Mm I think you have to be very careful in claiming someone has exercised absolute authority; and I think Biden's hands-off approach to the DoJ and especially with regards to the various Trump cases shows him stopping well short of "absolute". Biden recognized some number of agencies and departments are supposed to operate independent of the white house. Trump's admin explicitly rejects that, and has attempted to overstep that independence. I'm not sure even then he has successfully exercised absolute authority but he certainly is trying, and frequently enough to flood the judiciary.

It does not take a highly-trained legal mind to read and understand the Seventh Amendment, as the majority pointed out in both oral arguments and their opinion. You did read the opinon, right?

And you're apparently a centrist who thinks "partisan" is a damning descriptor regardless of the position. Even the Bible has plenty of criticism for fence-sitters.

The billionaire oligarchs don't need much government to function, at least not in the sense most folks think of government. If the federal and state governments disappeared tomorrow, there would still be a demand for security services currently supplied (regardless of opinions of quality) by government law enforcement. The private entities that step in to fulfill that demand would still in turn have demand for these surveillance packages. The primary difference is in their relationship with citizens' constitutional rights and whether the remaining government would have the resources to enforce that new relationship. And that's just looking at the security angle; private corporations under our current status quo have shown a tremendous appetite for surveilling all of us as much as possible for their own purposes. Adtech doesn't disappear with a 99% reduction in government. Subsidies and regulatory capture disappear, but the natural monopolization factors only increase with that governmental reduction.

When you boil capitalism or any other economic system down, it's about which economic factors are allowed or enabled to convert to political power. Removing explicit political capital while ignoring the barely-indirect political capital available to (under our system) the grotesquely wealthy only reduces the number of people splitting that pie. It's all well and good to say that remaining 1% will be charged with keeping the economic elites in check, but that comes via regulation and enforcement, both of which require enough political power to both remain independent of the economically powerful and overpower it when necessary. It's no accident the loudest voices in the shrink-the-government movement place regulatory agencies and independent ombudsmen at the top of their hit lists.

The OED disagrees with you. It's been in use since the late '90s.

There are definitely a few projects in that vein, including webserver Miasma which infinitely returns poisoned training data with self-referential links to serve as a tarpit, and Nerpenthes and Iocaine which focus on the tarpit "labyrinth of links" using robots.txt prohibitions as bait for scrapers that ignore that guidance.

Is there a reason you're too scared to follow other users around with your screen name attached? Or are you just embarrassed martin-boundary won't reciprocate your crush?

"If blocking a bunch of illiterates from coming in..." juxtaposes so nicely with "...acting like everything is being done from a purely racist perspective is ridiculous". All in service of a vacuous argument no one actually contested.

Were you going for irony in that last sentence or are you truly that self-unaware? The quote states that Linux follows that philosophy, and that the user likes that fact about Linux. It does not say the user follows that philosophy, much less to whatever degree of strictness you're insisting they must.

Several states have a pattern of cutting polling places and resources in areas that are statistically overpopulated by the minority party's voters, yes. You'll also see more creative forms of this, like Texas (my home state) limiting each county to one drop box (https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/27/texas-voting-elections-mail-in-drop-off), with the background context that big (majority Dem) cities annex neighboring towns into their home counties when they annex the towns themselves. See also Texas coming down hard to limit drive-through polling locations because those same big cities implemented the concept as a COVID mitigation and saw a massive increase in voter accessibility. Texas was under a Democratic trifecta until the mid '90s, and is still much more purple than one would expect. We just also have bottom-5 voter turnout rates, partially due to the state legislature pulling shenanigans like I described for the past 25 years.

...California primaries aren't ranked choice. Each voter selects one candidate.

None of those quotes show disdain at all. The closest it gets is mild judgment about frequency of changing political support. Contrast that with the sheer disgust you've flung in this thread--right down to incoherently insulting the extremely common metaphor of party support (or any other group affiliation) as ships. The only "wild" thing in this thread is the unprompted hostility you brought into a pretty basic discussion about a famous personality.

The US and Venezuela combined do not have the capability to ship anywhere approaching enough oil to make up for the shortfall present in the Persian Gulf. You're off in fantasy land.

There is zero hypocrisy in an atheist pointing out the insanity inherent in a group of nominal christians attempting to warn the pope away from discussing theology--not that you have any right to declare that "people on slashdot routinely" doing anything means nobody on slashdot is also religious.

"There is no civilian use for 60% enriched uranium" just tells me you get your nuclear engineering knowledge from the OANs of the world. Time to turn off the talking heads, grandpa.