Dramatic photos from The Age this morning show Melbournes enormous Port Phillip Bay on a tilt. Readers were witness to the astonishing spectacle of giant cruise liner Sun Princess apparently motoring uphill to berth at Station Pier. There was no explanation for this perplexing...
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A collection of useful words arranged in satisfying ways for the benefit of future historians. (Also beneficial when faced with drunken red-faced Howard-Huggers at Christmas parties over the next month who embarrass the host by rudely asserting that Mr. Howard was the best Pri...
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Bryan "Ozpolitics" Palmer on the state of play with counting in doubtful seats as at 8:24 this morning: The ABC Computer now has Robertson on the doubtful list (previously a Labor gain) after the pre-poll votes went in the Coalitions favour 53.3 to 46.7. It also has Solomon on...
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Miss Haversham refuses a proposal from Terry Sedgwick 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad I was nearly going to call this the Year Zero edition of Missing Link, but it would give people the wrong idea. I'm...
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If John Howard were to summarise his legacy, he would emphasise economics. As he claimed in the election, Australia has a strong economy with low inflation and low rates of unemployment. With the benefit of asset sales and budget surpluses, the commonwealth has the financial c...
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Here's the column foreshadowed in a previous post as published today in the Fin . I was only given 500 words, so whether or not you find it sweet, I had to keep it short. Fiscal Problem - what Problem? Its the alarm du jour. Going into the election with an overheating economy,...
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From today's Crikey! Brough, Pearson, Yunupingu rejected by Aboriginal voters Editor of the National Indigenous Times, Chris Graham, writes : I never quite understood how Mal Brough managed to escape genuine mainstream media scrutiny so often during his brief but, shall we say...
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Well, it's not standard Troppo fare I know - though aficionados may recall similar departures from me in the past , but Natalie Gauci won Australian Idol on Sunday night. Idol is quite a show - for the few who are uninitiated it's a kind of souped up talent quest in the age of...
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Peter Costello battles his emotions on election night Is it conceivable that the government would have scraped back in with Costello as PM? Nick Minchin thinks so, if his comments to Virgina Trioli on Sydney radio this morning are any guide. The Senator obviously would have pr...
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I've just read this piece by Judith Brett on why Howard will lose (it was written at the beginning of the campaign). I don't agree with it all, (why do people go on about that handshake? Even if it wasn't a good look, it just seems amazing that it would have tipped too many vo...
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From today's AFR Bob Hawkes election victory in 1983 was so sure that he and his treasurer-designate, Paul Keating, were able to meet treasury and finance officers within 72 hours of election day. The 1983-84 budget, was the agenda item because the Fraser government - with Joh...
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As I argued in a recent column , the Coalition has been a policy free zone for some time. Of course it's been in government, so of necessity it's had lots of policies. But it's heart has not been in them - it's jadedly presided over a jaded bureaucracy. This spilled over into...
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I don't have much to add to Rex's overall post-election rant , except to suggest that this is in many respects the result that might well have occurred in 2004 had John Howard's dishonest interest rate scare not been so successful and had Mark Latham not been a victim of his o...
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Its a repudiation. Its a rejection of Mr. Howard and much that he has stood for, and behold it is good. The Labor victory is so emphatic that it makes a mockery of the conservative vanity that somehow they were more attuned to the pulse of the nation. Yesterday Mr. Howard turn...
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Honorable mention? Could this curdle milk at five hundred paces? Congratulations to reader Doug, the clear winner of Missing Link's prediction competition . I use the word 'clear' advisedly: I was intrigued when I tabulated the predictions to find that there was a very large g...
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Yesterday I started classifying the questions that Kerry O'Brien asked the candidates in his final interview with them. Kerry's got a well deserved reputation as a pretty tough interviewer - I've seen him do a good job. But all his hard questions were really driven by the way...
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What could be more appropriate on election day than to reproduce the last two of Jon Kudelka's epic series 101 uses for a John Howard ? Moreover, they're even ideologically balanced (well, almost). Speaking for myself, the best use I can think of for John Winston is as a crotc...
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What do Nicholas Stern and Peter Brent have in common with me?
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I liked the Ross Gittins speech that I posted on Troppo a week or so ago . I didn't join in comments, but had a nagging doubt. While I'm sympathetic to Ross's idea that self control is a big thing in an age of plenty, I guess I felt a little uneasy at a certain intimation in t...
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Australia is blessed with great cartoonists. John Kudelka is one such. There are some terrific cartoons on his website - which I've reproduced below the fold. In the meantime, he's doodled away to produce a book of cartoons and light commentary on the theme of 101 Uses For A J...
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John Clarke rose to new heights on tonight's 7.30 report. Definitely a case of LOL. Go check it out .
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If the government changes hands on Saturday, the pundits will make an immediate beeline for their retrospectoscope. Within a few short months and a few columns by Paul Kelly and Hugh Mackay we'll have an official version of what went wrong. The Liberals will be trashed - as we...
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The idea that Hillary Clinton is the most likely person to win the presidency for the Democrats beggars belief. It's certainly possible she could win - but then look at the position from which she'll start. But how a Republican could beat Obama or Edwards beats me. Another cas...
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"My wife was absolutely outraged when she heard about the incident." Let her convince us. "We, I hope, live in a society where we treat husbands and wives - although we respect the closeness of their relationship - we treat them as individuals and we shouldn't automatically tr...
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Last weekend I read Melanie Oppenheimers article in the most recent Australian Literary Review entitled Women missing in action , I was struck by the use of the word "misogynist" to describe retellings of Australia's World War One which did not give serious attention to women....
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Most economists like myself have come to believe that monetary policy now carries so much punch because a reduction in interest rates has a compound impact on borrowing costs, on exchange rates and on asset prices that it is unthinkable that we will have a serious recession ev...
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I saw Kevin Rudds National Press Conference address. At the start, there was a technical disconnection between his mouth and the words that came out which was distracting but it was soon corrected. The speech also seemed a little too long and repetitive (Rudd still lacks Howar...
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Joshua Gans draws our attention to Amazon's attempt to create the iPod for text. Kindle . Joshua's quite keen though unimpressed by Kindle's inability to display pdfs. I'm more seriously unimpressed by that, and don't reckon it will be a goer. At $400 US it's expensive . And I...
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Warney dressed as his mum for a new TV beer ad. What is it about beefy Aussie sporting blokes that makes them want to dress up in drag in front of the cameras? The boofheads at the AFL and NRL Footie Shows seem to think it's funny too. Courtesy Will at The Corridor (cricket bl...
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Election campaigns are fascinating events for a social scientist. In a poor country with lots of tensions, the issues would be about survival and bitter divisions, whilst in some sedate countries with no problems election campaigns are about the length of socks. Hence the issu...
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Courtesy of Crikey!, here's a list of five things to like about JWH. I completely disagree with the fourth point, and the first is at best half a thing to like about Howard - I'd argue that a great weakness of his reign is a basic lack of interest in policy (as opposed to the...
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Yes Troppodillians, a new Troppo competition - hopefully you'll just keep coming back till 24th November when you will have weightier concerns on your mind. Please record in comments, the stupidist bit of punditry you've seen in the campaign so far. I confess I'm convening thi...
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Details below the fold. Optional fanfare. This time last year, regular readers may remember, Club Troppo sponsored a showcase of Australian independent blogging, which we called 'Best Blog Posts of 2006' . From a large pool of nominations drawn from a multitude of Australian b...
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I've long harboured the idea that economic journalists are a special breed because they have an actual subject. There are plenty of them about juxtaposed against political commentators, but the political commentators spend their time blathering - they're engaged in what I call...
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As linked to by Paul Krugman , here's a bunch of pundits smothering the claims of Rudi Juliani with punditry not on whether the claims are true or not (they're not) but on whether they'll work or not. And of course as the link points out with punditry of that kind, they improv...
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I was recently sent this correspondence by occasional Troppo poster, and person of considerable knowledge about the tax and transfer system, Spog. Here's what he wrote. Hello Nick, I haven't bothered you in a while, so I thought it was time to send you something out of left fi...
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I have only been keeping a casual eye on this - but this post is very enlightening.
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There's a bit of a thread running through three articles I've read recently. These two articles from the NYRB on Gordon Brown and Paul Krugman respectively both paint emerging responses to the excesses of yet another low dishonest decade. Brown is studied in his apparent desir...
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Gandhi's take on Miranda Devine's attempt to rescue fellow RWDB pundit Caroline Overington from her own ham-fisted effort at electoral rorting by the time-honoured RWDB gambit of labelling lefties "humourless". Nitpickers might observe that Miranda is actually a Fairfax Angel...
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Many years ago someone did up an animation for Peach Home Loans in flash and supplied it to me in an exe file . But you can't upload exe files onto YouTube. Cam Riley says that he thinks those with Apple OSX might be able to take a moving screen capture of the animation. If an...
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In The Shock Doctrine , Naomi Klein argues that radical free market reform requires some kind of crisis . Wars, terrorist attacks and natural disasters pave the way for authoritarian reformers to impose their fundamentalist visions on an unwilling population. Critics like Tyle...
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Trying to check up on some claims I made about Gordon Brown's promise to involve Parliament in any decisions to commit troops abroad, I found myself at pm.gov.uk. It's a much more interesting site than pm.gov.au - or at least what I remember of it. There are podcasts of often...
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Black Inc's 'best of' series are in the bookshops - Essays, Short Stories, Poems. In scanning the latter of these volumes I read the poem below and bought the book. White -Water Rafting and Palliative Care for my late wife, Gloria If I had understood (when down the river you a...
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With the polls remaining seemingly immovably against John Howard, it probably isn't surprising that some left-leaning bloggers already have their hatchets out. Howard sacked 6 department heads after his 1996 election victory, and if bloggers have their way Kevie will be sackin...
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Here is a picture of Harrison's Chronometer (a late version), which was so accurate that it effectively solved a huge problem with navigation - enabling sailors to figure out their longitude when thousands of miles from home after many months. No other method had worked. Harri...
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Below the fold is a column of mine about 'me tooism'. In short, not all bad, and something that could be usefully extended in various ways. You Too Just as Paul Keatings penchant for divisiveness and cultural warfare was a prelude to his successor John Howards brand of politic...
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I don't s'pose that's news. but this graph from today's morning Crikey! provides the relevant "compared to whats".
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I was pretty impressed with this. From a real game at the highest level, between a world Champion who is white. It's his move. What should he do? He did the wrong thing. Find out what he did below the fold. Then work out how you can beat him.
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Courtesy of Terry Sedgwick (where there are more orangutan policy images) 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Today's Missing Link predictably publishes a plethora of political content, but we also have ver...
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From today's Crikey! by Greg Barnes. When the Howard government and its allies in the ALP fell over each other in their mad scramble to pass draconian anti-terror laws, there were some wise heads warning that such legislation would open the door to abuse by law enforcement and...
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Courtesy Terry Sedgwick I've been getting increasingly puzzled about the course of this election campaign. Both parties are promising tax cuts and spending programs that would make a drunken sailor blush, although the Coalition has decisively outstripped Labor ($65 billion to...
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At my request, Ross has sent me the text of at least three speeches he's given. I've printed out the last, but not read it yet, but of the other two I'm an admirer of his ability to write compellingly on a theme with references to the books that are current on the topics he's...
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I was discussing a project with a software engineer last week and mentioned Gruen Tenders, which I've bored Troppodillians with previously here and here . He said that I was describing ' Evidence Based Scheduling ' as described by software geek and commentator Joel Spolsky (ob...
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Old pals Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser are on a campaign for better standards of ministerial accountability. Good on them. I read that (I think) Malcolm said it wasn't party political. It was addressed to all parties. Now I wouldn't for instance say that Howard is particula...
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Paul Kellys piece in last months Australian Literary Review was in its way quite well done. Many of his general arguments were not only sensible, but were expressed with clarity and, at times, considerable force. Nevertheless, as did Raimond Gaita in his response this month, I...
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That worthy organisation ACOSS has asked me to get the word out on their national conference - to be held in Adelaide on the 22nd and 23rd of November this year - just before election day! Since we hold various debates on social policy here, it seems like a good place to put u...
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Secret Internal polling conducted exclusively for Club Troppo , has found its way into the public domain today. This new poll, a welcome addition to the cacophony of other polls testing the mood of the nation reveals that my confidence in the Government as effective economic m...
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Hopefully Troppodillians will forgive me for tackling another Pearson piece only two weeks after my last effort. I'll try not to make a habit of it, I promise. With your indulgence, then, let's proceed. Is it relativism to hold our liberal democratic traditions to a higher sta...
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I was listening to the ABC Book Show and Ramona started talking about anti-spam technology - which rather surprised me. She was interviewing Luis von Ahn who created CAPTCHA who had now produced reCAPTCHA. You know those nasty little visual quizes you fill out to prove to some...
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Andrew Leigh and Joshua Gans' latest attack on the Howard Government is causing collateral damage. According to Helen Smart , the publicity surrounding their latest Baby Bonus paper "spawned a disgusting hatefest on news.com.au and similar forums, with all the usual suspects g...
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John Mathews emailed me suggesting I might be interested in posting a link to this op ed on development policy. He was right. The article makes points that I've quoted Dani Rodrik making against the Washington consensus in earlier posts . I have little doubt that the article i...
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The Sydney Morning Herald's article on the Sea-Eagles trying to sign Willie Mason has fallen to cost cutting journalism and now the server just returns a meta-comment which saves on journalist labor the and reader's precious time: Forbidden You don't have permission to access...
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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 This edition of Missing Link compiled by James Farrell, Gilmae, Peter Black, Amanda Rose and Ken Parish with editing by the latter. What with the election campaign and al...
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I went to Richmond last weekend to look at what I thought was an exhibition of paintings by Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack - sometime of the Bauhaus and subsequently art master at Geelong Grammar with transport to Australia being supplied by HMT Dunera in 1940. The exhibition turned o...
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This scene unfolded during an electioneering wander by John Howard through a shopping centre complete with all the hoopla of cameramen etc. A woman was knocked over. The video which can be accessed at the bottom of the page here only begins after the woman has hit the deck, so...
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As America entered the 1990s, Republican speaker Newt Gingrich was busy making plans for the nation's future. " I keep reminding my friends we've entered the decade of the teenage mutant ninja turtle ," he wrote. His plans for the decade of the TMNT included "transforming the...
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The article - filched from Crikey! is over the fold. Have no doubt, further plant closures in Australias car parts manufacturing industry are much closer than anyone thinks. The rapid escalation of the Australian dollar has created a price competitive crisis. But theres more t...
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As usual my correspondents seem incapable of taking responsibility for their own emotions. Troppo reader Don Arthur asks : Dr Troppo, I’d like your advice on something I read in the newspaper this morning . According to Peter Hartcher subjects in a Dutch study found politician...
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Peach's longest serving employee is pregnant! Isn't that good! Well I think so and so does she. But she now has a problem. She's a vegetarian because she hates eating meat (not because she's strict about it on principle). But she's very very tired a lot of the time given her p...
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What a lucky little girl Polly must be to have a dad who gives her a story like this for a fifth birthday present . Read it and other polished jewels at Melbourne playwright Sam Sejavka's blog Sails of Oblivion (via Alison Croggon's equally wonderful blog Theatre Notes ).
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In Nicholas's thread below tigtog raised the topic of The Sounds of Aus , John Clarke's documentary on the Aussie accent , written by Lawrie Zion . (Apparently there's no web site, nor even a page on the ABC site). I enjoyed it too, but a few issues weren't resolved to my sati...
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Australia's unemployment rate is at 33 year lows. This achievement is far from unique. It is a global phenomenon and Australia has benefited from the world boom more than most because of the impact on our export prices. That said, it is quite possible that some of the Howard G...
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Guest Post by Dan Walsh of Kwoff.com.au. For some time I've straddled two digital worlds. My 'hi geek' dual monitor setup allows me to read my daily dose of Crikey on one screen and the constant stream of tech news from Digg.com on the other. One world is determined by an edit...
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I travelled overseas a while back. I was tasked with an important mission for private enterprise so I flew Business Class. Business Class Travel has a lot to offer the practiced observer of the human condition. Just arriving at the airport for example offers an appreciation of...
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I noticed a link at the bottom of a piece on Auden by John Clarke in an Age supplement which is a couple of weeks old but which I just read today. I figured his site must have been there for a while, but not so. It seems to have been launched on 17th October this year. Complet...
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A picture tells a thousand words (via Apathetic Sarah ) 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad We're running a day late again. My fault, but we'll still publish again late tomorrow (Friday). This edition compi...
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As a fictional character, I'm fascinated by people who don't exist . There are just so many of us -- fictional people , imaginary people , hypothetical people and people who will exist but don't exist yet . But despite our non-existence, we are able to generate facts about our...
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House prices in Melbourne and Sydney - particularly in better suburbs - have risen very fast in the last few months. At the same time, home lending is sharply down. As Peach business partner, financial e-newsletter The Sheet reports "The Australian Finance Groups mortgage inde...
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On a visit to an art gallery yesterday I was told why paintings of the same size are typically priced the same, even when the artist and the gallery think one is better than the other. Any guesses as to why she said this was? It made perfect sense in terms of 'behavioural econ...
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You get a lot from your parents. Money, 'human capital' as they call it these days. Language, political orientation (to a substantial extent). If your ideology is your 'values' then I'm sure that parents play a large part. But how public spirited are you? Turns out knowing how...
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Bicycles for carrying stuff Most Australians think of bicycles as children's toys or sporting equipment. The typical suburban bike shop is packed with full-suspension mountain bikes , lightweight road bikes and fat-tired retro cruisers . And as wonderful as these machines are,...
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This Krugman column reminded me of the strange role of lies in politics. With some they just roll along. Everyone knows them but they're not election issues. Then others become election issues. Read the Krugman column below the fold, but it put me in mind of a very strange int...
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I continue to be amazed at the way the market for computer laptops evolves. Around eight years ago I bought myself a fantastic little Sharp with an external CD drive which meant that since you don't use the CD drive much, you could cart this little beauty round in your briefca...
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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 This edition of Missing Link is a couple of days late, owing mostly to Ken Parish's broken Dell PC (don't buy one, their warranty service is truly appalling). It was comp...
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The week began with the combined forces of the Foam-O-Sphere directing their heavy artillery on a supposed weak spot in the hitherto impregnable defences of the Rudd campaign. Altitudinous egghead Peter Garrett, provided the foamers with their first big break when he neglected...
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