palordrolap

Look, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but you’re not making a good case here. Brine is also known as salt water. Just how much of a stretch is that? Sea water is salt water. Sea water is also known as brine. Depending on which term we use, either the sea turns into milk or it doesn’t. This is a problem.

But then this is all a hypothetical and maybe the real bend is how far we’re both getting out of shape over this :p

Another name for brine is “salt water”. Now is it water or not?

Now you have to define “water form”. What percentage of dissolved constituents prevent water from being “water form”? Or is it how it looks rather than what’s in it?

It’s possible to have a brine solution of 25% salt that looks like ordinary water, at least at first glance, for example. Would only the H2O molecules in that be replaced by milk or would the salt be replaced as well?

What if I add food dye to a glass of water beforehand? That doesn’t look like water any more, so would that get turned into milk? Would the dye stay?

How about if I mixed an emulsifier, oil and chalk dust into a glass of water beforehand? That’s not milk, but it looks like milk. What would happen with that? And then we’re back to percentages again, I guess.

https://theconversation.com/palestine-action-what-it-means-to-proscribe-a-group-and-what-the-effects-could-be-259619

This article states that injuries are alleged to have resulted from the group’s actions. I should have added this to my original comment in the first place, but better late than never.

I was adding an edit to that part of my comment to clarify as you were submitting yours. I agree that it doesn’t even look like they’re seeking to injure anyone.

You’re right. I wasn’t clear. It doesn’t look like they’re going out of their way to cause grievous injury though.

So you can now be a terrorist without blowing anyone up or otherwise killing anyone. Merely inconveniencing and injuring is sufficient.

Therefore the UK government, in that act where they took away benefits, inconveniencing and causing indirect injury to many, is by this definition a terrorist organisation. (And likewise the government before them.)

Good to know.

Has Putin started being paranoid about his food and drinks yet?

If, as rumours suggest, the DPRK is in the habit of punishing the families of defectors, I can only hope he was an unattached man with no family.

At the very least, I’m sure someone in charge of the border patrol at the north side is going to get a stern talking to.

As to those family punishment rumours, I can imagine the DPRK might like people to believe them, even if they’re not true. It would go some way to discourage people from doing things like this.

Be strong, Clarence. Be strong for Mother.

Well, once you’ve had your country invaded by rabid psychopaths, there’s bound to be some gene admixture (to put that far too mildly) and so you’ve a chance that their descendents, even if it’s recessive and rare, will have the desire go on to do the same.

Of course, rabid psychopathy and the urge to invade other places can also come about on its own, but when you look at the way the Vikings and their Germanic cousins invaded western Europe a thousand years or so ago, and then note what happened a few hundred years later, it has to make you wonder whether it might have only happened the once.

There’s the figure of speech “to tap-dance around (a topic)” meaning to make concerted effort avoid talking about a particular topic all the while talking about many things that are adjacent to that topic. It’s usually to avoid coming across as offensive or ignorant in some way.

The underlying cause and/or whether a bit more knowledge on the part of the speaker could render the dance unnecessary is highly contextual (and mostly irrelevant here), but nevertheless, people tap-dance around topics all the time. (The previous sentence might even qualify as an instance.)

So, the question is: How much contribution to this n-gram is people pointing out that someone is, or was, tap-dancing around a topic?

Yes. And we can read that because we’ve a passing familiarity with Latin cursive. I assume Cyrillic readers can make sense of the Russian example, even if we’re clueless.

Latin cursive can be just as bad: https://imgur.com/WKPaFYf

Xena, no. That’s how you get Callisto.

“will protect the most vulnerable,"

It’s often useful to imagine that they know what people will think they mean when they say things like that, but that they actually mean an entirely different “most vulnerable” group: MPs, their friends and associates.

Happy Solspliff

For anyone who has somehow missed this bit of business knowledge, it’s extremely common practice to delay paying something for as long as legally possible, if not longer, to the point it’s expected that your debtors will do this, and that you’ll do the same to everyone else in return. It was set up so that small businesses got time to pay for things, but of course, it was immediately corrupted by large businesses to screw over the little guy as well.

I worked for a company that used the pay late tactic, and did this often enough and long enough to one smaller creditor that the creditor managed to issue a winding-up order, which was - or so I gathered - a nuisance to have to sort out.

The downsides are 1) you have to get creative with the “prove [company] cannot pay” clause that’s required, especially if they’re big and wallowing in cash, 2) it costs roughly £3000 that you’ll only get back if you’re successful and 3) If you involve your own legal representation, that might cost extra that you definitely won’t get back.

For the first one, an incompetence argument might work. Or else that the fact they haven’t paid means that their assets, however large, cannot be made liquid enough to pay. For the second, that money comes back from the debtor if you win, so it costs them more money. For the third and for everything else, good luck with that.

For French bread, life is pain.

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer has his arm stuck in a drink vending machine and it becomes clear that he would have been free if only he’d let go of the soda can inside it? And everyone laughs at him?

Here we see “Homer” Putin with his army stuck in a war holding onto a Ukraine. He even has the same haircut. D’oh!