The example Thiel used in the original "seriously but not literally" argument was the wall. Of course Trump wasn't talking about a literal wall, he said, it was more of a metaphor for, you know, something.
This argument was always embarrassingly stupid, but anyone still making it after Trump shut down the government for a month over literal wall construction has forfeited their right to be taken seriously at all.
The Compiz Cube was cool as heck and no one will ever convince me otherwise. I used to have it configured to layer the windows in 3D space based on how recently they had focus, had it snow and rain on my desktop to match the actual weather using cron, curl and a few compiz plugins, had hotkeys to change transparency or toggle always-on-top or invert colors when I had eyestrain - gods I miss that era.
Like everyone else, I use macOS now because it's what work supports, and the desktop is nearly unusable and primitive as anything. Every day I rage that I can't adjust transparency or toggle always-on-top however I want.
This argument was always embarrassingly stupid, but anyone still making it after Trump shut down the government for a month over literal wall construction has forfeited their right to be taken seriously at all.