Gonna need a bigger guillotine!

The way you guys rank money, people who are the "new Steve Jobs", or a guy cashing in 10 million stock options a week gets a free pass, while some fastner company's CEO making $720,000 a year and no stock options is evil incarnate.

Instead of economics, most need a course in orders of magnitude...

Oh wow, he went there. Well, if billionaires can say they are being persecuted like Jews were during the Holocaust, it seems only fitting to bring up another historical example.

We've all been saying it wrong: It's “Peek-et-tee,”

if the goal is to pronounce French stuff French-like, you might also point out that "Thomas" is more like 'toe-ma' .

yet we're already on a slippery slope here, as i'd bet no one is going to start to say 'mosk-va' for 'Moscow', mooon-chin for 'Munich', etc, uzw

@4: It's basic courtesy to attempt to pronounce folks' names however they pronounce them natively. Not so for cities having different names in different languages. Munich is not pronounced 'moon-chin'; München is. Different words, different languages, same city. No 'slippery slope'.

@5 bosh-flimshaw! the slope is so, as you say slip-per-ee, it's pente glissante! i've known Europeans who would class it as utterly non-courteous to make their ears bleed with 'pair-ous'. it's all names, names, and other names, how do you pronounce the name Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn? nope - you said it wrong. you vile Murkan you.

@6 I'm sure I pronounce 'Solzhenitsyn' even worse than 'Piketty', but I make a good-faith effort with both. Which is both as much & as little as can be expected. The city of Paris has a different name in English than it does in French; the fact that the two words are spelled identically is irrelevant. If somebody takes offense to 'pair-us' spoken as English, in the US, they're a silly jerk ... though somehow I'm not completely convinced that you've actually experienced this.

Oh. Brother. Anytime somebody references the French Revolution and guillotines as some sort of desirable thing is fucking idiot or hack.

The French Revolution of 1789 was an unmitigated disaster that led to The Terror, the war mongering Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte I ( plus II & III)," a bloody continent-spanning war that killed millions, PLUS TWO more monarchies - and the scourge of mindless Nationalism a legacy that plagued the 20th century.

The disruption to society was so great that the Third Republic didn't take hold in 1870, nearly 100 years after the Revolution. And that too was blighted by constant war and colonial expansionism.

Chaise longue, anyone?