Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, August 3, 2025
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11 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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BlueSky.
Trump defends himself from insults. Switzerland has been hit with 39% tariffs. This is in retaliation for their little wooden clocks yelling insults at Trump on the hour.
Jeebuz. From the president of J Street.
It’s a little hazy out today which the weather people say is due to smoke drifting down from Canada. We need to increase tariffs on Canada unless they stop that illegal smoke from crossing into the US. (Tariffs solve everything.)
Steve
Instead of constant reminders to buy a new PC that can run Win11, couldn’t Microsoft just make a version that will run on my old, and perfectly adequate, desktop?
Paging Jake Tapper: it’s happening in front of your eyes.
@Kathy:
I have two desktops: the newer one, which is something of a beast, running Win11, for musical work and gaming.
The old one, which is still pretty capable, running Win7, for browsing, and other everyday uses.
In particular, for running Excel 2003, which I far prefer for VBA work, because its the last version with a useful offline VBA syntax help system.
It’s usually pretty easy to code in 2003, then update to run it in the current version.
Microsoft’s apparent determination to force hardware upgrades is rather odd, if you think about it, given they are not a massive hardware company (Surface notwitstanding).
@JohnSF:
They didn’t charge for home Win10* upgrades when it came out. They do charge OEMs for licenses on new PCs. So they’d rather you bought a new PC with a Win11 license they charged for.
*I call it Windows Apology Edition
@Kathy:
I actually bought neither new nor old PC pre-built.
I assembled both myself, and then purchased the OS.
At a discount, in both cases.
I still intend to customise the Win11 menu/interface back to a Win7 mode, because Win11 annoys me.
But it’s not currently high on my “to do” list.
Installing a third party search system (Everything), and some other utilities, has made some things a lot easier.
MS Search in Win11 is totally pants, quite frankly.
“Do you want the web search results?”
“NO! F@ck off! Just search the local directories efficiently, you useless pos.”
I also need, when I have some spare time, to look closer at running Linux and Win x virtual machines on beastie.
I must recount sometime how I made, perhaps the only ever, good use of Clippy in an multi-user Access database application.
For arbitrary values of “good”, me being me. 😉
Beato demonstrates AI pop music creation. O brave new world…
Loni Anderson 79
RIP
Just stumbled on this clip of Johnny Carson doing a take on “Who’s on first” with Reagan.