What a lot of nonsense has been talked about the defection to French rugby of rugby league star Bobby Sue Billy Jo Sonny Bill Williams! First, the NRL isn't going to succeed in getting an injunction to restrain Sonny Bill's defection, still less get a French court to enforce i...
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Would you find lots of oval shaped stations popping up all over the place in your city an eyesore? And they have advertising on them. Still, I reckon you wouldn't. You see they're bike exchange stations and in Paris they've got them every 300 metres or so. And I just know that...
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The High Court's decision earlier today in the Blue Mud Bay case sets the cat among the pigeons (or maybe the shark among the barramundi) a little over a week out from the Northern Territory election. The Court has dismissed the NT Labor government's appeal from a decision of...
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Fresh from Krugman's blog . As usual, it can't be put much better. Economics of catastrophe Away from the headlines, theres a really important discussion going on about how to think about the economics of climate change. The key player is Marty Weitzman, who has made a simple...
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Here's today's column in the Financial Review. The interface between you and your bank used to be the branch. Today banks give your computer sufficient access to their computer over the net to let you do it all yourself. Reengineering of the interface is happening everywhere a...
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I realise this is kind of missing the main news story in the recent court victory of Max Mosley - son of Oswald who was the leader of the British Union of Fascists. (That's not to say that Max should automatically be tarred with the same brush, but he does seem to dip into tha...
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Via Beth Simone Noveck , Amex has got into the crowdsourcing game announcing an exciting and innovative philanthropic program Members Project in which you can propose projects, vote on the projects of others, and in so doing qualify them for $2.5 million of funding from Amex....
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I'm a fan of 'synergies' in policy - doing more than one thing you want done with one policy. Killing two birds, that kind of thing. These opportunities come up all the time, but we're very often too flat footed to catch them. The last time Australia was good at this kind of t...
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Am I the only newspaper reader who expects an opinion column to develop a coherent thread of argumentation, as distinct from a series of provocative comments stuck together precariously with specious howevers and therefores? The editors who approve these pieces evidently think...
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Everyone knows that egalitarians believe in equality . But what does that mean? If the core egalitarian idea is that all human beings have equal moral worth, then even Friedrich Hayek is an egalitarian . But if, as Rafe Champion insists , egalitarianism means "equal material r...
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I gather this YouTube is quite well known. I'd never seen it when I came across it.
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Andrew Bolt admonishes abusive foam flecked greens for their reaction to a grim metaphor and contrasts the obsession with AGW with a lack of concern about the coarsening of our culture. A moderator has just told me half a dozen spectacularly nasty comments have had to be snipp...
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This is really something IMO, but if you want an eerie and remarkable experience, just left click on this 1 minute movie to download it and travel in silence with Cassini around Saturn. Awesome. PS: well you'll 'left click' if you use your left hand to operate your mouse like...
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Why are left-wingers less happy than right-wingers? According to psychologists Jaime Napier and John Jost , it's because of the way they interpret inequality. American right-wingers are more likely to believe that hard work leads to success. As a result, they find inequality l...
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Well no doubt others have posted this around the traps, but Tim Watts posted this truly spooky argument for the existence of God. You might think the arguments are obvious, but that's always the case once things are pointed out.
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Read this (reproduced below the fold). Should taxpayers bail out the banking system? One of the worlds leading international macroeconomists contrasts the Larry Summers dont-scare-off-the-investors pro-bailout view with the Willem Buiter they-ran-into-a wall-with-eyes-wide-ope...
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Support for the welfare state is often based more on chauvinism than a desire for justice, says Will Wilkinson. He argues that if first-worlders really care about improving the lot of the poor we should open up our economies to trade and allow more poor foreigners to cross our...
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I'm sick of paying $100 or more every time I crank through two or three thousand pages of printing. Back in the old days, printer drums and toner cartridges were replaced separately. Drums lasted 20,000 pages or more and could be persevered with even if they weren't giving you...
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"Over the past five years, a group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers has emerged on the scene", writes David Brooks in the New York Times . Instead of rising through the official channels of the movement, he says, "they found their voices while blogging. The...
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Dilbert is running mashups , many of which are less funny than the usual. IMHO the one above is an exception.
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Help! My insanity level is increasing. I've just written another letter to the editor of the Northern Territory News : Its understandable when political flacks and criminal lawyer advocates exaggerate the extent of crime in the Territory. Its both disappointing and puzzling wh...
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From the 'being grateful for small mercies department, and from this website , here is extrasolar planet HD 209458b (also unofficially known as "Osiris", which orbits a star in the constellation of Pegasus) revealed the strongest ever spectroscopic signature for a giant extras...
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From Paul Krugman Its just a glancing mention in this Times piece on how Fannie Mae won friends and influenced people: Fannies board once included Frederic V. Malek, a longtime friend of the Bush family and a former business partner of the current President Bush. Theres a bit...
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Brilliant! HT: Peter Martin .
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Verily this is a cool new development. Boeing is building super airships to double the capacity that can be airlifted around the world. These babys will be the size of football fields (not ours but America's) and fitted with four helicopter rotors and able to drag 40 tons of s...
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I couldn't believe my ears today when I heard The Queensland Police Minister, Judy Spence interviewed about the paedophile who is living in the semi-rural town of Carbrook on Breakfast on ABC Radio National. As you no doubt know, there's a baying mob there right now. I might b...
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I've made various suggestions about the possible terrificness of open source approaches to government, for instance here . The Poms are having a crack at this kind of thing. They're trying to use suggestion boxes to improve policy. Thus the front page of betterregulation.gov.u...
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Catherine Carby, Rachelle Durkin and Gábor Bretz If one wants uniformity to be the basic rule for an opera, it is easy to see that a more perfect subject ... than 'Don Giovanni' is simply not to be contemplated. (Source) Was Kierkegaard right about this opera being the greates...
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And exciting presentation of fascinating data. Hat tip to a Troppodillian whose email I have now lost but who emailed me a week or so ago suggesting I watch this and write it up on Troppo. Apologies, this isn't much of a write up, but I'm afraid I'm flat out. And I didn't thin...
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Government and the private sector are good at different things, and there are gains from trade. Thus government has certain assets at its disposal. One of those assets is the taxing power. That asset should be 'worked' wherever it gives rise to value. Bruce Chapman has spend a...
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Since I posted this post on my problems with my wireless broadband, I've received constant emails from around the Tropposphere on how I am going with the problem, begging for a sequel. Well folks, I can report the next exciting episode is that I contacted Optus at the end of m...
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This article by Charles Krauthammer seems cruel but fair to me. Obama is pursuing a 'small target' strategy against his opponents. John Howard did this - and Kevin Rudd. But Obama has an additional reason to do it on top of the fact that the incumbent is on the nose - he's a c...
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Superstar CEOs by Ulrike Malmendier, Geoffrey Tate - #14140 (CF LE LS) Abstract: Sounds right. From the NBER's latest research . Compensation, status, and press coverage of managers in the U.S. follow a highly skewed distribution: a small number of 'superstars' enjoy the bulk...
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Robbie Deans' tweaked team lineup for the upcoming second rugby test against France seems pretty sound to me. Neither speedster Lachie Turner for the injured Tuqiri nor Stephen Hoiles for Wycliff Palu will weaken the team, and Turner might even add desirable speed on the flank...
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From this site , via Kathy G , regarding Charlie Chaplin. They were dreadfully poor. Charlie's parents were third-string strolling players. His father died early of alcoholism; his mother was often in asylums, whether through drink or because of periodic mental illness. Whenev...
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Toyota Prius - not as green as it seems, but the forthcoming "plug-in" one might be If there's a certain bet flowing from last weekend's Gippsland by-election result, it's the proposition that any inclusion of petrol in Labor's emissions trading scheme will be carefully struct...
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In an interesting post a day or so ago Ken Parish made this claim, which went largely unchallenged (though I've not read all the comments). The need to avoid stifling innovation as the primary engine of capitalisms remarkable success was Hayeks principal answer to those who ar...
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With the departure of Andrew Leigh from the blogosphere and from the AFR, the AFR have asked me to step into his outsize shoes. So I've got a fortnightly column for six months. That suits me very well, as once a week can be a bit taxing after a while. And I think all columnist...
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Gummo is sick, Amanda doesn't have computer access at the moment, Jen is under the hammer to finish assignments for her Masters, and I'm not sure where Stephen Hill and Tim Sterne are (flat out looking for a job in Tim's case, I suspect). Gilmae is going on a holiday soon and...
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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 Nationals bitch slap ALP and LP in Gippsland . Ralph Buttigieg finds good news for Bren...
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Who knows if this speculation is true, but it gives me a thrill the way the human mind can deduce things so far from its immediate knowledge by a process of inference and deduction. Just like we can know things about the universe and about what goes on inside atoms from the ti...
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