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‘Why is garbage collection another tenner?’

‘Didn’t I tell you? There are no taxes at EasyCity.’

‘And yet we have to pay £10 to have our garbage collected.’

‘Yes, that’s a fee. It’s not a tax. We have abolished all taxes. In fact, we don’t believe in taxes.’

‘But how do you pay for stre…

As scholars of science fiction have long noted, the genre is a powerful and engaging medium because it uses extrapolation and speculation to explore possible worlds and to encourage the reader to reflect on how those worlds came into being, how they operate, and how they differ from and reflect our…

In the twentieth century, our capacity to create substitutes grew immensely. Many synthetic products were invented to take the place of natural ones. Declining soil nutrients could be replaced with artificial fertilizer; aluminum could replace copper; plastic could replace just about everything — w…

[...] A world buzzing with hundreds of millions of Teslas (or worse, e-Escalades), made with materials rapaciously extracted without the consent of local communities, manufactured under a repressive labor regime in polluting factories — in other words, a world not unlike our own, but powered by win…

[...] there are a lot of people in this country who are under-consuming, like Native people who live in dire poverty. But, by and large, the average North American middle-class and upper-middle-class person consumes way too much.

I don’t dwell too much on settlers and whether they will ever hav…