Troppodillians will want to know - OK, some will want to know that the chess world championship is currently underway. Topalov, swashbuckling, highly strung, nasty piece of work is challenger to Anand who is a calmer, probably nicer and a tad more consistent player - and the W...
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Here's my article for yesterday's Crikey. The media inform us that the Rudd Government is adopting the world's most draconian cigarette packaging regulation and requiring cigarettes to be sold in plain packages from January 2012. Good on it. When I was on the Productivity Comm...
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Doctor Labyrinth, like most people who read a great deal and who have too much time on their hands, had become convinced that our civilization was going the way of Rome. He saw, I think , the same cracks forming that had sundered the ancient world, the world of Greece and Rome...
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My article for yesterday's Crikey! It's been clear for a long while that we've picked a lot of the low hanging fruit available in traditional economic reform. Once tariffs get down below 10% not only are the gains from cutting them painfully slim compared with the gains from c...
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From the NBER Digest: Calorie Posting in Chain Restaurants , Bryan Bollinger, Phillip Leslie, and Alan Sorensen "Mandatory calorie posting influenced consumer behavior at Starbucks in New York City, causing average calories per transaction to drop by 6 percent." Nutrition labe...
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And why not? I wonder what his golf handicap is.
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Political commentary and pseudo demography speaks of a class called the latte sippers. This is a class of noisy, isolated, out of touch and elitist people; enemies of common sense and the common man. Apart from these traits they are also clearly defined by their beverage choic...
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I've never seen an aurora, but I'd love to. HT Three Quarks
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It's been a Fatih Akin blitz this week, having watched his new comedy and two older films - a music documentary and his dramatic feature debut. I've also revisited The White Ribbon , the must-see film of the festival (though it has a cinematic release just after). All up, ther...
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During the Hawke years one conservative columnist used to bemoan the lack of professionalism of the right in Australian politics. I don't much read columns of professional columnists anymore, so I don't know if this theme has recurred but somehow he seemed to become more prote...
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Even if I would have choked on my Weeties that the New Statesman presumably thought this picture looks like Adam Smith. The economist manifesto, by Amartya Sen, Commentary, New Statesman : The 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith wasn’t the free-market fundamentalist he is thou...
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True - at Three Quarks here .
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Salman Khan's Khan Academy is an amazing labour of love, if you haven't come across it. Over a thousand video tutorials, each around ten minutes long, on subjects ranging from calculus and statistics, through biology, to modern history. But this is what's really mindboggling:...
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It wasn't in any deliberate attempt to celebrate Anzac Day last night that I went to see Beneath Hill 60. (My spellchecker wants me to respell 'Anzac' as 'Antacid' but I'll press on!) Eva and I just wanted to go and see a film and she'd heard good things about it. It's a good...
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The Festival of German Films 2010 is now open in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, with Brisbane and Adelaide to come. It's the 9th year of the festival and this year there are 33 films to be screened. I spoke briefly to festival director, Klaus Krischok from the Goethe Institute,...
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Economist and blogger Andrew Leigh has won preselection as Labor's candidate for Fraser . Saturday saw preselections for both ACT federal electorates -- Fraser and Canberra, with Canberra going to communications consultant Gai Brodtmann . According to the Canberra Times ' Jess...
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I'd firstly like to thank Nicholas for inviting me on board Club Troppo. This is not my first appearance here - some of you may recall Alison Croggon from Theatre Notes , who posted here my article on Pedro Almodóvar's Volver in 2007 (which seems to have evaporated from Club T...
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President Obama's 'Wall Street' speech on Thursday was good news for the future of capitalism and for civilisation as we know it. He seems to mean business, urging finance leaders and their Republican servants to accept the main elements of the bill now being prepared for the...
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I wanted to post this video of Ronald Reagan (not to be mistaken with Ronald McDonald) and James Dean. However WordPress's new software strips the code away - ostensibly because it will handle it all without the code. But I can't master what I'm supposed to do. Anyway, click t...
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OK, it's a little bit rich and it's not any of its owners. Kaggle has just given away a netbook for an idea for a data competition which we intend to host. How easy was that? Will you be next? Prizes, Prizes, Prizes, out they go. Below is my post on Kaggle: Here at Kaggle we d...
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Some Troppodillians may be familiar with the wonderful Melbourne Film Blog . A few weeks ago I decided that it was just ridiculous that I didn't consult it more. I only see about one film every month or two, and almost invariably the ones that are advertised in the papers. And...
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(Originally published in the business pages of the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald on 21 April 2010) One of the sillier propositions which has been propagated on the internet and in a range of investment newsletters over the past couple of years is the idea that the ‘q...
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My observation that the US is a normal sane country harbouring a crazy one inside it (that for all my admiration for him, Abraham really should have let the South slough themselves off into oblivion without polluting the Great Republic) has served inadvertently as linkbait and...
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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy
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Comparing the Effectiveness of Regulation and Pro-Social Emotions to Enhance Cooperation: Experimental Evidence from Fishing Communities in Colombia Abstract: This paper presents the results from a series of framed field experiments conducted in fishing communities off the Car...
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A little more grist to my mill identifying just which are the craziest states of the United States of America.
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Robert Manne’s new book (co-edited), “Goodbye to All That? The failure of neo-liberalism and the urgency of change”, is an attack on neo-liberalism. There are several academic political philosophies currently in vogue: libertarianism (or its opposite): acute market interventio...
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No doubt some of you will know of this, but Prezi is a fabulous (relatively) new online platform for making presentations. It builds the presentation from a 'mind map'. Very compelling, and it's remarkably simple to put these presentations together from your browser. Check out...
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Here's an email I received from the Brotherhood of St Lawrence, disclosing an event that I'd like to go to, but won't be able to. But some Troppodillian may wish to go. ‘War Child’ film tells the story of Emmanuel Jal: a child of war in Sudan, a boy soldier, a survivor, a refu...
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Web 2.0 is proving very adept at finding needles in haystacks that we couldn’t have found before. Netflix is a company which rents videos and which relies on the ability of its algorithm to predict what movies you’re going to like from the ranking you’ve given past movies. Giv...
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Here's a quote I read today. It’s how PR (Proportional Representation) systems are meant to operate, and is far preferable to a minority government. It’s a mature and sensible approach, and a step away from the pathologies of winner-takes all so common to Westminster systems w...
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A friend of the family Tony Carson, an interesting fellow who was great at crosswords and so secured for himself a place at Bletchley Park during World War II, had a hand in designing the Smith Family's program Learning for Life. It helps families pay for school books and also...
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I have long viewed sporadically gifted journalist Christopher Hitchens as a caricatured bullying buffoon, but until quite recently I admired Richard Dawkins . Years ago I read The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker with fascination, along with the works of fellow biological...
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Before Freud was granted the exit visa he needed to escape from Vienna, he was made to sign a document: "I, Prof. Freud, hereby confirm that after the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich I have been treated by the German authorities and particularly by the Gestapo with al...
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I got this correspondence in my email today - last year we got a family membership to the Colliwobbles Football Club and enjoy going to most matches. I always email the words of our coach Mick Malthouse explaining the game on Saturday in hindsight on Mondays onto my son and so...
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Sri Lankan asylum seekers in detention on Nauru in 2007 I was asked an interesting question this morning (well, interesting to me anyway) by a local media person about whether the seemingly imminent transfer of Christmas Island asylum seeker detainees to Darwin would mean an u...
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I confess to not having read a proper biography of Leo Tolstoy. My conception of Tolstoy the man is based, unfortunately, on the relevant chapter of Paul Johnson's notorious Intellectuals . If you haven't come across this book, it's a series of case studies (or hatchet jobs) a...
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I have been sent the following guest post, by someone who wants to remain anonymous on account of his position in the public sector. (I know the author, but hey, here's an offer to those hundreds of thousands of public servants out there - if you want to send me a post that's...
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Recently there's arisen a debate about having a debate on immigration and also an attempt to relive the glory days of asylum seeker politics. Whilst attempts to link the two have been cynical, I believe there might be a good reason to link them. Why not draw almost all our new...
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ABC political analyst Antony Green is predicting that Kevin Rudd will seek a double dissolution election in July-August. A double dissolution election can't be held after 10 August because Constitution s57 forbids a double dissolution within 6 months of the expiry of the House...
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Tory leader David Cameron says he's " fighting this election for the great ignored ": Young, old, rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight. They start our businesses, operate our factories, teach our children, clean our streets, grow our food, keep us safe. They work hard, pay...
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News stories about the current population debate tend to be prefaced with the factoid that 'on current trends Australia's population will reach 35 million in 2050'. We are supposed to find this startling, either because we've only just adjusted to the idea of our millions bein...
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I'm not very old at all, but I'm old enough to have caught the tail end of a era in playground equipment design. This period was typified by danger. Metal slippery dips that one could cook an egg (or buttocks) on and which would hurl you far into the grass or merry go rounds t...
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From the NYT where you'll find other excellent reviews: If you’re old enough to remember the original 128K Macintosh, underpowered, not expandable, and soon-to-be obsolete, you know that the iPad doesn’t need to be perfect to be the harbinger of a revolution. If the iPhone did...
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From today's Crikey: Kevin, will that be two terms, or four? The government has got its eye in, and been blooded through the odd embarrassment. It needs to ask itself whether it wants to be a two term government? Of course it does. But what about becoming a four term governmen...
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An interesting post by Clay Shirky on the collapse of complex business models. This points to an issue which jumps out at me when I read the Moran Review on the Public Service. How much complexity, how much subtlety, how much productivity is it reasonable to expect a large cen...
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My last post on the UK and the third way began with this sentence. What do you do if you’re a ‘third wayer’ and things don’t seem to be turning out all that flatteringly for your vision? You just keep talking in pretty much the same way, slap a coat of Web 2.0 paint on the vis...
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Evelyn De Morgan, The Worship of Mammon (1909) An embarrassingly bad story on PM about economics versus Christianity spoiled my drive home on Good Friday. I suppose they need to present something about religion at Easter, but can't they do better than this? The hook for the st...
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What will Der Spiegel's German readers make of Kevin Rudd's dispute with comedian Robin Williams? In an interview with David Letterman Williams jokingly said that Australians were "basically English rednecks". And in a later radio interview the PM hit back ( video ). But the G...
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Lets imagine someone facing the end of a working career. They've built up a large jam jar of money. With these savings they can buy the goods and services they need/desire despite no longer producing anything to exchange in the market for them. Now imagine a society with a bul...
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What do you do if you’re a ‘third wayer’ and things don’t seem to be turning out all that flatteringly for your vision? You just keep talking in pretty much the same way, slap a coat of Web 2.0 paint on the vision and press on. Oh well, none of us that I know of are that cleve...
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