Why did it happen? I think that the combination of four factors (listed below) was close to a sufficient cause. Sufficient at least to make a terrorist attack highly likely . And they are also arguably necessary. I think if you remove any one the first three then Bondi does no...
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The Gregorian revolution gave rise to a form of organisation that was gradually stamped out all over the Western world and then to its followers. Constitutional monarchy: A pyramid with a chief executive at the top with the rest of the pyramid made up of checks and balances on...
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Posted in Philosophy, Innovation, Best From Elsewhere, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Death and taxes, Bullshit, Employment, Sortition and citizens’ juries, Isegoria, Coronavirus crisis, Criminal law
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="507"] A young Mondrian in 1908 channels an old Monet but is really thinking “I wonder if a bunch of rectangles on canvas would sell? If it did it could solve a lot of problems, perhaps not for everyone, but certainly for me.”[/caption] O...
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Michael Polanyi was highly suspicious of the hyper-reductionism of neo-Darwinism. It’s reduction of the evolution of a thing so vast as life into a single causal mechanism. And it was a good call. Darwin himself had proposed that natural selection was a major mechanism of evol...
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Valiant attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing. People much smarter than me have developed fancy indices, and people even smarter than that, such as our own Nicholas Gruen, has called bullshit on many of them . What I propose is something far simpler: make...
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Cross posted from Quillette from 16 Feb 2019, but now behind a paywall. When a conversation is not a conversation: party political discourse in the early 21st century I It looks like liberal democracy is falling apart. The chaos of Donald Trump was unimaginable just a decade a...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n43vCEju5Ck In this discussion, Peyton Bowman and I discuss my term ‘fast-foodification’. I coined the word trying to describe modern politics. The techniques used by politicians and their professional enablers are optimised to attract votes in...
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Czesław Miłosz is a Polish writer and Nobel Laureate who first came to Western attention in the early 1950s with the publication of The Captive Mind one of the earliest exposes of the nightmare of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe following WWII. He had not been in the Commu...
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[caption id="attachment_35644" align="alignleft" width="1163"] For anyone who’s interested I recommend David Cayley’s series of CBC radio documentaries on Illich. (He’s the best broadcaster I’ve come across). The first series of five programs focuses on Illich’s social thought...
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Posted in Philosophy, History, Education, Economics and public policy, Health, Political theory, Innovation, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Democracy, Sortition and citizens’ juries
It's here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months . It is also on Kindle . It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries and rich countries. They include our children, the...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Print media, History, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, Theatre, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Terror, Science, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Health, Political theory, Law, Dance, Review, Bargains, Travel, WOW! - Amazing, Social, Parenting, Ethics, Medical, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy, Employment, Sortition and citizens’ juries, Isegoria, Coronavirus crisis
I have been a utilitarian for about 30 years now and am seen in my academic work as an extreme version of the genre. I did my Phd on the topic . I do not merely say that governments should make policy for the benefit of the wellbeing of the population, but have spent years in...
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Posted in Life, Philosophy, History, Humour, Society, Religion, Economics and public policy, Science, Geeky Musings, Dance, Social, Parenting, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Death and taxes, Personal, Social Policy, Democracy
‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain Christopher Rufo https://vimeo.com/16717619 I wonder if I can keep this post short and sweet. Only by reminding myself that I’d like to write about his after much more consideration and effort. So can I keep this to a steak in the...
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I can't stand Jordan Petersen. I can't stand his remorseless humourlessness first of all. His self-righteousness, his grandiosity and megalomania, his boastfulness about how learned he is coupled with his preparedness to wade into subjects like what he calls cultural Marxism a...
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Compared to the trends on January 2020, has Australia or Sweden lost more wellbeing in 2020? And which has seen the greater damage to expected future wellbeing years for after 2020? The Table below summarizes the answers to this. For the first calculation, let us only count th...
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[caption id="attachment_34335" align="alignright" width="378"] Dan Andrews said that his 'Road Map' for easing the lockdown is not a doctoral thesis – a proposition that's hard to argue with. Further propositions will be offered at subsequent press conferences.[/caption] Life...
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[caption id="attachment_34242" align="aligncenter" width="2304"] I really love this design by Casey Finley, who was kind enough to allow me to publish it here. He has a very distinctive style which is really coming into its own as he works on it. For instance, see here and her...
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[below the exact text (with different font/highlight) as Gigi Foster's submission to the Victorian parliamentary library in mid-August here . To see her health-related notes, including on topics like non-linearities and Sweden, see here , and to see all documents of that inqui...
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Posted in Politics - national, Education, Economics and public policy, Science, Health, Ethics, Medical, Social Policy, Democracy, Employment, Coronavirus crisis
https://youtu.be/w5WsRmgqe_M Early this year I published an essay in the Griffith Review critiquing what I called the competition delusion. I was passing by more common critiques of competition, which for instance argue that competition isn't necessarily a great idea in numero...
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https://youtu.be/fI5kCr7eIJQ I recently sent a couple of emails explaining the Evaluator General and also did an extended interview explaining the ideas in the context of Matt Jones' Public Policy class at Melbourne Uni. The first email below is the one I sent him proposing th...
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Models, windows, reductionism and pluralism We’re familiar with the idea that thought creates ‘models’ of reality. So it’s easy to slip into thinking that our task is then to just make our models better and better, i.e. more accurate representations of reality. This leaves out...
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This post is a direct response and rebuttal to the recent ‘Has the coronavirus panic cost us at least 10 million lives already? ’ by Paul Fritjers. Paul’s post takes the current covid-19 crisis, and uses some haphazard multiplication to create an alarming narrative, muddying t...
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They got him! It cost millions of dollars in legal fees, and involved multiple trials, settlements, and dismissal of the worst charges, but they convicted Harvey Weinstein. A bit like a buck who is taken down by a pack of wolves might receive the killing bite from a different...
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I wrote a piece on Australia's Honours system for Australia Day last year and decided this year to make it an annual event. So here's this year's column, which in the 'original' had a couple of hundred words edited out of it to meet the Conversation's arbitrary limit of 900 wo...
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Episode 5 of the final season of Game of Thrones showed us a vengeful fallen angle, Daenerys Targaryen, after whom thousands of children in the real world have been named. Even though her enemies had been defeated and surrendered, she nevertheless used her massive weapon, a fi...
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Posted in Life, Print media, History, Literature, Society, Religion, Films and TV, Theatre, Media, Geeky Musings, Law, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Social Policy, Democracy
In 1900, the modern nation states of Europe faced many challenges in terms of how they were run, with poverty and disease still prevalent. The largest problems were more or less successfully addressed by 2000. The road involved world wars and civil wars, but the essential reci...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Environment, History, Education, Society, Religion, Economics and public policy, Science, Libertarian Musings, Climate Change, Social, Ethics, Social Policy, Democracy
[I just read a self-help book and, like Don Quixote, need to vent...] My 10 rules for becoming a successful guru: Appear popular at the start : humans are just like dogs that follow other dogs. So have a legion of disciples and followers. Make them up when you start out. Don’t...
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Posted in Life, Society, Theatre, Journalism, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Law, Space, bubble, Social, Ethics, Cultural Critique
The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is supposed to make the threat look a bit bigger than it is in order to get negoti...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Environment, History, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, IT and Internet, Terror, Science, Geeky Musings, Health, Climate Change, Ask Troppo's Love Gods, Dance, Space, Chess, Social, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Death and taxes, Democracy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWHgoT2LfnE&feature=youtu.be I was a little crestfallen when, after my public lecture on democracy and sortition at King's College London was filmed with a few to producing a video and the contractors informed us that the recording was hopelessl...
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In all ways that we measure these things, physical violence has reduced in Western countries in the last 70 years, particularly mainland Western Europe. What about psychological violence though? Psychological violence, ie the inflicting of mental pain, takes many forms. It inc...
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Posted in Life, Philosophy, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Education, Society, Religion, regulation, Media, Libertarian Musings, Health, Social, Parenting, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods, Inequality, Personal
Humanity is at a high point. What our ancestors dreamed of is slowly becoming a reality: a world without hunger in which the vast majority of mankind live peaceful and long lives. We are not there yet, but in Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and even in Africa (our cradle), m...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, History, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, Economics and public policy, Science, Political theory, Information, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy
Anglo-Saxon countries are often heaped together as having a single culture. When it comes to migration, attitudes to sex, teenage-pregnancy, inequality, language, and bellicosity, that seems about right. At least, the UK, the US, and Australia are pretty close on those scores....
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, History, Humour, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, bubble, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Bullshit, Indigenous
National history is the story that binds ‘us who make up the nation’ into a single entity with a collective memory . It has a purpose and as such we can choose what historical events and realities to put into that story, whilst forgetting the rest. Of the four main current con...
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Posted in Politics - national, Life, History, Humour, Society, Geeky Musings, Social, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Death and taxes, Democracy, Indigenous
Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately holding on to their colonial empires. Now, a confident China is the up-and-coming...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Philosophy, Environment, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Society, Religion, Sport-general, Theatre, Music, Economics and public policy, Science, regulation, Gender, Journalism, Media, Geeky Musings, Climate Change, Political theory, Business, Travel, Immigration and refugees, Information, Intellectual Monopoly Privileges, Innovation, Social, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy, Bullshit, Indigenous, Employment
The following is a guest post by RHONDA PRYOR , a recently retired senior manager in the Australian aged care sector. We are hoping Rhonda may become a regular contributor to Troppo. If you woke up to read the Government had announced that they have a totally new approach to S...
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[cross-posted, slightly updated, from Pearls and Limitations] Observations: About 40% of the population of Catalonia and its capital Barcelona was not born there, but largely comes from the rest of Spain. Internal migration is high , with about 0.4% of the population moving fr...
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Posted in Politics - international, Life, History, Education, Society, Theatre, Economics and public policy, Media, Immigration and refugees, Ethics, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy
[Note to self. Geeks only] Over the fold I muse on the nature of human intelligence, social intelligence, and the options for artificial intelligence to become 'smarter than humans' in the areas of social power and law-making. It is taken for granted that you accept that in ha...
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Looking at the newspapers you’d think Catholicism is having a hard time with philandering priests and cover-ups of their doings being found out on a weekly basis. In Australia, the royal commission has uncovered a lot of systematically covered-up child abuse in the Catholic Ch...
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Posted in Politics - international, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Society, Religion, Art and Architecture, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Dance, WOW! - Amazing, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Death and taxes, Bullshit
In Memoriam: Bill Craven [1. On Marnie Hughes-Warrington from ANU's History Department tweeting this address, I sent her an email as follows: Subject: Seeking to contact Bill Craven Hi Marnie, Thanks for your tweet to my speech on RG Collingwood. I’ve always wanted to write to...
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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...
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Posted in Uncategorized, Uncategorised, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Print media, Environment, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, Films and TV, Sport-general, Theatre, Music, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Food, Terror, Science, Art and Architecture, regulation, Gender, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Health, Climate Change, Political theory, Metablogging, Law, Dance, Space, Review, Startup, Products, Travel, Immigration and refugees, Information, bubble, WOW! - Amazing, Social, Parenting, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Medical, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Personal, Social Policy, Democracy, Bullshit, Indigenous, Employment
Continued from Part One . The ABC and Children’s Programming - The Highs, Lows and Power-plays Part one here and part two here . The promise of the early years When ABC television first aired, on November 5, 1956, children’s programs presented a dilemma. There was no Australia...
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[caption id="attachment_31072" align="alignleft" width="640"] Smurfing, sans cuckoos ...[/caption] There's a weird sort of dissonance in today's Australian Financial Review. On the front page, CBA CEO Ian Narev argues that CBA culture is "strong". Meanwhile, a detailed Neil Ch...
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Have you ever reflected on what a strange concept the notion of a 'cause of death' really is? We use the term so often that it wouldn't quickly register as a cultural oddity, but it really is a quirky beast and has an odd history. I have a bit of a professional interest in thi...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVRQK58jrbw You will no doubt be familiar with a fund-raising technique involving people coming to your door and asking for money for one cause or another. No matter how good the cause or how respected and established the cause, the technique se...
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This post is based on a comment on an article promoting informed consent for experiments. I don't seem to have got a response from the author, so in case others wished to discuss, I thought I'd post it here. While most of the examples used were ones where I would have agreed w...
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In part 1, I looked at whether it made sense to have random individuals inserted into parliament, or to let policies be decided by juries full of randomly chosen individuals. Both were argued to be unworkable and likely to lead to more corruption, rather than less: policies th...
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Posted in Politics - national, Life, Philosophy, Print media, History, Miscellaneous, Education, Society, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, regulation, Journalism, Libertarian Musings, Political theory, Law, Web and Government 2.0, Information, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Social Policy, Democracy
Family Descent as a Signal of Managerial Quality: Evidence from Mutual Funds by Oleg Chuprinin, Denis Sosyura - #22517 (LS) We study the relation between mutual fund managers' family backgrounds and their professional performance. Using hand-collected data from individual Cens...
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs] Here at Troppo we have referred to the 'Yes Minister series' many times because of its brilliant commentary on the timeless issues of government, exemplified in the skit above. I have gone through three phases with the serie...
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Posted in Life, Philosophy, Humour, Society, Economics and public policy, Journalism, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Political theory, Review, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Democracy
Effects of the Minimum Wage on Infant Health The minimum wage has increased in multiple states over the past three decades. Research has focused on effects on labor supply, but very little is known about how the minimum wage affects health, including children's health. We addr...
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I am seeking a lawyer to run an Adverse Action case connected to the recent Fair Work Commission verdict that found systematic breaches of procedures and procedural fairness in the University of Queensland's actions against me following my research on racial attitudes in Brisb...
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Posted in Life, Economics and public policy, Science, Journalism, Media, Blegs, Law, Competitions, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Inequality, Personal, Social Policy
Political parties and institutions in Australia and the US are increasingly dominated by interest groups representing the few, leading to a large policy-induced increase in inequality in recent decades and a long raft of new policies favouring the few by giving them the tax re...
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Posted in Politics - national, Life, Philosophy, History, Society, Economics and public policy, regulation, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Political theory, Law, Information, bubble, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods, Social Policy
Racial Sorting and the Emergence of Segregation in American Cities by Allison Shertzer, Randall P. Walsh - #22077 (DAE LE) Abstract: Residential segregation by race grew sharply in the United States as black migrants from the South arrived in northern cities during the early t...
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I visited Turkey in April last year, traveling through the country, witnessing the troubles of the leadership of the ruling AKP party: it had just lost a general election that left it without a workable majority in parliament and only 40% of the popular vote; it was sucked int...
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Posted in Politics - international, Print media, History, Miscellaneous, Society, Economics and public policy, Terror, Journalism, Political theory, Immigration and refugees, Ethics, Cultural Critique
Queensland boy Julian Assange seems set to walk out of the Ecuadorian embassy soon, hoping that the announcement by the UN human rights panel on the arbitrariness of his detention will protect him from being arrested. The baseline scenario is that he walks out, is quickly arre...
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Posted in Politics - international, Life, History, Society, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Law, Information, Ethics, Cultural Critique
Who knew that Alfred Marshall published an essay entitled "The Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry" (1907) (pdf)? I didn't until I came upon it the other day. Having now read it, it's thoroughly Marshallian - very much of a piece with his dissenting meliorism which I dis...
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When we know so little, it's incumbent on us all to show a little applied humility to interpreting the recent and much celebrated and punditised results about rising mortality amongst American whites. But I will at least say this. The results which Angus Deaton and his wife An...
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by Shamena Anwar, Patrick Bayer, Randi Hjalmarsson. Publication is available here . This paper uses data from the Gothenburg District Court in Sweden and a research design that exploits the random assignment of politically appointed jurors (termed naemndemaen) to make three co...
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From the latest Journal of Economic Perspectives Fair trade coffee is a cup half full, according to Raluca Dragusanu, Daniele Giovannucci, and Nathan Nunn in “The Economics of Fair Trade” (Summer 2014, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 217–36). We are not persuaded. The authors barely menti...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqoXrjQQ9x8 There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives — wher...
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[O]n the behavioral side, clearly people aren’t perfectly rational — but there are lots of ways to be slightly stupid, and it’s very hard to come up with a general theory about which of these ways they will choose in any given situation. Behavioral economics is a fine thing, b...
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Geo-engineering is increasingly looking like the only politically viable way of averting temperature rises above 2 degrees in the coming century. This is for three interlocking reasons: i) Any mayor country can try geo-engineering on its own without permission from anyone else...
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Posted in Uncategorized, Politics - international, Life, Environment, History, Society, Economics and public policy, Science, Climate Change, Ethics, Cultural Critique
http://youtu.be/jzG293KCitk I Some readers may recall an earlier post which I christened an 'untheory' of innovation . It argued that there's not much use in 'theories' of innovation if they're taken as recipe books for senior managers to 'drive down' innovation through organi...
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The Northern Territory News reports that veteran euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke faces a five-day hearing before the Medical Board starting today. Nitschke's arguments will include: Mr Nitschke says suicide is a lawful activity and the appeal was a question of whether...
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http://youtu.be/0B5xPYUNGeA Scribe publishing occasionally sends me a catalogue of books it's publishing asking if I'd like to have one to review. Looking through their long list I picked my friend Tim Colebatch's biography of Rupert Hamer on which he's been working for a good...
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A question for Troppodillians: does anyone have a record of the Australian Government's response to 1988's accidental US shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655? I ask because the parallels with the MH17 shootdown are so clear. At a political level the government's response has so fa...
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https://youtu.be/-9q-sMsXLHs I was bemoaning ethics committees to someone the other day and they told me of this case in which Australian Hospitals refused a patient - a nurse who had done her homework - aggressive chemotherapy for her MS. The ethics committee knew better. So...
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T he excesses of ethics committees are a pet hate of mine, but I'd always thought that for instance the Stanley Milgram experiment was an example of the kind of experiment where genuine ethical issues arose that might justify not going ahead. But now I read on Wikipedia that:...
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How would you measure the safety of private motor vehicle travel? Let’s agree to focus on fatalities. Serious injuries are also important, but all the points I am going to make hold equally as well for injuries as for fatalities. Probably the silliest way to measure road fatal...
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Last Monday I posted 4 questions to see who thought like a classic utilitarian and who adhered to a wider notion of ethics, suspecting that in the end we all subscribe to ‘more’ than classical utilitarianism. There are hence no 'right' answers, merely classic utilitarian ones...
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Do countries that are already rich become even happier when they become yet richer? This was the essential question on which I entered a gentleman’s bet in 2004 with Andrew Leigh and which just recently got settled. The reason for the bet was a famous hypothesis in happiness r...
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Posted in Uncategorized, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Literature, Society, Economics and public policy, Geeky Musings, Social, Ethics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaqpoeVgr8U One of the numerous downsides of the rise of feminism is the demise of righteous masculine anger. For the record I'm strongly supportive of the great achievements of first and second wave feminism. But just as with other great changes...
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I wrote a good while ago about the economics of doing well by doing good on the internet and when I received a curious email from someone with whom I was conducting a correspondence I decided to write the column below. I've just tried to find it on Google, and it seems I didn'...
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The story so far. Robin Dunbar is arguing that language developed amongst apes as something that could replace grooming in facilitating larger social groups than could be supported by grooming. Adam Smith is lurking in the background with the promise made that there are errie...
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I've just finished reading a book entitled " Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language " (Amazon link - but no pages to view) by Robin Dunbar a 1996 book written in a highly entertaining style for a lay audience. In my ignorance of the field, I found the book highly ente...
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