Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, October 30, 2024
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38 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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The headline of the day- An Arizona man stored his deceased father in a freezer for years to keep their home, police say
The Florida headline of the day- Florida postal worker allegedly dumped political mail, ballot in woods
@Michael J Reynolds:
Michael,
My right brain is saying the same. 2024 has been a very productive year for me with four books either published or in the pipeline. Then again all of them were in varying stages of completion when the year started. It isn’t like I started them from scratch.
A fifth book is in the works, that WW II story of mine, but a co-writer is still at it. When Tom is finished, I go to work on the after war parts of the tale, some of which is written already. In the meantime I’m taking a break.
After ‘MISSing in Action’, I don’t know what project I’ll go to work on next. I have lots of ideas/unfinished stories but none are exciting my muse at the moment. When I start writing again, I want it to be a book that interests me.
I’ve been binging Pachinko on Apple +. All around excellent. However, the opening credits plays Let’s Live for Today by the Grass Roots over a montage and a joyful dance party by the show’s actors in a Pachinko parlor. Why? I don’t know. But the show is great. But Let’s Live for Today has been in my head for days. And that replaced Long Long Time by Linda Ronstadt which wormed its way in by way of an episode of the Last of Us on Max.
I should preface this by saying I have good friends that are Yankees fans and they are perfectly fine people, so I know this is hyperbole.
Yankee fans are the most classless assholes in baseball. Two meatball season ticket holders in NYC all but assaulted the Dodgers’ Mookie Betts last night when his momentum catching a fly ball in the outfield carried him within reach of their grubby paws. But maybe it was done in the heat of the moment and the NY’ers are sorry? Fat chance.
All you need to know about the Yankees as an organization is that it appears these jamokes were just ejected for this game, when they should have been blacklisted permanently. Hell, they should have been arrested and charged with assault.
Looks like Project 2025 is back on the menu, boys:
Mike Johnson vows major changes to Affordable Care Act if Trump wins election
House Speaker Mike Johnson criticizes Obamacare and promises ‘massive reform’ if Trump wins
Leaked Videos Show Project 2025’s Architect Calling for a MAGA Takeover of the Federal Government
Scott- It was never off the menu. The America First group which has closer ties to Trump produced a plan similar to 2025 but did a better job of keeping it secret.
Steve
When I first moved to Des Moines I asked my native born colleagues “What is Beggars’ Night?”
Turns out, it’s just trick-or-treating night for the kids, but one day earlier than actual Halloween.
When I asked “Why is Beggars’ Night?” No one had a clue. It just is.
I looked it up. Since 1938 Des Moines (and now most of Iowa) shifted the trick-or-treating part of Halloween one day earlier because in the ’30s teens were starting fires and chucking bricks through windows, so local authorities decided to separate the two.
Nowadays, it works well for parents with kids so mom and dad can go to adult parties on actual Halloween if they can secure a babysitter.
This year, because of predicted heavy storms, Beggars’ Night is being pushed to Oct. 31, you know, like normal people do it. First time since 1938.
Just an odd local quirk.
@de stijl: We had Beggars’ Night in my Illinois city when I was a kid. I did not know the purpose, just that some kids would trick or treat a night early. I have not heard about it since the early ’70s.
@Joe:
Western Illinois?
I kinda dig Beggars’ Night. Lil kiddos in costumes. It’s fun. They are pumped. Last year I was super prepped, carved pumpkin, porch light on, and had a grand total of four visits with seven kiddos over five hours.
This year I live in a high-rise downtown so I expect no one, that’d be odd, but I bought a bag of fun-sized Twix just in case someone knocks. Be prepared.
I’ll eat ’em eventually if no one does show up.
@MarkedMan: I’ll repeat my late night reply from yesterday’s thread:
Ripping the ball out of Betts’ glove is clearly the only thing that ugly thumb of a person has ever accomplished in life.
@Scott:
My new earworm is Float On by Modest Mouse. I’m very prone to them.
The guitar line is obscenely catchy.
Halloween is distinctly weird.
It’s a holiday with established traditions, but no one gets the day off for it. All the traditional stuff happens at night. Including drunken monkeyshines for the adults in the later hours.
It’s a semi-holiday.
One year on Christmas Eve, boss dude showed up at 9 am and oh so benevolently told us we had the day off and to go home.
We commuted to work, got busy for an hour, only to be told to commute home an hour later. I was kinda pissed off. I shat, showered, shaved, got dressed, drove to work only to be told – PSYCHE! – go home now. That could have been an e-mail the day prior.
@de stijl:
Back in the day when most of the proposals we put together were presented in person (many or moat are uploaded today), we tended to finish them very late, then deliver them very early the next day.
So this one time we finished at around 1 am, which wasn’t that bad believe it or not, and had to be at the government offices at 9 am. Of course, that means getting there by 8 am at the latest, 7 am preferably*. In any case, by 8;45 am we were waiting outside the room where the event would take place.
One or two competitors were there already, another one or two showed up later. But by 9 am, no one from the government agency had arrived. This is unusual to the point of being unheard of. For one thing, participants who arrive after the stated time are not allowed in. For another, it can be cause for appeal and/or review for various reasons.
By around 9:30, one lone functionary from the acquisitions committee showed up, and let us know some administrative snafu messed up the vacation schedule or something, and the department handling the proposals was shut down til next week, so the presentation would be then. he handed out copies of a statement to this effect.
Late stressful night, under 3 hours of sleep, early stressful morning, and they couldn’t send an email or make a call to let us know the day before?
*In that particular instance, there were several restaurants within a five minute walking distance. So we had breakfast and lots of coffee while waiting. Some times the events could be in more isolated places, or in industrial/warehouse areas, with not even a convenience store nearby…
@de stijl: Definitely can relate to your manager not telling you the day before, but keep in mind that he might not have known himself. Or it might have been an “if we get x done, then we can have the day off” type of decision.
At my current company we had a tradition of letting everyone know they could leave at 3pm the day before Thanksgiving holiday and Christmas holiday. It was primarily so people could beat traffic a little if they were driving someplace. But it caused resentment, because the production people had long ago voted to come in at 6am so they could leave at 2pm, which meant that they were already gone. So we considered giving them the extra two hours, but then we got feedback from another division that the second shift which ended at midnight the night before would be mad. In the end we decided it was just getting too complicated with managing production on that last day (it would have required managers to hang around longer than normal to clean everything up, or would have required a special production routine just for that day) that we simply stopped the tradition.
@de stijl:
@MarkedMan:
Another thing that sometimes happens, is the bosses want us to enter a project we have no chance of winning. Usually one involving tons of outside wastepaper (ie documents we need to get from suppliers and manufacturers), and lots of samples.
About half the time, they’ll cancel the project at some point, rendering all our work useless.
This is rarely upsetting, unless it comes after samples have been shipped out or delivered. Such projects tend to be far more stressful than regular ones. So ending them early feels almost like a reprieve than a waste of time and effort and lost sleep and irregular meals.
Hell, one time it was cancelled when I was about to board the effing delivery van with the samples for a 4+ hour drive to Chilpancingo. To say I wasn’t heartbroken or upset is to understate the matter.
I was listening to The Town podcast. They were interviewing John Landgraf, widely seen as one of the smartest, most perceptive people in Hollywood. His list of official credits doesn’t begin to really touch on all the shows that exist because of him. The Bear, Shogun, Always Sunny, to name a few.
Anyway, this hit so directly on the book I just finished, and my broader concerns about media. And, I have to say, as a writer, it kind of pisses me off that he can be this coherent on-the-fly. The question he was asked was whether he ever watched YouTube. His answer:
I was a 19 year-old library grunt at a DC law firm, and one of my specific jobs was running out to various libraries – Georgetown, GW, other law firms, occasionally even Library of Congress – to get books we didn’t have. For the first time I encountered a digital catalog which was slowly replacing the actual paper card catalog. And I said to myself, This is a mistake. Because when I use a card catalog, I accidentally discover things, and that stumble-upon feature, is being lost.
We are way beyond the digital catalog. Now the catalog tells us what we’re looking for.
@MarkedMan:
3 PM is cool.
9 AM is just cruel.
I actually really liked working days when no one is there. Thanksgiving eve, Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve. I worked Christmas Day once. I was single. And an out of state transplant.
This was for a big mortgage bank. Absolutely nothing happened, business-wise, and we just goofed off the entire day. I was the most senior person there, an AVP because of job title. The only people there were because some processes need constant tending. The server room, call center routing.
The server room is super cool. Buried 30 feet under the parking lot. Literally super cool temperature wise, as well.
I walked around, introduced myself to everybody. A day of nothing happening at all is really interesting. A building that usually hosts 6,000 busy worker bees had maybe twenty folks. A liminal space. Spooky in a good way.
@MarkedMan: There was the same kind of outrage at a similar kind of incident years ago at another playoff game. Baseball survived, and it will this time too. It’s only a game. It has no bearing on anything other than whether fans will riot in NYC or LA next week.
(And depending on what happens Tuesday, it’s possible no one will notice what baseball fans do.)
@de stijl: At my first job, I always got Christmas Eve off–no delivery trucks to stores and restaurants Christmas Day.
And when we returned to work on Christmas Day evening, we planned how we would get the trucks loaded with several crew members calling in “too
drunksick to come in.”@Kathy:
I’ve worked many doomed projects.
Many failed because of institutional ineptitude. On many big IT projects managing both FTEs and contractors working on that project, they appoint the manager of the most salient department as the project director. That usually doesn’t work well. The skill sets are very different. If your daily is running a set and established department with goals, guidelines, and measurable, directing a project is probably not in your wheelhouse. You chose minimally disruptive for a reason.
Most of the failed ones didn’t actually fail, it’s just the delivered product wasn’t ever used as was desired and predicted.
I always had the practice of checking back on projects 6 months after launch. Sadly, many that delivered every project goal had little uptake.
The projects I worked on usually involved creating infrastructure to create and support a data warehouse, so, hopefully, that work will be helpful in the future.
Hope so. I built the front end query interface. That stuff gets shit-canned after two or three years, tops, for the new fancier version.
IOW, I wasted my professional life on ephemera.
@Michael Reynolds: Three shows I’ve never watched.
Come to think of it, I did watch a few minutes of The Bear. Reminded me of some a$$#@le I used to assist when I worked will call at the produce warehouse.
(No, this wasn’t the “beat and leave for dead in the wet cooler” guy. Completely different ahole.)
“of that experience is being taken out of the world by this notion of, okay, well, what you like is you like that kind of coffee, that kind of books, that kind of clothes.”
He has a completely different experience with AI algorithms than I’ve had.
@Michael Reynolds:
Walking around and wandering about is highly under-rated. Finding new places, odd, tucked away little micro-neighborhoods. I appreciate that.
When bored, I go for a walk. I live downtown now, so walking is way more interesting. I used to live in the city proper, but it was essentially like a suburb – detached single family houses. Nothing wrong with that, but boring to walk by daily. There is no there there.
Walking downtown is substantially more interesting. I am now a genius at determining whether a business will fail or succeed. The goth bar will fail. The indoor putt-putt emporium that hasn’t even opened yet will fail. The egg roll joint will fail (already has, actually, but I called it).
Downtowns are interesting because their purpose has failed. We kinda no longer have jobs that require us to be at HQ at a desk. Kinda. It’s in flux. Depends on the wfh/rto ratio for your employer, but downtowns as the commute terminus for white collar workers is if not kaput, getting close. It is no longer required.
That is what downtowns are specifically built for. Workers commuting in five days a week by bus, car, or train. My building is basically surrounded by parking garages that are never more than a quarter full.
There will always be a place for downtowns, but the primary purpose has shifted dramatically and quite quickly. It will always be a hub for central commerce. I’ve lived my life in downtowns about 50% of my years. Starting in the mid 80s.
Downtowns used to be where you went for the best retail options. Malls were easier, but lower tier in prestige. Now, there is almost no retail in my downtown. There’s a DGX two blocks away. A grocery store the city subsidizes (thank Odin). A weird, funky little store that caters to the homeless, or homeless-adjacent called The Pantry. They mostly sell chips, cigs and booze, but it’s cool and fun to walk around in. Kinda fascinating.
Literally, that’s it for retail in a six block radius of me disregarding the sketchy sex toy store down by the river.
Downtowns are restaurants, bars, hotels, professional services, insurance HQs, city/ county/state/federal buildings and various courthouses. Almost zero retail. Increasingly residential. Quarter full parking garages.
When I was in my young adulthood I lived in dt Minneapolis and retail was king.
It will be interesting to see how it all turns out.
@MarkedMan:
That punishment definitely doesn’t fit the crime. Ejection from the park is the routine punishment for touching a ball in play before it passes over the wall/fence.
I wonder if MLB is working on a more severe punishment. After all, 3 women who lifted their shirts to expose their breasts at Game 5 of the 2019 World Series were then banned from Major League Baseball games for life.
@Michael Reynolds:
Kind of.
One thing about browsing the shelves at a bookstore, is I may run into something I find of interest but had not known about. Even by an author I know already. This doesn’t happen as much if I look up Redshirts by John Scalzi*. But you do sometimes get near matches, and definitely other books by the author.
One can also browse digital catalogs, not just search them. I think half the non-fiction books I’ve gotten from Audible came from browsing (including general searches like “Egyptian history”), and this definitely includes most of the Great Courses lectures.
The algorithms aren’t that bad either. I forget exactly why I wound up finding a smartphone/tech reviewer on Youtube while browsing for classical music, but that’s what happened. While watching Adam Savage’s channel, Tested, mostly where he answers questions about Mythbusters, I began to get whole Mythbusters eps as recommendations. Those have displaced most other streaming since last June (over 250 eps, I think).
I tend to focus more on the availability of options these days, than in the shortcomings of how one finds them.
I ran into so much good news today.
I volunteer at the big homeless shelter in town. I bumped into a cool-ass guy I know from there earlier today. Brandon got an apartment! That’s so fucking awesome! He’s a good dude. He’s getting treatment for an underlying mental health thing and he’s looking great. Big clap for Brandon!
I walk a lot. On nearly every walk I see and interact with somebody I know from the shelter. I always say “Hey!”. I stop and chat if they want to. I enjoy it a lot. They had a good, positive interaction that day
randomly. Someone said “hi” to me, acknowledged me. That can mean a lot to folks who feel like they have nothing.
If I see somebody I know by sight or name, I’m going to greet them.
I highly recommend it.
Trolley problem variant: There are the same number of people on each track — let’s say 5 — the trolley is going to kill 5 and you can flip the switch to have the trolley kill a different 5. Or perhaps a large enough group on each side so they can be demographically identical.
Is it wrong to flip the switch?
There’s no net loss of life, so from a utilitarian perspective it seems fine. And what if you always wanted to know how it felt to kill people?
(The abortion thread got trolley problems in my head)
@de stijl:
An email sent at 8pm, just to reward those who check their email at night?
@Scott: For the longest time I had Iris DeMent’s “Let The Mystery Be” stuck in my head because of The Leftovers.
It’s a perfectly fine song, I suppose, but I have no idea why it got stuck.
Also, the fine folks who made The Leftovers didn’t follow their own theme song, and explained the show’s big mystery. I’m not sure that every answer was going to be a disappointment, but the one they chose was.
@Kathy:
I love Mythbusters!
They had to sort of invent new TV editing techniques to show the how, what, why. It’s about the process. The personalities were a bonus. To a certain type of person, Mythbusters hit the sweet spot.
Yes, we got super slo-mo explosions of a cement truck blowing up in a quarry. But, we also got to know how we got there.
I also subscribe to Tested with Adam Savage. He’s a mensch.
@de stijl:
I’ll post the links to the Youtube channels with the full eps when I get home tonight.
@de stijl:
Missed the edit window.
One thing about re-watching a TV show, is one gets to notice some background stuff that gets overlooked the first time around. For instance, the “blueprint room,” where they do a sketch/cartoon of the first myth to be tested on blueprint paper at the top of the show, is filled with mementos of past myths (not in the first couple of seasons, though). Sometimes these are for the myth they are about to test.
In particular, I noticed they had the sign saying something like “Blue Angels and Mythbusters Test Area” right there, as they were sketching the myth that sonic booms break glass*. It eventually required a Blue Angels F-18 to do a low pass at supersonic speed (great sequences BTW), in an area marked by that sign.
Curious, eh? Maybe they shot the start of each show after all the rest?
Another thing is that Jamie has a twitchy startle reflex. You can see this most clearly, coincidentally, in the cement truck explosion, He jumps back from it, even though it’s really far far away (that shot was replayed in a lot of eps).
Last, I’d love to write a satire horror film titled Night of the Living Crash Test Dummies** and cast Adam Savage in the lead. He’d be used by a large number of Busters to test very painful myths.
*They can, but not often.
**Yes, there’s a Far Side cartoon with that title. it shows crash test dummies cramming people into a car.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BQYK1qDs4Y
Life ain’t nothin but a fever dream.
We have so much snow. It’s nuts.
@de stijl:
Here are the links:
http://www.youtube.com/@banijayscience
http://www.youtube.com/@Mythbusterstvshow
No idea how legitimate they are, but they do have lots of full eps.
Thanks! I appreciate that.
You are a mensch, too.
A little Merle Haggard to end the night. My Dad sang this song to me once, perfect pitch and perfect affectation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30See2k4jkI
@Jax:
Dude! Omfg.
You are into the Rumjacks? That’s deep cut folk punk. If The Pogues met AJJ.
Goodnight, love. Sleep well.
@Jax:
Many are sleeping rough tonight. At the shelter I work at there are folks who show up two or three times a week to shower and top off their water. Grab any self-contained toiletries. Maybe stick around for lunch or dinner and then go out into the night, and really often it is not just because they want to use substances not allowed in the shelter, but because they prefer to sleep raw. I can appreciate that, but I don’t get it. I have a high preference towards sleeping indoors except while camping.
Yeah, some of it is people wanting to get extremely fucked up. (Meth is the worst followed by alcohol.) But fairly often people I see as rational and relatively squared away prefer to sleep rough. It is their choice. (Well, it’s now illegal within city limits since August.)
I don’t get it myself, but there are folks who prefer sleeping rough. In that instance, you’d need/want a buddy to watch your back