vaxjedi | Rant on

There is the rants page on Zompist.com. The first one is about Hitchhiker's Guide, and I generally like it (even if I don't agree with all of his points in terms of the lowpoints of the film). However, there are some other thought provoking rants on here. Makes me think that I haven't been paying enough attention to the world around me. Or reading enough.

Here is a semi-random smattering of quotes:

"moral relativism" is propaganda; it's the invention of people who don't understand and don't want to understand that people can disagree on morality. Differing moralities consider each other immoral. Why is this hard to understand? It's not that liberals or Marxists (these are, please note, two different creatures) want to erase moral distinctions. They are absolutely brimming with moral judgments of their own. They simply don't agree with some of the moral judgments of conservatives.

Frankly, I think there's only one solution to the impasse in the Middle East: make the Palestinians rich. People who can see their lives improving can be generous to former enemies. More desperation and poverty will only impel the Palestinians to more bad choices.

We all have a vision of living in big isolated house on acres of woods because, I suspect, it's in our genes: we're primates, and we feel most comfortable in a savannah. But for minimal intrusion on the environment, there's nothing like cities. They take up less space; they allow us to walk to places; they're dense enough that things like recycling and public transit become realistic options.

To be precise, Cooper sees that the ultimate problem is that managers think of programming as operations-- an area where cost savings are all-important. But really programming is more like capital investment. You don't save, in the long run, by building cheapo factories and providing shoddy tools. Having just escaped from a department which tried to run its programming like a factory, I definitely see his point.