Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, November 4, 2025
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48 comments
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.
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The business headline of the day- Denny’s to be acquired and taken private in a deal valued at $620 million
Two short comments
I have always preferred IHOP or even the long defunct Wags to Denny’s
Denny’s purchaser is a private equity firm. In other words- Denny’s is doomed. Private equity investors running a once profitable company into the ground is seen alot
Three time Oscar nominated actress Diane Ladd has passed away at age 89. I remember her first nomination, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, very well. She played Flo the waitress. Curiously the actress who played Flo on the sitcom Alice, passed away in early September. RIP to both of them.
Former SecDef and VP Dick Cheney has died at 84.
Idiotic story of the day:
Texas Governor Greg Abbott (pictured) promised to place an 100 percent tariff on any New Yorker who tries to flee the Big Apple should socialist Zohran Mamdani win the mayor’s race Tuesday. Abbott, a key Donald Trump ally in the Lone Star State, showed no sympathy for anyone trying to escape from New York if the socialist is elected. ‘After the polls close tomorrow night, I will impose a[n] 100 percent tariff on anyone moving to Texas from NYC,’ he wrote.
I guess this is Abbot’s idea of a joke, but it does show a mindset. He hates people based on where they reside. What a joke of a human being.
@Lucys Football: Back around 15 years ago, we attended my sister-in-law’s wedding in Brooklyn. A morning outdoor wedding in Prospect Park. Afterwards we had a reception brunch in the Park Slope area and then migrated to an outdoor bar. Chatting up the young owner, I found out he was a computer science major from UT-Austin who came to NY on a job and stayed. We are a mobile society and always will be. Abbot has, like a lot of other people here in Texas, has transmogrified into a far right demagogue. His approval rating is also declining rapidly.
Stephen Miller endorsed Andrew Cuomo in the NYC race.
I thought the White House wanted Mamdani to lose.
@Lucys Football:
If he and other wingnuts did not regard the constitution as a talisman or fetish object, he’d know what it says about regulating interstate commerce.
besides, how do you impose a tariff on a person. Would any fleeing New Yorkers become the property of the state of Texas? Or only of the governor? Or maybe they’d have to turn over a cash equivalent to their net worth to the state treasury?
Or maybe “tariff” is another of their talisman or fetish objects.
@becca: Miller endorsed? Does Miller realize most of the electorate have no idea who he is? Trump hisself and Musk have also endorsed Cuomo. That does seem like pushing for a Mamdani landslide.
Paul Campos at LGM predicts GOPs will lose their spit as today’s results show they aren’t really as popular as they think they are. I hope he’s right. He does note that big losses today may motivate them to cheat harder in the midterms and ’28. Doesn’t worry me, they were going to cheat as hard as they can anyway.
@Kathy: Like Trump’s tariff on movies shot abroad, any effort to answer, “WTF does that even mean?” is sanewashing. Just worship words.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, a big Texla shareholder, opposes the $1 trillion pay package for Adolf Muxk.
Here’s what I find interesting:
Didn’t the 54-year old XEO singlehandedly wreck the sales of his company by his own actions, like alienating the largest part of its customer base and foisting the successor of the Edsel on the market? And they want to keep him?
Recently Adolf did a Ballmer*, and proclaimed Texla to be an AI and robotics company, not a car company. I wonder how that will look when the AI bubble pops.
*Microsoft’s CEO at the time windows 8 (aka WINDOS**) launched. When that misbegotten boondoggle faced harsh criticism and complaints, he said MS had moved from software to being a “devices and services company.” That went over like a lead balloon*** when the Surface tablet line ended in a $900+ million write off.
** WINDOS: Windows 8 Is Not a Desktop Operating System (I’m contractually obligated with myself to belittle WINDOS at every possible opportunity).
*** I did see the Mythbusters ep on lead balloons.
@Scott: I just looked up Abbot’s approval rating and, in contrast to Trump’s national decline, where it creeps lower and lower with every point celebrated as “like a stone”, Abbott has lost 12 points since last year. Going from 51 to 39. Yikes!
No wonder he’s saying crap like that. I look forward to the day, which I know will come, when he and Ken Paxton are off the scene, and the State of Texas can adopt a more congenial attitude toward people like my daughter, which means we can go visit my other daughter in Houston again.
Diane Ladd Rip
She was in Chinatown.
One of my all time Best Films.
@Jay L. Gischer:
It says a lot that he thinks the solution to not being popular is to be even more of a rightwing jerk/lunatic. As opposed to Democrats, who are always told to tack to the center to appeal to the moderates.
@Bill Jempty:
At first I read your post as Disney to be acquired and taken private in deal worth 620 billion, yeah, I am still waking up here on the left coast, lol.
IHOP is my go to breakfast place whenever I am ready to get back on the road after visiting my Mom in Los Angeles.
I usually just do a stack of pancakes with butter only. It has been an extremely long time since I enjoyed syrup on pancakes.
I’ve done some more thinking on LLMs, and IMO, they will keep on falling short for a while.
When I consider what I do at work, I think back on how I learned to do the tasks I do. Partly was already knowing the basics of excel, partly it was by seeing examples of completed tasks, partly reading the requests for proposals, partly being told by coworkers and managers what needs doing and how to do it.
How much does the LLM “know”?
See, if a manager directs me to do an economic proposal (list of products with prices and brands and some other info), or a technical proposal (same, but without prices), I know how to do it. they don’t need to give me more of a “prompt” than “please do the economic and technical proposals.
The LLM bots don’t do this.
Presumably one can tech them to, though I’ve no idea how to go about it.
imagine a robot sold as capable of doing all domestic tasks. you’d expect that have to tell it things like “do the dishes,” “mop the floor,” “clean the windows,”etc., and have it do just that. If instead you had to prompt it step by step, or lay out instructions on how to wash dishes or mop a floor, how useful would it be?
I saw that promo picture for Trump Steaks! and was reminded of my restaurant days in Nashville.
If someone ordered a steak grilled above medium, you could expect a lousy tip. People who liked their steak rare or medium rare usually knew how to tip.
If someone ordered a Jack Black and coke, a good tip was iffy. If water was the mixer, chances improved.
You would not believe how hard waiters and bartenders judge you when you dine out.
‘I’m angry with the president’: Florida Trump voters reeling from ‘cruel and bad’ policies
Trump Supporter Regrets Vote Over SNAP Benefits, Calls Him ‘Very Selfish’
MAGA Fan Relying on SNAP Benefits Desperately Regrets Her Trump Vote
I wonder if regret will put food on the table?
I have (checks notes), ZERO empathy for any of these people. In fact, I wish I knew how to reach them individually so I could call them and tell them to their faces what fucking idiots they are.
Yep. I’m an asshole.
Hypothesis:
In every national election in most countries, whatever the polls say and whatever the various policy positions and issues are, it all comes down to the Carville Maxim: “It’s the economy, stupid!”
Just about every election since 1980, and probably earlier, was won or lost depending largely on how the economy was doing and how people felt about it (that last is important).
At the same time, the middle class has been taking hit after hit for over 40 years, and the outlook remains bleak. This results largely in finding out groups to blame. For high income countries, this usually means immigrants, regardless of the facts.
The actual problem, I think, is that corporate tax rates are too low.
Why? Because taxation is mostly redistributive in modern western democracies (and in other types of government, too). When taxes are low or absent, money will flow to the rich. And that’s why seems to be happening now.
The big problem is corporate tax rates are low all over the world, especially in high income countries. With globalization, it’s not hard for large corporations, who operate in many countries, to shop around and choose where to pay corporate income taxes by shifting money around.
The net result is the rich keep accumulating wealth, while the middle class and the poor keep getting hit over and over.
Changing the tax rate in one country can be done. Changing it in all countries requires all of them to enter into a treaty, which would take years to hammer down and might not be enforceable even after it’s signed and ratified even by all of them.
So, it won’t be solved easily.
Yesterday’s Daily Show found Jon Stewart commenting on the suspension of SNAP at the same moment that Trump is simultaneously throwing a lavish “Great Gatsby” soirée with the theme “A Little Party Killed No One,” building a grand ballroom fit for Marie Antoinette, and tossing $20 billion USD to his pal running Argentina.
Stewart inveighted that “Trump no longer gives a f____ that he is seen as not giving a f____.”
The sad fact of the matter.
As a thread from yesteday might now be moribund, going to repost this.
Perhaps of little interest, and just my opinions, but for your interest/annoyance 😉
@wr:
Not only “yes”, but in many respects it may have benefitted them.
The LibDem main vote harvest at the last general election was at the expense of Conservatives, with “upper middle” centrists abandoning the Conservatives post Boris/Truss, still dubious of Labour, and scornful of Reform as pack of populist chancers and Brexiteer dimwits.
As many of such voters regarded Cameron as the last acceptable Conservative leader, LibDem association with him does them no harm.
Hence the LibDems picking up 64 seats in 2024, mostly at Conservative expense.
And came second in 91; mostly Conservative held.
Mostly again due to both Labour and Conservative “centrist” votes switching : Conservatives out of anger, Labour at hope of toppling Tories.
This is the current Conseervative dilemma: their base inclines to view the Reform challenge on the right as the key, and the answer either to move right or ally with Reform.
But in many respects the “Blue Heartland” vote is more imperilled by the LibDems then by Reform
Reform a challenger more in the old “lower middle class” Con/Lab contested seats, where the larger right wing Con vote peels off to Reform, and Reform populism also attracts some Labour and floating votes.
But the Labour position is also problematic: it can lose protest votes on the left to the Greens etc, and working class/lower middle class votes to Reform, at the same time as Conservatives also may collapse to a Reform challenge in such seats.
So both Conservatives and Labour are in dire peril of getting squeezed in two very diffrent types of constituency.
On lighter topics, I want to try to make milanesas in the air fryer.
There are two problems with this. One is milanesas tend to be huge. Two is my air fryer is a combo with the instant pot, so the frying surface isn’t large. One solution is to make chicken cordon bleu, which is essentially a rolled up milanesa with a filling. I estimate I can fit two, perhaps three, at a time. So, two to three batches all told.
As per my penchant to modify any dish beyond recognition, I’m leaning towards suing turkey hot dogs for the filling, along with cheese. On top, I think a kind of garlicky sauce with browned onions mixed in. I haven’t worked it out yet. I think something acidic, like mustard and tomato sauce with a little mayo.
@Kathy:
I still regard Windows 7 as the best WinOS.
The 8 onwards start menu behaviour, search modes etc are all incredibly annoying by comparion.
“No, I do NOT want to search the web, dammit! Neither do I wish to store all my files in the MS Cloud. Now bugger off!”
At least 11 runs smoothly, and is marginally less annoying, so long as you install an alternative file search, and set up access folders for the main app and files shortcuts.
Ballmer translated: “Apple is doing great. Apple has a hardware focus. Therefore …”
Missing the entire point that the advantage of Microsoft, when it plays it’s cards right, is a more customisable hardware/software propsition.
Trying to mimic Apple with a hardware focus and a “walled garden” of services is playing the wrong game.
Hence why Office 365, which is still trying deperately to lock in the “software and a rented/subscribed service ties to MS Cloud” model is so damnably annoying.
Not to mention Sharepoint.
🙁
@EddieInCA:
“Thusly I informed you.”
@JohnSF:
My home desktop PC came with Win7, one the last to be made thus. I used it for only a little while, as I upgraded to Win10 shortly after.
WINDOS was optimized for a touch interface, which makes zero sense with desktop usage (ergo, not a desktop OS). And taking away the start menu (nor the button, which was what Ballmer’s people thought people missed) made it the system less convenient to use.
I did try it. On display models at stores, at first. I installed it on a partition in an older laptop, and found it infuriating and annoying in about equal measure (and ran into the charms bar* often). I don’t want to go through the whole matter again. Suffice it to say I took part on the World War against Windows 8 and we were victorious.
As to 10 and 11, I’ve little to complain. I liked the jump lists, which didn’t make ti to Win11. I liked the live tiles, which were deactivated in a Win10 update, and Win11 doesn’t even have tiles. We use OneDrive at work for all files. I sue it at home to 1) auto save when I’m writing and 2) to back up everything else. At home, I run it only when I need it. At work, it sometimes gets annoying. Files take a long time to update sometimes, and lately you have to check the time stamp to make sure it saved the latest changes you made.
* I run into a lot of blank stares when I bring this up. It was a toolbar with things like settings, search, share, etc., that sprang up on the right side of the screen. When using a mouse, it appeared whenever the pointer approached the upper or lower right of the screen. You know, the upper right part of the screen where the big red X to close the window is. Right there.
I still have that old laptop. I should see if the WINDOS is still in it. I believe I exorcised it, but I replaced it soon after the announcement of Win10.
@Kathy:
Not to mention the massive gaming of the system via the use of offshore tax havens for sheltering both personal wealth and corporate profit.
Ironically, the most nominally “redistrubutive” tax system in the OECD right now is Ireland.
Which is because Ireland taxes corporations at such a low rate, it has numerous corporate HQ’s and “intellectual property holders”, relative to the size of the economy.
So, even at low corporation tax rates, it still harvests a massive amount relative to the basic taxes on Irish citizens (income tax, VAT etc).
@JohnSF:
As I understand it, multinationals funnel their profits to Ireland and pay the bulk of their taxes at the low, low rate.
But, you know, multinational corporations were around before globalization and they didn’t do such things, or not so such extent, as they do now. Something is different now.
@Kathy:
OneDrive seems to work fine, mostly.
SharePoint is rather more aggravating, due to its default to a an “enriched interface” ie web page paradigm. And its changes over iterations.
“Microsoft: making your life more interesting.” as the UK techie snark has been for decades.
At work we are currently engaged on an excercise to make the “Intranet”/Sharepoint more logically structured, and I’ve been drafted into the team, for my sins.
One annoying “gotcha” seems to be the SharePoint default for shortcuts to be http urls.
And also that its very easy for SharePoint to go past the 260 pathname character limit which OneDrive on a PC still uses unless switched to 400. Which not all have been.
And it seems in some cases the 400 char pathname in SharePoint can lead to a longer one in OneDrive, somehow or other.
Which is not a problem until you try do something with VBA with some files down at the bottom of the path, and then you get borked.
And now cue people saying: Why can’t we make all these files acccessible to AI and then we can search SO easily?
Me: “Can’t we just use sensible, logical, directory and file pathnames and be done with it? And avoid the possible security issues of having an AI gobble up all our copyrighted material and financial data?”
(You can tell I’m old school, lol: I still habitually use “directory” instead of “folder”, to the confusion of some colleagues.)
@Kathy:
Yup, that’s it re Irelnd.
And because Ireland is a relatively small economy, even at a very low rate, those corporates yield a LOT of revenue relative to the overall tax base.
And thus Ireland has a very high level of nominal redistribution; its an artefact of their being a tax haven.
@JohnSF: Your second paragraph basically covered my reaction albeit with far fewer profanities than I used.
Windows 10 is where the real enshitification of windows began. At it’s bones windows 10 is a superior OS to win 7 (win 8.1 was also superior to 7). The issue is that 10 is when all the spying and pushing of online MS services began in earnest. Win 11 cranks all the monetization of you and your data to an 8. I can only imagine how bad win 12 is going to be.
Remember when win 10 was going to be the forever windows? LoL..
Win 8 provided key improvements in performance that were noticeable in gaming and CAD/rendering applications. Sure the loss of the conventional start button was annoying. The 8.1 patch fixed the misguided focus on a touch screen which made me happy. The start button fix was appreciated but I was already using a modified start button.
Win 12 will see the continued push to spy on everything and sell the data. I also expect MS to push harder on the subscription service aspect for more programs. Wouldn’t even be surprised if they start setting common features behind a subscription. Just look at what MS is doing to Xbox live right now. Blatant greed that is so bad it’s causing a mass exodus of the game pass service. I’m just glad they didn’t remove notepad when they removed wordpad.
For gaming the SteamOS or ArchOS with proton works great for windows based games. The only issue is if you’re playing a game that has kernal level anti-cheat. I’m against kernal level anti-cheat because there’s just too many ways that can go wrong. What makes it worse is that the cheaters are still getting around those kernal level anti-cheats.
I was originally planning to go with win 10 LTSC on my main machine. Leaning more towards to going with tiny 11 at this point though.
This is the kind of thing you expect to read on April 1st: Data centers in SPAAAAAACE!
I’ll omit what I feel are obvious criticisms and jump to the end: how much will it cost to fix an outage when you need to send astronauts to make repairs?
@Kathy: Great even more space junk floating around creating hazards..
I can’t even find any information on how they plan to cool those space data centers. Everything focuses on the power usage side while ignoring that power = heat.
@becca:
Even though Adolf and Goebbels did a professional job in conflating “communist” and “Jewish” within the minds of the German people, the German Nazis were primarily anti-communist. So many of the memoirs of German officers reflect on their initial puzzlement over the US joining WW2 on Russia’s side. They had heard so much about the growing Nazi movement within the US. Filled Madison Square Garden to standing-room only, it had.
As that little girl in the movie put it:“They’re baaaaaak.”
@JohnSF:
I understood some of that.
The directory for our work files is labelled Sharepoint, but it appears in the file explorer same as all other stuff on Onedrive and the PC drive. No web needed. Of course, at home I can, and sometimes need to, access it on the web. That’s annoying, and slow. If I’m going to work on a file at home (which is rare), I take it on a flash drive.
Far more often I download files from government portals. these I email to various interested recipients.
@Matt:
My big issue with Win8 and 8.1 was not the lack of a start button, but a start menu.
I pin absolutely nothing to my taskbar. Not.One.Thing. I use the taskbar to do work. The various tabs are separated for easy identification. Often I need 2 word files and two or three excel files open at a time*, and I can’t peer at miniatures on a pinned icon to guess which one I want.
So, a start menu where I can easily run any additional program I need is essential.
My current laptop came with Win8.1 (poor thing). I solved that with a $5 utility called Start8, which vanished the “modern” interface to the underworld from which it spawned, and restored a start menu. And I upgraded to Win10 as soon as it was available.
The data mining would take place regardless of OS.
WINDOS was so bad, I actually experimented with Linux distros on several laptop partitions. I relented only when utilities like Start8 came out, and gave up when Win10** was announced.
I do recall MS’s claim that would be the “last ever version of Windows ever.” I didn’t believe it.
*along with two or three browser windows, Lookout (or is it Outlook?), file explorer, and now and then other things.
**I argued at the time it should have been named Windows AE (Apology Edition)
@Matt:
The main reason I went for Win11 on my new self-build aka “The Beast” is because Steam stopped supporting Win7.
And also, I wanted a system that could run music DAW software (Bitwig; plus VCV Rack plus Arturia stuff plus Native Instruments).
So, Win11 it had to be, really.
I’m against kernel level anti-cheat, because if it wasn’t for cheating a bit, I’d have given up Elden Ring months ago. lol
But I do have a rule: I do NOT use cheats in multi-player, EVER.
Which is why every teenage x-box player scalps me for breakfast whenever I try multi-player modes. (Annoying little sods that they are. 😉 )
ER is really a bit of a bastard using keyboard and mouse; going to have to buy a X-box style controller at some point soon, I think.
Skyrim was much more forgiving in that respect: mouse, keyboard, and I’m merrily sniping draugr death overlords from almost a mile away. lol
@Matt:
That’s one of the obvious criticisms I skipped.
Water is note exactly abundant at 400 km above the surface. Vacuum does not absorb heat. Not to mention while being hit by sunlight, they will heat up on account of that.
I hope they have thought this through, and won’t launch very expensive satellites on very expensive rocket, only to find they’ll become inoperative after an hour of operation.
@Kathy:
Yes.
You can create shortcuts from SharePoint in OneDrive that then behave just like OneDrive/FileExplorer paths with (praise heavens!) tree view and other file explorer details view.
But first: colleagues “Why do it that way? Isn’t the web view better for …”
And second: the pathnames can still behave a bit oddly if you want to use VBA in Excel to crunch some stuff.
That’s not terminal in our case: you can just move it to a working directory that, umm, works.
But its still bloody annoying.
@Kathy:
“We’ll do it on the back side of the Moon, and they’ll never know”
😉
If you actually wanted data centres in space, the Moon rather than orbit might be better.
But I’d have thought just putting them on the surfaces of the planet, where you can handily cool and service them, and using sateliites as relays might be a better still.
But what do I know?
@JohnSF:
I don’t quite comprehend that.
The pathnames can be too long. something like onedrive/companynametoolong/documentsandfilesofrsomereason/directory 2025/evaluation/governmentagencya/filename (finally!)
then the file has embedded files in it, and when you try to open them the path and name is too long for something or other and they won’t open. I have to copy the original file to the hard drive and extract them there, then copy them to the cloud.
@JohnSF:
Oh, I know this one!
The Moon is below the horizon for a considerable time each day, which requires satellite relays. Add the unconscionably long 2 whole seconds light speed lag for the trip to the Moon and back, and the delay in generating a legal brief with imaginary cases is intolerable!
Oh, and the added cost of lifting stuff to the Moon and landing it softly.
Speaking of insane ideas for space, El Taco has renominated Isaacman to head NASA.
I guess the check cleared.
@Kathy:
See this.
Eseentially its to do with what you said: the pathnames can be too long.
And Excel VBA still seems to be unable to cope with pathnames over 260 char.
As I say, its not (for us) a catastrophe.
We don’t need to run such stuff as a matter of routine, so can just shift the files to a local working directory.
But it’s nonetheless annoying that MS did not seem to anticipate that people might want to run VBA on SharePoint files that cause it to throw its toys out of the pram.
@Kathy:
“Ah, but soon quantum entanglement … yadda, yadda.”
😉
@JohnSF:
Oh, in that case, put them on the poles or Mars an use the heat to melt the icecaps and flood the planet 😀
@Bill Jempty:
You get your results yet dude?
Apparently I (probably) don’t have prostate cancer. I also, as a bonus, don’t have an infected root canal. But best of all, my urologist PA thinks I look like a young 71. I thanked her and gave credit to the fact that I have never, at any time, done anything to take care of myself.
@Kathy:
You’re thinking too small!
Put them in Neptune (or perhaps Uranus?) and use the waste heat to fire off ice comets into the inner solar system to terraform Mars, Venus, Mercury and the Moon!
And others outbound to the Oort Cloud for interstellar adventures!
You know it makes sense! 😉
@JohnSF:
That would at least make LLMs good for something. 😉
Every single county in Virginia shifted blue. Some far more than others, yes. But still. This is…unusual.
ETA: LOL. Dems are allegedly nearing supermajority status in the VA House of Delegates.
@JohnSF: I just finally got around to playing skyrim for real. I’ve had the game since the original version back in 2015 or something. Furthest I got was barely whiterun with some kind of stealth archer build. I am terrible at aiming with an xbox controller and I find the mouse/keyboard controls to be awkward (the response feels off compared to regular PC games). So this time I went full melee dual wielding figuring it’s hard to miss when the enemy is in your face aaand I still miss a ton. That’s when I decided to get some atronach action going on to make up for my aim issues. My aim is getting better and there are moments when I do legit badass things but then other times I can’t hit a npc that’s standing still. Oh well my 2x flame thralls and frost thrall usually hit. If nothing else J’zargo has good aim with his spell spam.
I have no idea what my archer build was because the SE version overwrote my OG install some time ago. So I decided to embrace the new start by going with some mods. CBBBE, USSEP, Apocalypse, ordinator, SKYUI, Skyland AIO. Game looks great and the UI mod really helped. The unofficial patch does make a few changes that I’m not stoked about such as removing the fortify loop or changing AEla to heavy armor. Nothing that makes it worth avoiding the patch when compared to the wealth of fixes.
I put over 70 hours into Fallout New Vegas and I’ve yet to even see new vegas in the distance. Too busy cleaning up all the junk people left lying around in the wasteland..
@Bill Jempty:
I believe that this is how Mitt Romney made his fortune at Bain Capital.
Buy companies, strip various assets, sell the company. Rinse, repeat.