Club Troppo

Does anyone else have the problem that their Google reader occasionally just loads up a little more than the Google reader logo and then, while it proudly dispalays a sign against a dull yellow background saying “loading” it does anything but. It just sits there. This has happened intermittendly to me, and I’ve assumed it’s related to a poor connection to the net, but it’s happened consistently – I can’t get on at all now – despite the fact that I think my connection is fine (It is for everything else).

I’m sitting in a queue waiting for a Tiger plane from Melbourne to Perth.  There’s a good chance you’ll not get on the plane if  you don’t arrive 45 minutes early.  They’re a budget airline you see.  Well this is all very well, but in a thin market like ours when they often have flights at convenient times that others don’t, they could make plenty of money by selling me some right to express treatment and an ability to turn up with 30 minutes to go.  My preferred airline Virgin is very good for this, while Qantas is a bit dodgy – you can miss a plane if you get to check in 29 minutes before departure.

Anyway, what really pissed me off was turning up to this barn in Melbourne with a huge queue.  Now it is now Tiger may be a budge airline, but it’s also a BIG airline – a big airline travelling to a whole lot of cities around the world.  So I’m finding it hard to believe that it is anything but bone stupidity that leads them not to invest in a system where I can print my boarding pass out at home and walk on board when the plane boards. This won’t just save me time, but it will save them wages (trust me it will).  So would those little stations where you put in your credit card and it ferrett’s out your boarding pass and prints it out for you – with nary a human, and nary any wages getting between you and your boarding pass.

Right now it seems like a lottery.  I turned up with an hour to spare and ran into a queue of about a hundred people with three people checking them in.  There was another queue moving faster so I moved into that – having looked around for signs telling me what was special about it – there were none.  It turns out it was a queue for Adelaide – but if you weren’t there for the announcement you had to find out by osmosis.  Anyway, when I got to the front I refused to go back to the other queue and soon enough Perth started becoming an urgent queue. Meanwhile both the Adelaide and Perth planes were delayed anyway.  I generally like to save money for clients – in particular the government – but I’m afraid we all have our limits.  Only when I have to will I do this again.  The waiting around is bad enough but the stupidity is more than I can bear.

I saw some figures showing that Tiger does radically worse than other carriers on customer complaints. If that’s for being a budget airline how come the other budget now budgetish airline – Virgin Blue – does a fair bit better than Qantas?  As with cars a long time ago, higher quality can lower costs.  It certainly can with customer printed boarding passes.

PS: this was my last Tiger ticket.  It was a return ticket.  The return trip is 2 hours late.

PPS: The return trip being 2 and a half hours late by the time people had been loaded, it was discovered that as many as seven passengers had had enough and were no-shows.  So that meant we waited another hour while about three not very highly motivated baggage handlers dawdled around until the seven sensible passengers’ luggage was removed from the hold.  I got home at 4.45 am. Like I said, never again if I can avoid it.

What is the probability your vote will make a difference?

Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver, Aaron Edlin

NBER Working Paper No. 15220
Issued in August 2009
NBER Program(s):   LE PE

Abstract

One of the motivations for voting is that one vote can make a difference. In a presidential election, the probability that your vote is decisive is equal to the probability that your state is necessary for an electoral college win, times the probability the vote in your state is tied in that event. We computed these probabilities a week before the 2008 presidential election, using state-by-state election forecasts based on the latest polls. The states where a single vote was most likely to matter are New Mexico, Virginia, New Hampshire, and Colorado, where your vote had an approximate 1 in 10 million chance of determining the national election outcome. On average, a voter in America had a 1 in 60 million chance of being decisive in the presidential election.

It seems opportune to revisit my 2006 paper, Equal Opportunity in Australia: myths and reality1. I wrote this brief up-date for NewCritic (put out by the University of Western Australia).

(Continued)

This question is posed by Bruce Bartlett in Economists View.

The answer depends on how you define a conservative.

1. Is it someone who believes in small government?
2. Is it someone with an antiquated, minority philosophical stance – such as on Says Law relative to Keynesianism?
3. Does it refer to a person with a strong faith in democracy who wants to safeguard the capitalist system against the threat of socialism?
4. Finally, 4, is it a person who wants to deliver services closer to the people – including hospitals, regional development and welfare reform to all families? This contrasts with prejudiced views such as on gay rights which, as Tony Abbott tells us, are as archaic as the right to own slaves.

Leaving aside the fourth component, views on Keynesianism fall into two camps: those who support the first and second camps but reject the third; and those who embrace the third camp.

Keynes is treated as a conservative in at least three senses. First, by doing nothing to offset the greatest economic crisis since the depression, it encourages a wholesale retreat to socialism and undermine existing traditions and institutions. Second, it helps to minimise unemployment. Thirdly, Hayeks road to serfdom could as easily come from lack of government as from too much.

I am ambivalent about recently-axed SIHIP head, Jim Davidson.

His history shows that he can be sweepingly arrogant, convinced of his own intellectual superiority, and able to enjoy the very sourest of grapes. When he lost to my former employer, David Tollner, in the 2004 Federal Election, he remarked that he’d lost because soldiers voted for Dave Tollner so they could go to Iraq and earn danger pay. He’d called them, in so many words, mercenaries. Unsurprisingly he was not invited back for the 2007 election.

Today Davidson was out sinking the boot into various persons related to the SIHIP program, including the shiny-bums sent to look his shoulder by Jenny Macklin. Just another example of his propensity to lash out when things don’t go his way.

But, as I said, I am ambivalent about Mr Davidson. Putting his personality to one side, let’s focus on what he did. In my opinion, Jim Davidson got the sack for behaving ethically.

Davidson is an engineer by training and experience. Engineers, like medicos and legal eagles, hold themselves to a strict, high standard of ethical integrity.

Amongst other things, engineers are required to tell their employers the truth, no matter how unpalatable that truth might be. When Davidson saw Alison Anderson and told her that SIHIP would only be able to build perhaps 300-400 buildings, instead of 700, he was doing the ethical thing: telling the truth to his employer.

It was, of course, not a truth that was politically acceptable. It was a truth that NT Chief Minister Paul Henderson did everything in his power to discredit. Davidson had done the one thing that the foolish leader cannot forgive: he told the truth, despite the fact that his masters did not want to hear it or have it heard.

I find Davidson’s conduct as a professional engineer was ethically correct. I find Henderson’s punishment of that ethical correctness to be contemptible, low and self-serving.

I wish Jim Davidson further success in his career. We who are engineers, or in professions aspiring to that august title, could learn from his example.

Additional: There’s some confusion amongst non-NT readers about the order of events. Dave’s remarks give a good summary; I’ve also posted a comment below with a potted summary.

Additional remarks from Dave Bath below the fold.
(Continued)

My family is staunchly lower class English on my dad’s side (his mother emigrated from England as a lady’s maid and then started a chicken farm in Greenacre in Sydney’s western suburbs) and bog Irish/Scottish Catholic on my mum’s side.

However, not much is known about my maternal grandfather’s grandmother.  On the family tree she’s just shown as “Daisy” with no surname, and her marriage to my great-great-grandfather as taking place at Kempsey on the NSW mid-north coast.

My grandfather (who I’ve written about before at Troppo – here and here) had a rather wide nose and always sported a good suntan though he seldom went outdoors in his last few years in the nursing home.  Never big on tact or diplomacy, I have sometimes speculated to my mum that maybe there was a bit of blackfella blood in the family.  She would quickly change the subject.  My mum has always had distinctly Hyacinth Bucket aspects to her personality, and has never grasped the fact that Aboriginal heritage has a certain snob value these days, especially among the southern urban latte sipping classes who have never actually met an indigenous Australian.

If I had any artistic talent and was a complete wanker (some might argue about the latter even now), I might enter and win the Telstra National Aboriginal  and Torres Strait Islander Art  Award.

Republican Death Trip

By PAUL KRUGMAN

I am in this race because I dont want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I dont want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America. So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.

Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a different kind of politics was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow cant bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.

So, hows it going? (Continued)

A couple of interesting pieces, courtesy of Michael Warby, a tireless provider of hot links.

This is an interview with a Somali pirate, feel free to take it with a pinch of pirate salt!

How are the pirates organized? (Are there pirate leaders, financiers, and specialists?)

The financiers are the most important since they organize and plan the big shot operations and are able to pay running cost[s]. Financiers always need to forge deals with traders, land cruiser owners, translators, business people to keep the supplies flowing during operations and manage the logistics. There is a long supply chain involved in every hijacking.

And a local commentator raises some questions about the structure of the Chinese economy.

The absolute size of China means that even if its economy falters, China will continue to be a major presence in the region. However, given the weaknesses in its economic strategy and civil society, we need to consider the possibility that China is becoming more like an unbalanced South American giant such as Brazil than an East Asian success story such as Taiwan and South Korea.

Maybe classical liberalism will win in the long haul!

Independent MLA and “kingmaker” Gerry Wood has just about made up his mind how he’ll vote on Friday’s Legislative Assembly no confidence motion, and is delivering tantalising cryptic hints:

Mr Wood says he has almost made up his mind and will tell the leaders of his decision before Friday’s vote.

The latest whisper is that Wood is saying he thinks he should cast his vote in a way that “minimises disruption to the Territory economy”.  Now I admit it’s a real exercise in divining the political tea-leaves, but I tend to read that as suggesting that Wood is leaning in favour of voting against the no confidence motion and allowing Labor to continue governing in minority with his tacit support.

(Continued)