As you've probably noticed, Club Troppo has been almost unuseably slow-loading for the last few days. It has also been out of commission completely for substantial periods. Now the comment facility is not working at all. Apparently the latter is not an accident but deliberate...
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Any hint that virtue is it's own reward offers its own reassurance - bracing though it may be. I fancy that the look on this face is the contentment of genuine achivement. Yes folks you heard about it first on Troppo. A while back I came across a terrific article by Dani Rodri...
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I vividly remember wandering round the town of Nimes in the south of France about fifteen years ago and being completely blown away by the amphitheatre there (pictured above). What blew me away was the way in which this magnificent object had gone on a two millennium journey o...
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I was driving through the Burnley tunnel today. It has three lanes. As you go into it travelling east, the three lanes I was on had to become two to make way for another lane entering from the left. Normally what happens in such a situation is that the three main lanes become...
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Stephen Hawking will be weightless sometime today (if it hasn't already happened). Free at last from gravity which sucks at his body day and night making his life much much harder. A minute later he will be back to the earthly reality.
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Essays extolling the need for governments to get ‘connected’, lateral, vertical and all that kind of stuff – the need to find new models to engage stakeholders and to break down the silos of departments – are not usually my cup of tea. My problem with them is that as commonsen...
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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Years ago, Alan Seymour's play tagged Anzac Day the one day of the year . For mine (SL) this year's day brought the best out of Ozblogistan. Kicking off a plethora of fab...
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I've written briefly about my Uncle Dick once before, in the course of a rather sentimental piece about my family. This is another in similar vein. Most of my memories of Dick revolve around motor vehicles. When I was a small boy, before my mum and dad bought their first car w...
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One of my favourite quotes from World War I is John 'Jack' Wright, a flight commander with 4 Squadron Australian Flying Corps [AFC]. Like many of the AFC pilots and servicemen he came from the Lighthorse after having served in the Middle East. He missed Gallipoli as by the tim...
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This is a film with lavish sets and costumes, set in Vienna , about the last years in the life of history's greatest composer. We see his life and work through the eyes of a fellow composer who, though less talented, uniquely comprehends the extent of the composer's genius. Th...
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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Terry Sedgwick had a camera secretly filming the recent meeting between Rupert and Kevie There hasn't really been a dominant theme in the blogosphere over the last few da...
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Why are these people smiling? It's not really clear but perhaps they've got an Amazing Loan. If they own Amazing Loans they may keep smiling. If they have just taken one out, lets hope they didn't do it smiling, but out of grim determination to pull themselves back from the br...
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This column by Barry Cohen reminded me of an anecdote from the just concluded Radio National Hindsight four part series on the Liberal Party . In it someone explains how when Bob Menzies offered him a job in his office Menzies didn't want to know how he voted, and explicitly s...
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When President Bush announced his "surge" strategy for Iraq in January, he replaced General Casey, the last in the conga-line of Rumsfeld yes-men, with perhaps the sharpest General in the whole Iraq campaign, General David Petreus . Gen. Petreus is described as a warrior intel...
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Media ethics and psychology experts have been in great demand for their opinions on whether the American TV network NBC should have shown the video they received from Cho Seung-Hui, justifying his planned rampage. If you google 'Cho video public interest', the first page of hi...
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The Index of Economic freedom compiled by the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal has come out with its 2006 index of economic freedom. It again claims that the higher the rating the better the economic performance (measured by per capita incomes). But it uses a compos...
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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Inevitably, the mass killing at Virginia Tech University in the US brought forth commentary from around Ozblogistan, much of it bemused by US gun laws or - alternatively...
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After talking about it for years, its now official. Today's Australian announced that the University of Melbourne is going to copy the American liberal-arts style university system. They intend to do away with all specialisations and have 6 broad faculties. Students can pick a...
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This column was published by the Fin in early April and appears here as a matter of record - and invitation for comment. Peter Costello told us that he would relentlessly attack the oppositionâs $2.7 billion raid on the future fund for broadband investment. And he did, doggedl...
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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Nothing grabbed Ozblogistan's collective attention over the weekend, although as usual there was plenty of good stuff. Once again we at the Troppo Cabal (tm) are delig...
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Last weekend I decided I'd better do something about organising the shed. Well, to be accurate, I opened the doors of the shed to get the rake. The rake handle was just reachable if I leaned in over the clu tter, but in that awkward, out-of-balance posture, it was not possible...
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Coalition Ministers keep telling us that WorkChoices will boost workforce participation rates and that the job situation will be much better under WorkChoices than without it. The âevidenceâ of the last twelve months is quite inconclusive: the small increase in workforce parti...
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I just went to see the film Becoming Jane . Having read a couple of reviews, I didn't want to see it but I arrived at nine p.m. at the cinema determined to see a movie and it was the least bad of my options. On returning and doing a quick Google I can't find a good review of i...
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"People get on welfare because they are lazy PERIOD" says an anonymous commenter to a Wisconsin newspaper article. Last week the La Crosse Tribune ran an article about welfare reform which provoked the usual hostile sentiments. The commenter went on to complain about left wing...
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Yesterday I posted an introductory post on industry policy summarising some of the very good reasons to be suspicious of 'picking winners'. But that's only one side of the story. Here's another side. As Fred Astair says in some movie "That idea's so crazy it just might woik"....
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Industry policy â which can be anything from subsidising Research and Development to 'picking winners' and supporting some 'key industries' over others â is one of the shibboleths of the left. I'm always surprised and dismayed when ACOSS puts in its oar with other allies in th...
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From Beyond the Fringe 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad This edition of Missing Link has been delayed until today (Friday the 13th) because I got carried away with my post on performance pay for teachers...
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"Kill kill kill kill kill the poor tonight," sang the Dead Kennedys as they imagined slashing the welfare rolls by dropping neutron bombs on crime-ridden urban ghettos. The late-70s, early 80s punk band saw themselves as giving voice to a right wing fantasy -- ridding the worl...
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Performance pay for teachers is in the news at the moment, what with federal Education Minister Julie Bishop in Darwin today for a meeting with her State and Territory counterparts. Apparently she intends blustering and bullying the States about performance pay, despite an unp...
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A column from the Fin Review: During the next few weeks, the expenditure review committee (ERC) of federal cabinet will finalise the 2007-08 budget. One of the committeeâs tasks is to hunt down waste, but recent budgets show that the principal custodians for the taxpayer, the...
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"Talk to the Hand". That's the message the Prime Minister is giving the Australian people as an attempt at a cheerful smile collapses into a Dick Cheney impersonation with the results of yesterday's Newspoll What's going wrong in the house of Howard? Is the greatest politician...
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If you like an occasional straight shot of social criticism, withering satire and fine, hard, funny writing, you could do worse than dip into James Kunstler's weekly diatribes . Best known for his conviction that America's love affair with the automobile, suburbia and cheap en...
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If a (very large) tsunami hit Noosa - from FunkyPix2 (correction Beyond the Fringe ) 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S. 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad There wasn't any political issue as such that brought Ozblogistan out stoushing this...
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Vishy Anand - who has recently become the highest rated player in the world - just ahead of Kramnik and Topalov (the latter's prowess may be based on cheating) just won this game as white. See if you can see how he forced a win in this position. Over the fold is a further fact...
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I've probably missed this by a few weeks on Andrew Leigh's blog, but for those who've not seen it and want to listen to a podcast on the new economics do so here at open source radio who have put together a program on the explosion of empirical analysis being done on social ph...
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At last, a topic I can pontificate about off the top of my head. The case against PowerPoint, starting with yesterday's piece in the SMH by Anna Patty , and followed up by Dr Faustus (courtesy of today's Missing Link), is a textbook example of reasonable arguments leading to u...
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Artist's impression of Brisbane's proposed Northbank development, on which The Pencil Guy gives his thoughts (see under "life and other serious stuff") The wiki is playing up today, so no internal hyperlinks. And I only had time to insert one photo, liberated from The Pencil G...
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The Australian covered the story today of Australian finance unions teaming up with Indian finance workers to ensure that there isn't any nasty offshoring going on by banks. I can see why Australian unions might do it, but I can't quite see what's in it for the Indian union me...
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I had a quick squiz at the BCA's recently released climate change policy . It's in better shape than the current government policy and it is indeed an interesting phenomenon that a broadly based big business industry association would be adopting as policy a more politically d...
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Meet Ned the Bear. He's cranky. He's orange. He's a cartoon bear. Ned will appear two or three times a week right here, until such time as some giant, megalithic media conglomerate offers me money for him.
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Could this situation (data/graph compiled by Bryan "Ozpolitics" Palmer ) be the reason why Peter Costello is somewhat hysterically claiming that the States are breaching an agreement they never made to abolish particular taxes, and that they are planning to raise the rate of G...
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ECONOMIC LIBERALISM is about means to ends, the end being to increase aggregate utility of consumers (social welfare). Starting with the premise that individual consumers are able to maximize their utility or preferences (rational man) and that it is socially desirable to maxi...
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Joshua Gans is very happy with Office 2007 . I'm much less impressed and was sufficiently worked up to respond at length in his comments which are expanded here. I generally try to stay away from Microsoft Software, but it's not that easy. I was an early fan of Macs when they...
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