Lately I've been ranting about writing a pamphlet or putting on a seminar, for computer programmers, titled "Planning For Clusterfuckery". The idea here is that our software typically has to live in a heterogeneous environment with other software, and any number of issues--bugs in our code, bugs in someone else's code, misconfiguration on your or someone else's part--can bring the whole system down. So, we need the attitude that something will go wrong, and that's a natural part of the process; we need to bring this attitude both into the development of our software, and into the usually-inevitable problem-solving and post-mortem processes of a major system screwup. Seriously. I've even started an outline.

Some of my friends are libertarians. Most of them aren't particularly enlightened or well-read libertarians, which pisses off the rest of us who probably would have been called "secular humanists" in the days when it was still okay to think that society should help those who cannot help themselves.