Frank Devine passed away on Friday morning. He enriched the lives of many people, whether or not they agreed with his views on politics, religion or anything else.
An early tribute can be found in The Australian, from Bernard Lane . The Weekend Australian tomorrow will carry stories from Peter Coleman and others.
Condolences to Jacqui, Miranda, Rosalind, Alexandra and others who are close to him.
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About 10 days ago all State and Territory Attorneys-General agreed to enact uniform anti-bikie gang laws. The new uniform national regime will be modelled on the Victorian regime which is broader than three very similar laws recently enacted in South Australia and New South Wales and a yet-to-be-enacted bill in the Northern Territory. The Age reports that ‘attorneys baulked at adopting South Australian laws aimed specifically at bikie gangs and went instead for a broader approach’.
Although the Victorian regime represents a significant extension of existing police powers in numerous ways, it is less extreme in terms of erosion o basic civil liberties than the SA, NSW and NT regimes, which are the main subject of this post. However, South Australia and New South Wales seem determined to maintain their recently enacted laws, and the NT equally has given no indication that it will do anything other than push ahead with enacting its own version of the SA law. It appears that the only reason other Attorneys-General opted for the Victorian model is that Victoria itself refused to sign up to the more draconian SA/NSW/NT model.
Strangely, the SA, NSW and NT anti-bikie laws have generated almost no debate in either the blogosphere or mainstream media. I say strangely because NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery QC recently described them in the following terms:
“very troubling legislation” that could lead to a police state and represent “another giant leap backwards for human rights and the separation of powers - in short, the rule of law”.
Presumably the reason for the lack of public debate about these laws is that there is understandably little or no community sympathy for bikie gangs and their members. Most would no doubt agree with the Phantom of comic book fame that ‘rough justice for roughnecks’ is the appropriate response for both legislators and police. However, maybe if people understood that these laws can potentially target any group (not just bikie gangs) and its members who police suspect of ‘organised crime’ involvement, they might begin to share Nicholas Cowdery’s view that the laws are dangerously threatening to the rule of law and that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’
If they also learned the extent to which these laws allow police to prohibit suspect groups and impose drastic restrictions on the freedom of their members without those people having any real opportunity to defend themselves or even know what is alleged against them, at least some would certainly be alarmed, although no doubt most will still complacently think “it could never happen to me” and dismiss articles like this one as just the rantings of a bleeding heart ratbag.
One of the most widely accepted tenents of tax theory is that it is most efficient to tax immobile factors of production such as land. Such taxes cannot be avoided, and so they do not distort behaviour. Consequently, most economists would argue that an annual land tax is preferable to a tax on land transactions such as stamp duty. The latter, it is argued, discourages people from moving to more suitable dwellings and consequently has many undesired consequences. And yet stamp duties remain a major source of tax revenue for state governments and there seems little likelihood of them being replaced by land taxes any time soon. Why is this?
Ross Gittins has a piece arguing that this conventional view is wrong because economic orthodoxy ignores important facets of human behaviour.
I can’t think of a single song of his that is a really big favourite of mine. But has there ever been any big star who was more of a genius as a dancer? Surely not. Not even Fred Astair comes close.
Australia is in the midst of a flat-screen TV crisis, says Clive Hamilton. Driven by an insatiable desire for "stuff", we spend more time chasing money and less doing the kinds of things that would really make us happier and more fulfilled — spending time with friends and family, getting involved in the local community, and developing our skills and creativity. Greed and materialism are making us miserable.
But there’s no evidence that people in affluent countries like Australia are greedier or more materialistic than in the past. The major reason we buy more stuff is because stuff has become cheaper. The increase in working hours is not being driven by an increasing desire for stuff but by increases in the cost of things like housing and services.
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I read Disgrace before seeing the film; thanks to that, once again, the film didn’t have much impact in its own right. It was well made, as expected, and faithful to the novel. So the principal interest was in judging its merits as an adaptation, discovering small points of deviation, and seeing how the film interpreted the rather puzzling motivations of the story’s characters.
As far as the deviations go, although I heard Margaret Pomeranz say in a radio interview that they’d fiddled with the ending, there were no significant changes at all, except for a reversal of the order of the final scenes — which was a harmless and justified exercise of cinematic license.
As I saw it, there was only one moderate departure: the first half of the film makes the main protagonist David Lurie more unsympathetic than he is in the book. The Herald’s Sandra Hall, who gives no indication of having read he book, finds him too ‘icy’, althugh she attributes this in part to John Malkovich’s portrayal.
This is not to say that he’s very appealing in the book. But at least we are privy to his thoughts, and so can see things from his point of view; nor is the reader influenced by any visceral response to Malkovich’s thin voice and reptilian facial expressions. (No matter how good a job he’s doing in any part, I’m afraid he will always be John Malkovich first and the character second.) In the novel Lurie isn’t despicable. He is essentially Don Juan: you might not like his convictions, but you admire his courage in them. Long as his catalogue of sins may be, he does not intend to add hypocritical remorse to it. (Continued)
Troppo’s Paul Frijters, too self-effacing to push his work on Troppo, has a new paper on the effect of the internet on quality news content. I discovered it on a newsletter of new papers. Looks interesting, so I’ll have to have a closer squiz when I get the time.
Is the Internet Bad News? The Online News Era and the Market for High-Quality News
Date: 2009-05
By: Frijters, Paul
Velamuri, MalathiWe review and model the impact of the internet on the production and uptake of high- quality news. Our review of trends in the market for news suggests 3 stylized facts: i) particular quality news markets are dominated by merely a few providers, ii) demand for quality news appears stable, but provision of news has become specialized; mainstream news is decoupled from quality news, and iii) the dominant business model of internet news mirrors that of radio, television, and newspapers in that costs of news production are recouped via advertising. We build a stylized model that rationalizes these facts. Our model captures three conflicting effects: (1) economies of scale in the production of news lead to monopolies on particular markets, (2) easy access to information on the internet makes it cheaper to provide high-quality news and to disseminate it via the web, which increases the production of such news; and (3) the existence of bloggers and news aggregators who recycle the stories of news-providers reduces the effective property rights of high-quality news producers, thus forcing the business model of the internet to be advertising-based. For the most likely cases, our model would imply that the internet does not constitute bad news for the provision and uptake of quality news.
Click diagram to see the gameLike Fred Reinfeld says, White's next move is "one of the most beautiful ever played on the chess-board."
Several years ago I posted a graphic plotting country’s GDP per head against mean lifetime and drawing attention to the tragic loss of life in southern Africa, mainly due to AIDS. There is a fantastic data visualisation tool called GapMinder that tells this story – and other stories- much more clearly. And it is really fun to play with.
I subscribe to Learn out loud’s newsletter and so receive lists of books that you can get audio files of to podcast to yourself. You generally have to pay for these files, and because I have more than enough ways of spending my time including listening (well trying to listen) to way more free podcasts than I have time to listen to, I’ve not bought anything from them. But they do send bargains down the wire giving me free audio books every now and again - like Ben Franklin’s autobiography, which, sad to say I’ve not yet listened to.
BTAIM, I note that the latest newsletter has a long list of economics audio content. So I thought I’d share it with Troppodillians below the fold.
Now that my exams are over, I’ve gotten back to working towards launching my little startup. During the second half of my semester I couldn’t find time or energy for it, but I did occasionally give it some thinking time, some of which has borne fruit.
Beware, Troppo readers; here be nerds.
From UK PC world.
A new type of PC which is incorporated into a conventional three-point plug is being released in the UK.
The Plug Computer is based on a platform developed by US semiconductor firm, Marvell.The device squeezes a 1.2GHz processor, 512MB of DRAM, 512MB of NAND Flash memory, plus Ethernet and USB ports into a unit no larger than a plug adaptor.
The headless computer plugs straight into the wall, acting as a tiny, low-powered home server.
More here.
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