There is no perfect way to avoid fruitless effort, but a number of steps can be done to minimize them, including understanding of defining principles for how something functions.

I feel like it's a set of traits that seems tailored to fit a very narrow mold. Favoring optimism over pessimism, for example, is problematic. This is especially true if, in practice, what is emphasized is simply being optimistic, as opposed to the more specific traits mentioned, like being able to continue after failure and realize potential opportunities.

Nuclear warfare and a society with that kind of tech would leave behind much more than civilization we've found so far, and India is the second most populous country in the world by a rather large margin, which would make it harder to hide something there than the Amazon. Also, in order for them to develop the kind of technology to have a nuclear state, they would need to have had advanced farming, and would have had to have had a bigger population than the rest of the world combined at that time to have the manpower to have developed such things. Occam's razor is screaming that this is just a bullshit theory that's been made up.

If the makers are claiming 75% and nobody is trained against these kinds of polygraphs, they probably won't be a bit different in the real world any further than 5 years from now.

Of course economic plausibility is tied to economics, and if the economics change, so does the plausibility. If fuel gets cheap enough and piloting these things is automatic, the price difference could be minimal, thus making them much more practical.

Nuclear war that destroyed a civilization would probably leave some kind of trace, as would a civilization that advanced. The burden of proof would lie with those making such an outrageous claim.

http://www.kanyetothe.com/foru... Appears to be an example to the contrary, with a pretty noticeable difference of a fairly recent release, and I know a number of digital remasters have a lot of that going on, with The Stooges' Raw Power being one of the most egregious examples.

There are no technical advantages to vinyl, but assuming an album was mastered completely analog, it would be less susceptible to being fucked up by a producer trying to maximize loudness, as well as other effects of overproduction.

But then, most small businesses fail pretty quickly.

And that's precisely the advantage. It's an environment that is quick to cull out those that are managed poorly. TBTF businesses obviously aren't subject to the same kind of pressure, so incredibly bad habits can remain, especially if the government backs them when they fail. Centralization of wealth leads to the "all of your eggs in one basket" problem, which is obviously a very unsound strategy.

And we benefit greatly if wealth is hoarded by people who are great at making investment decisions.

Well there's your problem. Nobody is great at making investment decisions. White noise is a better and more stable investor than any strategy, and a large number of small businesses would bear a stronger resemblance to white noise than a concentrated power structure.

I wasn't advocating anything other than aspiring to a state where we lack a need for a government. I also pointed out that jumping straight to L/F would have problems because the evil fuckers have had the scales tilted in their favor for so long that the system would be imbalanced to a point where repair would be a slow process if it even happened. If we are going to jump to L/F right now, we would have to offset it considerably. For example, take 90% of the net worth of the top 1% and 50% of the top 5% and redistribute it. Until that point, suddenly going L/F is not going to have any chance of closely modeling a free market. Get off you libertarian witch hunt and actually read what posts are saying instead of trying to pin someone down to an ideology so you can pull out your irrelevant talking points.

You yourself are making some pretty ridiculous assumptions. You seem to be assuming that leadership can be perfectly competent, and that a single, unified piece of clockwork can run everything. The problem is that humans are often incompetent and always have a limited perspective. We also get tired and make mistakes. If our economy is overly structured, the flaws of humanity are compounded throughout the structure. KISS is an engineering principle for a reason.

Yes, a number of people are obscenely rich. Not because of how much they have, that's not a problem. If we had the means to do so and physics didn't get in the way, it would ideal to have every person on this planet be so wealthy that Bill Gates would look like a pauper. The problem is that the obscenely rich have used trade barriers, business regulation, other legislation, and just plain brute force to take from the general public to obtain those riches. While I am a big proponent of a society that no longer has a need for government, government has already created a huge mess, and has done so for millennia. That means that even if the free market economics stuff is right on, we still have to compensate for generation of evil fuckers in power first.

Except the changes here aren't primarily genetic, and no, evolution has not always preferred big families. Big families are a good way to get over carrying capacity, which can result in everybody dying. In fact, some species are capable of performing abortions if offspring would be a nuisance at this point.

If we don't have jobs because there's no more productive work to do, then we could, at least theoretically, live lives of leisure and self-improvement. For the remainder of jobs that do need human labor, we might adjsut schedules to that having something like George Jetson's 'grueling' 1 hour a day, 2 days a week job is the norm.