friend of the built environment

Liberals: “Let’s change ourselves! Let’s improve our country!”
Conservatives: “Let’s fuck up the rest of the world so that we feel better about ourselves.”
The concept that it’s anti-American to assume there is anything wrong with this country is what’s making conservative pundits so incredibly hard to tolerate right now. Latching onto the “God and Country” line [...]

Djarum Blacks are already selling for $30/pack on Ebay, four days before the sale ban. I assume Ebay will not allow listings after Monday.
All the shops I’ve casually stopped in in SF are already sold out - they haven’t placed any new orders for a couple months for fear of being stuck with inventory they [...]

In answer to Anatoly’s future-shock piece, Shifting Winds, I thought I’d come up with my own thoughts on what the world might look like 10 years from now.
The major game-changers to expect are of course an increasingly rapid decline in fossil fuel production across all sectors as peak is passed; increased economic volatility in all [...]

Strange, the more I hear anyone exclaim that doing, saying, being, feeling, wanting or believing something is un-American, the more I find myself saying, “OK. Yes. You’re right, I’m un-American. K thx bye.”

No Surprise Here: A Decade With No Income Gains.
Median household fell to $50,303 last year, from $52,163 in 2007. In 1998, median income was $51,295. All these numbers are adjusted for inflation.
If you thought that a middle class was a permanent fixture of the American landscape, think again. It’s an historic anomaly, something few societies [...]

An exchange with Jim Russell and some other recent posts in the peak of Pittsburgh fever got me thinking about my repeated attacks on Richard Florida. Russell commented that I seem to be confusing Florida’s lobby for the creative elites with his own lobby for individual mobility. My personal opinion on both is still somewhat [...]

Maybe my dream of being a career economist is related to my fetish for post-apocalyptic landscapes and my g0th fashion sense, no?
After all, economic commentators, both leftist and right-wing, seem to emanate an almost religious sense of cornucopianism (myself included - if you think my posts are gloomy, you ain’t seen nothing yet), even in [...]