Food waste represents a serious problem associated with today’s society to which a solution should be found. A notable share of the impacts originates from the fishing sector. It hardly results acceptable that, in a world with shrinking food resources, 25% of the total fishing catches end up being discarded as waste. It should be […]
In recent years, supporters of the theory of degrowth have found an ally in an imaginary “new economic theory” that has become very popular: the so-called Doughnut Economics , for the title of a book by the British economist Kate Raworth, who proposed the model in a 2012 article. Raworth is not really a degrowther […]
According to theory of degrowth , the only way to save the planet and humanity from catastrophic collapse due to depletion of natural resources would be to radically limit, and even reduce, global production levels and, since there is still a large part of the population living in intolerable levels of poverty, and the only […]
Most internet users are by now aware of the vulnerability of their personal data. When the news broke that tech companies misuse and manipulate our personal data, there was a widespread “techlash” against the corporate giants Facebook, Amazon and Google. The explicit motive for data harvesting is the prediction of consumer wants and needs. And […]
Nay, nay, I say! This cannot be, That machines should e’er surpass our art. We are the masters, them the slaves, And thus it ever shall be so! They learn, ‘tis true, but they learn Only what we bid them learn, no more. They cannot understand the heart Or beauty of our words, you see […]
In 2021, an investment firm bought 2,000 acres of real estate for about USD 4 million. Normally this would not make headlines, but in this case the land was virtual. It existed only in a metaverse platform called The Sandbox. By buying 792 non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, the firm then owned the equivalent […]
The transformation of a bundle of more or less deep insights on a few voting procedures, as we saw in a preceding entry, into something like a general logico-mathematical theory about the aggregation of individual preferences into a collective choice was the work of a single man, Kenneth Arrow, in his 1951 book Social choice […]
In 2000 and 2001, the use of child slaves on cocoa farms in West Africa was exposed in a series of documentaries and pieces of investigative journalism, sparking an international outcry . This series of events was far from unprecedented. As discussed in my paper, since the 19th century, when cocoa was first introduced to […]
That collective decisions made through voting may lead to some weird consequences is something probably well known since the first time one tribe started to use some kind of voting in order to reach an agreement. Contrarily to what happens in many other areas of human wisdom, we don’t have any deep reflections on the […]
The cryptocurrency bitcoin now uses up more electricity a year than the whole of Argentina, according to recent estimates from the University of Cambridge. That’s because the creation of a bitcoin, in a process called mining, is achieved by powerful computers that work night and day to decode and solve complex mathematical problems. The energy […]