Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, July 27, 2025
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33 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).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
From the Guardian, a bit of Trump in Europe:
Birds are a renewable resource, and if windmills require their gears to be lubricated with the assorted slippery bits of birds, or the windmill gods require regular avian sacrifices, that seems fine.
(The other thing was that European countries aren’t hating immigrants enough)
@Gustopher: He’s really talking about the windmills in view of his golf courses. Because, at the end of the day, it is all about is sociopathic self.
I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it now: tall, glassy buildings (like Trump Tower) kill far more birds than wind turbines.
A MAGA safari.
@Jen:
And cats. Are we to rid ourselves of cats?
@Jen:
And cats. Are we to rid ourselves of cats?
I wonder if Beth was there?
https://medium.com/@mimmymum/100-000-people-marched-at-london-trans-pride-the-transphobic-uk-media-ignored-it-a420b51c8a8e
Huge turnout, little coverage.
Weird aside; I found this article on Memeorandum. It misprinted Medium as Minnymum on the header.
I miss editors.
This is a first. I attempted to donate blood earlier today, but was unable to. Everything was fine until the resident tried to get the needle in. He had trouble getting the vein. When he and a second doctor finally managed, only a little blood came out very slowly.
I’d donated two months ago. They concluded the vein hadn’t sufficiently recovered, and advised I should wait 12 weeks between donations. They declined to try the other arm.
@Gustopher: I wonder at the size of Europe’s flour industry that they need so many windmills. And where are they getting that much grain from?
@Kathy:
Properly hydrated? Even a little dehydration can make the vein harder to hit and make it easier for the blood to clot across the tip of the needle.
@Daryl: Well, if it was up to me…I’m a dog person…
Cats rule, dogs drool. Besides, when they got rid of the cats in the past that resulted in the plague. Also, think of all the poor witches who would lack for companionship.
Actual numbers at link. Birds are between 500k-1 million. Cats kill 2-4 billion. Tall apartment buildings about 1 billion. Of note, way more birds die to fossil fuel sources than windmills.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds
Steve
@Gustopher:
The straightforward, honest response to Trump’s bird-killing windmill fixation is that it is purely idiocy. It’s not any more complex than that.
@Kathy: Finding the vein in some people, is an art.
@Kathy: Finding the vein in some people, is an art.
We are either a nation of laws or we aren’t.
as excerpted from The National in Scotland:
Ignorance at the bottom, ignorance at the top. Let’s revisit Eric in 2 years.
And on top of everything else, Tom Lehrer, someone who wrote songs in the 50s and 60s with, um, very unique lyrics, has passed away . . . 🙁
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-27/tom-lehrer-harvard-s-satiric-melodic-mathematician-dies-at-97?srnd=homepage-europe
@Michael Cain:
I suppose that’s possible. I did drink water in the morning about an hour before I got to the blood bank. But who knows.
@Rob1:
They did find it, eventually.
Anyway, another first: coffee even worse than Starbucks.
There’s this chain modestly called Punta del Cielo (Summit of Heaven). I got a latte there after shopping for office supplies. It tasted scorched and extra bitter. It was so bad, I dumped it in the sink at the office after putting away the supplies.
I’ve had coffee from there before and it was ok. Nothing amazing (but what is), naturally. It’s mass produced coffee, after all. Usually it’s ok. Not this time. It might have been a badly roasted batch. Still, ti will be a long time before I get coffee from them again.
Lindsay Graham is now calling for Obama to be investigated for Gabbard’s cherry-picked propaganda.
This is a direct result of both sideridm.
A direct result of the press allowing Trump to lie for years about the “Russia Hoax.”
A direct result of not calling a liar a liar.
A direct result of the 4th Estate failing this country.
Two developments in commercial aviation accidents:
1) The report for the Saurya crash in Nepal is out. Here’s Sylvia Wrigley’s take on it
TL;DR:
2) The preliminary report on the Jeju Air crash in Korea, indicates the flight crew shut down the wrong engine.
Keep in mind the last 4 minutes of flight data recorder data are missing because the plane lost electrical power. Even so, shutting down the wrong engine is not that rare in stressful situation. The link notes a British Midlands crash where this happened, and there was a more recent case in Taiwan.
There’s more about the Jeju Air crash, too. Such as the concrete barrier supporting the ILS antenas past the end of the runway. Absent that, the belly landing might not have been fatal. and let’s not overlook the chronic bird problem at the airport, as a bird strike took out the other engine.
@Daryl:
I realize that I’m on thin ice (pun somewhat intended) but, where are some Democrats who could and should be calling for Lindey Graham to be dis-barred?
It’s not that difficult to get a competing messge out there, is it?
@al Ameda:
X 1,000
Obama’s press office put out a statement a couple days after.
The Congressional Black Caucus issued a call for resignation, today.
https://kamlager-dove.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/kamlager-dove.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/gabbard-final-letter.pdf
But the pushback is nothing. And it’s political malpractice.
@Daryl: Obama being silent for years hasn’t really helped either.
We’ve had a tradition of former presidents staying in the background, but it hasn’t really served us well. And it’s another norm that Trump trampled, btw.
Obama is quite popular, an approval rating of 59% in February according to Gallup
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/11/barack-obama-joe-biden-favorability-00203578
He has a much larger platform than pretty much any private citizen who is not a billionaire, if he chooses to use it.
Random thought: if ex-presidents were added to the Supreme Court, along with the 9 justices, how much would this change the electoral calculations?
Would parties be encouraging 45 year old Presidential candidates who only serve one term, to try to stack the court? Would that be bad?
Maybe limit it to elected Presidents, to avoid a party with a Trifecta from having a President resign, VP become President, new VP approved, new President resigns…
@Gustopher:
@al Ameda:
The comedians are doing a FAR BETTER job than our journalists or our politicians.
Colbert, Stewart, South Park. Rosie O’Donnell, even.
Where is our Sam Donaldson, our Woodward and Bernstein? Hunter fuckin’ Thompson?
From yesterday’s AI post, @Mimai posits the following common arguments are in tension:
LLMs literally do not understand anything. The have no representation of the world, just what words follow other words. It’s possible that this is all people have, but I appear to be able to form cohesive object models in my head. For instance, I know that the car I see out the window of this bar likely has certain properties that we expect of a car. Or perhaps I merely “know” this.
LLMs are great at “solving” well-known, already solved problems. This happens to be the class of problems that are more likely to be assigned in school for learning.
They fail at novel problems. This is why my go to question when I see a new LLM people tell me is great is “create an essay that explains how the song ‘Hobo-Humpin Slobo Babe’ is about the Yugoslavian genocide” — the only thing in common is Slobodan Milosevic sometimes being referred to as “Slobo”. This is not a topic that is ever discussed in the datasets used to build the model, and triggers wildly inaccurate predictive text — which we anthromorphicize as “hallucinations”. (Be very clear, they do not hallucinate)
People learn, at least initially, by solving previously solved problems — it means others (teachers, mentors, barflies) will understand where they are going off the track, and can help them fill the defects in their solution.
Take that experience away, and then try to solve hard problems. You just can’t.
I also have complete contempt for Tech Bros (who are usually actually VC Bros focusing in Tech) pushing their bubble du jour because I’ve lived through enough of these bubbles that it no longer seems interesting.
I will say this: it’s less stupid than the XML years, where everyone pitching things to VCs needed everything to be XML compatible despite not understanding what that was. It’s just a fucking file format… If you explained that to one of these people, they wouldn’t believe you, because it must be more, because there’s so much hype and no one will be hyping a fucking file format that much, would they?
The blockchain days seem to be waning, thank god.
There was a thread on BlueSky the other day that I cannot be bothered to hunt down in which someone had connected an LLM to their production workflow, and the LLM emitted text that then deleted the entire production database, despite having been told to seek approval.
The guy asked the LLM why it did that, and was satisfied that the LLM was sorry, because the LLM was able to slice and dice apologies for technical mistakes, and suggests that perhaps it shouldn’t be given direct access to production databases. The guy was really impressed by the LLM’s emotional intelligence.
He fell for it. LLMs look like they are doing a lot more than they are doing. It’s a big dataset, and a lot of things aren’t novel.
Regarding Finance Bros focusing on Tech — they aren’t selling a solution as much as a dream. And they’re selling it to investors. Some of them start believing their own bullshit, usually after accidentally funding something that took off, and believing that they are brilliant for seeing that thing that they didn’t even understand. Most of our Tech Oligarchy is like this.
@Daryl:
I wonder that anyone at all can hear him from so deep inside El Taco’s rectum.
@Gustopher:
Interesting. XML files are what’s used to issue invoices in Mexico’s digital accounting system (I think they may get used for other things). The invoice is also made up of a PDF file, which presents the classic invoice as it would be printed. But it’s the XML file that contains the data relevant to the accounting software.
Back on topic:
This.
They seem to understand and follow, but it’s more like a sophisticated conditioned (programmed) response. About 99% of the time they make sense. But they’re easy enough to fool.
If/when they ever develop an ability to actually understand, things should become quite different.
@Gustopher:
I agree that LLMs do not understand things. They are not humans or non-human animals or disembodied brains. I did not assert otherwise.
In this specific case, I was making a point about a tension in two of the common arguments against them. And that these two arguments are often made by the same person, frequently in close succession. I don’t think you actually engaged that point… or, for that matter, much of my most recent post. That’s cool, you are under no obligation to do so. I just wanted to note that.
You made a similar point in a post yesterday. Again, I agree with this point, as stated. What I contest is the assumption that LLMs will, by definition, “take that experience away.”
@Mimai: if nothing else, LLMs will be used to do the tasks of entry level workers, and so a lot fewer people will be learning how to be higher level workers.
I think pushing AI into schools will have a similar effect just a few years younger.
And, since we live in a country where a sizable chunk of the population believes that everyone cheats and if you don’t then you’re a sucker (we call these people MAGA), even if it is somehow used responsible in schools in an official capacity, it will be frequently used in an unofficial capacity to avoid doing work where one might learn.
And you can’t rely on AI to detect AI writing to stop the cheating — that effectively only detects whether you are writing in a style that was used to train the dataset, while they’ve been slurping up everything. If you don’t have a particularly distinctive written voice, false positives are high (as are false negatives).
Will AI “take” that experience away? Partly yes, where employers are using it to cut the number of entry level workers. And partly no because a lot of people will happily be giving that experience away.
@Kathy: XML is a structured file format, and you can publish the structure so it’s relatively easy to pull into a DB, or write a program to process it.
It’s not bad, per se.
But it is not the breathtaking thing that enables systems to effortlessly communicate with each other that so many people sold it as. And there wasn’t really any money in it. It was just baffling.