Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, June 2, 2026
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15 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.
(NYC) Executive Order done right.
JFC. Trump has named Bill Pulte, the housing guy who runs the FHFA, as the acting DNI.
Pardon me whilst I crawl under my desk and weep.
On a lighter note, imagine an alien civilization that has mastered interstellar exploration thus:
Max speeds of 0.05-0.07 c, or around 15,000 to 21,000 kilometers per second.
Temporal stasis field (see Nieven and Vinge) that stops the passage of time during travel.
Explorers who know and accept they won’t ever return home.
Resupply capability when they find any planetary system
Ok, so suppose their very big ship carries a crew of 20-30 beings, perhaps of different species (they may even pick up natives when they find intelligent life). They also have a landing craft to explore planets up close.
Now, would it make sense to have the whole crew in the lander while the mothership is left moored to a trojan asteroid. Why because all of them want to see and experience the new planets. the ship is under the care of a competent AI (suuuuuuuuure!). When the mission’s over, the crew returns, or summons the ship
We made it! First wake-up in my new house! Cats, horses and people all arrived relatively un-traumatized.
The air…..it’s so full of oxygen! Big difference between 7,000 ft in elevation and 500 or so.
Now….to unpack. And shop. I need curtains everywhere. 😉
I thought Obama had better taste than this.
@Jen:
He’ll not only be the DNI, he’ll continue as head of the FHFA AND as chair of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
I’ll join you under the desk, if I may.
@Jax:
So great to hear from you.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is selling $80 billion worth of stock to build more data centers.
I don’t think this is what will pop the bubble, but it may indicate there’s little appetite left among investors to fund further AI slop factories.
It may also be a novel stage of revolution. Instead of the revolution eating its children, it now eats itself.
Of course this sale has resulted in a lower share price for Alphabet/Google stock. I suppose this means it won’t bring in $80 billion.
The big AI IPOs are coming soon. What if XpaceS price drops like a stone on IPO day?
@Kathy:
Link to the above story
@CSK: There may be a very small pool of people capable of holding their noses long enough to kiss Trump’s behind that qualify for important jobs.
@Slugger:
I imagine that pool would be infinitesimal.
It’s been a very long time since I worked on campaigns, but this cannot be normal behavior…Republicans are so very, very WEIRD.
@Jen:
Think of all the Rambo Trump and Rambo Jesus images, these men are very insecure in their masculinity. It’s part of the reason they are so down on gays and trans women, they’re threatened. Deep down they fear that if they got drunk one night and had sex with a man or sex with a trans woman, they’d enjoy it.
I’ve been testing LLMs on a more stream of consciousness, conversational way.
They’re getting too verbose and too sycophantic. Not to mention too contradictory. Talking about exposition*, Copilot insisted the amount of exposition in Bester’s “The Stars My Destination” is unusual, and that SF fans are hypersensitive to exposition.
I countered by listing several classic novels chockfull of exposition, like The Caves of Steel, Brave New World, 2001, The End of Eternity, Ringworld, etc. The LLM then said exposition is essential in SF because blah blah blah.
They’re getting tedious to even chat casually for lack of anything better to do at work…
And I still have found little use for them.
*Exposition is a sore point with me. I often get told I use it too much. I picture angry mobs of villagers with torches and pitchforks and signs saying “SHOW! DON’T TELL!” coming after me.
Well, sometimes a couple of paragraphs of exposition get an essential idea out of the way, instad of five or six pages of description and dialogue to convey the same thing maybe 90% as clearly.
The Trump Era has made this kind of mentality mainstream politics (my emphasis):
It was inevitable that the overt politicisation of the courts would lead to political actors treating them as an inferior institution subject to political direction, to be defied if they refused.