Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, January 27, 2025
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56 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 public is accustomed to having arrests being reported with information the basis for the arrest.
So, ICE arrested some 1,000 people over the weekend, supposedly because they are guilty of having committed some crime in addition to being undocumented.
Or, do they have to be guilty or just accused or criminal activity?
Personally, I’ve no issue with deporting convicted undocumented, but I do have an issue with deporting undocumented that are just accused, but not adjudicated guilty.
@Bobert:
That’s the Laken Riley Act that just passed, lots of Democrats voted for it.
All sorts of bad stuff will happen, Swatting with false accusations as an example.
ETA: I am getting very Germany 1933 vibes from this whole verkakte situation with Herr Trump and his sycophants.
It’s going to be really important for government employees to get everything in writing and to keep copies of that. I would also hope that they compile evidence of wrong doing and illegalities and keep that proof outside of their work environment. I recognize this may be illegal, but I still hope they do it.
Interesting goings on in the financial markets.
Looks like a lot of positions in AI are about to go sideways, due to a Chinese firm bringing out a cheaper and more infrastructure efficient challenger to the current players.
Well, I went and began to cash in the Amazon gift card I got last month… I got 30 days of Prime for free, which I found surprising, Usually this is reserved for first time subscribers, not for those who re-subscribe after unsubscribing. I may get my fill of Prime shows and movies and cancel before Feb 25th. I already got started on season 2 of Invincible (spoiler alert: not thrilled about a multiverse story, if that’s where it’s going).
I got my cast iron pan (Lodge), and now have to decide whether and how to season it. I also got a case for my phone (I don’t know why*), and a mount for the car that should work on the Honda. We’ll see. Since I was already shopping, I got a different spoonula (still hate that word).
I’ve heard of gift cards referred to often as interest free loans by consumers to big corporations. This is partly so, As some go unused, or small remainders are forgotten, some are gifts to big corporations.
Buffalo is a cursed team. they need to move to a city that’s lost its team, change their name and uniform, and let an expansion team take over the old Buffalo Bills name and record and history and legacy.
Just like the Cleveland Browns did when they became the Baltimore Ravens, The latter have won a couple of championships, while the expansion team that took over the former are a near replica of the hapless Browns, without even an equivalent to Bernie Kosar or Marty Schottenheimer.
Should the Chiefs win in February, the league ought to give them a bye season. I’ve nothing against the Chiefs, other than they play in Missouri and their place kicker is an abhorrent excuse for a man, but it gets tedious watching the same team win over and over. Maybe not if it’s the team you follow, but it does for everyone else.
So, win two in a row and you get a season off. term limits.
We just had an earthquake here in northeastern Mass. Jen and Sleeping Dog, did you feel it?
GO BEARS!
Super Bowl CX here we come!
Latest reports on the Jeju Air crash are that both engines sustained bird strikes.
This does not determine the cause, but it looks now like either both engines failed, or were damaged enough they didn’t put out enough thrust. I tend to favor dual failure, seeing as the power to the black boxes went out.
Major questions also remain about the concrete barrier past the end of the runway.
@CSK:
Yeah, at first I thought a vehicle crashed into the house, but the rumbling continued for about 10 second, so I assumed earthquake. The second earthquake that I’ve felt since being here, though this felt stronger. About 3.8 on the Richter Scale, I understand.
I’m quite certain that the Palestinians have a “biblical right” to being treated humanely.
Another take on Stefanik’s apparent pro-Israel stance:
@JohnSF: there’s a bunch of techbros with indigestion this morning.
I read DeepSeek “punctured” ai infrastructure plans here. Market positions are on hold.
Oh, my.
@JohnSF:
@becca:
Wait, did a Chinese company move fast and break things?
@Sleeping Dog:
It was a noisy bugger, wasn’t it? I’ve not heard any reports of damage or injuries.
@Kathy: I was hoping you’d chime in. What’s your take?
Just in-
DeepSeek, an artificial intelligence (AI) research lab in China, has cracked the ‘holy grail of AI models’ by achieving performance at par with the world’s best chatbots at a fraction of the cost. MSN
@becca:
I’d need to try the miracle LLM first, and see how it does against the older players. I only just found out about it now.
I know little of what goes on the back end. but if it can perform as well as ChatGPT or Gemini using far less computing power, and far less electricity, it would be like the difference in fuel efficiency between a 1950s V8 engine and a hybrid today.
The generative AI players here were set up to ramp up chips production, ergo Nvidia’s drop if their graphics cards won’t find buyers, and electricity generation, including the revival of nuclear plants (a good thing, IMO), This kind of flies out the widow now.
Oh, well. See how they like being on the other end of creative destruction and innovation for the sake of innovation.
I’ll try the LLM later today when I’m home. Management here doesn’t like us using AI at work.
@Kathy:
Lodge makes a seasoning compound that looks like half-melted butter. We use it regularly on our cast iron pots and pans and it seems to work great.
@CSK:
I don’t think it was that large. Nothing on the walls or in cabinets seem to be displaced.
From what I read the epicenter was 11km off the coast of Kittery, so near me, between Whaleback Island and Isles of Shoals. Bet the caretaker/photographer that winters on Star Island got rocked.
@CSK: Oh, absolutely. It’s the talk of the town! It was a pretty decent rumble. (Having lived on the Ring of Fire as a kid, I thought it was a 3.0 or so, turns out it was a 3.8 or 3.9). Not the first I’ve felt living here, but definitely the longest and it really did rattle the house.
The pup slept through it. To be fair, she was in a pretty decent sunbeam.
@Kathy: Being offered 30 days of Prime service for free seems to be standard now. In fact, on my last Amazon order, I had to go into my account to remove the 30-day trial because there was no button to reject the offer at POS. Curious.
ETA: Lodge pans are pre seasoned, but I cooked bacon in mine for the pilot project and just poured the grease out lightly wiping the pan after.
@CSK: @Sleeping Dog: @Jen: what an unpleasant way to start the day. Does take your mind off – you know – for a bit, though.
@Sleeping Dog:
@Jen:
Quake magnitudes are pretty much the same all over, but the distance of propagation from the epicenter are not. Quakes in the eastern parts of North America are rare, and strong ones tend to devastate larger areas. See the New Madrid earthquakes.
I’m really weak when it comes to geology. I read a long time ago that the abundance of faults in seismic prone areas, like central and western Mexico, or California, serve to dampen seismic waves, as they provide a continuity break of sorts. Central and eastern North America have fewer geological faults, therefore seismic waves travel farther. Take this with a truckload of salt.
It will be interesting as to how many people, companies and universities fully documented their violations of US equal opportunity and other civil rights laws in their social media and PR material
We knew this was going to happen, didn’t we?. Apparently all brown people look alike to ICE officers:
“At least 15 Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico have reported being stopped at their homes and workplaces, questioned or detained by federal law enforcement and asked to produce proof of citizenship during immigration raids since Wednesday, according to Navajo Nation officials.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/27/us/navajo-detained-ice-indigenous-immigration-trump/
@just nutha:
Hm. Now I want to try ending the Prime subscription days before it expires, then try to resubscribe a week or two later and see if I get a new freebie.
It would be a sloppy thing for Amazon to do, but that’s not my problem.
Thing is, whenever I drop Netflix, I get email after automated email asking me to resubscribe. they tell me what great content they have and what I’m missing out on. They never tell me I can get 30 days free, or even thirty minutes.
I can’t resist. From Axios –
The Magnificent 7 stocks — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla — were also down sharply in premarket trading, dragged lower by Nvidia but also the broad tech sell-off in general.
Their implied loss in market capitalization at the open exceeds $1 trillion, with most of the stocks down 5% or more.
The bottom line: The S&P 500’s incredible run the last two years has been heavily tied to the Magnificent 7 — but as a result, the market’s gains are more heavily concentrated in that small handful of stocks than they’ve been in decades.
In a period of such heavy concentration, what goes up can come down very, very quickly.
@becca:
Nah, it was only enough to be coffee shop conversation. Doubt there was any damage or injuries, except for a precariously placed vase.
Earthquakes are rare in this area, though I understand that there is a fault that follows Stellwagen Bank, a marine mountain range that runs from the Gulf of Maine to Cape Cod, that is 20-25 miles offshore. Unlike faults on the west coast through Mexico and into South America, it is fairly stable and any movements tend to result in small quakes like we experienced today.
@Jen: Yeah, the pug’s snoring didn’t miss a beat.
@Kathy: I buy stuff from Amazon about 2 or 3 times a year, so you might need a wider interval than a couple of weeks.
@Not the IT Dept.: I was just thinking yesterday about an incident during the first Trump administration, wherein several idiots cornered some people in a convenience store, hollering at them to “speak American” or go back to where they came from, and it turned out to be a couple of people from a nearby reservation.
@becca: As mild as this was, it was more “interesting” than “unpleasant.”
New Hampshire is the Granite State and therefore is basically a huge chunk of igneous rock. Where you find volcanoes, you usually find fault lines. Where you find fault lines, you can have quakes.
@Kathy: Having lived in Missouri, I am super-familiar with the New Madrid fault line. I even wrote a paper about it for an upper-level geology class back when I was in college. I *loved* geology. I am exactly that nerd who can still recite the ranks on the Mohs hardness scale (quartz is a 7! talc is 1!).
@becca:
I was in the bathroom and felt nothing. But I did hear an incredibly loud grinding roar, as if a plane were about 10 feet over the place.
@becca: I used my usual evaluation prompt: “write a short essay explaining how the song “Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe” by Whale is about Slobodan Milosevic and the breakup of Yugoslavia.”
It’s a subject upon which very little has been written in the real world, so I think it’s a good test to see how far the model goes off the rails and what happens.
It was then stuck in a hobo loop, as I guess a predictive text generator is going to predict that after 100 “hobos” the next word will be “hobo”.
I’m not sure that I am impressed. I mostly hate these things anyway.
@Mister Bluster: Once again, Karma proves herself a serious beeyotch. 😐
@Mister Bluster:
The rate of criminal offenses by these pardoned criminals is … not actually unexpected, but slightly more dramatic and quicker than I would have expected.
@Pete S:
I’m really ambivalent about seasoning. Lodge claims their pans are pre-seasoned, and can be used out of the box. Further seasoning, the label claims, will occur over the normal use for cooking.
Various websites an Youtube channels recommend seasoning 3 to 6 times before use, even if it comes pre-seasoned. I’ve no doubt this works for them, but it’s anecdote rather than data.
going by past experience, my cas iron pot was pre-seasoned. I never did anything else to it, just washed it and dried it before using it, and went on to cook with it without any issues.
The main reason, I admit, is that seasoning the pan is work, and I tend to avoid all unnecessary effort on principle.
A bigger problem is what I’ll make with it.
@Gustopher:
But they were all peaceful patriots, according to the MAGAs, except for the FBI infiltrators, Antifas, and BLM members who caused all the trouble.
If you had “one week” in your office pool on “Length of time it would take Elon to get the boot from the white house” … you’ve won a long black coat from Hugo Boss.
Apparently this is from the CoS susan wiles. Is this the only smart move Trump will make in the next 4 years? Many are saying this.
At the same time it’s also perhaps dumb because he will throw millions into primarying other politicians. Will the loose cannons shoot each other? Stay tuned!
@Gavin: I won’t believe it until Trump insults Musk on Truth Social.
@JKB: Yes, JKB, we know you think it should be illegal for anyone to be hired who isn’t a white male.
But what are you going to do once Trump fully enacts his whites-only policies and you still can’t get a job? Who will you blame then?
@Gustopher: I also spent a few minutes trying to get DeepSeek to correctly answer the question: If Canada was a US state, how would its per capita GDP rank?
The real answer is just above Mississippi, but with different sources you can get it up to 7th from the bottom. It varies year by year and source by source.
DeepSeek correctly noticed the “per capita” then and confidently asserted it would be in the top tier, just below Washington, California and New York, even citing figures that were vaguely accurate, but not considering a roughly $25,000 gap between Washington and Canada to be suspicious enough to look for other states above Canada’s $53,000.
This just furthers my belief that generative AI is best used for things that you don’t give a shit about. Customer service, making up reasons to deny health insurance claims, manifestos, etc.
@Gavin:
@wr:
Depending on how much money nazi in Chief Xlon dangles before the rapist felon, it may be Wiles who first gets booted off the asylum.
@JKB: from the tweet you reference, by the chronically wrong Megan McArdle
That doesn’t happen. It should probably happen a bit though.
The number of customer facing software projects I have seen fail because everyone involved was a white man is kind of remarkable. It turns out women and minorities have very different views on things like privacy, and that trying to reconcile the features with that later on is amazingly hard.*
In the last few years, I have seen candidate pools that were all white men, and companies holding off until they add a few under represented folks into the candidate pool. But, if they are hiring the best, going from a larger pool of candidates should be harmless, right?
(And then someone rejects the minority applicants because of racism, sexism, etc. But it’s later in the process! We waste more of their time!)
——
*: A couple of times, I have been the one in a product design meeting saying “we need to get some women to look at this and tell us why this terrifies them.” Each time, when we brought more people in, there were several things found that encourage/enable stalking or harassment.
It turns out nearly every woman has had a creepy man stalk her. Fun! And queer folks, and brown folks, and Jews…
@charontwo:
Explainer re Deepseek:
“Dropsite”
Trump blanket-pardoned Andrew Taake, who’s being sought by police in Texas on an outstanding warrant for trying to solicit sex from a minor online in 2016.
Taake was serving 6 years for pepper-spraying police and striking them with a metal whip.
Just another peaceful patriot touring the Capitol.
@CSK:
It was a day of love. Taake is just into rough stuff. Without consent.
And children.
Ok, how did no one know to prosecute him on that warrant while he was in jail for Jan 6th? I would have assumed that part of the booking process when arrested would be to check for outstanding warrants.
@Gustopher:
The Harris County, Texas D. A.’s office notified federal authorities to hold Taake 5 days before his release, but that request was apparently disregarded/ignored/overlooked/forgotten/whatever.
@Kathy:
For those who played “Grand Theft Auto” in their teens: I suspect Trump may now raking in so much from so many sources now that he may reach that point, like in the GTA, where you have mastered that part of the game and have all the money you care to have and begin to seek other objectives out of boredom…and about all that’s left is random, pointless mischief.
And perhaps no amount of money would save anyone in the Trump administration whom Trump thinks might be getting more press than he is. Unlikely Musk is wise enough to recognized this.
Eventually I want to try a Chicago style pizza on the cast iron pan*.
First, though, I think I’ll try corn bread, Just about every recipe for it recommends baking it in a pre-heated cast iron pan, in order to get the golden crust on the top (one you flip the pan and get the thing unstuck from it).
But then it’ll have to go on the side of something. I’m thinking a chicken, beans, and rice stew with green salsa.
*I’m terrible at working with dough. So this presupposes pre-made pizza dough of some kind.
@Kathy: My friend tried an upside down pizza in her cast iron pan and it looked delicious.
I have this favorite thing I make called piroshki’s, it’s a cabbage/sausage cheese mix stuffed inside a yeast bread….my grandma called them “Hand Pies”, some people call them runzas, some bierocks, but I’m always questioning my ratio on the filling vs bread. The yeast bread is so fluffy it takes over the filling. I’ve tried internet “bierock casserole” recipes, and the results were soggy.
We just had “taco pie” in the cast iron skillet and it was amazing.
Start with tacos, add eggs, everyone wins.
@Jax: My mom made this, too. Try a smaller glop of dough rolled out aggressively.
@Jax:
Are you from Pittsburgh? Everywhere else in the US, I see them called “pirogies”. The /shk/ spelling seems to be a Pittsburgh Lawrenceville (Polish neighborhood) thing.
@DrDaveT: in Seattle, they are entirely different things. Pitogies are polish ravioli filled with potato, and piroshkies are a turnover filled with cabbage, onions and mushrooms.
And the only time I had a runza, it was more bready, filled with breakfast (eggs, sausage, etc)
They are not fucking around. Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs
This is terribly destructive. Much of my research is funded by the NIH. A smaller proportion by the VA. My entire program of research is in peril. And that means a lot of livelihoods are too. And I’m merely one of many. sigh