This webpage surveys the various products on offer to rip (a groovy word meaning 'record' I guess) streaming video and audio into files like MP3 files. I'm not too interested in video, but occasionally want to convert a streaming audio into an MP3 file. So in the very likely e...
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Many years ago I used to donate quite a bit of the money I donate to charity to Community Aid Abroad. It seemed like a good idea to try to combine charity and aid with some attempt to address some of the political causes of poverty. Empowering poor communities seemed like a go...
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The American innovation on English Constitutionalism was that there is fundamental law - expressed in the constitution - that cannot be ignored by the executive and cannot be statutorily pasted over by the legislative. The Americans called them natural rights and entrenched th...
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From PC Pro: He's already endured five months in prison. But now a Linux user convicted of piracy is facing the ultimate punishment - he's being forced to run Windows. Scott McCausland was the one time administrator of the Elite Torrents, until the FBI shut it down and he was...
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Politics is all about compromise and trade-offs. Sensible politicians target the median voter not the extremists on either side. On that test, Labors IR package seems to get it about right. Moreover the proposed changes are transparent for all to see and contain a lot more det...
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We'll start with a community service announcement: The Australian Blogging Conference is to be held at the Queensland University of Technology on September 28 this year. Peter Black, one of the Missing Link crew, has put a considerable amount of time into getting it off the gr...
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On behalf of all Troppodillians I had lunch with Joshua Gans today. Actually it wasn't on behalf of anyone. I just felt like writing something pompous. Anyway, we spoke about many things including writing columns. Joshua writes all or many of his blog posts in the morning whil...
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"Michael Gerson never wrote a single speech by himself for President Bush", writes former colleague Matthew Scully . Along with Gerson and John McConnell, Scully was part of the team that crafted some of George W Bush's best known speeches. In a bitchy article for the Atlantic...
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Tomorrow sees the publication of a Lateral Economics report commissioned by the Victorian Government on Regulation and Innovation. It argues that our current approach to 'regulation review', though laudable in intent, is having at best modest success and that the reason for th...
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If you've ever wanted to make a burger with 100% pure bacon or you need a recipe for caramelized bacon then I've got links for you. Welcome to the baconsphere! "Bacon is totally meat candy," says bacon enthusiast Heather Lauer. Heather blogs at Bacon Unwrapped . See Heather's...
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Forget about strippers, the greatest menace on the campaign trail is food. Birthday cakes, pizza, cheesesteak sandwiches, or pork chops -- they can all stop a campaign dead in its tracks. Remember the unlosable election of 1993? Everything was going well for John Hewson until...
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I refer to my earlier posting ("well done Murdoch shame on business") regarding the current business advertisements and Steketee's critique of them. Peter Hendy, Chief Executive of ACCI, has a letter in the Weekend Australian claiming that Steketees criticisms were wide of the...
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First up, an apology for the lateness of this issue. I've been overdoing things at the Edinburgh Festival, with the result that Missing Link has suffered. Still, there's plenty of goodies here for your weekend delectation, so sit back with something drinkable and enjoy. I'll k...
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On Monday Media Watch castigated The Australian for refusing to correct its misrepresentation of the opinions of Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC. Anyone who hasn't followed this story can get all background from the Media Watch story itself, from Tim Lambert , who was on...
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According to Patricia Karvelas in the Australian yesterday (accompanied by the picture below) , it will be up to John Howard to decide whether or not same-sex couples will be granted equal status with heterosexual couples under Commonwealth law, since the Cabinet could not agr...
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Megan McArdle asks : "Did John Quiggin just write that it doesn't matter whether the New Republic ran a false story?" The short answer is 'no'. The long answer is over the fold. The whole thing starts with a story about dogs dying in Baghdad. What false story? Last month The N...
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While not retreating from my earlier accusations of systematic bias in the main Murdoch press, let me now strongly commend The Australians Mike Steketee for his column in todays edition of the paper. He takes on the business lobby for telling big fibs in their advertisements o...
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I'm sure that when we look back in twenty years, we'll see that some of our declining media were actually sitting on Web 2.0 gold mines that they failed to realise or tried to realise in ways that they completely bolloxed up . Here are some great ideas proposed for the New Yor...
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Who wrote this telegram? "1. Hang (hang without fail so the people see ) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2. Publish their names. 3. Take from them all the grain. 4. Designate hostages -- as per yesterday's telegram. Do it in such a way that for...
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Some of the true believers of the blogosphere are getting nervous about Labor's prospects of victory at the almost-imminent federal election. Fred Argy here at Troppo attributes his doubts to the evil and biased Murdoch press, while Mark Bahnisch over at LP blames the "me too-...
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I believe that the media will play a significant role in deciding the outcome of the next federal election. In particular, the role played by the Murdoch press- which controls some 2/3 of Australias national and capital city news market will be crucial. At this stage, Murdoch...
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See, this Kevin bloke walked into a bar... Ozblogistan (like the MSM, but somewhat more cynically) got into Kevin's Komedy Kapers at a New York strip club big time, and spent (a fair bit of) time concluding it was a storm in a teacup, albeit a highly entertaining one. Some of...
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"Australia is working again - moving ahead after decades of falling behind," says John Howard in his speech to the Millennium Forum . At the Sydney Morning Herald, Phillip Coorey thinks he hears echoes of Ronald Reagan's " It's morning again in America " campaign theme. And he...
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As long-term Troppo readers may recall, I don't have a terribly high opinion of the ethics of SMH journalist/"blogger" Jack Marx. But he certainly didn't deserve to be sacked for writing a (deleted) post imagining Heavy Kevy's experiences in a New York strip club. It's a relat...
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On Friday we heard that the Governor of the Reserve Bank stated that he is prepared to raise the interest rate during an election campaign , contrary to received wisdom. This was actually two pieces of news for me, since I'd never heard about the received wisdom in the fist pl...
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According to Glenn Milne , Kevin Rudd's visit to a New York strip club gives lie to "his claims to be a churchgoing family man who counts as his hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer , the Lutheran pastor martyred by Adolf Hitler." But what would Bonhoeffer say? Dietrich Bonhoeffer took ri...
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I always liked Frank Lloyd Wright. I have a theory that lots of ideas somehow get converted into their opposite as they propagate through the community. Thus for instance the theory of the second best in economics was a theory which showed that if you were in a second best sit...
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Well there you go! I read that blog action day - whatever that is - is due for the 15th Oct. Not only is it blog action day, but it's all been arranged that we rap about the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own t...
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After two years of solid blogging, I reckon Im entitled to a bleg (not that this is a promise to wait another two years before my next one.) My problem? Firefox is giving me hell. At the late stages of Firefox 1, I got a bug in which the program took about ten seconds (during...
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Having looked at several Googled images of Glenn Stevens, it's clear to me that the subbies are asking for 'stiff upper lip' pickies of the Governor. I was very pleased to hear Stevens' comments yesterday that, if the circumstances were appropriate he'd raise interest rates in...
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Backroom Girl was nice enough to tell me of a paper being given by one of the world's experts on the tax and welfare systems of the world in Melbourne yesterday. Australian Peter Whiteford was out from his current headquarters at OECD Paris and was giving a talk to the Brother...
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Commenter Link asked me to post on an interview I did on Counterpoint last Monday . In fact the transcript is up on the ABC website so I'm not sure there's a need. But because it's there I'll put up an edited version of it below the fold. Might be a good discussion starter for...
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With any sort of luck, this issue of Missing Link will wend its way out to our subscribers via email, as Jacques slowly rebuilds the Troppo server using the dedicated equipment he's just bought on the site's behalf. Let us know in the comments if you received the email, and ho...
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The Government Giveth and the Government Taketh Away is 'bad' Peter Saunders' latest book. He argues that the welfare state once supported the poor by taxing the rich. Today it attempts to support the non-poor with their own taxes. He calls this 'tax-welfare churning': Churnin...
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Has the electorate's hip pocket nerve finally gone numb? In today's Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher writes , "we are beneficiaries of the most successful macroeconomic management in the developed world, yet we seem ripe for a government that might want to promise to supp...
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From a back-issue of the ABC Law Report . A patient at UCLA's School of Medicine named John Moore, went in and was diagnosed as having hairy cell leukaemia. His treatment was to have the spleen removed, but before the doctors did that, they did blood tests and found he had a v...
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Teenage Affluenza Add to My Profile | More Videos
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Troppo aficionados will know that a Don Arthur often repays careful reading and linking. His links are full of interest and surprises. Anyway, no surprises that his link to what the great economist James Heckman thinks links to an interview . But what an interview. It reminded...
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Economists spend large amounts of time evaluating existing policies or pushing for some particular new economic policy. Equally important, but less frequently done, is to say what should NOT be done and why it shouldnt be done. Of course these 'warnings' have to relate to a po...
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"Australia's online news commentariat that has found passing endless comment on other people's work preferable to breaking real stories and adding to society's pool of knowledge", says the Australian . I can understand that when you've tracked down sources for interviews or pa...
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The plight of children is one of the most compelling arguments for government activism, say Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray . But in their 1994 book The Bell Curve , they argue that governments should resist the urge to intervene in dysfunctional families and communities...
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The Parliamentary Library released a research paper which divides numerous economic trends up by Governments from Whitlam to Howard . It turns out party hats don't work so well in analysing these trends. This is an interesting graph with a nice trend. Economic policy makers ov...
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Another day, another blogger... or, in this case, another member of the Missing Link crew. Ken Parish is leaving us temporarily (although he will be back, be assured of that). This means the Centrist Bloggers require a new custodian, and we'd like you to make gilmae welcome. A...
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Why is it that, in the endless discussion in the mainstream media about who had a 'better record on interest rates', we never hear any mention of the real interest rate? If you go on nominal rates, then no matter what interest rate you pick, or what period, Labor is going to l...
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I'll be doing another round with Geraldine on her Saturday Morning Radio National do this week on blogging - I expect with one or two other people. The Executive Producer has suggested we talk about the way in which blogging can take you into a discussion between people who re...
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Well I'm a friend of Crikey's Christian Kerr. He wanted to be my friend and I wanted to be his - it's Facebook you know. I guess his email contacts just twigged with mine and all of a sudden we're friends! Another degree of separation - gone! Anyway, we were gonna meet up for...
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Thank God you're here is a lot of fun. Here's the best effort I've seen. From Shaun Micallef a truly funny and very silly fellow. In the (likely) event that Wordpress won't properly embed the screen, you can click here .
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"It really is social science pornography," says Murray, as he pulls income and IQ statistics off his laptop computer. In a 1994 interview with New York Times reporter Jason DeParle , the think tank researcher talks about race, intelligence, poverty and Thai bar girls. Murray i...
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Many years ago I took up the Microsoft email client Outlook. It's a good program. At least in theory. It combines a powerful e-mailer with a few gimicks that I don't use and a calendar that I do use. Oddly I don't know any other email clients that offer that integration of cal...
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Today must surely be a watershed moment in the lead up to the 2007 election. Malcolm Farrs revelations concerning the secret Liberal party polling conducted by Textor Crosby, the findings that the voters see Howard as old and dishonest and its recommendation to respond by blam...
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Gam has been busy with Photoshop since JWH urged us all not to over-react to Australian soldiers getting pissed and dressing up in KKK outfits at Darwin's Robertson Barracks. 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and...
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Peter Whiteford, an Australian working with the OECD in Paris will be presenting a seminar in Melbourne next week at the Brotherhood of St Laurence in Fitzroy (details below the fold). People who are regular visitors to this blog and some others such as Andrew Norton's and And...
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The Barber of Seville is the most popular opera buffa in the contemporary standard repertoire and, according to one estimate , the seventh most performed opera in the world. This is for good reason, because the work is a gem, and also one of the most accessible. However, opera...
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With the national government digging its selective anti-federalist paws into the Tasmanian health system it might be a good time to look at the nationalist (as opposed to federalist) structure of government. This usually takes the form of state abolition ; where the states are...
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On Thursday 26th July, we had another policy discussion meeting figuring Nicholas Gruen as the introducer of a potential policy reform. The issue debated was whether we should have a national information policy. Ben Ives argued in favour, Tony Beatton argued against. The under...
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Via Gummo Trotsky's Tugboat Potemkin This edition of Missing Link is not only a little late but also rather abbreviated. Writing and commenting about the Haneef case has consumed all my blogging time, so there is no coverage in today's edition of either blogs that we classify...
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