Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, May 21, 2021
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96 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a 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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Republicans meddling in the labor market:
While other markets are locking up: The World Economy Is Suddenly Running Low on Everything
I can’t speak for everything butI know lumber has been sky high since soon after the pandemic began due to several factors including sawmills cutting back production in anticipation of an expected decline in construction that never materialized, to trump’s tarriffs on Canadian lumber.
I’m sure this is the fault of all those slackers sitting at home when they should be working too.
@OzarkHillbilly: I see it up close at work. Some mattresses are now taking 3-4 weeks to get to the customer. Some furniture, like Southern Motion recliners, are taking over 6 months.
http://www.nypost.com/2021/05/21/donald-trump-to-hold-rallies-in-florida-georgia-ohio-and-north-carolina/
Whoopie.
Right-wing media helped usher in the age of “cancel culture,” but now pretend it’s an invention of the left
She’s gonna go far:
@OzarkHillbilly: I had read the earlier story about that and thought it was lucky that he had slime on him; knowing that was intentional–wow, what a kid.
On another topic entirely, I hope that these fines stick. $52K sounds right for screwing up a flight.
Katie Porter Literally Eviscerates Pharma Exec With Her Whiteboard, Now It’s A Redboard
@OzarkHillbilly: If you go read that piece at Bloomberg you will read a lot of fear mongering over inflation. Which after all these years of near zero inflation it is not surprising I guess. The piece does note,
and then it returns to fear mongering, going on and on about all the various things that are constrained for many disparate reasons. It’s a bit overwrought.
@Jen: Fine nothing, that asshole had better get a significant all expenses paid stay at the Graybar Hotel:
He was out of control. I can see scenarios where that plane could have ended up in the drink.
I wonder if this will be trend:
Employers caught in the crossfire of the vaccine debate
In the wake of the Colonial Pipeline hacking and disruption it was widely reported that — (ahem) — unknown actors had disrupted the hacker. Just found this suggesting that reporting was true: From the BBC: Hackers Bail Out Irish Health Service for Free.
http://www.bbc.com/news/northern_ireland
For those not on social media and who are into punk, I give you the Linda Lindas (who, among other things, show that they rock harder in their teens (and preteens) than most of us have over the entirety of our lives):
https://www.bandwagon.asia/articles/youth-punk-band-the-linda-lindas-turns-encounter-with-racism-into-viral-song-racist-sexist-boy-los-angeles-moxie-film-covid-19-2021
I gotta pass this on:
One minute, that’s all it took.
The Arizona Secretary of State has suggested that Maricopa County may have to replace all of the voting equipment they had to turn over to the Cyber Ninjas. The price tag for that would be about $6M. I previously assumed the equipment would have to be recertified in order to meet federal requirements, but not replaced.
@Scott:
We just articulated a similar policy in my office. In addition, vaccinated people may remain unmasked and and are not required to get their temps checked. So far, no big push back, though a few fellow owners (unvaccinated) are grumbling.
@Michael Cain: I just read an article on WaPo about that (link).
I hadn’t thought about it before, but she’s right: once those machines left custody of the state of Arizona, they became potentially compromised. This is the key/alarming paragraph:
That is insane. Absolutely crazy, that no observers were permitted to stay with the machines–they are compromised, and must be replaced.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I am very aware of this. Our team just got updated on the outlook. Some parts might get here by August. Planning and Sales are putting off new installations for months, and repairs–which used to be in and out in under 2 weeks–are now taking months.
And this really sucks because we’ve got record orders… which we’re having difficulty filling. Engineering is at the point of re-designing some units using whatever chips they can find that work.
@Mu Yixiao: I would guess you are speaking of microchips, which are in short supply largely due to one of those disparate reasons. From the article:
There’s a link buried in the article that goes in depth into that issue, but I’m not burning another of my limited free Bloomberg articles on it. 🙁 If i were a rich man…
@OzarkHillbilly:
These trains travel at high speeds, and there’s just one engineer aboard? What’s to prevent an accident if the engineer is incapacitated in some way?
Now and then the Aviation Herald reports a pilot incapacitated mid-flight, from illness say. This is serious, but not very dangerous*. There is a second pilot who can take over and land the plane at the nearest airport. One would think a high speed train would have two engineers aboard for the same reason.
*If no issues with the aircraft develop, and if the weather is not too bad.
Feature, not a bug. Something tells me the cost of new machines will be wholly born by Maricopa County. Something else tells me Maricopa Co. can’t afford the $6M cost of replacing all of them. A 3rd thing tells me that Maricopa Co. will have fewer voting machines in 2022 and 2024, which a 4th thing tells me will have the very sad effect of longer lines for voting.
Which a 5th thing tells me will inevitably result in fewer votes cast in Maricopa Co. Amazing, isn’t it?
@Kathy: The article notes that there is a conductor on board trained to take over in emergencies, but it involves a mandated stop at the next station. The driver was trying to avoid that stop.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Microchips, LEDs, power supplies, wire, and even foam for packaging. And those are just the things that I know about.
@Mu Yixiao: They mention a small family owned manufacturer of crib mattresses that is having a really hard time getting polyurethane foam.
Jeebus:
@OzarkHillbilly: Apparently the AZ Senate signed an agreement that ‘the Senate would cover costs for the county to replace or recertify equipment that was “damaged, altered, or otherwise compromised” while in the “Senate‘s custody and control.”’
via TPM
I had an odd dream yesterday.
I dreamt it was Wednesday May 19th, and I was heading out to get the second Pfizer dose. I thought it was too soon, having only been two weeks since the first. Someone, I don’t know who, asked me, “So what? You’re not getting the second dose?” I replied something about waiting a week and then going to San Antonio for the second.
Really weird. I don’t recall ever dreaming specific dates before.
@Jen: “On another topic entirely, I hope that these fines stick”
I think the great lesson that asshole Trumpies took from his reign is that you are allowed to do whatever you want whenever you want and there are absolutely no repercussions whatsoever — at least if you are a white Republican. These harsh fines might start working as a corrective to that…
@Jon: Damn. Well, there went that theory, of course, when it turns out the state doesn’t have the money to fully replace the machines… 🙂
@OzarkHillbilly: We’ll just send them the machines from this *other* Democratic county ….
@Kathy:
It’s the microchips from the first dose.
@Jon: Yeah, that’s the ticket!
@Michael Reynolds:
Really? Well, the graphics were not that good. I’m terribly disappointed.
@Kathy: Has anyone analyzed the difference in chip technology between the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines?
@Scott:
Hm. If Pfizer’s puts dates in dreams, Moderna’s must advertise Lightspeed Briefs.
@Michael Cain:
Could the machines be returned to the manufacturer to be rebuilt & refurbished, then subsequently recertified?
OTOH, that might actually cost more than buying new replacements (as the manufacturer may not be set up to rebuild/restore.
The AZ Senate has made fools of themselves.
@Scott: @Kathy:
I feel so left out. I got the J&J vaccine.
@Michael Cain:
We know that the Cyber Ninjas have had the machines in their unsupervised possession for some time. We know that GOPs are obsessed with the idea that the voting machines somehow flip or create votes. And we know that everything GOPs say is projection. So why would anyone worry? Although I think the SoS concern is the more technical and realistic one that they may not be able to recertify the machines with the chain of custody so badly broken.
When the Cyber Ninjas are sued for the cost of recertification or replacement, I expect their defense will center on the fact that all these machines do is count paper ballots which are available for hand recount, so they can’t possibly be modifies to change an election. They will fail to see the irony.
@Scott:
They all use the same Bill Gates supplied chip. The real conspiracy is that the globalist deep state has created a chip shortage by diverting all chip production to what Gates wants for all the hundreds of millions of shots.
@gVOR08:
I think you’ve hit on the correct answer.
@CSK:
But… that means you got the life-extending blood of slaughtered babies. You should feel lucky!
@Mu Yixiao:
Yes, but I miss the ultra-high speed internet.
@CSK: You don’t need to feel left out; you got the dead babies vaccine. Remember? Plenty of opprobrium to go around.
@CSK: I got the Pfizer vaccine. The download speed isn’t really much faster than for my desktop with Xfinity service. The whackos have REALLY OVERSOLD the utility of the vaccine chip. 🙁 (Or maybe it was a typical Gates/Allen overpromise.)
@just nutha:
I run Linux. I’m pissed about the lack of compatible drivers. I can’t get a connection at all.
ROFLMAO!!!! Never underestimate the power of “little kid questions”. 😛
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/21/bus-hijacking-kindergartners-south-carolina/
@just nutha:
I suppose I can take pride in being more hated than you chip-implant people. You all are just slaves to Gates. I, on the other hand, am actively evil.
@Jax: Such a serious issue, but wow, what an outcome.
Anyone who has spent time around the Smaller Set can tell you, the never-ending questioning can be BRUTAL.
@Jax:
A cynic believes, that the perp must have been white since he isn’t dead.
Glad the kids and driver were unharmed.
@Sleeping Dog:
Apparently he was Hispanic, at least by his photo and name: Jovan Collazo. He was described as “desperate to get home” in the Army Times.
He’s facing some heavy charges.
Yrump supporter challenger to Cheney impregnated 14 year old girl when he was 28
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/554730-cheney-primary-challenger-impregnated-14-year-old-when-he-was-18
@Doug Mataconis:
Obviously, he doesn’t see a problem and in fact he’s a victim of opposition research. Besides, the girl killed herself, so she had problems that he had nothing to do with. The Trumpkins and the religious right won’t see this as a problem either.
What’s truly amazing about some of these people is that they appear to have no guilt or remorse.
@Doug Mataconis: fake news!
@Doug Mataconis:
Are we sure GOP doesn’t stand for Grand Old Pervert?
@Doug Mataconis:
Eighteen, not twenty-eight. There’s a considerable difference.
Otherwise, I’d say Bourchard is giving Roy Moore some competition.
@Teve:..(from yesterday)…Starbucks became a sonic hell,..
A brand new Starbucks in a brand new stand alone building opened here recently. (The other two ‘bucks in town are inside Barnes and Noble and Kroger and I rarely visit them.) Just in case I develop whatever aversion it is that you have for Panera Swill I need to know what to look out for. How will I know when I have descended into Starbuck’s sonic hell?
COVID numbers are rather unreliable, both as regards cases and deaths. This is even worse in countries, like Mexico, where most tests are diagnostic and even then not administered to all people sick with COVID.
Taking the global numbers as the standard, though it’s highly unlikely these are accurate, and taking excess deaths in Mexico into account as well, and assuming the death rate here isn’t far higher than elsewhere, to get approx. 320,000 deaths, we must have had over 17 million cases.
Assuming a death rate 50% over the global average, then it’s 10.2 million cases. The number at the Johns Hopkins tracker is 2.4 million.
I must be making some mistake, because I can’t believe 5 to nine times as many cases as reported would go unnoticed and unremarked.
Covid on the Run
The pandemic may now be in permanent retreat in the U.S.
The piece is by David Leonhardt, whose journalism, I’ve come to respect over the years.
He goes on to site additional statistics and to point out that future outbreaks will likely be regional.
Hopeful.
@Mister Bluster: go sit in the Starbucks for 10 minutes. If, during that time, you hear more than 7 high-pitched, screeching alarms, you’re in Starbucks Sonic Hell. Same reason I can’t sit in Mcdonald’s.
That as been obvious for some time now. Still, they don’t seem to care.
@Doug Mataconis:
Ewwwwwww…
Ick…..
Reminds me of guys in PC at the Home for Wayward Boys.
Ugh
@Jax:
Not a good week. First suffers the Basic Training Breakdown, then the Are We There Yets?
Probably looking forward to a nice quiet cell somewhere…
“Because I said so.” always ended it for me.
Marjorie “Jewish Space Lasers” Taylor Greene and Matt “The Younger the Better” Gaetz will be holding an America First rally in Mesa, AZ this evening.
I knew you’d all be excited to read that.
Not here, and not in many other red state areas. As the saying goes, don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
@Teve:..high-pitched, screeching alarms,..
I must admit that the only time I have heard an alarm on a coffee vat was in the local Huck’s convenience store recently. The store clerk said it was time to brew more.
The two local McDonald’s have shut their indoor dining and have been drive through only for more than a year now. I guess I always thought their alarms sounded so the fries wouldn’t burn.
When I visited the new Starbucks it was open to order inside but indoor seating was not yet available. Health Department something something they said.
To be honest much like screaming infants are music to my ears as it is something my failing ears can actually hear I am not bothered by alarms much.
@Teve:
I thought you meant something different.
For me, depending on my mood, a sonic hell would be any place noisier than a busy office. In a bad mood, noisier than a library.
@Doug Mataconis: The Hill’s story doesn’t seem to mention what I thought would be an important detail. What happened to the child? Who got custody? Did he at least pay support? Am I to assume that in his Facebook Video he failed to mention these little details? Family Values. And of course they were living in Florida at the time.
@Kathy: Traffic noise is my sonic hell.
@Sleeping Dog: @OzarkHillbilly:
Guess which regions.
@gVOR08:
Bouchard said that he raised the boy after his mother’s suicide, but that the son has made some bad choices. Bouchard didn’t specify what those choices were.
@gVOR08: The Casper Star Tribune had a more in depth report….he did raise the child, but it appears they are now essentially estranged because of “life choices”, something something….so I don’t know if the kid’s a druggie, gay, or a Democrat, but he made a wise choice if he’s not talking to his Dad anymore. His antics in the state legislature show up on my Facebook news feed way more than I’d like.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’ve never met anyone who likes traffic sounds.
I’ve lived and worked at places with little traffic. When driving, there ins’t much choice. If I wore earplugs, I couldn’t listen to my audiobook 😉
@CSK: Florida was obviously not sending it’s best people when they sent Bouchard. 😛
@CSK:
The child cannot be more than 10. What bad choices has he had time to make?
@Joe:
The son’s mother committed suicide in 1990 at age 20, so the son would be in his thirties.
@Mu Yixiao: That’s all part of the conspiracy. You have to run MS compatible hardware and software to get the advantages. Surely, you didn’t expect Gates to just give stuff to people even if it’s mostly like malware in performance and goals.
@CSK: Yes, exactly! And keeping an optimistic outlook is better for your health and happiness, too!
@Doug Mataconis: Only a problem depending on how secular Wyoming is. Current evangelical thought places Mary at 14 when the angel made the Annunciation.
@just nutha:
One takes one’s pride where one must.
@Scott: DOH!
@Jax:
one could ask Wyoming Republicans whether they want to be known as Florida’s dumping ground.
@Kathy: At my level of deafness there are noises I can ignore that others can’t, and vice versa. The constant drone of traffic wears on my nerves like few other things can. In a loud bar I just turn off my hearing (I don’t have hearing aides, I turn off that part of my brain) but loud live music can drive me away. A vacuum cleaner? Fingernails on a chalkboard.
@Kathy:
For people who live in metropolitan areas, it can be a sort of “white noise”. There’s a great little bit in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil where John Cusack’s character can’t sleep–so he plays a tape of NYC traffic noise.
When I first saw that movie, I’d never been to a big city except Chicago, and I’d never slept there. But I instantly understood the “familiar sounds” idea.
Tangential: My parents used to have a small cottage on a man-made lake (a hydro-electric dam was installed early in the 1900s). All the land where our cottage stood was originally owned by one family. The heir became a Catholic priest. He kept a big chunk of land in the middle of the U-shaped road.
The last I heard, the building on that land was a retreat for clergy. When Father V was alive, however, it was a summer camp for kids from Chicago. It was called the “I Get the Window Club”. Father V would drive a old school bus down to Chicago on Saturday (I think) and pick up a load of kids. The key was that each session allowed only as many kids as there were window seats on the bus. Every one of them got a window seat.
These were poor, inner-city kids. And as they got out of the city, through the suburbs, and into rural Wisconsin, the kids were amazed. And, on the first night, when he took them outside to look at the sky? Most of them ran back inside in fear. They had never seen stars. He took them to the small public access where they took out canoes, and were encouraged to swim. In a lake. With fish and stuff. Again, the kids were freaked out.
By the end of the week, they didn’t want to go home.
@Mu Yixiao:
I vaguely recall a Mike Hammer ep where Hammer says he couldn’t sleep with all that peace and quiet banging in his ears.
I can sleep with lights on, even outdoors at noon. I can’t sleep with noise, even if not loud. The other day a TV at a neighboring apartment was on very loud*. I could hear just enough to recognize human speech, but not make out more than occasional words, so not that loud where I was. I still had to fish out some foam earplugs before I could fall asleep.
I have to be dead tired to sleep when there’s noise.
That said, a constant noise, even loud, can become background noise for me in a short while. When on an airplane, say, the sound of the engines goes background quickly.
I still need earplugs if I want to sleep on a plane, because people talking nearby, or the flight attendant call DING! going off, wake me up.
*As judged by the fact I could hear it at all. Usually I hear not a whisper from the surrounding apartments.
@Kathy:..I’ve never met anyone who likes traffic sounds.
Every other summer my family drove from Rochester NY where I was born to Danville IL where my mom and dad were from for a two week vacation. The earliest trips that I remember were in our ’52 Stuedebaker before my brother was born in 1953 so I was maybe 4 years old. We would stop for the night at whatever roadside inn had a vacancy sign lit. Well before the interstates and toll roads were built a long stretch of the ride was US Route 20 through New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. I remember the motels being not far from the road and the rooms were not air conditioned so the windows would be open all night. It was mostly trucks and some cars running down the highway and the drone of the traffic would put me to sleep.
Years later as I traveled across the country working in the landline telephone industry I spent alot of time in towns and villages that were far enough from the interstates that they still had older motels on two lane roads that reminded me a lot of the places we stayed at back in the ’50s. The hum of the traffic at night would take me back to those family vacations as I nodded off.
Calling the EDIT key.
ETA…It worked!
@OzarkHillbilly:
here.
When the trump pandemic finally ends (not this year), there should be a commission that looks at what measures worked to contain the spread of SaRS-CoV-2, which didn’t, and what can be improved in the future. As I’ve said like many seven trillion times before, there will be another pandemic eventually. We’d best be prepared for it.
IMO, the biggest early misstep was the failure to recommend masks as the first line of defense against viral spread. Whether this was because health authorities wanted to prevent a run on them that would have meant shortages for healthcare personnel, or because they used the wrong lower limit for airborne transmission of 5 microns, doesn’t really matter.
Respiratory diseases may not go airborne every time, or even most of the time (and this seems true of COVID as well), but they do some of the time. We also can look at the big epidemics in the past 300 years or so, and see that most of them were transmitted either by droplets or were airborne. Think smallpox, flu, polio, SARS.
Most diseases don’t transmit presymptomatically or asymptomatically, but some do. COVID does. It simply makes sense to go with masks, distancing, quarantine, and otherwise limiting person-to-person contact early on.
We’ve learned this at the cost of millions of lives, overwhelmed hospitals, untold suffering and grief, and a really bad recession. It was a very expensive lesson, and we’d best not need to learn it again in ten years or fifteen years or five years.
@Mister Bluster:
Nostalgia can do funny things to a person.
Anyway, my definition of “meet” does stipulate “in person.” I, therefore, stand by my initial assertion, though I can add I know people who like traffic noises.
@Kathy:
I see your point, but I think it does matter. If they didn’t want people to use scarce resources, didn’t have the resources to spare, it would have been better to just say that and cut right to “how to make a mask that will protect you” right from the get go. (If they couldn’t cut right to there because we needed Japanese and Koreans to show us how to do it, that’s a “whole notha’ story,” as the saying goes.) My suspicion has always been that they recommended against masking primarily because of the supply problem and in fact, remember reading an article that specifically said that there weren’t enough masks for hospitals but that was okay because y’all don’t really need them. I also suspect that they knew that was a lie when they said it but didn’t want to panic the public.s
Now certainly the more conservative among us (I’m going to refrain from naming names) were going to reply “oh sure, the government didn’t prepare and is expecting us to risk our lives so some nurse in a clinic can have as many masks as she wants,” but those
d-baguys were always going to say that anyway no matter what. The big point is that you can’t maintain credibility if you lie. Even when your intent is good. Just say what the truth (to the degree that you understand it) is and leave it at that.@Mu Yixiao: @Kathy: Mu tickled my memory bone. One of my cousins married a guy who grew up under/over the EL tracks in Chicago. When they moved to the suburbs of Peoria, he was unable to sleep for months.
JFC on a grilled cheese, we need to stop letting these people run the show! Ammon Bundy has no more business running to be Governor of the great State of Idaho than he did his cattle ranch.
Couldn’t help but notice he got his paperwork all wrong (eyeroll).
https://idahocapitalsun.com/briefs/ammon-bundy-takes-first-step-toward-running-for-idaho-governor/
Nothing to see here, move along…
(William B. Davis stands in the corner and smokes.)