trouble. If the NYT breaks this with anonymous sources, there is wiggle room. I think that’s just executive realpolitik and not another character flaw in 47. He has enough of those already.

Anyways, eff me, I’m off to the shower.

To be fair, the courts didn’t order a transition. Nor could you say the poor man had much of a choice in the matter. Nor was he a Hannibal Lector type violent criminal, as far as I know.

What happened to Turing was reprehensible and wrong. His case is a good example to point at when decisions like this are forced upon unwilling people. OP doesn’t want to force this on anyone.

With these things, you cannot deal in certainties. So the best answer is probably there is a high likelihood that a theoretical, voluntary transition like that would lower aggressiveness. However, and I assume the down votes are a reflection of that, there probably is a way to achieve that outcome, including medical procedures, that doesn’t require a transition. And since that’s unfortunately a hot button issue, linking a gender transition to a form of criminal punishment is not a good look.

Physical integrity is a highly valued right even in countries that still do capital punishment. So few people would put your theoretical plan here into a therapy plan or the law. A transition should be a personal decision based on an inherent need of the self and not an item on a menu of therapies that might get you out of the institution faster.

There are no stupid questions (well, hardly any) here but there are ones worded off the cuff that may lead to a pile on. I’m afraid yours here falls into the latter category.

And none of that applies to what I wrote. Hence my confusion. Could this be hyperbole on your part?

vitriol

What now?

No, it isn’t fair. “Rugged” isn’t an objective measurement. Not all of them are outdoorsy. Some have emigrated to other climates. To Hollywood even. A lot of Aussies are doing everything they can to mitigate the impact of harmful UV rays. Especially actors might do more for their physical appearance than the average Bruce or Sheila.

Why are you so focused on how people look?

Everybody from a more recent generation looks on average younger than the generations before. In the middle ages people didn’t have sunscreen and bathed once a year. But even if you look at older movies, Sean Connery is 31 in Dr No but he looks like in his 40s. All those cigarettes, the booze, the lack of regular exercise, and only eating full Scottish breakfasts all the time. Fast forward to today where more people worry about their appearance and next to not smoking, not drinking, eating healthy, exercising, etc. people have a range of cosmetics and/or cosmetic surgery at their disposal. Of course they look younger.

There is this idea in international politics that the rest of the world should have a say in US elections. Because the outcome inevitably affects us all outside the US. Since we don’t have a say, we still rely on you to be the instrument of checks and balances on your government. And when it is as erratic and boneheaded as your current one, no amount of trade we do with the US should abrogate your responsibilities as the aforementioned instrument. Nor do I think we should stop encouraging protest against the dumb policy of tariffs, which is hurting your own economy as well. Or the end of Roe v Wade. Or the illegal kidnapping of a not much liked head of state. Or the illegal war in Iran. And while this is not exactly the example to follow, the French are rioting for much less these days. It started with bad conditions in schools.

Capitalism works very much with countries’ economies complementing each other. You have the IT sector, high tech military companies, and whisky. Europe has luxury brands, wine, and various niche industries. You buy our shit and we buy yours and then there is no need to produce your shit here as well and vice versa.

That’s a result of decades of a transatlantic relationship that worked in everybody’s favour. We invest in your economy and get security guarantees in return. It’s in a way an extended payoff of the Marshall plan. Your tech sector would be much worse if Europe had built up parallel infrastructures. Which nobody thought necessary because we were all friends. And especially arms deals are often decades in the making. So this “you buy our slop and guns so stop telling us to protest our idiotic government” doesn’t sound quite right to my ears. I think that’s too easy an out.

Rest assured though that Europe will be spending less of its money in the US. The loss of trust as a result of 45/47 is nearly instant. Rebuilding it will take more than a couple of saner administrations. Meanwhile, the US’s purchasing power is shrinking too. Europeans buy military equipment in South Korea and Canada looks to the EU for closer ties. And we haven’t even talked about the bubble yet.

It’s surprising really that you aren’t protesting more.

I don’t have much experience with Collabora but what I have wasn’t great. I’m very much in favour of governments ditching MS for something like Libre Office. But I also know that the formatting errors can be a pain in the røv especially if you have 20 year old Excel sheets full of important information spiked with macros that civil servants who have long since retired made ages ago. It’s minefields within minefields.

So I think many things can be true at the same time. Denmark would like to rely less on American software and services. It was in the interest of the government to communicate that loudly at a time when the mad orange hand was reaching for Greenland (and may do so again because what’s in a treaty?). The Collabora trial could have been an earnest effort that failed for many reasons I don’t have trouble imagining. Or it was a show piece, a signal to the Danish voters as well as American companies. Your contacts may not be as certain any more. It may have led to some increased MS lobbying bts. And this doesn’t mean this is the end of the effort. Just this one, at this point in time.

The big problem is this: success stories of governments switching to something open source are rare. You don’t win elections when people are fed up with long processing times in government services. They’d have to be sufficiently pissed off with the mad orange to tolerate that out of spite. And with the urgency of the Greenland crisis having subsided, the level of pissedoffness will have also declined.

I think they are doing that wherever possible. Schools and ICUs moved underground where it is possible and necessary. In war time, you don’t have the time or the money to finance big infrastructure projects unless there is a clear military advantage to them, e.g. reopening a bridge. And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that EU funds have already been used to strengthen civilian infrastructure underground in some areas of Ukraine.

I just had a quick search about temperatures in a crematorium. Around 800 °C. A structure that can withstand that sort of temperatures is probably also able to withstand exploding batteries. If I remember the Galaxy 8 disaster, they go pop and then it’s just mostly a chemical reaction releasing heat and gas. 30 batteries might be a lot. It may not end up destroying the place but it will possibly leave it in need of repair.

Why do you want to create this sort of fireworks show in a confined space where under normal circumstances nobody will be present to witness it?

Slim chance is the objective way of expressing a low likelihood. Fat chance is a colloquial expression using irony. You say one thing but mean the opposite. It’s more often used as just a quippy two-word reply.

Language doesn’t make sense. When flammable and inflammable can mean the same thing, all bets are off. You cannot make sense of these things; you can only accept them.