Political Whores posted:

What exactly is an excellent technical understanding of fairy tales?

China Mieville posted:

Libertarianism is not a ruling-class theory. It may be indulged, certainly, for the useful ideas it can throw up, and its prophets have at times influenced dominant ideologies–witness the cack-handed depredations of the “Chicago Boys” in Chile after Allende’s bloody overthrow. But untempered by the realpolitik of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the anti-statism of “pure” libertarianism is worse than useless to the ruling class.

Big capital will support tax-lowering measures, of course, but it does not need to piss and moan about taxes with the tedious relentlessness of the libertarian. Big capital, with its ranks of accountant-Houdinis, just gets on with not paying it. And why hate a state that pays so well? Big capital is big, after all, not only because of the generous contracts its state obligingly hands it, but because of the gun-ships with which its state opens up markets for it.

Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.

Kim Stanley Robinson posted:

Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you have to argue point by point. Especially since the minimalists want to keep the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

Curvature of Earth posted:

Somfin posted:

Getting a job in the actual industry of computers and getting my hands dirty with actual code broke a bunch of old myths I had about how code and coding worked. The first one being any concept of "goes FOOM." Computers and programs have to deal with very physical limits on how powerful/fast/optimised they can actually get and the bottlenecks that exist for concepts like 'long term memory' or 'recall' are so massive that you just end up laughing at the idea of simulating a living, breathing human.