Club Troppo

Well the ABC God bless its cotton socks can’t quite bring itself to mount videos that can be embedded elsewhere – or I can’t see a way to do it, but they did a great story on Kaggle tonight – so I thought I’d post it here. Just click here and all will be revealed.

Update: someone has emailed me some code which enables me to frame the video here.

Several years ago I posted a graphic plotting countrys GDP per head against mean lifetime and drawing attention to the tragic loss of life in southern Africa, mainly due to AIDS. There is a fantastic data visualisation tool called GapMinder that tells this story and other  stories-  much more clearly. And it is really fun to play with.

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A good while back I put up a post on all the ways I liked Platinum Capital. I hope some of you were suitably convinced to have invested.  Just as Kier Neilson (the firm’s founder) made his name in the 1987 crash, this is how Platinum international fund has performed recently. The Y-axis doesn’t seem to have come out – but the lines start at $10,000 and Platinum is now at ~ $9,000 with the index at ~ 7,250.  Of course cash might have been better, but then you’ve gotta be in it to win it!

My abiding and irrational loathing for Wordpress has at last yielded fruit.

Wordpress thrives in the classic shared hosting market, where the LAMP stack — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — is almost universally installed. It’s free, fairly user-friendly, well-marketed, widely used, has oodles of third party plugins and themes. My only objection to Wordpress is that it’s rubbish¹1. Har Har: Yes, I realise I’m saying this on a Wordpress website. Sometimes the poor workman doesn’t get to choose his tools. [↩].

But that’s not my point today. What Wordpress has given me is the impetus to think, and think, and think some more about what blogging software is and what it should do. The dozen or so computer types who follow Club Troppo have seen my sketches in this direction before. Starting with a pre-history of blogging, I moved through a call for a “next generation”, through to consideration of the various interested participants in the world of blogging software. Later I returned to the topic of Wordpress to complain about its architecture, then foreshadowed this post with remarks about a PHP performance benchmark.

My topic today is a discussion of how and why I think shared hosting is doomed. Let me start with a chart which I think will attract no argument²2. About the charts: All charts in this post are illustrative, not data-driven. So YMMAPWV. [↩]:

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I seem to be the only one, that I have seen anyway, in the Australian blogosphere who is excited about the 37c tax bracket going the way of the dodo in Labor’s tax policy announcement. Peter Martin even suggested it might be bad politics. Hopefully this policy becomes ‘common wisdom’ and the removal of the 37c tax bracket enacted no matter who the party in power is as it simplifies the tax system drastically and removes bracket creep for many income tax payers. Some graphs to visualise what a tax system without the 37c bracket would look like. The data for these graphs is from the 2003-2004 Tax Statistics which is the most up-to-date data publicly available from the ATO.

Note that the 30c tax bracket under Labor’s 2013 policy stretches from 37K to 180K. It becomes a long tail tax with the 15c bracket covering the head of the taxable income curve. The 40c bracket in raw numbers covers a very small minority of taxable individuals.
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The AES has an interesting graph which shows trending on how people consumed political information during elections. Unfortunately the trend ends at 2004, however, the internet was already rivaling talkback radio, newspapers and radio for media consumption patterns.

I am sure that the ‘internet’ includes mainstream media sites such as the SMH, Australian and so forth as well as independent media and blogs. It would be interesting to see those same figures for 2007 as well as a breakdown of mass media websites, independent media (a-la crikey) and citizen political sites (such as blogs).

Via Gary Sauer-Thompson: The Australian Electoral Study’s Trends in Australian Political Opinion [PDF] is a goldmine of graphs, polling and trending all thoughtfully gathered into the one document. Especially for graph junkies.

It is also interesting to see where the polling is at odds or in opposition to some of the narratives being told by special interest groups, of which political parties are an example. The graphs on Trade Unions is especially interesting. Fred Argy has already expressed bewilderment as to why the fear of union power is an issue:

Associated with this collective bargaining issue is fear of union power. Here too I find the debate mystifying. In todays highly competitive, globalised economy, unions cannot determine market wages and conditions except in rare situations where businesses have monopoly power (in which case unions are merely giving their workers a share of the monopoly profits).

Which I agree with, and from the graphs in the AES trending, the population seems to as well.

Since the 1970s the public seems to think that the trade unions have been declining in power. Note that this trend occurs long before Keating’s or Howard’s industrial relations reforms. Support for industrial action has seen an ever steeper decline with public opinion preempting any political or policy changes by the Keating or Howard governments.

The ersatz election campaign from the Liberal Government has been hammering on about Trade Union power and how the Labor Cabinet is composed of Unionists who would Mao the country down. Presumably the Textor-Crosby polling duo would have provided the empirical background for such a media message, but from these trends it suggests they are appealing to a minority of the population who still think unions are powerful.

Why would a majority government make appealing to a minority of the country such a big part of their media campaign? Are they hoping that the 44% in the second graph for 2004 thinks that prohibition of unions through Workchoices is not enough and gives all their primary vote to the Coalition? If that trend is consistent then the number thinking tougher laws are required for unions is probably around 39% in 2007. Which makes even less sense why the Government is banging on about it. I don’t understand it.

My brother and I both tried quite hard not to be economists. And we both failed fairly miserably.

He’s been busy producing some interesting graphs concerning the two intergenerational reports.

Bryan Palmer writes:

This gives an average of 58.25 for Labor and 41.75 per cent for the Coalition. Plug these numbers into the election calculator and see what you get.

A pie chart of the “see what you get” with a uniform national 11% swing (normal caveats etc):

The red area of the pie chart is almost large enough to resemble pacman.