Playfulness and curiosity in Natural Selection “Necessity is the mother of invention” While we don’t know who first said it, many people have. Surely you have heard this phrase, if not used it. This quote means that urgency induces creativity. When humans need something, we search harder for solutions. It…
Tag: capitalism
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You Don’t Need My Permission to Live
Do you ever feel like what you want to do goes against what society ‘wants’ you to do? Like, maybe you want to be a painter, but your parents and your school tell you that you’ll never make any money. Maybe you want to take a gap year after high…
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What if Nature Made the Rules?
You’re probably not old enough to remember, but a commercial in the 70s reminds me of this episode. In the commercial, a woman who represented Earth informed the viewer, “‘It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” I don’t know if this ad made an impression on me, but my adult…
The Thing Capitalism Gets Wrong
Lately, I’ve been wondering about capitalism and competition. As I have mentioned in other episodes (links below), competition only occurs when resources are limited. Also, capitalism requires competition to protect consumers from monopolies. While I argue in older episodes that this protective feature often doesn’t work, the fact remains that capitalism requires…
Growing Smaller is a Worthy Goal (Part 1)
I used to own a brewery. In our rural location and with our small customer pool, we struggled to be profitable. My partners and I disagreed about how to best approach profitability. One had an MBA and swore by the neo-capitalist, Econ 101 approach to maximizing revenues. Following this popular approach,…
Degrowth vs Growth
While I don’t want to perpetuate the ‘capitalism sucks’ argument, I want to spend some time on degrowth. Pretty funny that the spell checkers keep correcting ‘degrowth’ to ‘regrowth’. See? This idea is manifested in everything. Because of capitalism, humans have become obsessed with growth. Mostly in the financial sense….
Nature Knows Best
For the past twenty-some Episodes, I have been trying to figure out how to formulate my current question of interest. Generally, I am trying to make the case that Nature provides a wealth of information. Further, I am pleading with humankind to CONSULT nature when making decisions. Especially decisions that…
The Growth Fallacy
With respect to economics, people often say that you have to grow to stay in business. I heard this a lot when I tried to run my business at a static level of production (i.e., no growth). I found that we actually HAD MORE MONEY left over when we controlled…