It'd be helpful if you could actually state what you believe Piketty's flawed assumptions are.

we tend to call it paper-scissors-rock, so...

New Zealand free?!?! We're living in oligarch's wet dream here! Unions destroyed years ago, privatised public services, low tax rates, corporate media, sedated population, low wages, no tax on capital gains the list goes on and on. Australia has one huge advantage over NZ, you've still got strong unions. Therefore you've got: 1. better pay 2. employees who are at least exposed to how industrial relations are supposed to work. Over here people just take what they're given because they've been told for over 30 years that they're worthless and so people actually believe it.

Then in what sense is the matter universe an 'optimal' solution? ie what was causing that particular solution to be picked out from the others? If you say that all solutions are just as likely then it still is an anthropic principle of sorts because the universe would have been quite different if one of the others had been picked?

Isn't that just a restating of the anthropic principle?

Yeah except your hunter-gather society doesn't scale up to billions of people. Those economies were contingent on much higher levels of trust which was possible because it was much smaller groups of people where most people knew each other. That theory completely falls over with larger populations.

People's behaviour is a function of their environment. Very few people in the Western world really like the way the culture has gone, atomised , dog-eat-dog, selfish etc but with an environment like this you are encouraged to behave that way otherwise you are more susceptible to losing your place in the culture, sliding to the bottom in poverty etc. Eventually it will all dissolve.

And you don't think we live in idiocracy right now?

they can't both be correct.

Ray Kurzweil may be optimistic (to put it mildy) but I think his calculations about how much solar energy we would need to harvest is pretty good. http://bigthink.com/think-tank... So maybe 1/10000 of the total sunlight energy that falls on the earth. Here's another interesting link, wikipedia this time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

You can't guarantee squat.

You know, I read these articles about Microsoft, and I start to wonder who actually cares. As opposed to 10 years ago, Microsoft just isn't a part of my day-to-day interactions.

* Laptop is a MacBook Pro
* Phone is Android
* Tablet is Android

At work:
* I work with very large e-commerce sites - everything is Linux
* No SharePoint

Outside of Outlook/Exchange at work, I just don't use anything Microsoft anymore.

^^ THIS ^^

Another thing I do not "get" - even if one was to believe in a "creator" (in particular, the Judo-Christian one), why would you worship it? Epicurus said it best:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Make sure programmers having documented unit tests is a standard at your work. Then watch him write tests for his uber-methods. Either he'll "get it" or he'll think testing is stupid. Having a programmer proclaim "testing is stupid" usually doesn't go over well with the rest of the department.

Reflecting back, it is sort of amazing how far Microsoft has fallen. From being nearly synonymous with everything computer related to now being the last one you think of when it comes to the technology that is nearest to us (our cell phones and tablets), it is stunning. And everything they make now looks like a desperate me-too move. Even more broadly, just a few years ago I was working in all Microsoft platforms from server and web development to desktop and office automation. Now, with the exception of Exchange, I don't even see Microsoft products. Amazing.