Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • arrogant fidelity

    Looks like the universe is serendipitously feeding my streak of focus on growthism. Clipped from Geoff Mann reviewing William Nordhaus’s new tome at the LRB: Nordhaus attempts to make climate change compatible with ceaseless long-run growth by emphasising the global economy’s ‘carbon intensity’ instead of its carbon sensitivity. The Spirit of Green is most sanguine…

  • an immaterial objection

    Via L M Sacasas, an interview by Evan Selinger with David Chalmers, who appears to be analytical philosophy’s current useful idiot from the POV of the tech scene. Does that seem harsh, whether on analytical philosophy in general or Chalmers in particular? Well, given said discipline prides itself on a rigour that the filthy continentals…

  • (not) giving it the progressive legitimacy it would lack otherwise

    One of the joys of having unplugged from the birdsite again is being able to largely ignore the whole crypto/Web3/NFT circus, at least in its most immediate expression. Of course, various people are writing about it more slowly, and it’s probably a function of my pre-existing biases that have ensured the vast majority of what…

  • both men believed they knew how the world worked

    I’m always here for anyone giving neoclassical economics the kicking it so rightly deserves; in that sense, this piece at Aeon is a bit measured for my tastes, but Bergin—like all the best journalists—leaves plenty of room for one to read between the lines. If even the simple supply-and-demand curve, a staple of the orthodox…

  • it’s about being right, whatever the heck that means

    Couple ‘graphs from Julian Bleecker, here, which manage to put fairly succinctly an argument about futuring which I first found myself trying and failing to make ten, maybe fifteen years ago: Predicting things feels like a setup for bad behavior. It feels weird trying to anticipate what’s going to happen “next” or down the road.…