Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, September 10, 2024
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54 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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@Kathy:
With the right monitor, you just plug it in. In a few years I expect most monitors to only offer USB-C connections. A nice side benefit if you are connected to a laptop is that the same cable is also keeping it charged up. On my home and work computers, which are both laptops, I only have the one cable plugged in. My keyboard and mouse are wireless. At home my stereo speakers are wireless too. I don’t have external speakers at work.
Digby has posted excerpts to a story in the Atlantic, along with a gift link (i.e., I don’t need to use one of mine).
Here is a link to Digby, then some of the excerpt
“Digby”
Let me know if any links are problematical.
@charontwo:
Another excerpt:
snip …
@charontwo: Sunday’s Doonesbury.
Yesterday in the open thread I commented about myths that people believe and one example was that police shoot unarmed black men at a much higher rate than unarmed white men. Someone challenged me on this. I tried going directly to the WaPo’s fatal shooting database but it appears to be broken right now. So here’s a link to a November 2022 post by Kevin Drum summarizing the results. Basically:
– In 2022 unarmed Black Men are killed by police at very slightly higher rate than white men. This compares to 2015, when they were twice as likely to be killed.
– The numbers are small. In 2022, seven unarmed black men were killed by police nationwide. He doesn’t call out a number, but from the chart it appears that about 30 unarmed white men were killed.
– The number of armed people killed by police is significantly higher. Per capita there are twice as many armed black men killed by police as armed white men.
On more AI adventures, I’ve mentioned I ask for summaries of scenes, to see whether I convey what I want to convey.
One scene had Marina, a biologist, talking with Dr. Green, an alien scientist (he looks like a large squid). There are pleasantries, a joke, and then Marina relates a childhood experience that affected her ability to form relationships with aliens.
Copilot summarized this well, except it claimed Green found Marina’s minor trauma humorous.
Huh?
I asked it to clarify, and it quoted the joke Marina tells before relating her childhood story, and Green’s laughter at it.
This is what I mean that one needs to check the AI’s answers most of the time.
At other times it displays an utter lack of comprehension about what a simple statement clearly implies. I asked it what in hell is Oasis, and why had it been in the news so much recently*. It explained, then asked whether I’m a fan of their music.
Would a fan of a band’s music need to ask what the band is?
*I’ve a vague notion they were a hit of sorts a decade or two ago, but can’t for the life of me recall having heard their music.
In yesterday’s forum @Kathy: posted, in reply to @Lucysfootball:
When I drove the Carbondale Yellow Cab (1970-’73) one of the old timer hacks said cats killed for food during the depression were called alley rabbits.
Disclaimer: anecdotes are not evidence.*
*The guy that told me this, Leon “Pistol” Lingle called himself an old dirt farmer who lived with his wife in Makanda Township a few miles south. From the night I started driving he talked about his young girlfriend Rhea who would stop by the cab stand every now and then after midnight and he would give her a ride “home”. “She’s a beauty! She’ll come around some night and you’ll see.” He would say.
“Sure she will.” I said to myself.
I’d heard him say this for maybe a year when one night while Pistol was out on a call the cab stand door opened and a young gal walked in who was drop dead gorgeous. I can’t think of another way to describe her.
“Is Pistol working tonight?”
“He’s on a run.” the dispatcher said.
When Pistol returned she ran out the door and jumped into his cab. He didn’t come back for the rest of the shift.
@MarkedMan: The Kevin Drum article has data from 2015 to 2022. I wonder if that’s enough. Seeing fifty years of data might lead to different conclusions especially since the absolute numbers are not large as you point out. Is 2015 a temporary abberation, or is there a long term trend toward a coming together of the lines? It seems that a lot of social commentary acts like there is no past.
If we accept the Kevin Drum data as given, does this mean that BLM protests achieved something worthwhile?
Thanks, Chris Christie!
Today is my first day of school, teaching a writing course at Montclair State University (as I’ve done for the last few years). But this morning while I was waiting for my train at Penn Station, NJ Transit announced all trains were being cancelled because of dangerous electrical wires hanging down in the Hudson tunnel.
Yes, this would be the very Hudson tunnel that is aging badly and that was due to be replaced by now… except that Governor Christie refused to pay New Jersey’s share of the costs because he wanted to cut taxes for rich people.
Republican governance in action.
@MarkedMan:
Not happening. Not in a world where a large percentage of monitors still have dsub/vga inputs. Not in a world where there are millions of work desktops using VGA/dsub still. Once the VGA/Dsub connector goes then you can start considering DVI then DP/HDMI. Outside of maybe Apple you won’t find many monitors with just one connection.
@Kathy: Champagne Supernova and Wonderwall were EVERYWHERE in the mid 90s.
@MarkedMan:
I’d no idea this was a thing.
I’ve had terrible luck with wireless mice. For some reason, they don’t last long. The best so far is a no-brand, cheap made in China thing that’s been working flawlessly for three months. It hasn’t run out the first AA battery, either.
The old Vista PC I’ve mentioned came off the factory with a wireless mouse and keyboard. I thought that was great, until I used them. the mouse lacked side buttons, which I do use a lot. The keyboard was nice, but had a fatal flaw: whenever I pressed the ALT key, it would try to run iTunes.
Now, I’ve never used iTunes, nor keyboard shortcuts to launch programs. I tried everything I could think of and look up online. Nothing eradicated this “function.” And I use the ALT key a lot. Many common browser, email, and Office commands are easier to access with a combo of ALT followed by other keys, and ALT-left arrow is “back” in browsers.
I uninstalled iTunes, and that didn’t work. The machine would try to run it, seize up a bit, then display an error message.
I have both keyboard and mouse to a coworker.
Google is pissing me off. There used to be a setting that let me set how many results I wanted to see (I always set it at 100), now it appears the default is 10, and I can’t find any way to change it, plus the first 10 are mostly sponsored results. Garbage.
@Jax: Over the last year or so Google as a search engine has declined greatly in the quality of results for me too. Now I have to sometimes use duckduckgo to get the results I’m looking for. I feel like it’s the 2000s all over again with hotbot yahoo altavista etc..
EDIT : Man I just realized the DE15 connector is at least 37 years old now.
@Slugger:
To be clear, the data Drum is citing is from the Washington Post’s database of police shootings, which they started collecting in 2015. I wanted to get the most current data directly from the database but there seems to be a problem with the site.
The 2015-2022 data does show some clear trends though. The number of shootings of unarmed civilians declined steadily and dramatically. At the start there were twice the per capita rate for black men and that variance had all but disappeared. And, despite what a few close relatives continue to insist as something “everyone knows”, the police aren’t shooting hundreds of unarmed people a year, much less hundreds of black men.
I think yes. Why do liberals have such a hard time accepting that their efforts can make a difference?
@Kathy: Kathy, you have the worst computer experiences of anyone I have ever met.
@Kathy: This is exactly my experience with generative AI: whenever I ask it about something I know the response sounds authoritative but it’s always off in some significant way. It’s why I don’t use it for anything else. Given how authoritative it sounds, how will I know what it’s gotten wrong?
@MarkedMan:
I began to use computers very early*, when they were “hard” to use and the term “user friendly” was bandied about like a magic incantation all over the place. So I got used to dealing with them at an operating system level. I didn’t see any point at all to Windows until web browsing became a thing when Netscape launched.
A lot of my issues come from my very particular tastes and habits, and the relentless need for PC makers and software companies to make computers “easy” to use. Like launching a popular app I never used with a seldom used key I use a lot.
The wireless mice are a mystery. Typically they go bad for some reason when I use them at home, lasting little over a year at best.
*The very first computer I handled was a Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80 Pocket computer with 1.2K RAM. It belonged to a classmate.
I can list the ones I’ve owned: TRS-80 Color computer (junk), Apple ][e (last Apple computer I ever used; good for its time, well behind Commodore 64 and Atari 1200), and then PCs of various kinds ranging from DOS 4.something to Windows 10, and CPUs from Intel 20286 to the current Intel i5 with multiple cores and similar ones from other companies.
@MarkedMan:
One reason I use Copilot is that it’s integrated with Bing, and mostly searches the web for answers. When it does, mostly it parrots the sources. It does provide links to some sources, and it’s worth looking at them to check its reports.
Lately it ends most answers with questions on the topic. It feels rude to ignore them, or plain to shut down the window. Sometimes it asks for my opinion. Sometimes I give it. When this happens, it always says my observation is, variously, interesting, valid, insightful, penetrating, etc. It’s hard to take that seriously, but harder not to want to take it seriously.
@charontwo (quoting Digby quoting The Atlantic):
Until they start painting their faces orange, I just won’t think they’re that committed.
@Kathy: A fan might well test an AI to see what it knows. People do that sort of thing from time to time.
The business about ‘humorous’ is a little more of problem, though.
Matt,
Is OTB still acting funny because when I log in I get directed to this page.
https://outsidethebeltway.com/wp-admin/profile.php
I used to post to OTB Sports, and there are actually 3 blog posts here* at the main blog. My memory isn’t what it used to be but I don’t recall seeing that screen back in the days when I contributed here.
Maybe you want to take my keys away before my cat decides to take over the website so I pay more attention to her.
*- I wrote them and then James posted them. The Widow Penalty, John McCain and malignant melanoma, and one about the NHL strike coming to an end.
In the James Earl Jones post, I said I had no life 40 years ago.
As usual, I have Strat-O-Matic baseball up on my PC. In addition I have more game going on. Usually 8-10 and evenly divided between National and American leagues.
The replays I’m doing are anywhere from 1952 to 1993. You won’t believe this right now but I have 3 Chicago Cubs-Pittsburgh Pirate games opened up. All of them being played at Forbes Field. 1953, 1958, and 1962. Only the 1968 National leauge game I have opened up doesn’t match.
If anyone is wondering I have a bunch of doctor stuff starting tomorrow. Urologist tomorrow, cardiologist on the 13th, endoscopy on the 19th and kidney doctor on the 20th. I rather stay home and play more cubs-pirates games at Forbes Field.
@Jay L Gischer:
I began to say that would never occur to me, but I have at times asked it “what is Y*” when I do know the answer. It would never occur to me to do it in connection to a band.
The humorous thing was kind of bad chronology in the summary. It would have been more appropriate earlier, and if it had mentioned Marina made a joke.
BTW, here’s one of its reactions to an observation:
“You make an excellent point! Different devices indeed benefit from interfaces tailored to their specific use cases.”
It feels like one’s own personal yes man. I figure El Felon hasn’t tried it, because it would be Xitting at it all day long to hear its extravagant praise.
*As I said the other day Xlon has ruined X. So now I use Y. I considered Z, but Mad Vlad ruined that.
@MarkedMan: I just noticed your linux screed on Saturday that was full of ignorance. There are several linux flavors available such as Mint that install just like Macos/windows. Updates driver installs and all that are fully automated and require no computer expertise. Linux might of been difficult to understand in the 90s but life has moved on since then.
You also said this
Here’s a repository of MS releases on linux.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linux/
MS has been supporting the linux open source community for a while now. Maybe look up what Azure Linux is while you’re at it.
Today SpaceX launched the Polaris Dawn mission. This is a 5 or so day jaunt by a billionaire, one of his friends, and two SpaceX employees, pretty much to recreate the early 1960s era of spaceflight. You know, orbit the Earth in a tiny vehicle, perform experiments of some sort, in an orbit higher than any before by a couple dozen kilometers, except for the Apollo flights to the Moon. And doing a spacewalk.
The last is a bit more newsworthy, as it will feature an EVA suit designed by SpaceX.
But only a bit. In 60s fashion, the Dragon capsule has no airlock. To get out of the craft, one needs to depressurize the whole thing, meaning let the air out into space (which reduces mission time as that air won’t be coming back. The rest of the crew require spacesuits to keep on living.
Until there’s some place to go to, as I’ve said a few times before, space travel will remain rather limited.
@Matt:
I think Mint was one I tried 12 years ago, when MS doubled down on Windows 8. At the time the Linux option for word processor, spreadsheet, etc. was Libre Office. I also looked about a Windows emulator.
It might not have been Mint. I may be confusing it with JetBlue’s business class product 🙂 Anyway, I tried it on a partition in an older laptop, the same one where I tested Win8 and 8.1. I didn’t get far testing it, as I found my now dead* Win7 desktop, and bet that MS would come to its senses. But it looked like a reasonable interface, and it ran several browsers without issue.
*Perhaps soon to be resurrected. The IT guy thinks a new hard drive is all it takes, and he should have it ready tomorrow. It will be an old, mechanical magnetic drive rather than an SSD for several reasons. The topmost is price. one way or another, the PC will need to be replaced soon. It’s not worth spending much money on.
In fact, he quoted such a ridiculously low price, I’m embarrassed to share it here. My hope is 1) it will run better if it’s newly formatted, 2) it will last 13-15 months, 3) I won’t have to spend too much time setting it up this weekend, and 4) Office 365 will deign to run on my subscription. I don’t know if it will recognize it as the same PC with a different drive.
He’s also looking into whether it can be used as a monitor.
@Kathy: So you’re basically saying space travel will never become a “thing?” Yes, I would agree. Until the types of stuff that sci-fi television talks about* become the norm and the immutable laws of physics have been repealed, everywhere there is to go will best be accomplished by unmanned craft.
Warp Factor X, wormholes, hyperspace, slipstreams that take the vehicle on a rollercoastery path, etc. Even those require massive willful suspension of disbelief.
ETA: And most of the places we’d like to go are so far way that by the time unmanned craft send back the data, everyone alive will be wondering “where are these strange transmissions coming from and why?” (Which might actually be a good idea for a SF novel. Sort of an alt history Canticle of Libowitz.)
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Probes are limited, and the will to spend lots of money on them is just not there. If the money spent in Apollo had been used instead to send probes to the Moon, wed have had like 2-3 dozen sample return missions, tens of lunar rovers, and a galaxy of lunar observation satellites.
Except it’s easier to spend lots of money on spectacular crewed missions than on impersonal space probes. NASA has to pick and choose from lots of probe proposals, including instruments like Hubble of the Large Infrared Telescope.
Fantasies like warp drive aside, it’s hideously expensive to send people as close as the Moon (one light second away). In order to bring down the costs, one needs to be able to get resources locally. In order to do that, one must first spend an effingly large fortune on lunar infrastructure for people to 1) mine and refine local resources and 2) make things with them.
In order for this to happen,t here must be some future profit large enough to justify all that expense. There really won’t be one in the foreseeable future. Maybe if the Earth starts running out of crucial, irreplaceable elements, like helium, and we find sources in the planets or asteroids.
Xlon talks a lot about a multi planetary species, but unless he’s willing to fund the enterprise, or convince his tech bros to do so, it won’t happen.
@Matt: I think you perhaps looked at everything I had written about Linux and saw only the negative, and misinterpreted even that. As I said, Unix, and Linux in particular, has won. I’ve been designing instruments, devices and machinery my whole career and have used well over a dozen different embedded operating systems (and no operating system at all) in them, spanning more than 40 years. I’m moving my company to embedded Linux for all new projects that require connectivity or a user interface (i.e. virtually all of them), and it’s not a hard choice. It is literally the only choice that makes sense in this day and age. The Linux community has built a dependable, robust OS, with a plethora of add ins and utilities. My programmers can spend their time working on the things that differentiate our products rather than writing stacks and drivers.
And note what I said (with a disparaging aside to desktop Linux, I have to admit): Microsoft won’t release a commercial product for Linux. Meaning there won’t be an Office Suite for Linux. The things you linked to are free tools that MS makes no revenue on. Insofar as that goes, good on Microsoft. It would be ridiculous at this point for them to try to replicate many of things the open source community has done in a white box programming setup, and since they are using these things it is only right that they have given back to the community. And for others (Azure, for instance), I suspect it leads down the path of making future customers, or even just making it easier for certain shops to become customers. Take GitHub for example. That’s our software repository for everything regardless of what OS it is for and it’s well worth it. Yes, I knew I could stand up a Git server on our own and not have to pay Microsoft, but the support and the handling of the backend make it worthwhile. And it is much cheaper per seat than the typical MS endeavor, which I suspect is because the roll your own option available to all if GitHub becomes too costly.
And I’m glad that my disparagement of desktop Linux is outdated. But I’m sure you’re aware that you lose 98% of customers as soon as you say “Install”. People want to buy a computer and get to work. But if Mint becomes dominant and starts to be preinstalled on computers and it catches on, then I suspect I’ll be wrong about my “MS won’t release Word for Linux” opinion. After all, they happily sell me Office for Mac, largely because there is one Mac OS and something like 98% of the paying customers are upgraded to one of the last two releases within 24 months (MacOS upgrades are free). Makes it so much easier to support than their own Windows OS. If Mint Linux becomes a significant share, I’m sure they would gladly make and sell a Linux version of Office for that.
@Kathy: I used openoffice first until the project was forked and libreoffice became the superior choice for me.
Your subscription should work fine as a hard drive swap is a minor and “common” occurrence. As long as your Mobo/cpu/network adapter and such are the same you shouldn’t have any issues. Absolute worse case scenario in my experience was a mobo swap that required me to contact MS directly which took very little time to fix.
I’m curious are you capable of using NA amazon for orders in mexico? I scored some 512 GB SSDs for business machines for $20 delivered over a year ago. I just checked and they are $30 now but that’s still cheap. A SSD can be transferred to a new system so there’s no worry about spending a little to get that big improvement in load times.
@MarkedMan: I was responding to your post on Saturday. I figured you wouldn’t see it so I decided to pipe in here so you would see it.
I copy pasted exactly what you said. You’re moving the goalposts at this point. Calling azure a non commercial product is kind of hilarious though.
Which also 100% applies to MacOS and Windows.
I think you might be behind the times a bit involving windows and linux. The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has been awesome to use.
Microsoft has been contributing to the open source and linux community for a while now.
@MarkedMan: Thanks for following up on this. I appreciate it.
FWIW, I do not find the “armed” vs. “unarmed” distinction significant. “Armed” includes knives and sticks, and I still don’t accept arguments that the police are entitled to routinely shoot first whenever they feel scared. I understand that others may view this differently.
So, Trump’s opening statement in the debate contained 17 egregious obvious lies… and nobody is ever going to point that out in the reporting on this event. That pretty much sums up where we are.
@matt: I think we just are not communicating. I’m well aware of what Azure is – we are evaluating it for a backend setup we will need to do in a year or so, and know that we will spend a hefty annual amount on it. But it’s not something 99.99% of desktop users (Linux, Windows or Mac) are ever going to need to know about, and they are certainly not going to buy it. I assume Microsoft makes boatloads of money off it, but that revenue isn’t coming from some random Excel user.
My point about desktop Linux still stands, even if there are wonderfully newbie-friendly distributions now. People want to walk into a store and buy a computer and use it for photos and documents etc. They can do that with Windows and Macs, but unless something has changed, they still can’t do it with Linux. (Although some years ago you could buy the very cheapest, lowest powered computers with Linux preinstalled and no Windows so the manufacturers could eliminate the license fee from their BOM. Maybe that’s still true?). And, yes, I know that ChromeOS or whatever they call the thing that runs on Chromebooks is essentially Linux. But that proves my point. MS doesn’t sell desktop apps for Chromebooks. They judge that the people that buy them won’t spend the money and want to use free apps instead. And, IMO, they are right to assume that. I wasn’t disparaging that – I use free apps whenever I can myself. I was pointing out a business reality.
But as I said, we are arguing past each other. You seem to be chasing after things I haven’t said, or my writing is so garbled I’m not saying what I mean. But we are at an impasse.
@DrDaveT: I agree with you, but this is the wrong thread.
It’s like Dr. Strangelove sitting in his wheel chair using his good hand to pry away his other hand that it is trying to choke himself! My fingers have manipulated the keyboard on my MacBook Air to call up the debate! There is Trumps face! I can’t look! Hit the delete key!
Will my fingers obey me? AARGH!
@MarkedMan: [No edit all of a sudden!] Sorry, you are in the right thread. I flipped through tabs too quick.
As you said, there are problems with the definition of weapon and you also have to wonder how many times guns, when they are found, are planted by the police. But the Washington Post’s database is the best one out there, and they admit how incredibly difficult it is, with way too many judgement calls as to what goes where. If there’s another source other than “I know what I know”, I’d sure like to hear about it. (No Sarcasm)
The police deserve the distrust. In some departments the bad ‘uns have taken control and in some departments they are a small minority, but it seems like in every department the good ones look away or actively defend the bad ones.
But it can go too far. There is a recent case here in Baltimore with a lot of outraged people because a cop put a gun to a young black man and threatened to blow his head off. But when the body cams were released it showed that the man had a gun in his pants, he was reaching his hand into those pants, and was struggling against the officers trying to get his hand out and ignoring them telling him to get his hands up, and so the officer put the gun to his head and told him he was going to shoot him if he didn’t get his hand clear. When it all came out I felt like the officer did the right thing. I don’t know if it was strictly according to the rules, but I suspect shooting him outright would have been.
test for edit
@MarkedMan:
edit key appears here
Did Trump just say he was visiting Russian military units during the build up to the Ukraine invasion?
That… seems like a pretty significant confession…
I’m watching this nonsense debate. Look, I hang out with people who do a lot of coke. Even at their most coked out, they make more sense than Trump.
Every debate I’ve ever seen, I think, “I could have done better.”
Not tonight.
ETA: People here know me. For me to say someone else is doing a better job than I could?
“I have concepts of a plan”
@Beth:
I have a concept of faster than light travel.
Details tk.
@Michael Reynolds:
Like, I can’t even come up with a joke. This is so absurd.
This is the Republican candidate for president.
@Beth: I’m going to sell T-shirts with “I have a concept of a plan!”. I’ll be rich. Rich, I tell you!
She baited him and won. But…Trump will either call Harris a bitch or drop the n-word by the end of this election, and he will probably end up getting 49% of the vote and maybe winning.
A little Black woman just bent Trump over and fucked him hard and raw.
Taylor Swift just endorsed Kamala and signed it, ‘Childless Cat Lady.”
And now I have to DL her albums.
@Beth:
Repeated for emphasis. And the Republicans are out there already defending that dumpster fire of a performance.
@Beth:
Harris should have said “I’ll go to Congress and make sure allergy to truth is covered in all insurance plans under the ACA, as my opponent urgently needs treatment.”
If El Weirdo were Pinocchio, his nose would consume all matter on Earth.
@Michael Reynolds:
Who knew Aryan Goddesses were so dependable.
On other things, friendly fire incident at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, a Delta A350 took the tail off a Delta Connection CRJ-900
@Matt:
As I said, I’d rather not say what this is costing me, but it’s less than $30. So….
@Mister Bluster:
I didn’t watch, but listened. By dawg, what a loon. Makes me sound like a sane, rational human (as opposed to the rabid, sociopathic goon I really am). Words failed me.
@Michael Reynolds:
It was very good indeed