Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, September 21, 2024
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87 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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Georgia’s election board passed a rule that could delay the results of the presidential race
What could go wrong? Well…
Gillespie County election costs balloon after switch to hand count
And…
They counted primary ballots by hand. Now a Texas county Republican party says they found errors.
All that on just 8000 ballots. Apply to the whole state of Georgia.
Heather Cox Richardson’s newest newsletter is an exposition about the electoral college – how it developed and its historical effects:
“Richardson”
I have also posted the above link to yesterday’s EC thread.
ETA: As I keep pointing out, the EC will stop preferencing the GOP when/if either FL or TX tips blue – which I think likely for TX come 2028.
I currently have the worst designed coffee mug. The handle is not made so you can pick it up and support the full weight easily or comfortably just by the handle. I have to compensate just to get it to do its intended function. It fails at its job. It is poorly designed. Designed for aesthetically pleasing over actual function.
What is a physical something in your life that just doesn’t do it’s intended job well, or at all?
I have a bottle opener thingy that only works to open a beer bottle if you twist it about 30 degrees away from square. If you try to use it as intended you would not be able to open a bottle ever – the geometry is wrong.
Background: The State of Texas took over control of Houston Independent School District in 2023.
Waltrip High School marching band forbidden by HISD from playing at Sugar Bowl
What?? Is this what it has come down to?? State intimidation of parents?
Riddick, the North Division superintendent?
Republican Texas: “We hate public education and the children must suffer”
@charontwo:
People have been predicting that Texas as a whole will tip blue in the next cycle for 15 years. I’ll believe it when I see it.
@de stijl:
My latest drip coffee maker at work. The structure for bringing up the hot water obstructs the reservoir, so there’s only a small space where you can pour.
Also at work, the desks have a drawer with a keyboard holder. It seems like a great idea, as it frees up desk space. But the keyboard is to low for comfortable typing. If you lower the chair, then the mouse is too high, and you wind up looking up at the screen. It’s not just me. No one else uses their keyboard holders either.
IMO, a good design is kind of invisible. It just works, so you don’t notice it. A bad design is an annoyance that you notice every time.
I’m nearly done with No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States by Erwin Chemerinsky,
He proposes abolishing or reforming the EC, among other notions that would be very familiar to the OTB community*. He does mention a constitutional amendment, while conceding it would be hard, expensive, and take a long time. No new info there.
But he also claims the EC is unconstitutional.
He’s a law professor with a long curriculum. But if we learned anything from the 2021 coup attempt, is that law professors can have some rather screwy interpretations of the law and the constitution.
Chemerinsky’s main idea is that an amendment can invalidate prior sections or amendments of the constitution. This is valid, as for example the way persons are counted per state. the 14th amendment renders an earlier section invalid, when it mandates counting the whole number of persons, no longer counting “three fifths of all other Persons.” However, this is an explicit change to one specific clause.
Next he mounts on the 14th amendment’s clause of equal protection of the law. Chemerinsky’s claim here is that under the electoral college system, a vote in one state is not of equal weight as a vote in another state, and that this violates the equal protection clause. He suggests two remedies: abolishing the EC altogether, or mandating all states award electoral votes proportionally to the popular vote.
He has not yet said how to get to a SCOTUS decision on this, nor how to get the Leo & Crow court to simply consider such a case rather than just ignoring it, much less to reach his preferred outcome.
I’m not sure I buy his argument, especially since Section 2 of the 14th refers to the choice of electors in each state.
*The book also makes the case for enlarging the House, setting term limits for supreme court justices, ending partisan gerrymandering, and a few other things we regularly discuss here.
@de stijl: Have you considered switching to a different mug?
@de stijl:
That is an insightful, thoughtful contribution. considering that the past is a reliable guide to the future..
Actually, I have looked at the voting history and trends in TX, also the statistics on demographic trends.
@wr:
Yes, sometime next week it’ll sit in a cupboard until the next time I move.
I sorta dread the next Target visit because I’ll need to go to the housewares area. For me, that is impulse purchase central even when I walk in with a list and a frugal mindset.
@charontwo:
What in the world possessed you to think you should call me “sport”? JFC!
@charontwo:
I declare shenanigans!
You edited that and replaced what you initially said which was, and I quote:
“Whatever, sport.”
Second paragraph the same.
I’m glad you had the sense to hide your misdeed.
@de stijl: Calling people by such names is a fraught prospect. Here in Baltimore sometimes women (waitresses, nurses, doctors, lawyers) of all ages will call me “darling” and (yes, the stereotype is true) “Hon”. Doesn’t bother me in the slightest, as I just take the intentions as good and I’m probably right about that 99.9% of the time. But when written rather than spoken and without body language I might take it differently.
@MarkedMan:
It was an impetuous reaction to a smugly supercilious comment.
ETA: Some backstory: this is the same individual who was giving me all kinds of shit a couple of years ago because I was pointing out that Donald Trump exhibits a lot of senile dementia symptoms – something that has now progressed to the degree that many people are noticing.
@MarkedMan:
There is no way to sugarcoat “sport” especially “whatever, sport”.
I’m absolutely fine with hun, darlin’. One woman I used to work with would call me shug. I gd loved that.
You get called “sport” by a slick dude with a fancy car trying to nail your single mom in the 50s.
I always write it off as rude but unintentional. But I’m really significantly introverted, so my “personal space” is easily encroached upon.
@charontwo: I didn’t see the comment as supercilious at all. We’ve been “a decade away” from fusion power for my whole life. Your comment is in the same category, by my view anyway. I’d be interested reading why someone believes that, but the assertion based on *I study stuff and so know* triggers my inner skeptic.
ETA: On the other hand, “Whatever, sport” without the additional comment is a nearly perfect internet retort. With the additional, it shows that you dislike being challenged. Fun stuff.
@charontwo:
“Smugly supercilious”? You, obviously, read it that way, and I have no clue why. You called me “sport” so you don’t even get the passive-aggressive fake apology. Nope.
I have, indeed, heard several dozen times the theory that Texas will flip blue. Since at least 2008. It might very well happen, eventually.
@charontwo:
So I cautioned against unsupported speculation by a nonprofessional to telediagnose a complicated disease. That sounds like something I would think and say. Stand by it today, actually.
I, actually, vaguely remember that. Please quote me where I gave you “all kinds of shit”.
To me, it was a Tuesday.
@de stijl:
Based on Charon’s further comments, it sounds like your initial reaction was justified. But “sport” is used by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.
Initially resisted comment, but it seems like this beautiful September morning, some folks are a bit out- of-sorts.
Perspective, I’m sitting in intensive care waiting room while the doctors are struggling to extubate my wife’s endotrach.
Fairly often, in the evenings, in that mellow state of slightly drunk and fairly high, ideas pop into my head. Work-related ideas. So, aware that I have very little memory at the best of times, and rather less when stoned, I go to the current manuscript and write all-caps notes that I’ll see the next day. The most recent such note: Flashback make trans more spazzy. Which actually does not involve a flashback, and the ‘trans’ in question has nothing to do with transgender, and spazzy is the wrong word. But I know what I meant.
Which is one reason I dislike literary analyses that dissect marginal notes in drafts of manuscripts. There’s a guy who collects early drafts of manuscripts, who has reached out to me and my wife. We both rebuffed him. No one needs to know how the sausage gets made. When the sausage is served, eat it or don’t eat it.
‘Sport’ may be just another version of, ‘dude.’ But then again, ‘babe,’ and ‘sweetie,’ both seem like perfectly affectionate, interchangeable terms, and yet here at the AppleGrant Estate, ‘babe’ is me being affectionate, and ‘sweetie,’ means I’m annoyed. Context, tone of voice, and of course teeth-gritting, are all modifiers.
@just nutha:
I stand by my interpretation because of the obvious implicit assumption that that was some big revelation, as if I am unaware of all the past speculation about a blue Texas.
I have no past of such speculation and have never before this year said anything about a blue Texas. I lived in Texas for 15 years before retiring and leaving, my son has been living and working in Houston for most of the past 40 years, I am not totally unfamiliar with the state.
ETA: Texas is the big outlier in the U.S. in regards to how rapidly the proportion of population of young people in the state is increasing, about twice as fast as in AZ and NC, two other states trending blue for similar reasons.
@de stijl:
With my wife living in memory care now, and unlikely to ever come out, I’ve been getting more aggressive about downsizing. Things that don’t work well are going to reuse (ie, Goodwill), recycle, or the trash. The next big part is my wife’s lifetime accumulation of sewing and crochet stuff.
I’m apparently the designated archivist for the families. I have literally hundreds of pounds of paper that I have to decide what to do with. That includes eight big containers with the original source material for my uncle’s (never written) history of one part of rural Iowa. I haven’t decided how to approach that part.
@Michael Reynolds:
Make the transition more abrupt / include more.
I got that pretty immediately.
As a reader I kinda dig ephemera, but I’m with you on this. As an author, you have the final say as to what goes to print and that is as it should be.
I’ve written enough to know roughly 98% gets re-written, changed, edited, re-arranged, dropped entirely, shuffled forward or back.
Personal question: what is your first draft process like? Screen, paper? Capture the full blast and edit later, or edit as you go? You are under no obligation to answer.
@charontwo:
North Carolina has been breaking the Democrats’ hearts for decades now. Given that their state legislature is still gerrymandered to be >60% Republican in each chamber, I’m not particularly optimistic.
@de stijl: “You get called “sport” by a slick dude with a fancy car trying to nail your single mom in the 50s.”
Or by Jay Gatsby in the 20s…
To answer a question from yesterday, after consulting a dictionary “behalves” is a valid plural of “behalf” but is considered somewhat archaic in favor of the more modern “behalfs”.
I intend to continue using “behalves” though =3
@de stijl:
Charlie Stross has an interesting little essay up now about “They don’t make readers like they used to”. He thinks readers today are less inclined to simply accept how the author does the story, and want a voice. I’m old, so I’m like you: I may not always like what the writer does, but it’s their choice. With at least one exception. The writers for the last two seasons of the Game of Thrones TV series should be taken out back and shot so they can’t do something like that again.
@charontwo: I’ve been in Texas for 30+ years, divided between San Antonio and Houston. It will not turn blue until someone comes along and rips apart the current Democratic party apparatus, fire all the featherbedders in it, and populate the Party with hardnose players. And it has to be statewide, not just in the urban areas. Even someone as popular as Beto O’Rourke stays away from the Party and runs his own organization independently. Because the current party is irredeemably bad and is rife with magical thinking.
Comment on site layout… It’s good to have the edit function back, but at least on my browser, the edit textbox is this tiny little thing that’s difficult to use. Can y’all make that bigger?
@Scott:
My recollection of Texas is that it is controlled at the state level by religious loons, some creep named Steven Hotze being basically the “Godfather” of TX. The trend in the country is away from religious looniness, and voter suppression can only go so far. I still think this stuff has a sell-by date coming down the tracks.
@wr:
Touche!
I tried watching the DiCaprio/Maguire/Mulligan version. I made it about 40 minutes in before bailing.
I used to live a block and a half from Fitzgerald’s home. I wrote college essays about that man’s work. Yeah, I just couldn’t take it.
@Michael Cain: I am sorry to hear about your wife. We recently went through my Mom’s dementia decline and know how tough that can be. Now that I’m 70 and have two APOE4 alleles of my own, I am ultra sensitive to any kind of incidental memory lapse.
Anyway, my wife and I recently went through a downsizing exercise: selling a large house we lived in for 30 years, moving to a new city, and buying a much smaller one. Even after shedding huge accumulations of stuff, we still moved 2 1/2 16ft Pod containers. My main retirement project is digitizing all the photos, slides, and movies, some of which date from the 1880s. (Weirdest photo: a photo of four generations of the German Hohenzollern Emperors (Wilhelm I, Frederick III, Wilhelm II, and Crown Prince Wilhelm)). And deciding what to keep and throw away.
In addition to Goodwill, your location may have a group called Buy Nothing/Sell Nothing on Facebook (https://buynothingproject.org). It was active in our area and a lot of items were given away through them.
@Bobert: Wish you both well and success for her doctors.
@charontwo: Speaking of Hotze:
Conservative activist Steven Hotze charged with more felonies over voter fraud conspiracy assault
@charontwo: Whatevs, sport.
@charontwo:..
You can call me anything. Just don’t call me late for dinner.
In the Heat of the Night
@Michael Cain: Significant numbers of authors thank their teams of readers and some even solicit commentary from readers who send fan mail. That people are going to want to participate in or study the collaboration isn’t odd. But declining to allow such participation is still the writer’s prerogative.
@just nutha:
And this is an example of something taken seriously by much of anyone?
@Michael Cain: Today was my first tiny edit box. Previously, I had a slightly smaller box on my desktop and an unmanageably wide (as in wider than the screen) edit box on my phone. My answer is to adapt.
@de stijl: Hmmm… I thought the DiCaprio version was the closest at capturing the feel of the book that I’ve seen. No accounting for taste, eh?
@Michael Cain:
Contact your local library on your uncle’s history writings. Historians’ might want it.
Chances are pretty great I’ll never move again. If so, probably to an old folks home. Sorry, assisted-living senior facility.
Relatively recently I moved to an apartment downtown and jettisoned 98% of the stuff I owned / had. It was a great relief and was catharsis all through the process of throwing away almost everything. Gave away my furniture.
That poorly designed coffee mug will likely sit in a cupboard until I die.
Swedes have a thing called dostadning – death cleaning. It means decluttering, getting rid of crap no one will ever want. Settling all your paperwork affairs and only keep what is necessary. The purpose is to make life easier for your family / heirs to deal with all the stuff in your house or apartment after your death.
I think that is healthy and lovely. It’s liberating.
@Scott:
Google tells me he is only 74, just a young’un. I would have thought he would be older by now.
@charontwo: No, just putting your prognostication abilities in the same category. The “decade away” people are probably just as earnest as you are and only time will tell in both cases.
Trump claims that women will be so happy when he’s re-elected that they won’t even think about abortion.
@Bobert:
Wishing you and your wife all the best and a good outcome.
@just nutha:
There is good possibility I went in biased.
—–
That neighborhood in St. Paul is socio-economically bonkers. On Summit Ave. are robber baron mansions and just gorgeous houses. Multi-million dollar fancy ass Victorian houses on huge lots. A block away is hardscrabble. Three blocks away is ghetto-adjacent, or was when I lived there in the mid 80s.
What a difference a block makes.
The east end of Summit Ave. is it’s own neighborhood. It exists nearby to, runs through other more down-to-earth working class neighborhoods.
@just nutha:
I don’t take a position on fusion because I know nothing whatsoever about the technology involved.
But you do not need to be Harry Enten to look at population characteristics and trends, the statistics are widely available (such as government census data, Pew stuff etc.), and draw your own conclusions.
@just nutha:
I thought 30 years as “time until commercially-viable fusion power” was the universal constant. The most recent schedule from the ITER project has DEMO — their first reactor that will actually produce electricity, although probably not at commercially-viable prices — scheduled to start operation sometime in the 2050s.
My local power authority’s official target for 100% no-carbon electricity is 2030. The most recent update to their models say they won’t make it, and will still be about 12% natural gas-fired electricity then. They already have occasional periods when they’re running on 100% renewables. More starting next year when a (relatively) large solar farm comes online. More again a couple years after that when their first storage comes online. Not as many periods as parts of California.
Sport was Harvey Keitel’s character in Taxi Driver. Iris’ / Jodie Foster’s pimp.
There is a fairly wide-spread theory that Taxi Driver’s epilogue – post shoot-out stuff is Travis Bickel’s dying fantasy as he’s bleeding out. He, the brave hero, saved the day and the girl, and finally got recognition and acclaim and love.
Iirc, the ending seemed distinctly weird in comparison to the rest of the movie. Totally off, tonally, to everything before.
This might be the one fan theory I could actually get behind. Most fan theories are garbage.
I used to intentionally freak out my co-workers after a thunderstorm would blow through. I would stare down at the street from the 12th floor and say “Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets” and walk away mysteriously, sit down, go back to work.
Brian, the COBOL guy, busted me after two or three times.
@just nutha:
I added a few lines to the chunk of JavaScript that runs on all the pages I download. They resize the textboxes for the comment editing to a more comfortable size.
@de stijl:
I don’t even look at paper. I go back to the days when editing meant cutting pages up with scissors and taping them in a new order. Then. . . computers. Yay!
I don’t actually work in discrete drafts. I start. I write along and 25 pages in I think, I need X. So I put in some X. And write some more. Then, around page 100 I have this nagging feeling that I need to rectify, so I go back to the start and getting everything into line. Rinse and repeat. So it is often the case that the first chapters will have been rewritten multiple times.
All this is because I’m what people call a ‘discovery’ writer, or ‘seat of pants’ writer. I don’t outline. In fact I seldom know what the next chapter is going to be. I prefer to get my protagonists into some kind of trouble and only then think about how to get them out. This introduces more randomness, which I like. Instead of doing all the thinking ahead of time, I like finding answers as I go along. It surprises the reader because it’s less tropey, and I hate the idea that a reader can ever guess where I’m going. (Oh you think you know what’s coming? Hah, read on.)
Normally I start with an idea: what if all the adults just disappeared. (Gone). I come up with a rough idea of a few characters, and some general notions, and I always have my geography settled. But after that it’s all improv. But this process is so familiar to me now I can do it from muscle memory. Idea, Map, lead characters, Bible, start typing.
So, because that was getting easy, the thing I’m working on right now started with literally a single word: feral. And I kind of had a theme. And because 3rd person past (Gone) is easy and familiar, and also first person past (Animorphs), and some third person present (Front Lines), I decided to do first person present. Also I’d never really done magical realism, I thought that’d be fun. And I decided to steal my wife’s thing of very short chapters. So, I wrote the opening line: I want to feel pain. And we’re off to the races.
(Incidentally, the ‘trans’ is actually for ‘transformation.’ ‘Spazzy’ meant make it more visceral. And ‘flashback’ meant, ‘back-write,’ IOW, do this earlier in the story.)
ETA: It is not a coincidence that my entire life has been unplanned improvisation.
Two unimportant thoughts:
Is Ohtani the best baseball player ever?
After the debate, I saw a couple of reports quoting “body language experts.” There is no such a thing, is there? Astrology has more legitimacy.
My wife and I have called each other “Babe” for 35 years or so. At some point there was a popular movie about a pig named Babe. Shortly thereafter a young woman heard my say “Babe” to my wife and she felt so certain that her tiny frame of reference was the whole world that she called me out for referring to my wife as a pig.
@Scott:
If you are down-sizing, de-cluttering your clothes closet, that type of process please consider your town’s homeless shelter.
There is a great likelihood they have a built-in or adjunct service that hands out clothes to those who ask. The shelter I work at would love more used, but serviceable clean clothing for men or women to distribute.
Bonus karma points for clothing that would work for a job interview or for an apartment tour.
@MarkedMan:
“That’ll do, pig.”
That is one of the most soul satisfying codas in film history. I cried like a wee baby.
@just nutha:
That’s overly optimistic. I’ve been two decades away from fusion power all my life. At that, I had it easy. An essay by Arthur C. Clarke written in the late 60s, had it at fifty years.
I think the last highly optimistic “fusion is just around the corner” piece I read was in 2014 or so… On the other hand, last year the big news was the National Ignition Facility obtained slightly more energy than it put in.
IMO, fusion will be kind of a major disappointment for science fiction fans for decades after we finally make it work, if not for ever. It looks likely fusion reactors will be huge, complex, and not at all suited for propulsion power in space, ie no nuclear rockets in the foreseeable future.
Also, the amount of fuel needed to generate vast amounts of power will be tiny. Therefore, no mass transmutation of elements. Not even an endless source of helium.
@Michael Cain: “The writers for the last two seasons of the Game of Thrones TV series should be taken out back and shot so they can’t do something like that again.”
The writers of the last two seasons are the same writers who wrote the first six season. Apparently you liked those enough to care about what came next. But then they made choices you didn’t like so you think they should be killed — or at least prevented from ever writing again.
And people say that fans feel too entitled these days…
@Stormy Dragon: “I intend to continue using “behalves” though =3”
Please do! I think it’s cool…
@de stijl:
Many years ago when I was living in New Jersey, I went with my aunt and uncle when they were looking at townhouses in just-started-gentrifying Hoboken. We saw some beautiful restorations, and two blocks away it was run-down and gun shots a nightly occurrence. The broker told us that the cops had a deal with a couple of the gangs, who were treated more leniently if they kept crime out of the restored areas.
@Scott:
That’s pretty much my plan. Right now I’m in the middle of catching up on a dozen old pieces of tech that I have some obligation to support, then I’ll feel free to start another big project that needs a tool chain to do what I think I want. When I put the list of pieces together, I was surprised at how many things were still in use where I had more or less promised to keep them running.
@wr:
When they ran out of books to follow, the writing fell off a cliff.
@MarkedMan:
I’ve started using “Darling” a lot. But I don’t use in like the southern/midwestern diner kind of way (“Darlin’”) and more in a deranged 50’s movie star kinda way (“DaaaHRliiing!”). Very Sunset Boulevard.
I like it cause it’s weird and annoying and makes me laugh.
@Bobert:
I hope your wife and you are ok today.
I have seen conflicting phrasing in print about what has to be counted. Sometimes it’s hand-counting all the votes, ie, replacing the machines with a hand count for each contest. Sometimes it’s counting the number of ballots but not the results.
@Michael Cain: My answer remains “to adapt.” Don’t know anything at all about Java Script and am unable to tweak features in existing online universes.
@Michael Cain: find a local university with a thumping good history department and ask them if they want the material for the archives.
What you have is the sort of stuff that makes Ph.D. students drool. You just have to find the location to put it.
P.S. if there’s no where local, contact the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Bog knows they have the space and probably the inclination.
@Bobert: sending good vibes, hope all goes well.
@just nutha:
I do really like the pic of DiCaprio holding out the champagne coupe meme.
@de stijl: Unexpectedly good movie
@wr: So first off, I liked all of GoT and am grateful to everyone that worked on it. That said, there was something different in the last two seasons. The GRRM ones had a certain completely-unexpected-but-in-retrospect-entirely-predictable quality that the last two seasons didn’t have.
@Slugger:
There’s no such thing in any sport. There’s typically a handful (or more) of players who qualify as one of the greatest at their chosen pastime.
But pretending there is one “best ever” is fun for passionate low stakes arguments at the water cooler or the barbecue, and good for filling airtime on ESPN and sports talk radio.
(Yes, Ohtani is the latest to enter the one of greatest ever pantheon, in baseball. Unsurprisingly, the city of Los Angeles hardly cares.)
@Michael Cain: Pictures of the most important docs, shared online in a family album. You are then absolved of all responsibility of keeping it available.
https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1837528658275143694
https://x.com/gtconway3d/status/1837533586502635658
With relevant video embed.
@Michael Cain: It really doesn’t matter. Whatever the idiot Republican officials THINK they are doing, the purpose of the instructions from Trumpville they are following is to sow confusion on Election Day to give an excuse to eventually throw it to the Republican house. Full stop.
@wr:
Except, the writing for the earlier seasons was more closely tied to George Martin’s books.
Unfortunately, as they got up to where Martin had not published, they seem to have increasingly run wild.
Film/TV writers and directors have an unfortunate inclination to “we know best!” regarding plot and character, versus authors who have, frequently, spent considerable time thinking about the motivations and perceptions of the characters and their “grounding”.
Hence my ongoing campaign for Denethor to sue Michael Jackson.
😉
And also Christopher Tolkien’s contempt for Jackson.
(And CJRT was not just Tolkien’s son, but in much of the “additional material”, a co-author.)
@Bobert:
May all go well.
On politeness:
For a upper/upper middle class Brit, the more annoyed, the more formally polite they tend to be.
It’s a warning sign.
Vulgarity is friendly; absolute formality of manners indicates an imminent transition to ultra-violence. 😉
@DK:
@Slugger:
Yes, but never mind that nonsense.
Is Joe Root England’s greatest ever batsman?
Xlon caved
At least for now. Tomorrow he may say something different.
BTW, according to some hasty AI searches, the current annual world’ electricity production would require about 150 tons of hydrogen, if it all were produced by fusion. But that’s a straight energy from fusion vs electricity production. Since the energy from fusion will be used as heat to turn steam turbines to generate electricity, figure some losses along the way. So triple it to 450 tons, and add some margin for good measure.
That’s very little hydrogen. I recall something along the lines of 5-8 billion tons of coal are used up annually just to generate electricity. I expect more is consumed in industrial processes, like steel mills and such.
I won’t vouch for the accuracy of the AI results, but it seems about right. Hydrogen bombs that can produce megaton explosions use up mere grams of tritium.
@Michael Cain: “When they ran out of books to follow, the writing fell off a cliff.”
And so they should die?
And it’s not like they were getting any help from RR. Did you ever read that last book in the series? It’s just terrible — just endless stalling. There wasn’t a lot to adapt there…
But even if they completely did run out of gas, they gave you the thing you loved and then they weren’t strong enough to see it through. They didn’t do it to spite you. It’s like wanting to hang a quarterback because he missed some crucial passes.
@JohnSF: Michael Keaton is the best Batman ever.
@MarkedMan: I’m really not fighting over the quality of the seasons of the show. I do believe people should be free to hate whatever they want. It just bugs me when hating what turns into hating who.
@JohnSF: “Unfortunately, as they got up to where Martin had not published, they seem to have increasingly run wild.”
They weren’t “running wild.” They were doing their job, making and executing creative decisions. A lot of people didn’t like those decisions — that’s fine. They had a series to run and they did it the way they wanted to. Which is what they were being paid to do.
“Film/TV writers and directors have an unfortunate inclination to “we know best!” regarding plot and character, versus authors who have, frequently, spent considerable time thinking about the motivations and perceptions of the characters and their “grounding”.”
But in this case, that author was right there beside them. And he wasn’t just spending considerable time thinking about the characters, he was taking years to figure out where to go with the story. When the show premiered in 2011, Martin had published five of the projected seven books in the series. When the finale aired in 2019, Martin had published… five of the projected seven books in the series. And as of now, 13 years after the publication of book five, Martin has published… five of the projected books in the series. At least Benioff and Weiss actually finished!
@Michael Cain:
I will happily take the over on that, if you’re inclined to bet. I fully expect ITER to downgrade their goals to “produce more power out than is coming in for a few hours at a time” by then. I don’t think they have any chance of producing a facility that, over its lifetime, produces more power than it required to build and operate.
@DK:
Ray Ewry, standing high/long/triple jump.