Inspiration Feed – 08.20

End of capitalism, basic income, beyond renewable energy, useless jobs, garden hacking & more.

links selection – 20.aug.17

Don’t Be Scared About The End Of Capitalism—Be Excited To Build What Comes Next
by Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk (fastcompany.com)

It would be a sad and defeated world that simply accepted the prebaked assumption that capitalism (or socialism, or communism) represents the last stage of human thought; our ingenuity exhausted.

Capitalism’s fundamental rules–like the necessity for endless GDP growth, which requires treating our planet as an infinite pit of value and damage to it as an “externality”– can be upgraded. Of course they can. There are plenty of options on the table. When have we humans ever accepted the idea that change for the better is a thing of the past?”.

How to Reform Welfare and Taxes to Provide Every American Citizen with a Basic Income
By Scott Santens (medium.com/economicsecproj)

Basic Dividend is a great idea: “an annually rising intellectual property fee could be added to any intellectual property wishing to be monopolistically excluded from the public domain, with the revenue returned to us as co-investors of the government granting such protection. I also suggest that big data should be seen as a new form of property being digitally created by everyone through everything we do, and that as a result, citizens should see a percentage of the money derived from it as a big data dividend.”

We’ll always have the Sun: solar energy and the future of humankind
By Ugo Bardi (medium.com/insurge-intelligence)

Asking if renewable energy can replace fossil energy implies that the only possible civilization is our civilization as it is nowadays, including SUVs parked on every driveway and vacation trips to Hawaii by plane for everyone.

But keeping these incredibly expensive wastes of energy will obviously be impossible in the future, even imagining that we were able to stay with fossil fuels for another century or even more.

We are hitting so many physical limits on this planet that the question is a completely different one.”

A growing number of people think their job is useless. Time to rethink the meaning of work
by Rutger Bregman (weforum.org)

The paradox of progress: the richer we become, the more room we have to waste our time.” “The time has come to stop sidestepping the debate and home in on the real issue: what would our economy look like if we were to radically redefine the meaning of “work”?”

What the Garden-Hacking Grandmas and Grandpas of South Korea Know
by Patrick M. Lydon (yesmagazine.org)

In many neighborhoods around the world, you can’t say that gardening is a hobby, or even a way to make money. It seems to have a far more fundamental purpose, one spawned by the realization within people, that there is inherent value in the action of tending a garden, and in the action of taking time every day to be with nature.”

* weekly inspiration illustration by Ilan Katin