Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, May 5, 2026
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24 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).
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Snow has started here on the north end of the Colorado urban corridor. Forecast calls for 4-8 inches (10-20 cm) down here, as much as 24 inches ( 60 cm) up in the high country. The moisture is welcome, but won’t break the drought. This snowfall is largely on the east side of the Continental Divide and will do nothing for the Colorado River crisis.
California, Nevada, and Arizona appear to have reached a one-year emergency agreement where each takes only 60% of their legal allotment from the river. No progress on a long-term restructuring of the Colorado River Compact; the upper-basin and lower-basin states are at an impasse over the foundation for any changes.
Still on pace for the generators at the Glenn Canyon Dam to be shut down around August. That’s ~1.3 GW of capacity. I don’t know what Trump’s Dept of Energy might order in response. The big regional coal burners were retired years ago and torn down.
We’re #1!
Texas leads nation in utility shutoffs as electric bills rise, federal report finds
Well, cry me a river:
A few months ago these two kidlit authors decided to fly their two dogs to Portugal on Bark Air at around 10 grand per dog – because Pugs can’t travel in baggage like normal dogs. And now, thanks to an increasingly likely lack of jet fuel, these two geniuses are worried that come July, Bark Air will be grounded and the dogs marooned in Portugal. Possibly along with the authors themselves – who are limited by the 90 day Schengen rule.
Fuckin’ dumbasses.
Long think piece I think worth reading.
The Illusion of Sovereignty: How International Law and Big Tech are Eroding the State
Basically, describes how international law is lacking in the age of digital warfare and how private international tech corporations are beyond boundaries and sovereignty in this day and age.
@Michael Reynolds:
What we do for our dogs!
In 1964, my dad was transferred to Buenos Aires for work. We took our two mutts (half beagle, half basset) with us. Crated up and put in baggage. Flew first class on Panagra from New York to Quito to Buenos Aires (about 12 hours). We were in coat and tie. Gagged when they tried to serve us kids caviar. Our dogs must have been put in a kennel after that because we stayed for about a month in the Hotel Continental (shades of Eloise at the Plaza) before moving to our house in the northern suburbs.
Moved back to NY two years later with same dogs.
Todays’ marks five years since I got the first mRNA COVID vaccine shot.
@Scott:
BTW, this is entirely my wife’s fault. She had picked out a nice, normal, small dog online. Went into the Humane Society and came out with a Pug. Despite the fact we’d already had a Pug and knew it would be a pain in the ass. Of course I’m not dumb/brave enough to say that to her.
@Michael Reynolds: I find it confounding that we have so many international travel restrictions on animals (pets, food animals, etc.) while 8 Billion nasty, disease carrying humans wander the world pretty much unrestricted.
@Scott:
Well, it’s unlikely dogs will catch most human diseases 😉
The Circle K and Huck’s that I drive by every day and were both charging $4.999/gal for unleaded regular recently are both charging $4.799/gal today.
Trump is right. Gasoline prices are falling and the war is over!
Wait…What?
@Scott:
It’s gotten worse. Back in 2008 we moved to Italy with a Labrador and a Pug and no one GAF except the German customs at Frankfurt (where we flew in) who insisted that they did not have a certain form, and therefore the dogs could not possible have been allowed into the country. This as we were literally looking at the dogs. Germans. So I said to them, “Hey, remember the whole Hitler thing?” At which point they surrendered.
Patrick Wyman has a new book out, called Lost Worlds.
I began to follow him years ago, when he did a podcast on the fall of the Roman empire. Later he switched to a thematic podcast, largely on medieval history. It was good, but unfortunately it lost out to other podcasts and audiobooks I was more interested in. I still look at his substack now and then.
This new book sounds interesting. It covers 10,000 years (give or take) between the end of the last glaciation period until the Bronze Age. I should know better than to get into another tome thick with archaeology and short on records, which I find hard to get through, but I’ll give it a try.
Besides, there’s an audiobook version.
@Michael Cain: Here on the western side of the bump we might get a smattering of rain tonight while you get your snow. The flow in the Colorado right now in Junction looks like the August flow. There is enough irrigation for the fruits, vines and the Olathe Sweet Sweet Corn to start but if the monsoons don’t come in July and August there won’t be water to finish off the produce for picking. There will be no sweet sweet corn for the grocery chains this year only local purchase. Oh, and to top it all off there are now Zebra Mussels in the main stem of the river from Dotsero to Lake Powell. Good Times.
The Trump admin is investigating Smith College for admitting trans women as students.
Also, they want 1 billion from the taxpayers to ramp up security in Trump’s ballroom. Gee, I thought that was being subsidized by private donations.
@Scott: Ok, I’m reading this piece, and it’s good. There’s this:
I am extremely skeptical about the Administration’s narrative on this. I note that Anthropic is a competitor – a very successful one – to AI efforts funded by Thiel and Andreesen. I consider that FUD could easily be a driver here. The framing in the piece, though, makes out Anthropic – which the US DoD knowingly signed a contract with – as the bad actor.
That paragraph is definitely murky.
@Jay L. Gischer:
How do you judge success in a market that hasn’t produced much? Number of users? Gigawatts of compute? Size of data centers? Number of dangerous AI Agents?
I learned a few things today I hadn’t realized about Hell Week. Some papers we needed were produced using AI. A few of them were wrong, but the persons who made them didn’t check them. In one case, they didn’t even read the result.
I did follow up on a project we’d decided not to take part in. A participant was disqualified for using AI generated photos for their production, warehousing, and loading facilities. How did they know? the photos had the Gemini marker in the corner. It’s a grave offense to submit false documents in a proposal. The company can be prevented from submitting proposals or making any contracts with federal agencies for anywhere from 3 months to five years, along with a hefty fine.
Now, I saw the images as uploaded by the agency in their adjudication papers. they look like commonplace, average facilities. I know this participant has such facilities, so why fake photos at all? Most likely these were photos of their facilities, enhanced or cleaned up using AI. Stuff like changing the lighting, or removing employees to better show the facilities.
I’m not sure what LLMs do qualifies as artificial intelligence. I am sure a lot of people employ genuine stupidity when using LLMs
Last year I had Copilot make up phony HACCP certificates. These were obviously fake (like one issued to Starfleet, LLC by the Klingon Certification Unit), and came with a few obvious errors. The latter might have been intentional, as the bot told me it could do them only as samples or to illustrate what a HACCP certification looks like. But they’d have been easy to fix in photo editing software, or even using a different LLM. I wonder not if any participants have used phony certificates, but how many and how often.
Is anyone as sick of hearing about the Met Gala as I am?
@CSK: Not as sick as I am of the constant coverage about The Devil Wears Prada 2.
@Kathy: I’ve read a fair bit about that incident. It isn’t good, but it also isn’t disqualifying, in my mind.
In my career, I have seen multiple incidents where the humans deleted important data/code. One such incident set a large organization – maybe 300 engineers – back 2 weeks or so. No AI was necessary to do that.
Right now, Claude is the category killer. It’s the one all the cool kids are using. Which means everyone else is gunning for them.
I resist black-and-white pronouncements on AI. Neither all good nor all bad. I think it will be useful in programming. AND it is dangerous. Of course, Unix is dangerous. Just a few characters typed into the command line can really mess things up. Any really powerful tool is also really dangerous. So caution is advised, and some folks aren’t showing that caution.
@Kathy: Thanks for the heads up on Lost Worlds. With all the new genetic information available, the rock art and cave art discoveries in Asia and our relatives discovered in Tibet, China and Siberia it should be an interesting read.
@Mr. Prosser:
Yes, that’s very tiresome. So is the brouhaha between 2 people named Baldoni and Lively.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I cited the incident you’re referring to a few days ago. Today I linked to the Claude Mythos bot, which is alleged to be able to find and exploit all vulnerabilities in all systems.
My main problem with LLMs is that I’ve found little use for them, aside from frivolous uses like playing dress-up with images of myself*. Sometimes they’re good at obtaining specific info from a website, and they’re decent at summarizing short documents.
I hear of other uses now and then, but nothing convincing. I also see a lot of comparisons with the PC revolution of the 80s. I recall a lot of ink spilled in the pages of TIME about PCs at the time, all of which I read at work where I sat in front of a PC all day long 😀
All the serious uses I’ve tried require long, sustained, deep checking of the LLM output. Maybe I’m atypical this way, but I find it harder to check someone else’s work in detail, than to do the work myself.
Take a regular technical proposal for a food program. The main task is to copy and paste the very long descriptions of each product (plus stuff like nutritional info, limits on contaminants, type of packaging, and lots more). The big issue is to keep the format more or less intact (lots of tables and lists per product), and to fix it where it’s not.
I’ve tried LLMs for this, and they can’t do it. They mess up the letterhead, the formats, they add info now and then for some reason, they skip portions. fixing all that took a lot longer than copying and pasting myself, even on badly formatted files that required doing it page by page (only 100+ pages for most projects).
Now, a manager or supervisor will check my work. this is simpler, because copying and pasting between Word documents is accurate and reliable. They don’t have to check every word, just make sure all paragraphs and tables are there. Most corrections involve stuff I add, like product brand names, allowed changes, and other small things.
And this is eating up billions of dollars every week, increasing pollution, using up fresh water, increasing electricity rates, raising the price of RAM, using up graphics cards, and very very likely inflating a huge bubble.
* It’s fun, but not very useful. While it more or less keeps my facial features intact, it tends to change my body shape. No way I’d look that good in real life.
I’ve nothing against fun. But if the old 80286 PCs had been good only for playing Zork and Lode Runner, they’d never have evolved into the essential business toll they have been for the last forty years.
@Mr. Prosser:
You’re welcome. I moved it to the next spot on my reading list already, before even downloading it.
The Circle K and Huck’s that I noted earlier today had lowered the price of gas are now back up to
$4.999/gal.