Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, December 15, 2024
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44 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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Yesterday I finished reading Tim Alberta’s American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. It was a good read but a depressing reminder of just how bad the next four years will be. Sigh…
It’s been That Kind Of A Year already so why not invite aliens from outer space into the vortex? Of course I’m referring to….Drones over New Jersey!
Or we could keep it on Planet Earth and just make it foreign spying:
“Citing anonymous “high sources”, New Jersey Republican representative Jeff Van Drew said that they were coming from an Iranian “mothership” in the Atlantic. The Pentagon swiftly dismissed the comment, saying “there is no truth to that”.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62785697v0o (A good source as it’s a compilation and the Brits think we’re nuts anyway so the tone is nicely done.)
Okay, so what are they? I’m betting on a combination of genuine confusion between small aircraft and groups of pranksters operating very large drones (apparently 6′ long) to freak people out.
Oh.
@Not the IT Dept.:
Agreed. Except for the size. Estimating size of aerial objects is notoriously inaccurate.
Ah, yes. Exactly what one looks for in a world leader.
Not a big opera fan, but yesterday I half listened to “Grounded” on NPR while I baked cookies.
It’s about a female fighter pilot during the Iraq War who becomes a drone pilot stationed somewhere in Nevada. In a nutshell, remote killing does a number on her and she can’t deal with the guilt.
All in all, I prefer old school opera if at all. There’s something anachronistic about drones and opera.
Yes, let’s close the huge numbers of money losing rural post offices and rural delivery routes and stop delivery to about 3/4s of the country.
Trump eyes privatizing United States Postal Service during second term
About that burrowing in of political appointees when their party loses. When you win the larger battle by losing the skirmish.
I haven’t seen much about the clear parallel between Mangione’s case and the Israel/Gaza conflict, with Luigi being the Gaza character.
Sure, Mangione/Hamas didn’t go about it the right way, but the oppression and evil were so abhorrent that they were left without civilized options.
I just read a transcript of some of FDR’s speech given at the 1936 New York State Democratic Convention.
It’s fascinating how he handles certain kinds of issues that still come up:
Last night I had dinner with a British arms contractor and his daughter and learned that Storm Shadow is more reliable than ATACMS.
@Scott: Trump eyes privatizing United States Postal Service during second term.
I used to work in finance for Nielsen. We sent out enormous volumes of letters and packages of equipment on a regular basis. We used to occasionally do estimates of privatizing our deliveries on the east coast (DC to Boston), especially for equipment. We probably could have done deliveries for about 60% of the post office costs, but we first would have to build some costly infrastructure. But there is no question that any competent delivery company could deliver a letter for far less than the USPS for a large part of the country. Rural Montana to rural Maine? Probably would cost $10 per letter to turn a profit.
I say go for it, I live in a large metro area. Why am I subsidizing SD, WY, etc.?
Referring back to my suspicion the drone flap is another Summer of the Shark, via Eschaton Blog, NJ guv Hogan took video of suspicious objects over his home. A group of them are recognizable as Orion. That allowed others to be identified as specific stars. They move erratically. Well, them or Hogan’s phone.
What this video, with its few visible stars, really proves is that there’s a lot of light and other pollution in NJ.
How does Elon Musk know “state secrets”?
Is the state secret that there are Biden DOJ secret FISA warrants served on X/Twitter?
In other blog news:
I keep seeing the argument that self driving cars, while they will have accidents, will be safer than humans. Maybe someday. From Road & Track, via Balloon Juice,
Tesla had 5.6 fatal accidents per billion miles driven, double the average for all cars of 2.8.
In fairness, the study can’t separate self driving from assisted or manual modes and implies it’s Tesla owners as well as Tesla cars. Mistermix adds that it explains why Melon fights accident reporting.
@Paul L.:
Perhaps because he’s been a guest at Mar Largo?
How does Elon Musk know “state secrets”?
Could be he used the throne room at Mar-A-Lago. Plenty of reading material there.
Then again those boxes could have been full of toilet paper from Sam’s Club.
@Paul L.:
A considerable amount of SpaceX’s technology, from Falcon 9 return-to-base software to some subset of Starlink’s antennas, are almost certainly ITAR-restricted. If it’s illegal to trade the product, or reveal the inner workings to foreign nationals without explicit government permission, it’s a “state secret” as far as I’m concerned. I forget if ITAR approval comes from the Dept of State, or Commerce, or Defense, or if it’s some mash-up of all of them.
Long ago I got a phone call in the middle of the night from a colleague working on a project in Russia after the USSR break-up. “Two questions,” he said. “Is this piece of switching system software ITAR-restricted, and if so, how the hell do we rip it out of the system before we turn it over to the Russians?” Some number of calls later, it turned out that if the system had been American, it would have been restricted. Since the software was written in Sweden, and shipped as part of a Swedish system, we weren’t responsible.
Some weird dual-use things show up on the ITAR lists.
I’ll say it again: Trump is a traitor, a Russian asset.
1) Russia is 100% in the wrong. It invaded a peaceful neighbor and has deliberately targeted civilians. There are no shades of gray here.
2) This is the best deal imaginable for the US. We are destroying an enemy military at zero cost in American lives.
3) We are also learning a great deal about the strengths and weaknesses of our own weapons systems, not to mention Russian limitations.
4) An American who opposes our support for Ukraine is either woefully ignorant, or siding with the enemy.
@Mister Bluster:
So the classified Obama ATF Fast and Furious, IRS targeting of tea party groups and Crossfire Hurricane documents that Trump used to blackmail old man Mueller to not indict him.
Of course the FBI brought a bunch of classification coversheets to put on toilet paper and old newpapers for the photos.
@Michael Cain:
Why would the CEO of a company understand how the software work under the hood? Did Musk write it?
Could Putin cut out the middle man and go straight to his puppet Trump?
@Jen:
But I’m sure he’ll tell you that he’s an expert.
@Sleeping Dog:
Oh, yes, indeedy. After all, Trump knows more than the generals. He even said so.
@Paul L.: “How does Elon Musk know “state secrets”?”
Most likely because Trump stole them from the White House and hid them in the Mar a Lago bathroom.
Next question?
ETA — Looks like everyone in the world beat me to this. Serves me right for posting something so obvious…
@wr:
I suppose it’s possible Trump simply blabbed them to Musk.
@Scott:
Privatizing the postal service is a bad idea that keeps coming back like winter.
A reminder that establishment of a postal service and post roads, is an enumerated requirement of Congress in the constitution, so any change will not be simply legislative change. Any effort to privatize will still be litigated long after trump.
Any time proposals trickle in to reduce the cost of the postal service that include reduction in services, it is realized that the reductions will fall most heavily on rural patrons. Those represented by R’s.
There’s a reason why FedEx/UPS/Amazon use the USPS for last mile delivery in rural areas, cost. The USPS drives by every address in America 6 days a week, a reason that the postal service has high cost of operation.
@Sleeping Dog: And yet, Lucysfootball, a fairly reliable Trump critic, says,
Is it any wonder you guys keep losing “flyover country.” [sigh…]
@just nutha: you’re absolutely right. It isn’t the group proposing the policy that is in the wrong….it is the ones that say, “well. ..proceed” are the problem.
@Sleeping Dog:
If it’s not making some grifter filthy stinking immorally rich, what the hell good is it?
Asking for Paul L.
@just nutha:
In general, Dems support services and projects subsides that accrue to America’s rural places, yet the party receives no love from said rural places, so the desire to say F-em is high. In a lot of ways Dem support for programs that benefit rural and southern interests has a Stockholm Syndrome vibe about it.
Trump is fat-shaming Chris Christie by showing photoshopped images of him gobbling bagfuls of McDonald’s delivered by drones.
Guess who’s annexing a third country?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz6lgln128xo
If I were Egypt or Jordan, I’d be worried
@Sleeping Dog:
From the opinion piece:
Given that Trump is on record recently as saying that he’s considering privatization of the Postal Service, despite the fact that the Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution empowers Congress “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.” Perhaps Joe Biden, as he’s going out the door, ought to consider firing privatization advocate, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, (something he should have done 4 years ago)?
Nine years of trolling, and 4 more to come.
For anyone interested in a deep look at the Lion Air 737 MAX crash, this video goes on for over an hour. Lots of technical details and background, including several prior flights by the same airplane.
One thing. The faulty angle of attack sensor was known since shortly after the crash. While it caused a lot of problems, the crash still wouldn’t have happened absent MCAS.
For more background on MCAS, and why Boeing decided to re-engine the 737 with the MAX program, there’s this video
The short version is money. But the video makes it clear Boeing wasn’t the only entity acting stupidly in this matter. Airlines are to blame as well, seeing as they wanted minimal retraining for their next mainline narrow body fleets.
Granted this was just what Airbus offered with the A320neo family, but the big difference is Airbus didn’t have to use dangerous software gimmickry to accomplish this.
@Michael Reynolds:
100%.
The corporate memory of how Russia presented a threat to the U.S in the past and how Russia has resurrected those threats through Putin’s revanchist vision, is lost on several generations of voters.
There is a perceptual disconnect in those voters, between the stability of their dollars and U.S. global might, which includes projected military strength and robust strategic alliances. Trump is setting off all kinds of red flags.
This is Paul L. reporting obvious conjecture as asserted fact and then everyone here trying to defend the fact. We need to be more critical in responding to our trolls.
@gVOR10:
I suggest it’s a combination of the great acceleration of electric cars and their high battery weight which increase stopping distance. Those batteries are heavy and to partially counter that increased weight the mfgs have made the bodies lighter. Lighter body generally results in less protection for the passengers.
@dazedandconfused: Then the answer is the same here as it was in the warehouse I worked in: Don’t drive as fast on/in an electric machine, especially in congested areas/zones.
Or is that too simple?
@Rob1:
After WWII there was a big question as to whether communist Russia was an aggressive threat because they were communist or because they were Russia. We now know the answer.
But our conservatives were mostly worried that communism would spread and develop into a domestic threat. The threat of domestic communism was never much and now is gone, although they still call everybody left of Goldwater a communist. Russia is no longer a bunch of godless commies, so conservatives don’t see the threat. Perhaps because it’s mostly a threat to Europe and they don’t care as long as it’s not their asses getting bitten.
(In history I’ve been struck by how deeply our 1%ers fear that there’s going to be a revolt against them. I can’t help but have a niggling suspicion that there’s a good reason for their fear, that if we knew what they know, we would revolt.)
@dazedandconfused: Indeed. I have some acquaintance with ships, airplanes, and cars. In each, mass is the enemy of everything good. Short of EVs,
In one of their serial failures with electric vehicles Chevy made one called the Imapact. The standard line was if you hit something with a ton of batteries on board you would see a heck of an impact.
Been contemplating the condition of people getting most of their information from social media. This is a big change for the US and people in general. Instant access to complete BS, much if it designed to trigger emotions which short out the frontal lobes is a somewhat new and modern problem.
Kill the right people to make me king and this is what we will have: Mandatory classes starting at around grades 6-8 on “Bad Stuff”. Detailed and comprehensive education on BS detection and awareness will be instilled in the nation’s youth. Competitions on detecting and describing BS will be conducted, and for meaningful prizes. Talking free ride scholarships that athletes get and/or and six figure cash awards here. I will make Bad Stuff detection a national pastime or die trying.
@gVOR10: The weigh distribution plays a part in collisions. The engine in a normal car puts a significant percentage into the body of the car you hit, but a half to three quarter ton of low-slung batteries would tend to get forced under, shearing off that which is above it.
@dazedandconfused:
Hm. EVs use regenerative braking to convert some of the car’s kinetic energy back into electrical energy. Granted this is overall a good idea, but I wonder how effective such brakes are at stopping the vehicle.
I assume they also use brake pads, but have no idea how they work in EVs.
About @JohnSF’s comment yesterday, Sylvia Wrigley at Fear of Landing, has some early info on the DHL cargo plane’s crash in Lithuania.
We’ll know more when the black boxes get analyzed. But from the transcript of air traffic control, the impression is of a fatigued crew making several small errors. The last we hear from the plane is a readback of the wrong tower frequency, which might explain how communications were lost. From my experience reading and watching videos about air accidents, a crew making several comms mistakes often makes piloting mistakes as well. Note Sylvia says they were exceeding the maximum speed in the charts by about 70 knots (approx. 130 km/h).
@Not the IT Dept.: The majority of pictures I’ve seen were of aircraft or even stars/planets.
Large drones are expensive starting at $18,000 and rapidly increasing in price as you add features. Stuff like the FlyCart 30, Agras T50 sprayer are very large and expensive. There are some drone makers that are basically producing remotely controlled helicopters.
I feel like a large portion of the population had no reason to look up until now and suddenly they are noticing a whole bunch of stuff. At this point I would be surprised if people aren’t building and/or flying their drones in a way to fck with people. Stick some poles with high output LEDs on the end and boom your small drone suddenly looks huge in the sky.
Personally I’m curious why the media suddenly decided to start highlighting this across all the market segments. My bet is the handful of rich owners of the US’s media ecosystem is worried about some Ukrainian style FPV drones visiting them. New York Gov Kathy Hochul is planning to meet with the CEOs and security teams of 200 companies to discuss using state services to protect the C suite members..
If you’re a kid in school you just need to deal with the reality of gun violence but if you’re a CEO oh no suddenly something has to be done…