Club Troppo

The overheating issue caused the system to crash hard. Our friends in the UCC have rebooted the server, so we’re back on the air.

Sorry everyone.

Troppo will be up and down like a yo-yo today as the airconditioning our server relies on has broken. Please bear with us.

As you can see, it broke at about 8am.

Update: the issue is resolved for now.

Update II: No, it’s not resolved at all. Might be a while folks.

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 the fate of the US. He spoke, too, as if a large fiscal stimulus would be enough to restore prosperity. If that is what he believes, Mr Obama is in for a shock. The difficulties he confronts are much deeper and more global than that.I have little doubt that his advisers are telling the president-elect just this. The points they are or should be pressing on him are these.

Mr Obama must be fully persuaded of these last points. If the fiscal deficits are to fall sharply in the medium term, as they need to, the new president needs effective programmes for private sector deleveraging and global reform and adjustment. The fate of the US cannot be determined in isolation. (Continued)

The HyperText Transport Protocol, HTTP, underlies every website visit you make. Your browser negotiates with the server for the website. Once they come to their split second agreement, the server starts to send the web page, along with any other requested files (like images)¹1. Curious?: If you are using Firefox, install a program called Firebug. This popular programmer’s tool reveals all this under-the-hood magic. [↩]

The governing document specifying the protocol is RFC-2616, published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an anarchic nerdopoly that authoritatively defines hundreds of protocols and file formats for internet use.

In common with many other IETF protocols, HTTP allows servers and browsers to send information not given in the RFC document using X- headers. Originally the ‘X’ stood for ‘experimental’. Today X-headers are used to create important de-facto sources of information and to facilitate services that build on the basic HTTP model.

I think that a useful additional header would be X-Torrent.
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Below the fold is today’s column for the Fin.
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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" into Google News.

In the Wall Street Journal Stephen Moore writes that if only Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, "were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster." Even with the filter off I had trouble dealing with this idea. According to Wikipedia, Atlas Shrugged is longer than War and Peace. It’s also printed in type so small nobody over 50 is able to read it without a magnifying glass. Washington would be deadlocked for months while senators squinted at the tiny text through their reading glasses. But maybe that’s Moore’s cunning plan — the less the government does, the better off we’ll be.

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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 organisations for 50th spot in a list of the top non-US think tanks worldwide. The Brookings Institution is ranked number one in the US.

Think study was conducted by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the International Relations Program, University of Pennsylvania. According to the report’s author, James G. McGann, "It’s the first comprehensive ranking of the world’s top think tanks, based on a worldwide survey of hundreds of scholars and experts."

The think tank index appears in the January/February 2009 issue of Foreign Policy magazine. You can read the full report here: The Global “Go-To Think Tanks”.

Dave Bath emailed me to say that the Australian Parliament’s website is down. For techie minded amongst you, it’s not responding to pings from Dave, my home computer or some virtual servers I can access in the US.

Here it is: your invitation to make the nerdiest jokes you like about the causes and/or meaning of this failure.

Speaking for myself, I think it’s an overheating problem. What with all the hot air …

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 the militant amateur athiests. (Continued)

I wrote this column for the Fin at the end of the year only to discover that I was on leave. Anyway, it 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 2008 the end of an era the bursting of a super-bubble. It also the beginning of an era: The era in which an unlikely cast of characters assembled themselves to crowdsource answers to the global financial crisis.

In late 2006 a former academic in English with decades of experience in Americas mortgage industry, off work ill, began posting at finance industry blog Calculated Risk, anatomising her industry and prophesying doom with encyclopedic knowledge and wry hilarity.

Why were things going off the rails?  Because God hates us she suggested beginning a paragraph that explained yet another attenuation of the relationship between borrower and ultimate lender in the by then stupefyingly complex chain of mortgage securitisation. 

To retain her good name in the industry she wrote pseudonymously using only her family nickname Tanta. But in the intellectual hothouse of the blogosphere she rapidly gained the authority she deserved even being cited in Federal Reserve research.

Welcome to the turbocharged ecology of cyber-opinion where intellectual esteem matters rather than notoriety or media budgets: Where towering figures usually, but not exclusively, top academics direct the traffic, and literally hundreds of high quality contributors weigh in with posts and comments like a set of strategically placed cameras around a sports ground. Blogs like Naked Capitalism, Angry Bear, Follow the Money and Grasping Reality bring you the action from every angle.

One of my favourites is Steve Randy Waldman whose searching posts on Interfluidity rethink issues from first principles with bracing originality and perspicacity. 

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