Whoops! Slip of the thumb. Thanks for catching that. I was thinking “administrators of the Executive branch” and it morphed before I got it out.

Now and his in last term. It’s coming to a head now because of all the judicial appointments that McConnell held open in the Obama years.

“Judges”

I say that in “scare quotes” because they are literally not judges and it is not a court. They are not part of the judicial branch. They are bureaucrats of the administrative Executive branch that started cosplaying a couple decades ago to project an impression of legitimacy and finality.

Oh! The humidity!

Bold of you to assume my floor is level.

the government

1. These are different silos of information within the government. One demanding that the other release the information that they have.
2. Congress could demand the DOJ release of the pee tape, the identity of any and all the reptilians in government, or photographs the moon landing set; it doesn’t mean that any of those things exist, or that the DOJ has access to them.
3. The files exist. Everyone agrees on that. What the Bondi claims is that a client list does not exist, even though she said the client list was on her desk a little while back. She is now trying to ret-con that she meant that “the files” were on her desk, not a client list specifically.

Now I can’t help but imagine robots having “family joules”: batteries that have been passed down through the iterations.

I may be misremembering, but wasn’t there a thing 10 3 years ago or so where trains were randomly stopping somewhere in Europe. And I think it turned out to be a remote shutdown from the manufacturer (according to independent investigators. The manufacturer maintains that hackers added that code to their software) due to 3rd party replacement parts or an unrenewed service contract or some other anticompetitive behavior.

Edit: Jiminy Cricket! It feels like it’s been 10 years. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/manufacturer-deliberately-bricked-trains-repaired-by-competitors-hackers-find/

Whenever someone makes that “I’m not worried. I say ‘thank you’ ” argument/joke, it gives me that gross “but I treat my slaves well. They’re like family” vibe.

We all love the 1864 goth girl

Correct! It’s called a contronym, it is such a normal thing in language that they made a word for it.

Because it blocks those government heat rays. /s

Wow! What a headline: It makes it sound like DDG was compromised by Google.

DDG protects you from Google (knowing your search history, and which links you clicked from each search) while you are on the DDG website. Of course it doesn’t protect you from trackers once you leave DDG. For that you need other cookie and tracking blockers like PrivacyBadger, uBlockOrigin, and Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection.

It is definitely an important point that up to 40% of US sites send user data to google, but that is not something unique to DDG. A more accurate headline would be “Google is tracking you even if you never use it.”

Oh, no. I only meant that the use in the figurative sense was more than twice as old as any concerted movement against it. And even that movement is “old”. This isn’t some skibidi Ohio dreamt up by “kids these days”. It has a well established pattern of usage.

The notion that “just because someone lived a long time ago, they must have been backwards, ignorant, or stupid” is one that needs to die a loud and public death. It is that line of thinking that leads people to believe that aliens built the Pyramids, Stonehenge, etc. because they are certain that folks back then weren’t clever enough to move large rocks about.

He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.

– The History of Emily Montague, by Frances Brooke, 1769 (emphasis: mine)

The use in the figurative sense isn’t valid merely because of “some rando uttering a word” a long time ago. It is valid because it continued to be utilized with that meaning for the next 250 years and is still used and understandable in that sense to this day.

The opposite of what? I’m curious how you interpreted my words, because that quote does not contradict any claim I intended.

Except it literally does.

The oldest known record of that use is from the 1700s, and prescriptivists didn’t start whining about it in any significant amount until 100 years ago.

Primary thought; secondary (interjectory thought [aside]) thought, supporting thought that wouldn’t work as an independent sentence, digression: the actual point.

Brown is the new orange

That’s a contributing factor on the comparative desirability of an electric kettle here vs there, but I think the more significant part boils down to familiarity and need. Most Americans just don’t drink tea/cocoa/instant-coffee regularly enough want a separate appliance for it. And if the boiling is for cooking, most folk would just boil the water in the pot they will be cooking in, and probably with the lid off because we are lazy like that; time and energy efficiency be damned.