The Mystery of the Missing Feed

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Jacques Chester

On and off over the past few months I have received emails to say that our feeds don’t appear in aggregators like Google Reader or Bloglines. Or that they turn up late in big bunches. Or days in arrears.

Each time I would fire up my browser, navigate to the feed URL, confirm that the feed was feeding, and promptly blame Google or Bloglines; sometimes for variety I blamed Wordpress.

Then yesterday I got an email from James Andrewartha. He wrote:

http://clubtroppo.com.au/feed/ is sending a last-modified header of Thu, 01 Jan 1970 08:00:00 GMT which is messing up my bookmarks script. In other words, EPOCH FAIL!

James’s joke is a Unixy nerd thing — all computers running Unix, a Unix-derivative or a Unix-like OS measure time by counting the seconds elapsed since midnight, 1st of January 1970, known as the “beginning of the epoch”. The 8am GMT thing has to do with our server living in the Perth timezone.

Jokes aside, this was a big fat clue that I was wrong. Eagerly I scurried to my command line to test the claim:

Continue reading →

Missing Link Daily

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Ken Parish

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint.

Politics

Australian

Petering Time is listening to Kevin and hearing a dog-whistle.

Despite the endorsements of Andrew Bartlett and Brian Bahnisch (the latter distinctly lukewarm), bloggers of all persuasions remain skeptical about Earth Hour – including Helen, the Editor and Andrew Leigh. Perhaps the idea of presenting Mother Earth with a bunch of flowers once a year to make up for the other 364 days of blacking her eye might be ready for the old heave-ho.

If you weren’t good enough, or bright enough, to receive an invite to the 2020 gabfest one alternative is to get yourself along to the Search Foundation’s round table, when it turns up in your capital city. Too much effort? Just send Kevvie a bitchy e-mail instead. (cartoon by Gianna)

International

Ken Lovell assembles the facts, crunches the numbers, filters the evidence, runs the simulations, and arrives at the following analysis of the latest Administration rhetoric on the surge:

Christ theyre a lot of wankers.

What lessons does the recent spate of anti-Emo rioting in Mexico hold for Australia? Is it time for a crackdown on rockabillies, punks and rasta-men? Will you get a mention in Missing Link if you post about it? Who knows?

Geert Wilders’ anti-Muslim film, Fitna, arrived on the web on Friday. Broken Left Leg is unimpressed with Andrew Bolt’s publication of the film, and Bolt’s avowed reasons for publishing. Amir at Austrolabe thinks all the fuss is just a storm in a demi-tasse:

As far as such things go, Wilders film is quite a weak effort…

The thing that strikes me more than its offensiveness is its lack of originality.

Economics

Peter Martin’s thorough analysis of our distorted incentive system for property investment (from last Tuesday’s CT) ends with a bold prediction, which needs to go on the record:

I am expecting the Rudd Labor government to move against negative gearing, despite its apparent timidity.

Robert Merkel puts some astute questions to Joshua gains re. his ‘Aussie Mac’ proposal (for government guaranteed housing loans). And he gets answers.

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Forward to the Past

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Jacques Chester

A Troppo reader thoughtfully emailed me to point out that our clock was way out of whack. For some reason Wordpress had decided to set its time to GMT+22, which means that comments in the last day or so have all come to us (cue spooky theremin music) FROM THE FUTURE, duh duh daaa!Don’t be surprised if things show up in weird orders.

Update: Another helpful email, this time from our UCC liaison James Andrewartha. He has pointed out that our feeds are reporting that they were last modified on January 1st 1970. In his words, an epoch fail (that’s a nerd joke). It explains why so many feed readers have had trouble following our feed properly. When I get home today I will try and spelunk the Wordpress codebase to suss out what’s going wrong — and whether upgrading to the new release of Wordpress will fix it or not.

Two economic paradoxes of our time: Part One – the paradoxes

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Nicholas Gruen

Paradox one

Over the very time we were clearing away the detritus of the various collectivist institutions we cobbled together under the name of the Australian Settlement, or ‘protection all round’, while we proceeded with economic reform by deregulating markets to try to optimise the contribution of competitive forces, a whole range of things turned up in the in tray which were in effect new and very important public goods (or bads) – which markets might be expected to deal with badly.They includeBads

the threat of global pandemics
the threat of global warming
post cold war nuclear proliferation

Goods

software and other ‘content’ or intellectual products (e=mc²) that in principle can be distributed at negligible marginal cost
the internet – a means of doing this and much else such as
goods produced using ‘open source’ methods of production

And an old public good that we’d come to take for granted is pressing itself on our imagination as I write this – that public good is the liquidity and solvency of the financial system.

Paradox Two.

At least with regard to the new public (knowledge) goods, although much of the basic technology, and the IT architecture that made the new world of public intellectual goods possible had heavy public sector involvement, much of the rest of it is provided by private agents operating in a (reasonably) competitive market. That’s a paradox because, at least in principle, public goods are supposed to be the metier of government, and a problem for private providers who can’t fund public good provision adequately because the good to be provided will be available to all, so there is no practical way of measuring how much people want the good, and so getting them to participate in its funding. Continue reading →

The skills of the fathers

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Nicholas Gruen

The image http://blogs.ft.com/crookblog/files/2008/03/kierkegaard.jpg cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. Courtesy of Clive Crook, here’s a fascinating chart on skills development across OECD countries. The graph shows the proportion of the labour force with at least a college degree, by age group, for OECD countries.

The bigger the span of the vertical lines, the more younger generations exceed older generations in their educational qualifications. The US having led the world thirty years ago is the only country where younger cohorts are less well educated than the older cohort. In marked contrast to just about everywhere else.

Look at the developmental state of Korea!

Hillary Clinton: I told you so

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Nicholas Gruen

Hillary Clinton is a strange female politician. Politicians have to play to their strengths, and some of those are gendered. I argued in this post that it would surely be very difficult for Hillary Clinton to win by being aggressive. I think that’s a taboo with women politicians. Even Margaret Thatcher dressed her aggression up in a kind of imperiousness that Clinton simply doesn’t have – or at least can’t have until she’s won power. (As in all things electoral, I think defending an incumbency is a very different proposition from winning it, and I can’t see how Hillary can win.)

Unlike her husband, Clinton doesn’t really ‘do’ charm. She’s a strangely cold person who seems to have thought that she could run on wonkishness. Bill her hubby might have been the original wonk, but he won as much on charm as anything else. Kevin 24/7 is a wonk, but he was also very careful to craft his image in a positive light, and indeed was not that aggressive in winning government.

Anyway, these chickens might be coming home to roost. According to this article, in the zero-sum game that seems to dominate the democratic nomination now, Clinton’s attacks on Obama seem to be turning her popularity southward a good deal more than his:

Meanwhile, the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows Clinton popularity dropping precipitously. She is now viewed favorably by 37% of the country, and unfavorably by 48%, down from 45-43 in early March. (Obama’s rating is 49-32, and John Mccaib’s is 45-25.)