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.

Hug time!

I had to look it up because I hardly ever actually buy mayonnaise, but I’ve walked down the mayonnaise aisle at the supermarket… What’s funny is that your 600g “50% more: American size” is actually a tweener size here.

The standard small jar here is 15 Floz (about 400g; we sell mayo by volume here apparently). The standard large jar is double that. And of course we have less common, but not uncommon, 48 Floz for “family size” and larger still in bulk.

We do have containers that are between or smaller, but the those are usually specialty containers (mainly squeeze bottles), specialty types (such as avocado oil based or flavored/blends), or just less common in general.

who’d ever’ve thought it?