Categorie: capital

Capitalism and Comfort: a segregation of state and economy is needed.

I have to admit, capitalism has worked, allowing us, at least in our part of the world, to live in luxury. Even the poorer part of society here with us don’t have it as bad as in large parts of the rest of the world. However, the whole system has…

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Loss and damage fund, filled by miljonairs…?- COP28

Loss and damage fund, filled by miljonairs…?- COP28 The first result of COP28 seems to be already there, a loss and damage fund for ‘weaker’ countries. However, there was already an agreed-upon investment fund to help those countries get into transition. But that fund is not functioning, still largely empty,…

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climate calculation vs financial calculation 1/2

In projects with students, it regularly clashes between economic and environmental cq climate objectives, and thus also between real estate and building physics tutors. Or between ‘the project developer’ and the ‘energy calculator’. And the battle is fought over the heads of the students ; they have to find a…

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Is Art innocent…? and what about Musk or Putin?

Why does someone throw a can of soup against a van Gogh? Everyone was shocked. Either because of the van Gogh, how dare they, or because of the soup, from a multinational company, not an oil company or something, or because of the ‘soup-against-art’. What a strange way to bring…

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Forget tech-optimism…

The newspaper article on Saturday on the front page of the economics section of the NRC national newspaper , opens with the headline:  “believing in growth or shrinkage.” With that, I was immediately on the fence. Because it’s not about believing. It’s physics. You can calculate how much energy and…

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the creating-debtors-theory of money…

Time for yet another ‘episode’ in my series on ‘money’. I am trying to ‘understand’ things, that’s how this episode regarding money should be read. A rediscovered old research sheds some light in the darkness. Virtually everything today is expressed in money, and everything is also measured in money: even…

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Faster to disaster, with Bill Gates

What I feared was confirmed: Bill Gates’ new book is a noncommittal plea for innovation, technology and economic growth. Sold as providing the ultimate solutions to our climate crises, the book doesn’t get much further than measures we already know and many platitudes about what should be done next. As…

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Land, between heaven and earth

It is intriguing how the world fundamentally works, with its cycles, driven mainly by solar energy. Which can be traced back mainly to the yields of land, as I found out earlier. [1,2] (Land that has virtually disappeared from economic theory as a production factor). But yields from land is…

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land (-potential) as the new money standard

Someone suggested recently to think about a new money standard. Well, thats a challenge, so I did. Since money is a virtual unit of trade, not based on any actual value. Not anymore, at least, since we left the barter economy and entered the money exchange economy, somewhere around 1600,…

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