In a way this story is reassuring. I don't have any objection to some extra attention being given to someone who fits a profile of a terrorist. But of course the potential helplessness in the face of bureaucracy is thoroughly spooky. In this case nothing too terrible happened....
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I've just got back from a trip to Canberra which allowed me to pick up the family copy of Pride and Prejudice - my Dad's favourite book by his favourite author. I wanted to bring it back for my 11 year old daughter to read as she'd loved the movie. There was quite a few books...
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I sent two unsolicited essays to Black Inc a couple of months ago a longer and a shorter essay on open source software. Neither was successful which was fair enough. Fortunately I hadn't written them for that forum, but was hoping that they might publish them. When I inquired...
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Richard Ackland has a powerful and angry article in this morning's SMH about the Howard government's anti-terrorism bill (a topic about which I've blogged here and here ): The design of the legislation is to conscript the federal judiciary into sprinkling holy water over asses...
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As David Williamson's latest foray demonstrates this idea that we're stealing from our kids is back in fashion. Cruise Ship Australia is in fact living off resources that took billions of years to accumulate. We're eating up our past at a prodigious rate. Our grandchildren won...
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I must be going through a particularly grumpy phase of middle age at the moment. It's not often these days that I find myself so peeved by a TV current affairs story that I can't resist resorting to a cathartic blog post. But that was certainly the effect of an item about the...
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Thanks to Ian for providing the link to this 1994 piece by Noel Pearson , deploring the Labor failure to allocate more money to health care or any other stragegies to address the devastation wrought by alcohol in the outback communities. I just wish that the honorable members...
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The aptly named Chas Savage contributed an opinion piece in The Age the other day about the sedition provisions of the Howard government's proposed new anti-terrorism laws . Savage's article is well written and makes some good points: I openly urge disaffection with the consti...
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Noel Pearson gave a talk this evening, actually yesterday, sponsored by the dreaded rightwing think tank The Centre for Independent Studies. The venue was a rather unlikely location, a bunker under the Sydney Stock Exchange, an interesting place to talk about relieving the con...
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I've been mystefied that so little attention has been given to the idea of imposing an access regime on Microsoft - surgically targeted to 'natural monopoly' bottlenecks in their software. The strongest case for doing something is in the area of the standards that their file p...
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Optimism seems to be a quality in short supply in this current period of Islamo-fascist terrorism and authoritarian responses to it. That's why I was taken by a SMH article a few days ago by Peter Hartcher . The world, he pointed out, was pretty damned good and getting better,...
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Inveterate Troppodillians (that's not invertebrate Troppodillians) will know that I'm pretty interested in how 'open source' things are working out on the internet. Open source software like Linux particularly that under the GPL licence has demonstrated itself as a new and pow...
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Hugh Pavletch has sent me this exchange on 'corporate social responsibility'. The two parties arguing the standard Friedman case against CSR (one of them is Friedman) are much less interesting than the party arguing the case for - John Mackey. That's not because Friedman et al...
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I thought of a post on this film, and then thought it wasn't worth the effort. Suffice it to say, it is very pleasurable to look at, and everything clicked into place when I saw on a bus stop poster that it was by the producer of Bridget Jones Diary and Love Actually and Notti...
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Saturn, it's rings and one of its many moons, Dionne.
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Courtesy of Ric Simes and Yahoo: October 20, 2005 OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- A man got a prison term longer than prosecutors and defense attorneys had agreed to -- all because of Larry Bird. The lawyers reached a plea agreement Tuesday for a 30-year term for a man accused of shooti...
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Great news from Mattel Toys , and not before time. But why does the most recent Ken doll look like a Madame Tussauds effigy of Princess Diana? And the 1990s version like Boy George after a fright but before he lost his hair? I'm certainly available if they're looking for a mor...
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On October 19, in 1899, a 17 year-old Robert Goddard climbed a cherry tree on a beautiful autumn afternoon in Worcester, Massachusetts. Inspired by H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds and gazing out across a meadow, young Goddard imagined it would be wonderful to make a device that...
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Have a look at this article on Trolltech . In short it explains a nice little bit of price (and product) discrimination by which software is developed simultaneously as a proprietory commercial product and as a GPL licenced open source product. This is not particularly new, bu...
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Abraham Lincoln is one of the great politicians of all time. A man who confessed he was at sea in the chaos of politics and war, that events controlled him more than he events. And yet Lincoln did that thing that a great politician does like the alchemist. To fashion something...
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Here's this week's column in the Courier Mail . And here's the devastating graph which shows how poorly correlated with poverty low wages and minimum wages are. There is almost no relation between these jobs and household income. So, at considerable cost and while it generates...
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I was reading Tim Colebatch's column on IR reform thinking it was a bit overblown. He argues that IR reform could be a lingering threat to the Coalition's electoral prospects. My own thinking was that it would be more like the GST - something for an Opposition to conjour with...
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Peter Kemp has an interesting post at Mark Bahnisch's place , in which he argues that the "preventative detention orders" to be created under the Howard government's proposed new Anti-Terrorism Bill 2005 may be unconstitutional, in that the provisions repose non-judicial funct...
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Our institutions are constantly evolving and so we are faced with a challenge, a promise and a responsibility. The challenge is to join the eternal task of critical appraisal and piecemeal reform, the promise is the hope of unending progress and the responsibility is to mainta...
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I've been trying to get Tony Harris, friend, some time colleague, Auditor General and Fin Review columnists to post on Troppo for some time. He sent me the fantastic piece you see below the fold - which he published in the Fin on Saturday. So I've created a profile for him her...
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. . . instead make them listen to the latest novelty ring-tone, on endless loop I'm not sure if such an idea has yet crossed the minds of this Indonesian/American odd couple , but once you start using music in the services of ideology which is what Abdurrahman Wahid and C Holl...
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How come this article by David Marr and Nick O'Malley is in the national news section of the Sydney Morning Herald , and not the opinion section? Compare the nakedly partisan polemic of Marr and O'Malley with the balanced, careful analysis of Nicholas Gruen here at Troppo, or...
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I've been meaning for ages to give a plug to Colin Wicking's blog . Wicking is the long-time chief cartoonist for the Northern Territory News and Sunday Territorian (the local Murdoch rags here in Darwin). People tend to either love Wicking's cartoons or hate them. I'm unasham...
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The figure above is a curve which was all the rage after it was published by two European economists in 1988 the Calmfors and Driffill curve. Calmfors and Driffill's idea was that you could get caught between two stools. The curve models unemployment against the kind collectiv...
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Topalov, known affectionately on tihs site as Troppolov is World Champion . In a personal message to Troppodillians, Veselin said "Comrades, I couldn't have done it without you". Apparently in his darkest hours Troppolov took great comfort from Rafe Champion's notes on the tri...
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On Tuesday, IBM Research celebrated it's 60th Birthday. IBM inventions and discoveries include the programming language Fortran (1957), magnetic storage (1955), the relational database (1970), DRAM (dynamic random access memory) cells (1962), the RISC (reduced instruction set...
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Among a few others were Babbage, and Lyell, both of whom liked to talk. Carlyle, however, silenced everyone by haranguing during the whole dinner on the advantages of silence. After dinner, Babbage, in his grimmest manner, thanked Carlyle for his very interesting Lecture on Si...
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Readers of Troppo will be familiar with my concerns about the Australia Institute's recent foray (pdf) into name-calling and finger-pointing at city drivers of 4WDs. A creepy development if you ask me. (And here on what my old friend and occasional lurker Kathy call's "Pontifi...
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I think David McKnight has to move a lot further to locate himself in a viable position vis a vis left, right and neoliberalism. In addition to the links provided by the indefatigable and mercurial Nicholas Gruen in the post below, there is an appraisal of the concluding chapt...
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There's been a bit of interest in the blogosphere regarding David McKnight's book 'Beyond Left and Right: New Politics and the Culture Wars'. Rafe has some links here . I'm going to try to go along, because from what I've seen and heard on LNL, McKnight's effort is a worthwhil...
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Last Christmas I was doing some writing on intellectual property and got interested in how James Watt was a bit of a forerunner of Bill Gates. Microsoft bought MS-DOS and built an empire out of it. James Watt did better, and introduced an important innovation, but his was an i...
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Concentrations of people with university qualifications in Melbourne in 2001 (from the ABS's social atlas of Melbourne) From a talk to be delivered tonight . The pattern is striking n'est pas?
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My Adam Smith posts haven't exactly laid them in the isles - at least judging by the number of comments they've generated. But perhaps some people have enjoyed them. I enjoyed writing them. In any event part of their purpose was to collect my thoughts in preparation for an int...
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From the Social Change project , at the Mercatus Centre, George Mason University, a link to a report on the recent three-day World Islamic Economic Forum held under the auspices of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The forum hosted more than 500 delegates from...
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Another triumph - another brilliant piece of work .
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I doubt this will be of much excitement to many Troppodillians, but, emboldened by Troppo's webmaseter Scott Wickstein , I am posting my second chess post. The first was a game by Albert Einstein. Every now and again something amazing happens and right now someone whose been i...
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Those interested in the development of our economy may be interested that insurance against one's house prices falling has just been introduced to the Australian Housing Market not a bad time to get a policy if you ask me! Of course the beloved Peach Discount Mortgage Broking...
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In this week's column, I took a certain amount of pleasure in being 'right wing' (ie pro-market) about petrol and 'left wing' (ie pro-collectivism) on greenhouse. It surprises me how many people get caught up in the greenhouse denialist agenda. It's not that scientific consens...
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Adam Smith sketched what I've called a 'dialectical' picture of humanity in which people grow from infantile 'self-love' to become socialised and psychologically much more complex individuals. Self love remains powerful throughout their lives, but so too are the internal restr...
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This is a picture of Enoch Mankayi Sontonga who, though he only lived 32 years, somehow managed to bottle over a century of suffering into South Africa's magnificent national anthem. I've always been moved by the song and did a little reading on the net from here an edited ver...
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I don't know why regulation and its failures annoy me so much. It's not healthy - because there's a lot of bad regulation about and only so much nervous energy to go round. Anyway, I got my GST installment advice today. The story of the GST has been a sad farce from the beginn...
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Hyperion, the strange tumbling moon of Saturn has been photographed by Cassini. Remarkable non? I read about Hyperion when I was doing some reading on Chaos. Hyperion gets its own chapter in Ivar's Peterson's Newton's Clock: Chaos in the Solar System alas not available to be p...
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Having bagged Australia's latest efforts with film - or more specifically said that the New Zealanders were leaving us in the shade, I'm pleased to say that I thought "Little Fish" was a very good flick and good enough for you to try to go and see it - even if I wouldn't put i...
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The Age carried stories on the weekend of the collapse of a company called "Money for living". It preyed on elderly people who were asset rich(ish) and cash poor by buying their home (often worth around a third of a million dollars in return for a paltry lump sum of around $50...
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While the Australia Institute was pouring over the numbers which show that the drivers of four wheel drive vehicles are solitary, nasty, brutish and short (well fat anyway), the Canadian Recording Industry Association was commissioning similar research about what a bunch of na...
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