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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Worst of Perth wonders about the values of all the bogan talkback ranters harassing Hen...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Suggest a caption (via Terry Sedgwick ). Thank God for those activist judges on the Sup...

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'One of my closest friends is Turkish, and she won't have anything to do with Muslims, OK?' Camden Council has finally voted on the Quranic Society's development application, and has unanimously voted against it . We now have to wait and see whether the applicants will appeal,...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Random photo from Flickr - page 1 of 72,701 hits for "teenager". Is this more or less "...

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I've just spent two hours finding stuff for Missing Link because other team members (except the arts ones) didn't have time. However I've now discovered that the arts section, while full of great material, is also full of extraneous formatting code that will need to be strippe...

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Here's a column I've just written published today in the AFR. The Gruen Transfer Those with an unusual surname have to get used to spelling it. No its not Gluner. Not Glueball or Grewbie its Gruen G-R-U-E-N. The compensation is, your name identifies you or a family member pret...

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My ten year old son is in trouble. Last week his sports teacher, Mr Bryan said to his class "stand up if you've been a bad sport". Alex returned home having stood up. He then confided to his mother that he hadn't been a bad sport, but he thought he had better stand up to be su...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Exclusive Club Troppo investigation reveals another Henson peddling kiddie porn. Where...

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The following paragraph is an abstract of the paper "The Effect of Employer Access to Criminal History Data on the Labor Market Outcomes of Ex-Offenders and Non-Offenders" by Keith Finlay Since 1997, states have begun to make criminal history records publicly available over th...

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The super-rich aren't super-smart says Ezra Klein . While it might be comforting to believe that that income differences represent differences in knowledge and skill, it's just not true: The massive gains in wealth in this country are apportioning to a small slice of rich peop...

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cycad tree ferns rude senile royal turd obsequious Tory blogger

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In a speech on May 19th, Tim Flannery reportedly proposed, as a last-ditch solution, the mass depositing of sulphur into our atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the earth, thus counter-acting the greenhouse effect of increased amounts of CO2 in the air. The spe...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Lauredhel gives a hand to an aptly named blog called Photoshop Disasters . Paul Norton...

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ABC news story this afternoon: Northern Territory Police believe a woman found dead at Mindil Beach last night may have been assaulted in the hours before her death. Police received a report at 11pm that a woman was lying on the beach unconscious and bleeding from the mouth. P...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Paul Norton looks at the current cult of global cooling and lessons unlearnt from South...

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It's not long since Paul Frijters raised the subject of paid maternity leave here, inspiring a long and stimulating discussion in the comments. The topic is in the air again, largely because the Productivity Commission has been looking into the issue. Unfortunately I stll have...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Threats from certain Missing Link colleagues have resulted in a penis photo theme in to...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Robert Rauschenberg's Skyway (1964)(he died this time last week, but better late than n...

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Below the fold is Crikey's ruminations on Bob Brown's story that he was offered $1 mil in coverage if he would support a particular media proprietor get stuff through the Senate. The thing that bugged me about Brown's story was that he said that he didn't disclose it at the ti...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Reason 's Jesse Walker on the fate of the Spaghetti Monster (originally a comment on th...

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John Quiggin and Dan Hunter have written a very interesting survey article on Web 2.0 . They characterise the new innovation on the web as the innovation of the amateur. Their choice of word is deliberately provocative, and also rehabilitative. As they note, at least in the wa...

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Three quarters of America's wealth is invested in its people, writes Gary Becker . He argues that while physical capital is still matters, human capital now matters more. Where once a nation's wealth lay in the fertility of its soil, today it lies in the knowledge, skills and...

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Nicholas Gruen's post a couple of days ago on American RWDB shockjock Bill O'Reilly's dummy spit has got me thinking. Why haven't local TV programmers inflicted similar current affairs "personality" commentators on Australian audiences? After all, we've had their radio equival...

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I've added a new Australian sports blogs category to TroppoSphere , with lots of great feeds kindly identified by Guido (whose new blog is one of those featured). I've also split the arts blogs category into two - "theatre, film, TV and visual arts" and "books, music and gener...

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Many thanks to the readers who responded to our joint Burma campaign with John Quiggin by donating to aid agencies assisting the victims of Cyclone Nargis. They include: Dylan Nicholson (100), John Warburton (100), Kim Weatherall (150), Stephen Luntz (350), Robert Merkel (100)...

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You've heard of the tragedy of the commons and if not you can look it up here . But as the public commons burgeons on the internet and in the headlong rush of at least a substantial portion of the corporate sector towards open innovation (or more open innovation) there's anoth...

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A friend of mine's partner and her son are setting up a cafe/bakery in an old Church in Perth, Tasmania . So, in the true style of financial markets of the eighteenth century (my chosen favourite century to be part of - so long as I got one of the good parts) I've invested wit...

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How's this for commentary as news? The opening sentence of the lead story in The Age today . OPPOSITION Leader Brendan Nelson has sought to revive his ailing leadership with pledges to cut petrol excise and block a 70% tax hike on pre-mixed alcoholic drinks. How absolutely dis...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian The California State Constitution protects gay marriage! See today's ML "law" section ....

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The Archibald Prize Exhibition at the NSW Art Gallery winds up on Sunday. That doesn't leave much time, but, having seen it myself now, I strongly endorse Nicholas's advice from two months ago -- see it if you can. And if you have children between seven and twenty, take them....

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian A t-shirt every blogger should have, courtesy Will Wilkinson who argues (compellingly)...

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Heather Ridout was asked to give the Budget a mark out of ten on the radio today. She gave it 8/10. As I said to some colleagues today, I'd like to have been in her class. The two most long-standing governments since Menzies absolutely ripped into outlays in their first budget...

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Im going to look a right idiot if I was first steered to 3 Quarks Daily by someone here on Club Troppo. Still, its good enough to take the risk. The site describes its mission as . . . . present[ing] interesting items from around the web on a daily basis, in the areas of scien...

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Australia may be lucky and sail through the boisterous economic seas without any significant impact on unemployment. However, while we may have seen the worst of the credit crisis, I would rate this outcome as only a 1/3 probability. Allowing for the delayed impact of earlier...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian The Budget It's Wayne Swan's first but it's Andrew Bartlett's eleventh . Robert Merkel...

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Several readers have sent money to Burma's monks, via Avaaz . This is a progress report on Club Troppo's joint campain with John Quiggin to inspire reader donations to organisations assisting the victims of Cyclone Nargis in Burma. As John announced in an update yesterday, 'do...

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You may not know it but around 20% of the home loan market has just collapsed - the securitisation market. The banks are moving into the space and and, as a result, rationing credit elsewhere. Below the fold is an op ed in the Age about it. It introduces a theme you'll probabl...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian From Jeff at Rigorous Intuition . Like a fat kid eyeing off a doughnut, the inevitable...

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TroppoSphere TroppoSphere is a project I've been working on for quite a long while on and off. It's intended as a feed reader for people who don't want to use a feed reader! A gateway to a world of news and expert opinion and analysis for those with feedreader phobia. I suspec...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian From Terry Sedgwick . It's a bit like the armadillo book that gave rise to the original...

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"If everyone had enough, it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others", says Harry Frankfurt . Skepticlawyer agrees. In a recent post on 'progressive fusionism' she suggests combining Frankfurt's 'doctrine of sufficiency' with Amartya Sen's capabilitie...

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The Australian reports breathlessly that Lindsay Tanner can't guarantee that no working families will be worse off, nor that interest rates won't rise in the future. Nor can Malcolm Turnbull, or Kevin Rudd or anyone else. Or to put it more fully, they can't but if they did the...

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If you'll allow me my fancy, it occured to me that, mutatis mutandis , Edmund Burke might have been contrasting the slow cumulative progress of TQM or the Toyota Production System nicely written up by James Suroweki here , with more 'dynamic' (and often less successful) method...

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If you've been round bureaucracy for any length of time (and yes, folks, this includes anyone in the private, public or 'third' sector working for an organisation of any size) you'll know how hard it is to get good ideas up from the bottom to the top. Toyota built its dominanc...

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I haven't paid much attention to Telstra's participation in the public policy debate. It usually manages to get itself seen in a fairly poor light at least if one is not paying much attention as I haven't been. Even so, I've just read this speech by Phil Burgess (pdf), and I'm...

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With tens of thousands dead ( possibly a hundred thousand ) and hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed, the disaster in Myanmar is approaching the scale of the December 2004 tsunami. The difference is that it's confined to one extremely poor country with particularly poor in...

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I've been puzzling about international humanitarian interventions lately, in part because my daughter Bec is in the middle of a uni assignment on the subject, but mostly because as I write this Robert Mugabe continues to terrorise and impoverish his own people in Zimbabwe whil...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Apathetic Sarah takes Julie Bishop's latest pronouncement to its logical conclusion App...

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I was going on about the renewed importance of public goods to the Review Panel on the Innovation System and so they asked me and another economists on the panel to do a bit of a write up for them. For various logistical reasons, the ultimate document was run up by me the nigh...

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Cute site .

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As many of you know, I'm usually around Troppo for Missing Link purposes, and it's Missing Link that can take a great deal of the credit for Legal Eagle and I heading off on a new joint blogging venture . Jacques Chester - Troppo's redoubtable blog admin - can also take a bunc...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Holbein sketch of Lady Guildford (via Scarlett W Blue ) Apathetic Sarah notes that Quee...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Bernice Balconey , Kim and clarencegirl review Morris and Michael's most recent public...

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One of the respondents to my earlier post on NSW electricity privatisation accuses me of a possible "ideological bias against privatisation" and proceeds to make sweeping generalisation about the benefits of privatisation.. I thought I might clear the air on this issue. I have...

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I was more than a little surprised when what I thought was a reasonably uncontroversial item in yesterday's Missing Link elicited a heated response from frequent Troppo commenter and erudite legal eagle Patrick Fitzgerald. The item concerned arch-conservative US Supreme Court...

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The AFR published a letter of mine today on this topic. It is reproduced below. It was brief so in this post I elaborate on why I think Iemma and Costa messed up their arguments very badly. M Y AFR LETTER The debate on electricity privatization in NSW has gone off the rails, w...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Tim Lambert on the fallacy inherent in yesterday's umpteenth climate change denialist "...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Gummo's New-New Political Compass Apathetic Sarah anticipates an interesting judgement...

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One of my grand kids is studying economics at the University and, to help him with an essay on current macroeconomic policy in Australia, he asked me three rather pertinent questions.. 1. If there is an inflation problem which is overwhelmingly supply-side driven, as we now se...

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"The phrase is suddenly everywhere", said the New York Times' Katharine Seelye . It was 2000 and Al Gore was running for president. In his acceptance speech , Gore used the phrase 'working families' at least eight times. In Australia, Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd seem equally kee...

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We've had web-translation for yonks. But given that podcasting is often an inefficient way to both take in and disseminate information I'd like to be able to go to a site and feed in a relevant audio or audio-visual file - or point the site to a YouTube video for instance and...

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Blogging allowed me to stumble on at least one simple description of my approach to economics. There are $100 bills lying round all over the place, in the form of perfectly simple things that we could do to improve things, that we don't. That's one of the reasons I get so anim...

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Is this a joke?

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One of the most important things that I learned at the summit was in a conversation on the Saturday night dinner. I was in the 'productivity' stream but snuck off to the economics dinner where I encountered a businessman who had barracked for the West Coast Eagles. Collingwood...

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I am not a greedy man. Ever since it was announced that the London Mayoral elections would be a contest between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, I have had to confront the fact that I would not be that happy with whoever ended up as mayor. Ken, in fairness, has done a good j...

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And, in case you're intersted, the book program is broadcasting from the Clunes Booktown, some festival in which Clunes - which is near Ballarat - invites booksellers to have a big book sale in Clunes - this weekend. And there are other attractions. Listen all about it on that...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian From Terry Sedgwick Jason Soon points out how Craig Emerson has misrepresented Alan Mor...

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As I've said ad nauseam on this blog and elsewhere, and quoting John Kay, the way we work out what's good and what's not is not by assessing it individually but by reputation. We know that Apple makes insanely great products not because we get our screwdriver out and check its...

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Previous tatooed breasts scales of justice deep-sixed to avoid bad taste distraction from a post intended to provoke serious discussion ... John Greenfield is a conservative blog commenter who occasionally fulfils a useful function, rather like a canary in a coal mine. He can...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Annie Leibowitz photo of 15 year old Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus (see items under "...

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