BillTongg

I've been wondering how long it will be until his opponents start to be arrested. That has been a successful strategy for Putin, along with rigging who can be on the ballot if there are any future elections (and from comments I heard before the election, when Trump was addressing some kind of white nationalist evangelical gathering, I get the impression that elections are far from certain now) so it would be no surprise to see a similar approach in the US.

You'll have to forgive me because I'm a European with a limited understanding of US law, but what can stand in the way of wholesale dismantling of the democratic process? Am I correct in thinking you don't have a politically independent judiciary and that the Supreme Court was stacked with Trump supporters during his first term, so he can essentially do whatever he wants?

I've been wondering how long it will be until his opponents start to be arrested. That has been a successful strategy for Putin, along with rigging who can be on the ballot if there are any future elections (and from comments I heard before the election, when Trump was addressing some kind of white nationalist evangelical gathering, I get the impression that elections are far from certain now) so it would be no surprise to see a similar approach in the US.

You'll have to forgive me because I'm a European with a limited understanding of US law, but what can stand in the way of wholesale dismantling of the democratic process? Am I correct in thinking you don't have a politically independent judiciary and that the Supreme Court was stacked with Trump supporters during his first term, so he can essentially do whatever he wants?

My 5th birthday. I had mumps, but my mother had already organised a birthday party for me, so I lay upstairs, confined to bed, listening to a roomful of other kids having fun downstairs.

This was a very long time ago, before children were routinely given the mumps vaccine.

Yes, agreed. He seems to regard life as a zero-sum game, in which he can't win unless someone else loses, so he doesn't understand the concept of win-win. It's a kind of cognitive bias which is a serious weakness in someone who apparently imagines himself to be a master of 'the art of the deal'.

Well, the vikings reached the east coast of what is now Canada in around the year 1,000, but they were Norwegians, not Danes. They never got any further than New Brunswick, but who knows, if they visited Florida perhaps they would have stayed...

In these dark times it's great to see the Danes responding to unpleasant orange chauvinism and bigotry with dry humour. It kind of deflates the mafia boss's self importance.

I'm watching series 7 of a Danish TV programme called Badehotellet at the moment and it struck me that the Danish sense of humour it portrays is very much like the British, full of irony and self-deprecation. If they could buy the UK as well I'd be extremely happy.

I haven't followed pop culture since about 1985. I've never heard of Kendrick or Drake (apart from Sir Francis Drake and Nick Drake, and of course you can't mean either of them, given they died in 1596 and 1974 respectively).

I like it here, not least because I understand a lot more of the things people talk about than I ever did on Reddit. Perhaps the users here tend to be older on average, I don't know. There are certainly fewer people than over there, and that must account for some of the differences in content scope.

Yes, I'm new to Lemmy, ex-Reddit, and now I'm looking at what else I can do. I ran Linux Mint on an old laptop for many years, but that was when I was still working and I also had a company laptop on Windows if I needed it. So now I'm retired and currently I only have a refurbished Lenovo with Win 10, which goes out of support soon. I suppose I could do dual boot on that machine, but I'd rather have Windows in a VM for the rare occasions when I can't get something to run in Wine. I have no idea where I'd buy a copy of Win 11, but presumably Microsoft have a store.

I've had a few QSOs though amateur satellites. I bought a dual-band antenna from a company in the US and used a cheap Chinese handheld and my 20 year-old FT817 for the uplink and downlink. There was a surprising amount of activity, really tricky to make myself heard.

I'm interested in those Dresden books. I've read all of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series, and the premise sounds similar, albeit with an American setting rather than a British one. I did a quick search and saw a description which mentioned 'hard boiled' detective fiction - I'm not a fan of Raymond Chandler-style prose, so I wonder if that's a feature of the Dresden series.

As for me, I just finished Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I'm reading all of his novels chronologically, but for a bit light relief I'm now reading Hamlet by Wm. Shakespeare.