Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, March 21, 2024
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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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BlueSky.
The headline of the day- Ohio dad facing charges after continuously calling to complain about child’s homework
A few days ago, my adopted city of Rochester, NY, learned that a body had been found in our local reservoir.
This morning, we learned that, apparently, city residents have been drinking, washing, and cooking (I guess taking bong rips as well) with corpse-marinated water for roughly a month.
In two weeks thousands of visitors will come here as we are in the path of the total solar eclipse.
…
So I’m basically living in the set-up to a horror movie.
(I live outside the city proper and as far as I know, no human body has been found in my area’s water supply–So no worries about me writing any articles about “how minds are wonderful things to taste” in the near future….
Or at least no more worries than usual about that. For our more “Q” inclined readers, I’m not saying that I’m not still waiting for my next shipment of babies to eat.)
@Matt Bernius: I don’t want to upset you but uncovered water sources such as reservoirs have all kinds of things that are in them. It’s why they filter and treat the water before they put it into the supply. And while that treated water is tested every day or even several times a day, if you’re on a well you probably had it tested when you bought the house and never since, despite all the things leaching down through the soil.
Drink up!
@MarkedMan:
There you go bringing science into this. 😉
Though we I first saw the Highland Park reservoir, I remember that one of my first thoughts was: if supervillains existed in the world, we would be so screwed. What can I say, I was raised on Batman ’66.
Had to call my cardiologist’s office just a few minutes ago. While I was on hold, there was music playing.
My Heart will go on
@Matt Bernius:
Me too. I haven’t watched any of the movies except the one from the 60’s.
@Bill Jempty: Our local mega hospital has a specialized practice for people like my late father who are experiencing medical issues with their hearts. It is encouragingly called the “Failing Heart Clinic.”
A good summary of why people who are indifferent or enthusiastic about voting for an autocrat are dangerously deluded:
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-strongman-fantasy
So, at 4:17 am the phone chimes. It’s a text from on of the company owners, meant for someone else.
What was so important and urgent to send a text at that time?
Beats me. it was a routine inquiry about supplies.
I managed to get back to sleep. but I’m still irritated about it.
@Joe:
One of the things I learned when I was designing surgical devices and working closely with surgeons, is that patients often do not really process what their clinician is saying. I think part of that is because good clinicians speak in a reasonable and calm way and that leads to a mental disconnect when the news is of the screaming-and-hair-on-fire variety. So any effort to make it clear to patients what is going on is probably a net good thing.
I once got into a discussion with several thoracic surgeons about the brutal, debilitating and painful procedures their patients would elect to have that might give them a few weeks at most. These were procedures the surgeons themselves would never have for themselves. At leas no small part of it was this:
Patient: Wow. So the cancer is still spreading. What do we do next?
Doctor: Well, there is nothing left that we have to stop the cancer. As you asked about before, sometimes cancer stops on its own, but that is very, very rare. All we have is this one procedure that might give you some more time, a few weeks or a couple of months at the most, [white noise begins to rise] but here are all the terrible things about the aftereffects of the procedure… [white noise reaches the point that it drowns out everything the clinician is saying]
Patient: Ok, so there is something we can still try. Let’s do it.
@Kathy: The owner may well be a jerk, but I can offer a less harsh reason for a 4:17am text. I have my phone on silent mode 100% of the time, and even the screen notifications from my work apps are suppressed after work hours. So in my mind, if I send you a text because I happen to be up at 4am and I just thought of something and I wanted to deal with it before I forgot about it, I just send the text, assuming you won’t be aware of it until you start checking your messages for the day.
I was once more cognizant of sending stuff during work hours, but even that was limited to appending “[Not urgent] to the front. But by the time I had lived in China for a few months and virtually 100% of the messages and replies I sent to the US team were compose during off hours, I stopped even doing that.
@Joe: I had a wheelchair with the brand name, “Karma”. Was a nice chair tho.
@Matt Bernius:
Too long ago for me to remember specifics, but someone asked the guy in charge of NYC’s reservoirs about the threat of someone dropping LSD or a poison in the open reservoirs. He replied that he had X thousand acre feet of water. Meaning there wasn’t enough LSD in the world to do anything.
@MarkedMan:
Oh, there’s no question about the level of jerkitude. I know him 🙂
Some operations people are up that early, but not the person this was meant for. Not me, either.
I can’t silence the phone, because something urgent might come up. But at 4 am, you think of a real emergency, like someone needs to get to a hospital right away.
@MarkedMan: Your post brings back many specific memories of accompanying my sister through her journey with cancer.
Biden leads Trump in six new polls
Which media will report this as breathlessly as “Trump leads Biden” polls?
The strongman essay by Snyder is very good, maybe a bit hyperbolic, but good. (For background, Snyder has written some of the best, most highly detailed books on Eastern Europe, especially the 1920-1950 period.) While he concentrates on the downsides, what I think he misses or underemphasizes is the part where people are convinced that a strongman will be their strongman. I think that at least at the beginning the strongman actually will be doing what his supporters want. The supporters dont actually care about the nation as a whole, they just want their wishes carried out. I think the fact is that it actually is a good short term bet and most people dont think about the long term.
He also emphasizes that the strongman will use the position for his own benefit to gain riches. I think it’s pretty clear that at least those in the US who favor the strongman argument dont care about the corruption and self serving as long as their perceived enemies are harmed.
Steve
@Bill Jempty:
Hey, he was just being a concerned father.
@gVOR10: Very tangential but this reminds me of the “sleeping gas” trope in countless movies, where someone snakes a hose in and releases sleeping gas, putting everyone safely asleep within minutes. But there is no such agent! Even if you were willing to spend the small fortune required to fill up a room with anesthesia gas, leaks and currents and eddies means it would: take a long time; you’ll have to blow it in with a big fan rather than a hose; that everyone wouldn’t go out at once; and the odds are that you would kill at least some of them.
@Kathy: I get it, but I have so many family and friends in significantly different time zones, not to mention coworkers, that I had to figure it out long ago.
@MarkedMan: The Russians tried this back in 2002, with the results being pretty much what you described.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Moscow-theater-hostage-crisis
@Matt Bernius: So, with the double negative, does that mean you STILL ARE waiting… ?
@just nutha:
I’ll never tell…
Lately I’ve been wondering how realistic expectations for widespread space travel are.
Science fiction glosses over many of the economic and logistical problems, even when space travel is portrayed realistically as in most of Niven’s and Pournelle’s Motie series, or in Kubrick’s 2001.
It glosses over other issues as well, such as radiation, prolonged weightlessness, and so on. But I think economics and logistics will be the big limiting factors. If we had unlimited money and lifting capacity, we could easily shield against radiation and provide some form of artificial gravity. We don’t have that and odds are we never will.
Imagine you want to erect a four story building. You’d need several tons of materials and dozens of people to do the work. Now imagine you have to fly in all the materials, tools, and personnel, because there’s no other way to access the site. Further, there’s no water where you’re building, so you must fly it in as well. You’d also need to fly in supplies for the workers, as that would be cheaper than flying them back and forth every day. They’d also need temporary living quarters, perhaps on the plane they flew in to begin with. Oh, and you’d need to fly in the fuel for the return flights, and the tools, etc.
How much would such a small building cost?
So, it’s not that we can’t build lunar bases, or fancy space stations, or asteroid mining complexes, or send people to Mars or the moons of Jupiter, etc- But that such things would cost a LOT.
The theory si that once you begin, things would get cheaper. If you can mine the Moon for resources (including water), launching them from there to the asteroids, Mars, etc. is far cheaper. Mining and launching from the asteroids would be even cheaper.
So, in short, the futures of space travel is a Catch-22.
Apologies for linking to Xitter:
Lardass asked “are you better off than four years ago?”
Biden answered.
@Mikey: I’m not going to click on that link, but given the title I’m pretty sure I know what it’s about. Short story, either the Russians thought they could make the sleeping gas trope work in a real life armed hostage takers situation by using a substance several orders of magnitude more potent than normal anesthesia and they ended up killing a whole lot of people, mostly hostages… or they wanted to try out a new method of delivering a chemical weapon and chose this as an opportunity with plausible deniability.
My gut instinct is that it was a “good” idea gone horribly wrong, but on the other hand, Putin. I mean, this is a guy who uses radiation and biological weapons delivered in strange and bizarre ways as a matter of course.
@Kathy: Good points but given my engineer’s mind, I immediately started contrarian thinking mode.
– If we could get automated machinery (robots?) to do all the work our there, they wouldn’t care if it took months or even years between destinations.
– The building techniques you describe are how many remote structures are built. I outside Palm Springs, CA at a park only accessible by a gondola (at least in the winter) and watched a helicopter essentially be the fifth man of a small construction crew all day long.
– In previous centuries, people were willing to spend 2-3 years on a sailing ship just to earn a bit more than they could farming. Of course, this would necessitate something at the end of the journey so valuable that it more than offset all the costs.
– Despite the point above, there are very successful island nations that exist only on tourism.
Headline news in the NYT
How is this news? We all knew Trump threatened Pence and, for what it’s worth, Trump was absolutely and predictably correct (just this once).
@Kathy: Hence the desire to set up a base for production on the moon. Water etc are already there in various amounts and asteroids could be used to provide whatever else is needed. Gravity is nice and low so launching finished products would be easy. The presence of gravity would make it easier to prevent wasting than in space. I have wondered how well the body would heal with moon gravity vs earth but I’m pretty sure it’s still better than space. Humanity already works, lives and builds in extremely remote areas requiring all materials/people to be air lifted in. So that’s not exactly a new concept for us.
What I find silly about a lot of sci fi is that no one ever exploits the FTL drives to destroy planets or use orbital mechanics to toss an asteroid or two at stations/cities. Lord knows humanity has a bunch of asshats who would risk everything just to cause death and destruction.
@MarkedMan:
Building is always more expensive in remote places. But further suppose you can only fly in cargo, tools, supplies, materials, personnel, etc. using only the Concorde and its meager load capacity.
Consider the Apollo astronauts made deals for exclusives with LIFE because it paid a lot more than what NASA paid them.
That’s my other long term gripe: there’s nothing in space that’s worth the cost of bringing to Earth.
There may be one exception. How much would we be willing to pay in order to remove a lot of pollution? Mars, the asteroids, the Moon, etc. have no ecosystem. Polluting those places causes no harm to anyone or anything. A big source of air, ground, and water pollution on Earth is mining.
So, if we banned almost all mining on Earth (coal and oil ought to be nonexistent off Earth, as they result from biological as well as geological processes), we’d be rid of a major source of pollution. Provided ores can be refined off world
Random stat of the day.
Since the State of the Union speech:
Biden…17 cities. 8 states. 17 events.
Trump… 2 cities, 2 states, 2 events.
@Matt:
That’s the Catch-22. It may be cheap once we spend several fortunes setting up the infrastructure to make it cheap.
BTW, the Moon also lacks an atmosphere. So it would be possible to build a sloped maglev track to launch payloads to space. Make it long enough, and you can achieve huge speeds with tolerable accelerations, like those in a regular Falcon IX* going to the ISS
In Stargate SG-1, Capt. Samantha Carter uses a stargate to blow up a star.
@Kathy: I guess I should have expanded on my point. The raw materials to build in space are available from much less dire gravity wells than Earth’s or even the Moon’s, such as the asteroid belt. You could set automated constructors that didn’t care about time to the task and they could slow burn out, mine asteroids, process the ore or water or what have you and slow burn the materials back. Or even send an entire small asteroid back once they had hollowed out spaces for us (the rock would provide shielding from cosmic rays and insulation from the heat and cold). Whether an asteroid or station they could eventually put it where we wanted it, and then all we would need to send up are people and light equipment.
@Bill Jempty:
Probably not an accident. My latest doc has a mix tape running in the waiting room. Includes Lime In The Coconut , She blinded Me With Science, (this doc is a she), Voodoo Woman and an instrumental jazzy version of the knee bone connected to the ankle bone song, vocals covered by an alto sax.
Somehow, I tend trust docs that have a sense of humor more than the other kind.
@Matt Bernius:
The drought out here in the West had the result of Lake Mead being at about one-third capacity.
Water levels were so low that they found bodies (previously submerged) that had been dumped in the Lake over the years. Viva Las Vegas.
@dazedandconfused:
Well, as long as the doc doesn’t have a recording of “Send in the Clowns” playing in the waiting room.
@MarkedMan:
This carries a great many assumptions. We’ll be able to refine ores on site. We can make robots that can work without supervision, or with distant, laggy supervision. We’ll be able to stockpile volatiles on site, etc.
And if the robots should rebel, they’d have many, many megatons of asteroids to chuck at us 🙂
@steve:
I learned long ago in my personal life that there’s no such thing as “our asshole”. All assholes are out for themselves. I’m surprised when people don’t recognize this fact of life. And yes, initially the strongman will care about public opinion, but as he takes control of the levers of persuasion and coercion he will take support, or at least acquiescence, for granted and focus on his own ends. Putin was originally OK with NATO and wanted to join the EU. Tim Snyder points out the EU insists on lefty woke stuff like the rule of law. So Putin made his choice between the economic good of his people and being President for Life.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) challenged Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. James Comer (R-TN) to move to impeach President Joe Biden. Both Jordan and Comer declined and said they still needed more time to investigate.
They’re never going to do because they’ve got nothing.