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.

I'm not trying to be a smart arse but do you mean "memristor"?

I think it's just too darned difficult for most of us to write mainstream apps whilst figuring out the how to take advantage of multiple cores, or figuring out how to write a web browser in erlang etc. I'll be curious to see what comes out of the stanford pervasive parallelism lab, I think they have the right approach to tackling the 'coding for many cores' problem. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/30/stanford_funding_ppl/

sounds like you just spouted a bunch of hand wavey crap, much the article. You don't work for new scientist do you?

this world is rough and if a man's gonna make it he's gotta be tough, and i knew i wouldn't be there to help you along
So i give you that name and i said goodbye an i knew youd have to get tough or die, and it's tht name thts helped to make you strong.
now you just fought one hell of a fight and i know you hate me and you got the right to kill me now and i wouldn't blame you if you do.
but you oughta thank me before i die for the gravel in your guts and the spit in your eye cos im the son of a bitch th named you sue.