Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, September 24, 2023
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41 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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What a load of horseshit. Conform to what? His standards? Texas’ standards? As far as I can tell from who is sitting in the Texas AG office, they have no standards.
The vast majority of NFTs are now worthless, new report shows
Consider my Freude to be thoroughly schadened.
And moving from the outrageous to the outrageous and gobsmacking:
The story continues:
(Degree to which heartbreak may occur could vary from constituent to constituent.) And finally:
OOOOH kay. [grimacing, grated teeth emoji]
But the Huff Post article following does show that she has learned from the experience:
Hmmm… I thought that the word that describes her actions started with “h,” but maybe “eccentric” is a synonym in this case. (I also wonder after the “he is a private citizen, and, you know…” statement who is blowing off whom, but I should probably seek to take the higher road here.)
@OzarkHillbilly: That “the vast majority of NFT are now worthless” isn’t all that surprising. Collectibles–especially virtual ones–have always been a spotty investment. I’m wondering whether to try to sell my dad’s Churchill Commemorative Medalion collection on the market or whether they will be more valuable sold a scrap silver. The same goes for my mom’s bag of highly tarnished silver pre-decimalized coins she
hoardedcollected on her last trip to N Ireland before decimalized currency came in.In other news of freudes being thoroughly schadened:
@Just nutha ignint cracker: No it’s not, they were worthless when these gullible marks were buying them up. Even still my Fruede remains thoroughly schadened because now they have to look at themselves in the mirror and wonder wtf they were thinking.
Tho I’ll bet you donuts to dollars at least half of them are saying, “Just you wait. It’ll turn around and then you’ll all see what a genius move it was for me.”
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Well that deserves some attention. I don’t think that destroying government property on the way out the door is legal.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I was just reading how she was forced to leave DC because of the threats she was facing after her testimpny. Not that I get any enjoyment out of her troubles but I couldn’t help thinking, what was she expecting from the Face Eating Leopards Party?
@Jen: I think that’s called “obstruction of justice”.
@OzarkHillbilly: On the other hand, she put the thought you had aside and testified all the same.
More courage than either her boss or his.
@OzarkHillbilly: NFTs were the new Beanie Babies.
And still are.
@just nutha: My hat is definitely off to her, it couldn’t have been easy. And I do hope she can someday live a normal life again.
@OzarkHillbilly: I saw a picture that was reported as this young man’s hair. I would call his hair braids, not dreadlocks. I suppose they may have been based in small dreads, but they were definitely braided and all above his ears, even though they would have been at least shoulder length if down. It’s important to me because dreads have an entirely different connotation to me than braids. Whatever his hair was, it was very intentionally managed and kept well out of his face and off his collar. If discipline is what you want, his grooming screams discipline.
The headline of the day- Tigst Assefa shatters the women’s marathon world record by more than 2 minutes
@OzarkHillbilly:..Conform to what? His standards? Texas’ standards?
Superintendent Greg Poole’s Texas white man standards?
@OzarkHillbilly:
Guess what? What a small town school superintendent believes is legal is irrelevant.
@OzarkHillbilly: Yesterday in a different thread, James Joyner posted this:
I’m going to take a little time out before possibly responding to that.
@Scott: Well it certainly isn’t racist. I expect the policy bans dreadlocks without regard to race, creed, or color.
In light of the reaction to David Brooks’ $78 “joke”, I’ll add /s.
Harking back to James’ post a few days ago about the press, WAPO has a headline today,
An early paragraph reads,
In fairness, most of the article is fairly good, but as I commented at WAPO, Milley wan’t at odds with Trump because Trump was a Republican, but because Trump is, in Rex Tillerson’s word, a moron.
@Joe:
Well sure, but you can’t have black children deciding how they will exercise discipline over their own lives. It’s unnatural.
@Mister Bluster:
Well duh! What other standard can their be? (See above)
And following up my follow up @gVOR10: to James’ post, the adjacent headline at WAPO reads,
Another in their series of “in breaking news, Biden is old” stories. I believe James has commented that polls this early serve only as excuses for running stories. Are they ever going to run a story headlined, “Trump faces criticism for being a narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopath who attempted a stupid plot to overturn his election defeat”?
@gVOR10:
“Red Wave 2022!!!11!!”
Maybe the Butlerian Jihad is the answer after all.
AI-generated naked child images shock Spanish town of Almendralejo
@gVOR10: I have a digital subscription to WAPO which I will not renew. It’s repetitive, has more clickbait than Google and is just dull. Anyone have any suggestions to a decent on-line news outlet. I’m thinking Al-Jazeera or the Guardian.
One very obvious thing about nuclear that gets kind of overlooked, is how much less fuel mass a reactor requires to “burn” in order to achieve the same power production as a coal or oil fired plant. Maybe it’s because reactors are still huge, and the fuel rods look big as they are often encased in other metal alloys, etc.
I bring this up because we keep approaching practical fusion (and we have been for fifty years, I know).
A coal burning plant requires tons of fuel. A fission plant requires hundreds of kilograms. A fusion plant, if we ever build one, requires grams. Seriously. A multi megaton H bomb requires several kilos of plutonium to set off the fusion of 5-10 grams of tritium. This is because we keep going up the energy ladder, and more mass gets turned into energy.
So what?
Well, the nuclear age also saw the synthesis of new elements, typically heavier than those fund in nature (but others as well). This is achieved either by splitting heavy nuclei apart, or by getting atoms to absorb neutrons. thus we can make plutonium, for example, by exposing thorium to the neutron flux in a fission reactor. IN fact, a breeder fission reactor can this way make more fuel than it consumes*.
One aspect of fusion, though, is we can make light and heavy elements by fusing nuclei together. We get visions of large fusion reactors making, for example, helium and lithium.
This is absolutely possible. In principle, we could fuse progressively heavier nuclei and make any element we want. Gold, for example, or platinum, or palladium, etc.
What gets overlooked, see three days ago at the top of this comment, is how much less fuel a fusion reactor uses. We’re talking of grams of deuterium and hydrogen to make fewer grams of helium (the rest of the mass becomes energy). We’ll never get to make tons of helium, much less lithium or gold or titanium, because we’ll never fuse tons of hydrogen isotopes to begin with.
Also, when you get to iron, fusion uses up all the energy produced to synthesize that nucleus. This means elements heavier than iron would require additional energy. So you’d need far, far far more hydrogen isotopes to make energy to make heavier elements.
So, in theory we can at last, as the old alchemists dreamed, transmuta base elements into gold, or other more valuable materials. But it would be very very expensive to do so. TL;DR, we’ll likely never develop industrial scale transmutation of heavy elements, and possibly not light elements either. We’ll still depend on the free energy from supernovae and colliding neutron stars to get such elements, even though that takes millions of years.
You can’t have everything.
*Don’t worry, all conservation laws are observed.
@Mr. Prosser: Most mornings I read WAPO and NYT, then I read The Guardian to catch up on the news.
@gVOR10:
Well, I know I’m not holding my breath waiting for that story.
@Tony W:
No, Beanie Babies were really cute toys. When the bubble faded, you still have a nice toy, suitable for children or sitting on your desk (the anteater has been helping me debug software for a quarter of a century) or being dragged around by cats (my one cat always stole the anteater — the anteater outlived her)
An NFT was always nothing. It was a bet against anything on the internet being there forever.
The underlying value of a Beanie Baby was $6 or whatever. And that’s $6 greater than the NFT.
@OzarkHillbilly:
It’s Barber Hill. Of course they are going to be wanting people to get their hair cut. They’re in the pocket of Big Barber, and they’re not even hiding it — it’s right there, in the name.
@Tony W:
Nah, Beanie Babies have actual cute value. More like Pet Rocks.
@Kathy:
As pointed out by a recent xkcd comic, essentially all of the gold in the universe was created via r-process nucleosynthesis when binary neutron stars finally collapse. Even supernovas can’t quite manage it. It’s going to be a looooong time before we can recreate those conditions in a contained environment, much less harness the results.
The Florida headline of the day- Miami Dolphins defeat Denver Broncos 70-20 in their first home game of season
Miami had a chance to break the all-time NFL record for points in a game, 72 by the 1966 Washington Redskins, but opted to fall on the football in the last minute of the game rather than attempt about a 45-yard field goal.
@Mr. Prosser: Do you want to be informed about what is happening in the world, or what the “responsible” wealthy and powerful believe is happening? I’m not sure the Guardian and al Jazeera really do the former, but WaPo is definitely the latter.
One has far more impact on your life. It is probably not the one you are hoping for.
@gVOR10: To be fair, I think the term Tillerson used was “fucking moron”
@SenyorDave: It’s hard to believe that the least qualified cabinet member of the initial Trump administration turned out to be the best.
I think he actually achieved the exalted status known as “borderline mediocre, slightly better than an empty chair.”
@Gustopher: He was also a legitimately accomplished person who didn’t seem like a suck-up from day one. I guess I have a soft spot in my heart for Tillerson, if nothing else he seemed like a straight shooter.
@gVOR10: @Gustopher: I want to know what’s going on with a bit of honest perspective. I’m tired of paying WAPO to find out how many ways to make goat cheese salad and reading how old Biden is. I think I’ll stick with Kevin Drum and the Guardian.
@Tony W:
As long as Melania’s and Donald’s NFTs are worthless.
@DrDaveT:
Well, here and there we’ve found ways to do things differently than nature and get similar results. Like using vapor deposition rather than massive pressure to make diamonds (which does require a diamond as a seed). So maybe we can find different ways to make gold, ones not involving neutron stars.
But if we do, it will be massively expensive.
It would be gold worth several times its weight in gold 😉
@Bill Jempty:
I’m wondering when I fell into a parallel universe where the Dolphins are the sole undefeated AFC team 3 weeks into the season.
@Mr. Prosser: the salad I ate for dinner really needed goat cheese.
Arugula and Spinach blend, cucumbers, tomatoes, a dressing of oil, vinegar, Dijon, dill and pepper, and then some smoked salmon on top. A little goat cheese would have been perfect — like cream cheese and lox on a bagel, but goatier.