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Infinite Growth of the Service Economy?
A simple thought experiment is enough to show how absurd the infinite growth of a service economy is: People would be paying each other for ever more trivial "services" at an ever increasing rate, until the economy resembles a monopoly game on steroids.
Advertising to Children
[series-miru] I promised to write about the relentless assault on young children by corporations and their henchmen, the marketeers. I am afraid that they will somehow devise a way to creep into Miru's head before I have detected and neutralized the threat. That they will invade her fragile mind with Trojan horses belching with greasy, ...
Burping the baby
This is part of a series of blog posts that is inspired by our baby daughter, Miru. Imitation, it seems, begins as soon as our children open their eyes, just in ways we are unable to recognize due to our preoccupation with highbrow communication techniques like smiling and cooing. What if the baby develops its ...
Unsubscribe: all
Over the course of the last few days, I received dozens of e-mails from organisations I didn't knew I knew about, and I invariably clicked on their 'unsubscribe' link. Political campaigns, real estate listings, environmental actions, job openings, social networks, online marketplaces, and so on. It feels a little bit like the mise-en-scène of an ...
Grace
I remember watching the Tour de France on television on Sunday mornings as a teenager. I remember wonderful names such as Indurain, Ullrich or Janukovitsch. I remember motorcycles patiently following a courageous and ambitious cyclist as he forged ahead alone on a steep col. The camera sometimes showed the beautiful mountains and the road that ...
Very Bad vs Downright Catastrophic Climate Change
Image courtesy of realclimate.orgOn this blog I find myself often describing the psychological features of our climatic predicament. I mean, we know the facts, people are working around the clock to get the facts straight, and have succeeded in spite of the heavy lobby in favor of 'the economy' and against the facts. You can ...
Presentations in Seoul – The future
September 9. Seoul, South KoreaWe've given some presentations about Charity Travel in an Arts Center in Seoul, for middle school children who spoke no English. In such cases it comes in handy that Yeon speaks Korean. The presentation was a nice distraction from our preparation for December...
Since we are expecting a daughter in ...
Peep!
I saw a brilliant movie the other day. It featured a highly sophisticated critique of both the prevailing intellectualism and the corporately hijacked political elite. Its protagonists presented in part woolly, but mostly toothy arguments supporting the view that our system is undeniably adrift and we are headed for imminent disaster.

The name of the movie ...