Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, August 11, 2025
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39 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus 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 Sports headline of the day- NASCAR driver Connor Zilisch breaks collarbone while celebrating latest victory
Who knew they were still offering it. From USA Today–
It was for me and I was an AOL subscriber*. Anything over five hours a month was extra. These days I’m on the internet for 5 hours by 10 or 11 in the morning.
When I had open heart surgery in 2008, I still used AOL dialup. That ended not too long after that.
*- My primary email is still an aol one. I have an author one at gmail and a secondary personal one at bellsouth also.
@Bill Jempty: LOL. I still have an email account at http://www.juno.com which is the address I send emails never to be seen again. Yes, they still offer dial up service. Looked them up and they are owned by some investment bank.
I had AOL, like a whole lot of other people starting with 14.4 dial up service. Was excited to move up to 56K dial up at one point. Then again, our first home computer was a Gateway Pentium 1 with a 540 harddrive which is about 3 apps on your phone. A lot of change in a very short amount of time.
I want to recommend this first person account of the Guadalupe River flood last month. Wrote by a senior editor at Texas Monthly who spent that July 4th weekend at his family’s home. It really brings home the terror and the tragedy. Well worth your time.
Yes, you’ll cry.
“The River House Broke. We Rushed in the River.”
I have to say that Texas Monthly is one of the few long form magazines that still produce outstanding product month after month. And has the advertising to support it. The month’s magazine is about 160 pages long. This article by Aaron Parsley is about 4000 words.
@Bill Jempty:
One is tempted to say something like, “That’s ok. you can still order whale oil for your lamps on broadband.” But it’s not hard to imagine remote rural areas with landlines but no broadband connection, maybe even not yet upgraded from copper wire, and with poor cell connectivity. For such places, dial-up might still make sense.
I never used AOL, though we did have a dial-up ISP service for a while. By the late 90s, at home I got a fast connection through the cable company. I also did get plenty of AOL coasters.
I think I might have used AOL Instant Messaging (AIM). But I may also be confusing it with ICQ.
@Scott:
Our first home computer was a 486. IIRC, 4MB of RAM.
Trump economic consequences of the day:
Swiss lawmakers turn against F-35 deal after Trump’s tariff bombshell
Immigration crackdown causing ‘Trump slump’ in Las Vegas tourism, unions say
The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics
@Kurtz:
Fancy. My first PC was a 286 with 1 MB RAM and a 40 MB HD.
That’s PC. My first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, with who knows what CPU and a whopping 4 K RAM. No HD, not even a floppy drive; just an external cassette player for storage.
@Kurtz:
486? 4mb ram? Oh, you crazy kids these days! Next thing, you’re gonna want a color tv and cable!
ETA
soul shattering angst: your shoe box of punch cards scattered on the sidewalk outside the computer lab…in the rain. OTOH, I was smart enough to mark a pattern on the top of the cards so I could put them back in order.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Flashback! That happened to me also. 1975. It happened in the parking lot. Wet punch cards are not recoverable.
Almost as fun as putting your deck in at the computer center at end of day only to see that it bombed in the overnight run.
Veterans’ Care at Risk Under Trump as Hundreds of Doctors and Nurses Reject Working at VA Hospitals
I suspect this is a feature of the administration’s plan given that they want to privatize the VA’s healthcare business.
Because the people who join the FBI really want to be street cops.
FBI dispatching agents to D.C. streets as Trump weighs calling National Guard
@Kathy: I work with a lot of rural telephone companies and, over they last decade, they regularly ran into customers who didn’t want their copper upgraded as it would interfere with their AOL dial-up accounts. It is, after all, the devil you know (now knew).
Our small community rural library just got rid of its copper lines a few years ago. We were having trouble with calls dropping and discovered that it was the 50 year old copper wires fraying, which were no longer supported by the phone company!
@Bill Jempty:
An AOL drink coaster (aka, those AOL discs offering internet service that were oftentimes included plastic wrapped with whatever magazine subscription you had at the time) was how I first connected to the internet when I was no longer living on the campus of UC Santa Cruz.
The 1st year was guaranteed on-campus housing which had nice fat T1 lines providing zippy internet, at such fast speeds folks had to keep being reminded to stop using the college provided internet connection to use Napster.
The IT guy for Kresge College kept having to make an appearance where I lived with a group of other folks to gently chide certain repeat offenders to please not use school infrastructure to illegally download/play music/films/tv, lol. I was Mr. Square as I never went the napster/pirate bay route in college, or after, to listen to music and watch tv/films.
When I was living in a motel across from the Boardwalk (UC Santa Cruz was having housing supply issues so they worked out deals to make blocks of motel/hotel rooms available to students looking for off-campus housing) I used AOL, and slow internet combined with an even slower connection due to signing on from a Motel where speeds were throttled meant I went through a period where I had to hurry up and wait anytime I was on the internet and looking at a web page that was more than a block of text, images did not load quickly back in the day.
My days of using AOL are a reminder that once upon a time most all of us survived surfing on the web when it took forever to load images and potentially up to an hour plus to download even modest length videos. Ahh…those were the days.
I am tempted to check out life in Green Bank WV. No internet, no cell cuz of this place…
https://science.nrao.edu/about/greenbank. The Observatory prohibits anything that would interfere with its signal.
We watched The Penguin Lessons on Netflix last night. I so highly recommend it. Some memorable words from a scene, “When bad people do bad things I expect it. When good people do nothing, I want to punch them in the face.”
@becca:
It would not surprise me if the current administration took steps to dissolve the 13,000-square mile National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ).
@Scott:
I recall this from an episode of the Bulwark podcast back in April… David Frum said that one of the prices of Trump is programs like the F-35, and “the American defense industry is going to be paying for Trump for the next half century,” to which Jonathan Last replied “Oh yeah.”
@Scott:
@Kurtz
Pentiums and 486s ???? Such kiddos!
Try 8086s and TRS99/A for first home PC. My first “upgrade”was to an 8086 “turbo” !!! Turbo mode was like 50% faster than a snail’s pace.
@Scott: Speaking of state capitalism; Nvidia and Advance Micro Devices agreed to give a 15% cut of revenues to the US Gov’t on AI chips sold to China.
From The Bulwark, “This seeming quid pro quo is unprecedented from an export control perspective. The arrangement risks invalidating the national security rationale for U.S. export controls,” said Jacob Feldgoise, a researcher at the DC-based Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
It “will likely undermine the US’ position when negotiating with allies to implement complementary controls,” he added. “Allies may not believe U.S. policymakers if they are willing to trade away those same national security concerns for economic concessions—either from U.S. companies or foreign governments.”
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Walking across the quad at Iowa State I saw a guy carrying a card box (those like 18″ long boxes) under each arm slip on the ice and fall. About a dozen of us were running all over the quad chasing wind blown cards in the snow.
Our first home computer was a Compaq. A portable, i.e. about the size and weight of a sewing machine. The display CRT died. I called a Compaq store to schedule service. They asked what model Compaq. I had to reply I didn’t know, when I bought it, it was the Compaq. I recall getting a chuckle when we bought a printer with more RAM than the Compaq. But it got my wife through MBA school.
You had to learn a few DOS commands and swap 5″ floppies, but unlike now, I knew where my data was and who had access to it.
@Rob1: My first work desktop was a Trash 80 with two 8″ floppy drives. The company bought two of them to share, we thought we were real cutting edge.
We had a Commodore 64.
I threw the monitor out a window. It swung on its cord outside the window. Still worked, hand to god.
Did Jesus even have a religion?
@Kathy:
According to your wiki link, the processor is a Motorola 6809.
9000 transistors.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
You’re all soft.
@gVOR10:
Don’t remember much about my first PC, bought at Sears in 1991, except that it was an IBM.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
Well, if he was indeed man and god, he must have been a devout Narcissist.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
I never used punch cards. The early lotto and sports bets in Mexico, though, were done in duplicate punch cards. One went to the lotto agency, one you kept as your ticket. I think tickets for a Sunday drawing were sold until Friday, as they needed the time to feed all the cards tot heir computer.
@Kurtz:
The photo of it looks huge.
The most amazing thing about that computer, is we found someone who paid us actual money to buy it from us. To this day, I feel guilty about it.
@gVOR10: I helped a friend set up software on the big brother model to that TRS-80 (I forget the model number) when computerized his business. He said it cost $10k, and that was 1980!!!
RFK, to excuse his pull of funding from MRA type vaccines, claims the NIH is “working” on a single vaccine that works for the “whole phylum” of viruses by “mimicking” the natural immune system.
Best guess: RFK ordered the NIH to start “working” on one of his fantasies.
I have a question for the really old people here — those who are even older than me.
Were Democratic Administrations before Bill Clinton treated as legitimate by Republicans?
Clinton only won because of Perot, Obama was born in Kenya, Biden stole the election and was senile… This illegitimacy has been used on the right to justify an “anything goes” mentality.
I kind of want to blame Ross Perot for starting this trend and breaking America.
@Gustopher:
The R’s hadn’t completed, really only barely begun their transition to the fantasyland party they are today in 92. Remember Newt didn’t become speaker and kick off the 50+1 legislative philosophy that drove partisanship.
In fact the R’s in the congress of the 80’s early 90’s, were pretty much like the institutionalist Dems of today, more or less accepting their irrelevance and hoping to work with the majority party. But also remember that Clinton was viewed as the enemy by Dems that today we would describe as progressives.
@Scott: I suspect Trump and Patel expect their agents to act as political commissars, who were assigned to every army unit and naval ship to ensure compliance to political goals in a lot of authoritarian governments. IOW, to police the DC police, not assist in catching perps.
Highly unlikely the guys and gals who jumped through all the hoops they had to to make it to the FBI are going to be thrilled with riding around in the back seats of patrol cars…like you say.
It wasn’t the first PC we had at home, but my favorite was a little notebook computer with a 386SX processor (ie, no floating point unit), 4M of memory, a 40M hard disk, and a little 640×480 grayscale display. I got it so I could install a very early version of Linux. Also the very light-weight MGR windowing system. I had it out on an evening flight from Newark to Denver in 1992/3. I had a large make job running in one window while I used a text editor in another. If you were familiar with Unix on workstations in those days, a scrolling make job and C source code in an editor both had distinctive appearances.
I was sitting in the aisle seat. A guy was coming back from the restroom, paused where he could look over my shoulder, then yelled the length of the plane, “Hey! This guy’s got Unix running on a laptop!” A half dozen people jumped up and came running down the aisle, then all hovered over me, pushing and shoving each other trying to see. The flight attendants were NOT happy.
Ha! I even have a picture of that bad boy.
@becca: I enjoyed The Penguin Lessons as well!
@Gustopher: Republicans almost always go back to wailing about Kennedy and dead people voting in Chicago. It’s a standard line. They seem to think that Democrats somehow perfected stealing elections in 1963, and have managed to repeat that feat without anyone noticing the obvious fraud. But! For some strange reason, even though they have managed to (somehow) steal elections without detection, they only do it every so often. As one would. It’s eye-rollingly stupid, I know, but this is what we’re dealing with.
In other news, a steel coking plant had a bad accident today, including at least one death. I wonder if a completely hobbled and under-funded OSHA will be investigating.
Taco Monday!
TL;DR: El Taco extended the deadline for reaching a “deal” with China by 90 days.
@gVOR10:
Two of the best PCs I ever had were Compaq. I forget the specs. One was an early 90s laptop with a monochrome screen that ran Win 3.11, with a trackball that clipped to the side of the keyboard area. This was at our office, and I sued it a lot to get online (dial-up times).
The other was a desktop that ran Win95. It rarely went bluescreen, and I played lots of Rollercoaster Tycoon and X-Wing vs Tie Fighter on it (I even still have the joystick). It was the first PC I had with USB ports, too.
When I upgraded to Win98, it slowed down to the point it was nearly unusable, and I was looking at ways to revert it to Win95. A friend advised to get more RAM on it. I did, I think from 16 MB to 48 MB, and it ran fine after that.
I’ve an old Vista PC stashed in a closet somewhere. I never sold it because in good conscience I couldn’t take money for it, I’ve been meaning to restart it one of these days because I think it has some old files and software I might want, but I’ve been putting it off. I may just do it now that I’m on vacation. If I do, I’ll let you know how it goes.
Trump’s entire tariff rationale is simply to make him more money — nothing to do with Jobs or Trade Deficits or Canada Becoming The 51st State.
Nope — we’re all paying more for everything just so he and 9 other people can make a few more deals.
I think we all knew that but just didn’t want to admit it to ourselves.. because it’s too stupid. Now it’s in black and white.