Categorie: capital

Slow Living: Why Less Speed Means More Future

As human beings, we seem to want everything faster. Or at least, that’s how society and industry are structured—faster cars, fast fashion, fast food (who even peels their own potatoes anymore?), and so on. We call it progress, or prosperity. And we convince ourselves it’s a good thing—mainly because many…

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Raw Materials Are Truly Finite, Biobased Is Inevitable, So Land Is the Limiting Factor

Imagine you’re on a small island (metaphorically speaking, a little ball in the universe), and you theoretically have only one source of concentrated material—a small hill, so to speak. You also have a piece of land just sufficient for growing food, and nothing else matters. Let’s say that hill is…

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GDP=GDE, Gross Domestic Exhaustion.

“The EU must invest more, to avoid falling behind”, economists warned this week. “Otherwise, in 50 years we will be the open-air museum for the rest of the world”. Well, if we do, invest more, society might end in a collapse, and in 50 years we will have to go…

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We need yearly a land-budgetting

The Netherlands is grappling with its land. With its land management and spatial planning. From all sides, there’s a demand for scarce land: by livestock farmers for pasture and spreading manure, they want to expand more and more. But also for construction, roads, and solar parks. And data and distribution…

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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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