In this post a while back I explored an idea as follows: I was driving through the Burnley tunnel today. It has three lanes. As you go into it travelling east, the three lanes I was on had to become two to make way for another lane entering from the left. Normally what happens...
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The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Better Know a Beatle - Paul McCartney Colbert Report Full Episodes Paul McCartney Appearance Funny Political Videos More Funny Videos
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A short column in t he Age published today Reduce the bugbears with some beta-tested policies THERE'S a saying made famous by Eric S. Raymond, the author of the landmark book on Web 2.0, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In computer geek speak, it's this: "given a large enough bet...
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Carmen M. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff NBER Working Paper No. 14656 Issued in January 2009 This paper examines the depth and duration of the slump that invariably follows severe financial crises, which tend to be protracted affairs. We find that asset market collapses are deep...
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One of Nicholas Gruen's favorite people, William Easterly has joined the blogosphere to keep the Aid bastards honest. Today, I foist a new blog called Aid Watch on the blogosphere. The objective is to be brutally honest when aid is not helping the poor, but also praising it wh...
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I sometimes like to try to get the feel of the prosperity of a US era from films and TV shows made at the time and about that time. Not the fantasy stuff, or things for kids generally or horror, but the consciously era-based ones that set out to create a feel. This is not a sc...
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A feed on US road accidents summer vs winter etc . A feed from Organizations and Markets. Does the inclement weather have you worried about sliding off the road to an icy death? If so, Ive got some good news for you. On a per-mile driven basis (or per-trip or per-minute travel...
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Here's my AFR column for today Making an exception As Groucho Marx said to some unfortunate, I never forget a face, but in your case, Ill make an exception. In policy, as in life, it matters when and how you make exceptions. If you want to free up trade, economic textbooks and...
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By reaching out to neoconservatives Obama could "fracture the opposition's idea machine and help turn the Republicans back into the stupid party for years to come", writes Gabriel Schoenfeld . This isn't as far fetched as it sounds. The first wave of neoconservatives were disi...
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According to my lights this post is of no significance. All the hoopla surrounding Obama's inauguration irritated me. All the reading of the tea leaves of what he would say, as if the words were more important than the deeds. All the pomp and circumstance - just like a British...
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The US National Bureau of Economic Research an academic body which is regarded as the arbiter of American business cycles defines a recession as a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP,...
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When Barack Obama chose pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration it sent ripples of disapproval through liberal ranks. Salon's Joan Walsh , for example, attacked Warren as "a poster boy for kinder, gentler 21st century bigotry". An evangelical Christian...
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From today's Business Spectator I experienced a rather unforgettable shock literally and figuratively when I was just five years old. Prior to that time I had always made what I thought was a reasonable assumption: a fence is a fence. But on a traumatic day in the 1970s I disc...
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I was talking to someone yesterday and mentioned apropos of nothing, that I thought that I had one of the big markers of gender determined behaviour. When I talk to people on the phone for more than a minute or two, I just love - leerrvve - to wander around. In and out of room...
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Note to self: Where morale is high - for instance in a workplace or a community - at least some regulations - for instance dome designed to make sure people don't cheat or free ride are unnecessary as very few people do this and when they do they are detected and sanctioned. I...
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Quadrant's editor Keith Windschuttle has been held up to ridicule . Despite efforts to defend himself, the Sharon Gould hoax has damaged his reputation. But, strangely, some people seem to think the hoaxer's reputation has suffered too. Like the authors of the Ern Malley hoax...
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Fancy a little time travel? This time eight years ago, satirical magazine The Onion reported on the new Bush presidency. Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over' It may have been a joke, but reading it now, it comes across as historical fact....
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Thousands of birds collide with aircraft every year but in most cases there is little or no damage to the plane. However in a small proportion of cases aircraft have been destroyed as result of bird strike. In 1988, 35 people died when an Ethiopian Airlines 737 crash landed an...
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Why Obamas plan is still inadequate and incomplete Last week, President-elect Barack Obama duly unveiled his American recovery and reinvestment plan . Its title was aptly chosen, for Mr Obama spoke, astonishingly, as if the policies of the rest of the world had no bearing on t...
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Below the fold is today's column for the Fin. Cap on moralising needed The world's most pressing issues require moral courage, not self-righteousness, writes Nicholas Gruen. Since the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, weve tended to moralise disasters to see them as the just...
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Due to the motion of Mercury , my horoscope advises me to "run any really audacious ideas through a sanity filter." So I ran the idea of consulting astrologers through the filter and straight away I had a problem. I decided to turn the filter off before typing " Ayn Rand " int...
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In a recent ranking of the world's top think tanks , only two Australian institutions make the cut. The Lowy Institute for International Policy is ranked fourteen in a list of the top think tanks in Asia while the Centre for Independent Studies ties with seven other organisati...
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I've drawn attention to the very teriffic Michael Bérubé previously . Anyway, below the fold is a terrific review of his on a book that's suddenly particularly relevant given the recent activities of Weathergirl . It also raises a bunch of issues which have been stirred up by...
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I wrote this column for the Fin at the end of the year only to discover that I was on leave. Anyway, i t was put in this morning's Fin in a slightly edited back form . The original is below. Blogging the Crisis: Enter the bright world ushered in by 2008 George Soros called 200...
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Below the fold is Ivan Krsti's explanation of a short squeeze, a maneuvre which allowed Porshe to filch around 6-12 billion from hedge funds that were shorting VW stock that Porshe was buying. Adolf Merckle, one of the worlds richest men, committed suicide yesterday by throwin...
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The global conservative movement is not a conspiracy, argues Mark Davis . Instead it is loose-knit and decentralised. "Ultimately what unites radical conservatives", he writes, "is the power of belief and the pursuit of common objectives, not the conspiratorial activities of s...
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A rather amusing ranking of jobs in the US . The rationale is explained, if you really want to know, with a mix of remuneration and working conditions. To quantify the many facets of the 200 jobs included in our report, we determined and reviewed various critical aspects of al...
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Keith Windschuttle has been hoaxed. In a post for Quadrant Online he writes: "An author calling herself 'Sharon Gould' has tricked Quadrant into publishing in its January-February edition an article about popular scares on biotechnology issues ." As Crikey's Margaret Simons pu...
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For the third year running, On Line Opinion and Club Troppo are collaborating to collect an anthology of Australian blog posts from the previous year. The first handful have now been published at OLO ; by the end of the month the collection will grow to about forty articles. F...
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HT 3 Quarks In The Know: Do You Remember Life Before The Segway?
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IPART is the independent economic regulator for NSW. It oversees regulation and conducts pricing reviews in industries such as electricity, gas, water,taxis and public transport. IPART recently completed a review of pricing for RailCorps rail pricing provided under the CityRai...
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In affluent societies, consumption is about creating identity rather than meeting human needs, argues Clive Hamilton. And to reinforce the point, he invites us to " consider the semiotics of the potato today ". According to Hamilton, today's shoppers can choose from 15 varieti...
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Paul Krugman points to a discussion on the prospects of the kind of financial meltdown (pdf) we've just had at Jackson Hole in which, most of the economists were in fawning agreement with Saint Alan Greenspan. As Krugman says "Larry Summers, Im sorry to say, comes off particul...
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HT Kathy G. Charles Bingley is renting a house in Hertfordshire! Mrs. Bennet became a fan of Charles Bingley . Kitty Bennet can't stop coughing!!! Charles Bingley is now friends with Mr. Bennet and Sir William Lucas . 11 of your friends are attending Assembly at Meryton . Fitz...
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Nice to see some ideas I proposed a good while ago getting a bit more of an airing , namely governments running open market operations in assets other than their own bonds (pdf) in the process of managing the economy. I suggested that governments should purchase equities on a...
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Tim Blair reports on Yvonne Ridley the British journalist who converted to Islam after being kidnapped by the Taliban who has won a case for unfair dismissal against the Islam News Channel. Earlier in the year she won nearly £14,000 in damages after winning a four-year unfair...
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