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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Interesting piece over at Gizmodo on how Social Media sites could be better regulated with respect to misinformation, without bringing them crashing down. They don’t touch on the one thing I’ve wondered about for years: how is it that Section 230 still applies when social media companies use algorithms to actively promote false or misleading content? It’s one thing to say “we are essentially a bulletin board and we are not responsible for the content” but quite another for them to single out postings that generate the most revenue for them and actively push them on their users. But I’ve never heard of a lawsuit taking this tack so I assume there is something fundamentally wrong with it.
The WaPo has an interesting article (no subscription needed) on an unincorporated community outside of Scottsdale Arizona that has had their water supply cut off. It’s complex in its details but simple in its central points: this community has few zoning regulations and likes it that way, but years of unregulated growth means that the aquifer is so drained that even wells hundreds of feet deep no longer reach water. They want Scottsdale to bail them out.
What’s that saying? “There are no libertarians in a foxhole”? So these proudly independent folk who don’t need big government solutions and no doubt badmouth the big bad city on a daily basis and vote against anything that might benefit those leaches find out that if they want to build their McMansions in a desert, getting water from the dust is not really something a rugged individualist can do on their own.
@Jax: It happens every six months or so when the cert auto-renews. We haven’t been able to figure out why, although it’s a common glitch. It’s really frustrating, especially since there’s no good reason for a site that doesn’t handle financial transactions and the like to even require a cert. Google has essentially forced it on us, alas.
@Jax: @CSK: I rebooted the server at the hosting company. It seems to have fixed the issue. I happens every six months or so, when the cert renews, and I always forget what the hell the solution is.
I kind of didn’t pay much attention to the weekend’s wild card playoff games. I had them playing on the TV, but I was also catching up with the aviation blogs, and yesterday was quite eventful. A passenger plane crashed in Nepal, apparently while on approach. At JFK, there was a near miss when a Delta 737 aborted takeoff* as an American Airlines widebody encroached on the runway. Plus there was much fallout from the recent Southwest disaster.
So while it seemed the Chargers had won the game halfway through the first quarter, it turned out Jason Mendoza should be happy today. Then the Bills seemed to be walking all over the Dolphins, and suddenly the Dolphins briefly held the lead.
That’w what football looks like when you’re not watching the games, but rather just catching up periodically.
*The current usage is “rejected takeoff.” This sounds ridiculous to me. It’s as though the pilots are given the option to take off, and decide to do something else instead. IMO, aborted takeoff better captures the feeling that takeoff was in progress, but had to be stopped for some very important reason.
I don’t think they’re certificate errors, but I get a white screen that says the anti spam bot program is running a few times a week before the website shows up. [confused emoji]
@MarkedMan: This happens often out here in the SW. The first question is why would anyone buy a home with no well (and a groundwater level too far down to be practical to drill one) or water system? They rely on water tanker trucks filling up their tanks every few months. Where I live in Colorado people build on a parcel, put up a Gadsden flag and drive to town to fill their tanks in the back of their pickups.
Lots of areas in the SW are pulling water out of aquifers faster than it can be replenished. In about 15 years, large areas are going to become uninhabitable because there will be no water
The first time that I saw a white screen a few weeks ago it vanished so quickly all I caught was something about anti spam and “don’t close this page for 30 (?) seconds” and it was gone long before 30 seconds had passed. This was on my MacBook Air when I was using MickeyD’s wifi connection. I saw it there again a time or two and it stayed on longer and I could almost read the whole thing before it vanished. Then I saw it once at Panera. As fast as I try to read what it says I couldn’t repeat it accurately.
Just the other night it popped up on my new iPhone SE. On the Verizon Cell network.
It always vanishes before I can read the whole thing and the next screen I see is
what I was looking for.
@Stormy Dragon: Holy Smokes! I was about to reply that I had read somewhere that Phoenix had sunk by 2 feet because of water pumping and then stopped myself because 2 feet sounded kind of absurd. So I looked it up and there are parts of Phoenix that subsided much more than that. According to this piece from the Arizona State University newsletter, one section sunk 18 feet from 1957 to 1992.
And, sorry Kathy:
Disturbing news came out of Mexico City over the past few weeks. In some places the megalopolis is sinking as much as a foot and a half annually. Some areas could sink as far as 65 feet in the next 150 years
@MarkedMan: I am very familiar with the Rio Verde area. My parents are in a community not too far from that (on a different water supply/system, thank goodness). That was a sobering piece to read.
@Kathy: Every drop of surface water in the West is over-allocated. The water in the lake belongs to someone else, and they are almost certainly not interested in selling. Not to mention that the lake’s not potable, so someone has to pay for the treatment.
I’ve no idea how these terms get chosen, but they do become standard, and often a worldwide standard.
Some are ridiculously sanitized. Like “controlled flight into terrain,” or even “uncontrolled flight into terrain,” both mean “the plane crashed.”
The former may sound like an emergency landing outside of an airport. It only means the plane was under control when it met the ground, or more usually the side of a mountain.
@Kathy: I have a feeling that @Mister Bluster: is correct. Any use of “aborted” rankles some. It reminds me of a Facebook post I once read about baking bread, which noted that you can retard the dough by placing it in the fridge for a few hours, allowing you to bake on your schedule. The comments devolved into a fight about the inappropriateness of using the word “retard”.
I get it on rejected-aborted. Those two things mean exactly the same thing. But there is a world of difference between the pilot flying plane into the ground as opposed to losing control of it.
Random question: How many of you have a touchscreen on your computer? For those who do, do you ever use it?
I have a Mac at home, so no touch screen. At work I have a PC and there is no touch screen on that, but a few years ago my work PC did have a touch screen but I never used it. Given that nowadays I have 3 additional monitors attached to my PC, I can’t imagine there would be any use for a touch screen at all.
@Beth: Not just lawyers, engineers too. Laymen refer to “bugs” but an engineer has a whole hierarchy that dictate how they are handled. Is it a mistake in a system or process that resulted in a conflict with the design, or was it an error of design? If it was an error of design was that a mistake itself, i.e. the designer intended to specify one thing and mistakenly specified another, or is it an error of understanding, in which the designer misunderstood what the user or system required? Each of these different types of “bugs” has a different remediation, but to the user these are immaterial.
All the way back in 2012, my first hint of trouble regarding Ballmer’s Folly (aka Win8) was the mention of touch screens as necessary for the new version of the OS.
I thought that was the stupidest idea in connection with desktop or laptop computers. You do the work on the keyboard, with some assistance from the mouse now and then. The screen is not within easy reach, unlike the mouse. You have to extend your arm(s) a fair distance, or even lean towards the screen. Not to mention that leaving finger streaks all over the screen is not a good idea (I have to clean my phone screen several times per day).
A display monitor, like in a mall directory or an information kiosk, might make good use of a touch screen. But not a working machine.
Having said all that, my home desktop PC, a Win7 native, has a touch screen. I’ve never touched the screen once, nor felt the need.
@MarkedMan: The only situation where I see the touch screen as an advantage–aside from not having a keyboard and mouse–is that it provides a shift from fine motor control (using the mouse for example) to gross motor control. If I had touch screens when I teach, taking roll and other things would be significantly easier because my tremor makes putting the little tiny cursor into the only slightly larger box (after I’ve scrolled up to 175% or more) much easier. The process I use frequently now is to steer the mouse with both hands, use the left to hold the right in place, and finally click the mouse button. I usually get it after the second try.
The worst is when someone is actually requesting a new feature, but keeps referring to it as a “bug” to create the impression that the development team was some how at fault for not providing functionality that was never requested by anyone previously.
@Kathy: I claim no expertise on FAA bureaucratese, but I suspect it has to do with the controller ordering the abort, in effect withdrawing clearance for take off, rather than it being a pilot decision.
@Kathy: From James Fallows, a journalist, blogger and small aircraft pilot:
Delta pilot; Rejecting. [That is all he says, using the aviation lingo to confirm that he is cutting the power and aborting the takeoff. If he had wanted to say instead that it was too late to comply, he would have said “Unable.”
@Beth: Not just lawyers, engineers too. Laymen refer to “bugs” but an engineer has a whole hierarchy that dictate how they are handled
Not just lawyers or engineers, scientists (in my case entomologist), too. Laypeople refer to “bugs”, but entomologist have a whole hierarchy (family tree) that identifies the creature.
Also, snakes, etc are not poisonous. They are venomous.
I’m not entirely clear how far ATC can order commercial pilots around.
There are many situations where conditions are suboptimal, to be charitable, yet the airport’s open. When that happens, if there are no obstacles on the runway, landing or takeoff are usually at the pilots’ discretion.
@BugManDan: Ha! Finally, some details on BugManDan! I’ve always wondered if you were actually an insect guy, or a guy who specializes in listening in on people! 😛 (In my defense, I always imagined MarkedMan as a guy covered in tattoos.)
What kind of bugs do you specialize in? I have some very dear friends who come out every year to hunt for specific bugs (skippers, mostly) on the ranch.
I always imagined MarkedMan as a guy covered in tattoos
Hah! No tattoos for me. As I said to my kids, no matter how much I like a shirt I don’t want to commit to wearing it every day for the rest of my life, even when it has grown faded and misshapen.
Axios is reporting that New Mexico police have arrested a losing Republican candidate for state office for shooting at homes of Democratic officials. Seems he paid others to shoot up Democratic offices also. I can’t provide a link as I haven’t figured out how to do that on my new phone.
@MarkedMan: I know, it’s extra hilarious knowing that you’re a guy who specs and develops medical equipment for a living. I totally thought you had tattoos. 😛
@Mister Bluster: Big surprise, there. Nobody wants to talk about “domestic terrorists”, but that’s where we’re at.
@Beth: It’s a distinction that attributes blame, certainly, so your instincts are solid.
Like nearly all people are the NTSB is given to categorizing. Controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) is their catch-all for pilot errors of the navigational sort. Their goal is education though. The FAA’s job is enforcement. Both view CFIT as a category which calls for specific educational efforts, apart from those of aircraft certification, maintenance and simply losing control of the aircraft.
Keeping the NTSB out of enforcement is very wise IMO. It allows for a degree of freedom in their investigations from the meddling of prosecutors and lawyers.
Happy MLK day, everyone. Hope it’s a good day for you.
Interesting piece over at Gizmodo on how Social Media sites could be better regulated with respect to misinformation, without bringing them crashing down. They don’t touch on the one thing I’ve wondered about for years: how is it that Section 230 still applies when social media companies use algorithms to actively promote false or misleading content? It’s one thing to say “we are essentially a bulletin board and we are not responsible for the content” but quite another for them to single out postings that generate the most revenue for them and actively push them on their users. But I’ve never heard of a lawsuit taking this tack so I assume there is something fundamentally wrong with it.
Gina Lollobrigida, 95, has died.
The WaPo has an interesting article (no subscription needed) on an unincorporated community outside of Scottsdale Arizona that has had their water supply cut off. It’s complex in its details but simple in its central points: this community has few zoning regulations and likes it that way, but years of unregulated growth means that the aquifer is so drained that even wells hundreds of feet deep no longer reach water. They want Scottsdale to bail them out.
What’s that saying? “There are no libertarians in a foxhole”? So these proudly independent folk who don’t need big government solutions and no doubt badmouth the big bad city on a daily basis and vote against anything that might benefit those leaches find out that if they want to build their McMansions in a desert, getting water from the dust is not really something a rugged individualist can do on their own.
Anybody else getting certificate errors on OTB today?
@Jax: It happens every six months or so when the cert auto-renews. We haven’t been able to figure out why, although it’s a common glitch. It’s really frustrating, especially since there’s no good reason for a site that doesn’t handle financial transactions and the like to even require a cert. Google has essentially forced it on us, alas.
@Jax:
Same here. So annoying.
@Jax: @CSK: I rebooted the server at the hosting company. It seems to have fixed the issue. I happens every six months or so, when the cert renews, and I always forget what the hell the solution is.
@James Joyner:
If you can see this, it’s solved for me. I could browse the blog, but not post comments.
@James Joyner:
All’s well on my end. Thank you.
I kind of didn’t pay much attention to the weekend’s wild card playoff games. I had them playing on the TV, but I was also catching up with the aviation blogs, and yesterday was quite eventful. A passenger plane crashed in Nepal, apparently while on approach. At JFK, there was a near miss when a Delta 737 aborted takeoff* as an American Airlines widebody encroached on the runway. Plus there was much fallout from the recent Southwest disaster.
So while it seemed the Chargers had won the game halfway through the first quarter, it turned out Jason Mendoza should be happy today. Then the Bills seemed to be walking all over the Dolphins, and suddenly the Dolphins briefly held the lead.
That’w what football looks like when you’re not watching the games, but rather just catching up periodically.
*The current usage is “rejected takeoff.” This sounds ridiculous to me. It’s as though the pilots are given the option to take off, and decide to do something else instead. IMO, aborted takeoff better captures the feeling that takeoff was in progress, but had to be stopped for some very important reason.
I don’t think they’re certificate errors, but I get a white screen that says the anti spam bot program is running a few times a week before the website shows up. [confused emoji]
@Kathy:..rejected takeoff.
To abort anything these days is against the politics of some. This may be an example of sanitized language.
@MarkedMan: This happens often out here in the SW. The first question is why would anyone buy a home with no well (and a groundwater level too far down to be practical to drill one) or water system? They rely on water tanker trucks filling up their tanks every few months. Where I live in Colorado people build on a parcel, put up a Gadsden flag and drive to town to fill their tanks in the back of their pickups.
@MarkedMan:
Lots of areas in the SW are pulling water out of aquifers faster than it can be replenished. In about 15 years, large areas are going to become uninhabitable because there will be no water
@Mister Bluster:
Yeah, I thought of that. “Halted takeoff” might describe the procedure more accurately than “rejected takeoff.”
@Just nutha ignint cracker:..confused emoji
The first time that I saw a white screen a few weeks ago it vanished so quickly all I caught was something about anti spam and “don’t close this page for 30 (?) seconds” and it was gone long before 30 seconds had passed. This was on my MacBook Air when I was using MickeyD’s wifi connection. I saw it there again a time or two and it stayed on longer and I could almost read the whole thing before it vanished. Then I saw it once at Panera. As fast as I try to read what it says I couldn’t repeat it accurately.
Just the other night it popped up on my new iPhone SE. On the Verizon Cell network.
It always vanishes before I can read the whole thing and the next screen I see is
what I was looking for.
@CSK:..Halted takeoff…
There are always Puritans around who are opposed to halter tops so you better watch out!
@Stormy Dragon: Holy Smokes! I was about to reply that I had read somewhere that Phoenix had sunk by 2 feet because of water pumping and then stopped myself because 2 feet sounded kind of absurd. So I looked it up and there are parts of Phoenix that subsided much more than that. According to this piece from the Arizona State University newsletter, one section sunk 18 feet from 1957 to 1992.
And, sorry Kathy:
@MarkedMan:
That’s been going on for decades.
It is rather ridiculous a city built on a lake also needs to fetch water from very far away.
Kathy- I think those were caused by the vaccines.
Steve
@MarkedMan: I am very familiar with the Rio Verde area. My parents are in a community not too far from that (on a different water supply/system, thank goodness). That was a sobering piece to read.
@Kathy: Every drop of surface water in the West is over-allocated. The water in the lake belongs to someone else, and they are almost certainly not interested in selling. Not to mention that the lake’s not potable, so someone has to pay for the treatment.
@Mister Bluster:
@CSK:
I’ve no idea how these terms get chosen, but they do become standard, and often a worldwide standard.
Some are ridiculously sanitized. Like “controlled flight into terrain,” or even “uncontrolled flight into terrain,” both mean “the plane crashed.”
The former may sound like an emergency landing outside of an airport. It only means the plane was under control when it met the ground, or more usually the side of a mountain.
@Kathy: I have a feeling that @Mister Bluster: is correct. Any use of “aborted” rankles some. It reminds me of a Facebook post I once read about baking bread, which noted that you can retard the dough by placing it in the fridge for a few hours, allowing you to bake on your schedule. The comments devolved into a fight about the inappropriateness of using the word “retard”.
@Kathy:
I get it on rejected-aborted. Those two things mean exactly the same thing. But there is a world of difference between the pilot flying plane into the ground as opposed to losing control of it.
Random question: How many of you have a touchscreen on your computer? For those who do, do you ever use it?
I have a Mac at home, so no touch screen. At work I have a PC and there is no touch screen on that, but a few years ago my work PC did have a touch screen but I never used it. Given that nowadays I have 3 additional monitors attached to my PC, I can’t imagine there would be any use for a touch screen at all.
@Kathy:
This seems to be a lawyer distinction. The distinction is how to apportion liability after the fact. Yes the plane crashed, but how and why.
Reading those terms set my lawyer brain off.
@Jen:
Are we still allowed to refer to miscarriages as “spontaneous abortions,” which is technically the correct term.
@Beth: Not just lawyers, engineers too. Laymen refer to “bugs” but an engineer has a whole hierarchy that dictate how they are handled. Is it a mistake in a system or process that resulted in a conflict with the design, or was it an error of design? If it was an error of design was that a mistake itself, i.e. the designer intended to specify one thing and mistakenly specified another, or is it an error of understanding, in which the designer misunderstood what the user or system required? Each of these different types of “bugs” has a different remediation, but to the user these are immaterial.
@MarkedMan:
All the way back in 2012, my first hint of trouble regarding Ballmer’s Folly (aka Win8) was the mention of touch screens as necessary for the new version of the OS.
I thought that was the stupidest idea in connection with desktop or laptop computers. You do the work on the keyboard, with some assistance from the mouse now and then. The screen is not within easy reach, unlike the mouse. You have to extend your arm(s) a fair distance, or even lean towards the screen. Not to mention that leaving finger streaks all over the screen is not a good idea (I have to clean my phone screen several times per day).
A display monitor, like in a mall directory or an information kiosk, might make good use of a touch screen. But not a working machine.
Having said all that, my home desktop PC, a Win7 native, has a touch screen. I’ve never touched the screen once, nor felt the need.
@Beth:
I think it’s more of a bureaucratic thing. Like how a tax increase can be called a “temporary refund adjustment.”
@MarkedMan:
My Chromebook has a touch screen, but the only time I use it is in table mode. Using it like a laptop, I just use the touch pad.
@Sleeping Dog: What is “table mode”?
@MarkedMan: The only situation where I see the touch screen as an advantage–aside from not having a keyboard and mouse–is that it provides a shift from fine motor control (using the mouse for example) to gross motor control. If I had touch screens when I teach, taking roll and other things would be significantly easier because my tremor makes putting the little tiny cursor into the only slightly larger box (after I’ve scrolled up to 175% or more) much easier. The process I use frequently now is to steer the mouse with both hands, use the left to hold the right in place, and finally click the mouse button. I usually get it after the second try.
@MarkedMan:
The worst is when someone is actually requesting a new feature, but keeps referring to it as a “bug” to create the impression that the development team was some how at fault for not providing functionality that was never requested by anyone previously.
@Kathy: I claim no expertise on FAA bureaucratese, but I suspect it has to do with the controller ordering the abort, in effect withdrawing clearance for take off, rather than it being a pilot decision.
@Kathy: From James Fallows, a journalist, blogger and small aircraft pilot:
@MarkedMan:
That should have been tablet mode. The screen is hinged so that you can hold the the device like a book.
@MarkedMan:
Not just lawyers or engineers, scientists (in my case entomologist), too. Laypeople refer to “bugs”, but entomologist have a whole hierarchy (family tree) that identifies the creature.
Also, snakes, etc are not poisonous. They are venomous.
@gVOR08:
I’m not entirely clear how far ATC can order commercial pilots around.
There are many situations where conditions are suboptimal, to be charitable, yet the airport’s open. When that happens, if there are no obstacles on the runway, landing or takeoff are usually at the pilots’ discretion.
@BugManDan:
Rhabdophis keelback snakes, whose diet consists primarily of toxic toads and frogs, are both poisonous AND venomous.
@BugManDan: Ha! Finally, some details on BugManDan! I’ve always wondered if you were actually an insect guy, or a guy who specializes in listening in on people! 😛 (In my defense, I always imagined MarkedMan as a guy covered in tattoos.)
What kind of bugs do you specialize in? I have some very dear friends who come out every year to hunt for specific bugs (skippers, mostly) on the ranch.
@Jax:
Hah! No tattoos for me. As I said to my kids, no matter how much I like a shirt I don’t want to commit to wearing it every day for the rest of my life, even when it has grown faded and misshapen.
Axios is reporting that New Mexico police have arrested a losing Republican candidate for state office for shooting at homes of Democratic officials. Seems he paid others to shoot up Democratic offices also. I can’t provide a link as I haven’t figured out how to do that on my new phone.
Axios.com
@MarkedMan: I know, it’s extra hilarious knowing that you’re a guy who specs and develops medical equipment for a living. I totally thought you had tattoos. 😛
@Mister Bluster: Big surprise, there. Nobody wants to talk about “domestic terrorists”, but that’s where we’re at.
@Mister Bluster: Man, these Republicans, they’re not…..sending their best. 😐
https://www.abqjournal.com/2565117/solomon-pena-arrested-in-shootings-targeting-new-mexico-democratic-politicians-homes.html
@Mister Bluster:
I think if phones were as good as desktop PCS, they’d be desktop PCS.
Let’s see if this is the Axios link
Working way too late again…
@Jax:
@Kathy:
Thank you for the backup.
@Beth: It’s a distinction that attributes blame, certainly, so your instincts are solid.
Like nearly all people are the NTSB is given to categorizing. Controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) is their catch-all for pilot errors of the navigational sort. Their goal is education though. The FAA’s job is enforcement. Both view CFIT as a category which calls for specific educational efforts, apart from those of aircraft certification, maintenance and simply losing control of the aircraft.
Keeping the NTSB out of enforcement is very wise IMO. It allows for a degree of freedom in their investigations from the meddling of prosecutors and lawyers.
@Jax: I deal with mostly freshwater insects (and a few other aquatic inverts), and marine if the money is good enough.