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The author John Aziz
John Aziz
I am interested in global trade dynamics, debt dynamics and the flow of credit, moneyness and currencies, unclearing markets, futurology, civil libertarianism, drone warfare, market democracy, solar technology, ecology, the psychology of bubbles, behaviourism, Bayesian statistics, subjectivism and a whole load of other stuff.

John Aziz: Azizonomics

Why will people colonize space?

Noah Smith over at Noahpinion does a rundown on why Firefly doesn’t really resonate with him. I agree with his take: But in Firefly, why do we – meaning the crew of Serenity – go to space? It’s not for a higher purpose. There’s no science being done, no galaxy being saved. The show’s theme song may be about freedom, but unlike many of the people around them, Mal and his crew aren’t colonists. They aren’t going to found a new, more liberal republic on the virgin soil of a distant world....

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Beyond Good And Evil

It is tiring to hear voters complain about having to stump for a lesser evil. The whole notion of purity in life — but especially in politics — is Manichean at best, and sophomoric at worst. Every choice in life and politics is a shade of grey. Pretending that any political candidate is anything other than a mesh of good and ill — much of it unintentional — is facile. Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are shades of grey. Policies that appear to be unadulteratedly pure and...

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Britain Is Finished

On the 23rd of June, Nigel Farage says we got our country back. This couldn’t be any further from the truth. The UK’s decision to leave the EU is the UK’s death knell. I don’t mean to speak in cliches, but goodbye Great Britain, and hello Little England. Every region in Scotland voted to stay in the EU. If the UK leaves, this is a direct violation of the will of Scottish voters. Scottish independence — and possibly Irish reunification, given that a majority of Northern Irish voted to stay...

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Automation, Space Colonization & The Post-Transactional Economy

Image: NASA “How is this even a business?” my late father asked when I described a notional model for human space colonization. “How are you going to make money? What product are you going to sell?” Admittedly the model — developing a swarm of self-replicating , self-repairing decentralized, solar-powered construction automata and using them to mine asteroids and produce more such automata as well as habitable colonies— is not monetizable in the same fashion that building a picture-sharing...

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Political Correctness And The Extreme Fragmentation Of Society In Modernity

One of the defining cultural events of the 2016 election season so far has been the overwhelming rejection of the notion of political correctness expressed in the Republican selection of Donald Trump as presidential nominee. Here is Trump expounding his view on political correctness: What is the political correctness that the Trump supporters are rejecting? Trump-supporting website Infowars.com gives the following definition: In his novel 1984, George Orwell imagined a future world where...

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The Economics of Building That Wall

Photo by: Matt Clark. First things first: the U.S. already has a border wall with Mexico. This is a widely-documented fact, illustrated in detail by National Geographic. If Trump supporters had bothered to do so much as a Google search, they would realize that — whatever one might think of illegal immigration — it isn’t going to be stopped by a border wall. A border wall already exists, and illegal immigration continues. But what about replacing the current border wall with a bigger one?...

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Universal Basic Income Is Inevitable, Unavoidable, and Incoming

The last time I saw universal basic income discussed on television, it was laughed away by a Conservative MP as an absurd idea. The government giving away wads of cash responsibility-free to the entire population sounds entirely fantastical in this austerity-bound age, where “we just don’t have the money” is repeated endlessly as a mantra. Money, they say, does not grow on trees. (Only as figures on the screen of a computer). In this world, universal basic income seems like a rather distant...

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Drone Strikes Against Alleged Terrorists Are An Abandonment Of The Rule Of Law

I have no doubt that the vast majority of British people will support David Cameron’s decision to blow to smithereens two British jihadis fighting with the self-proclaimed Islamic State who were allegedly involved in planning and directing terrorist attacks on the UK, just as the vast majority of Americans support Obama doing similar things. I don’t think the Conservative government will harm its popularity in assassinating these people. The opposite, in fact, or as The Sun put it “Wham!...

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Correction or Crisis?

After almost seven years of relative calm and stability, a stock market crash is finally upon us. This is a very predictable crash stemming from a very widely known cause. Hundreds of analysts including myself — following the trail illuminated by Michael Pettis — have for a long time been banging on about a Chinese slowdown gathering an uncontrollable momentum, sending China into a panic, and infecting global markets. What’s less clear yet is whether this is a correction or a crisis. My...

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Is Jeremy Corbyn The Answer?

Labour’s defeat in the 2015 election may have been as much of a function of demographics as anything much else. As I wrote earlier this week: “Britain is greying, and older people tend to be more conservative.” If that’s the case, then the deck will be stacked against Labour in 2020, and even more so after constituency boundary changes that will help the Tories and hurt Labour. Still, the question that Labour members and supporters should be asking themselves is: which one of the candidates...

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