Month: December 2007
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Götterdämmerung Capitalism
When capitalism is working well, it unleases the creativity of everybody in society. Because capitalism specifically rewards people who do what other people want, and because it gives everybody the freedom to try and fail, the effect is that society as a whole gets steadily better at giving people what they want. Of course, that…
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C++ Threads
I went to a talk by Hans Boehm about threads in C++. He was mostly discussing the plans for the future C++0x standard. He said it was important to get threads right, even though they are hard to use correctly, because they would most likely be the base for any other multi-processing paradigm. That seems…
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Kim Stanley Robinson
I saw Kim Stanley Robinson speak today. He gave a good talk on climate change, which was of course the subject of this most recent trilogy of SF novels. He said a few things which I thought were interesting. He gave an interesting definition of ideology which unfortunately I don’t remember precisely. He said, quoting…
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Old Fogeys
It’s proverbial in our society that you get more conservative as you get older. I mean more conservative in the traditional sense of wanting things to stay the same: this should not be confused with some platforms of the Republican party, which seeks radical changes in various areas (government reduction, government support for religious institutions,…
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Israel and Palestine and Annapolis
It’s nice to see the Bush administration doing another quick flyby of Israel and Palestine. Getting them to agree to end the conflict, and getting the rest of the Middle East to feel that the Palestinians were treated fairly, would make us far safer than even the best possible invasion of Iraq could ever have…