Club Troppo

In a week from now, UQ student leader Drew Pavlou will face an internal hearing at the University of Queensland to decide whether or not he will be expelled for having organised rallies against various pro-China organisations on campus and generally being a pain in the *rse of...

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As part of the Government 2.0 Taskforce in 2009 I coined the term 'info-philanthropy' though someone may have coined it before me and the Taskforce proposed that it qualify as a head of philanthropy. I don't think any changes have been made, but there's reasonable scope to inc...

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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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There is one hell of a recession coming for Australia. Economic activity has already reduced by 20% and actual unemployment will probably peak near 20% too , and about a million businesses have already applied for some sort of assistance. The population increase of the last 20...

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Here at Clubtroppo, we have been saying for well over a month now that a quick look at the economic damage and the health damage of the responses to the corona virus tells you they dwarf the possible benefits of suppressing the virus, anywhere in the West. This has lead to the...

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Note: Article expanded on 24 April and again on 27 April. The middle now has more meat. So you can read it again! As Paul Frijters has recently said on this site, many countries will soon ease their restrictions on social isolation. As Paul has been pointing out , we pay a hig...

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Did you know that Australia has over 13,000 IVF babies born per year, the UK over 20,000 , the West as a whole (Europe+US+offshoots) over 200,000 and the world as a whole 500,000 ? And did you know that due to the corona panic these services have been halted pretty much everyw...

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My first prediction is an easy one: many countries are going to ease their restrictions on social isolation in the coming weeks, including many countries with an ongoing corona problem. They simply have to if they want to have any economy left. You can see this happening to di...

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Well, certainly wearing a mask walking down the streets of Melbourne makes no sense at all Brendan Murphy, Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, March 9 . The philosopher Mary Midgley styles her own writing as that of a critic. She means something urgent by this – not something A...

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We're constantly in team meetings here in the underground bunker at Club Troppo working out how to tweak the linkbait. An edict has already been passed down the line from the AI that runs the place that no posts will be published on anything but Coronavirus for the next six mo...

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How much unhappiness is created by the unemployment of millions of people in Western countries (mainly N-Am +Europe) caused by the corona panic? How much unhappiness has been created due to the vast expansion of loneliness and physical inactivity? And in terms of the tradeoff...

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Well, well, well. The legal system has bungled its way to releasing a guilty man. Even if George Pell were not guilty of any acts of child molesting (as it was called during most of the time he was doing it) he'd belong in jail for his criminal disregard and wilful hostility t...

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From Twitter . Till now I’ve organisd a TROPPO GROUP CRIKEY SUBSCRIPTION for around 50 I advertised I was doing renewals on Twitter and Troppo a month ago and got about 1 or 2 takers Now someone else wants a renewal If I can get some serious buy-in I’ll rinse and repeat If not...

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This post is barely worked up from an email I wrote in response to a student in development studies. She'd been working on environmental this and that and the Sustainable Development Goals (about which I'd class myself a card-carrying member of the economists club as being hig...

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[caption id="attachment_33714" align="alignnone" width="1800"] Whoever is doing PR for this virus has certainly come up with a natty logo.[/caption] An argument someone put to me today which makes a lot of sense. In the GFC markets collapsed not just because there was too much...

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[caption id="attachment_36337" align="alignleft" width="939"] Creating and managing a high-performance knowledge-sharing network: the Toyota case [/caption] I recently reposted my old column on blogging the 2008 crisis and there's been some great blogging of this crisis. What...

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[caption id="attachment_36339" align="alignright" width="337"] Is this a bunch of black patches on a white background? It is. Of course it is. (Remember you're at Troppo now. No mucking around.) It also depicts something which you can't unsee once you've seen it. Such is the p...

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[caption id="attachment_33674" align="aligncenter" width="3840"] Not sure Winston ever said that, but it sounds like the kind of thing he might have said. Quote investigator doesn't tell me sadly. Grateful for any others' researches in comments below.[/caption] The subject of...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPHlT6LBXeo Since we're blogging the next crisis, I thought now was a good time to reheat the blogging of the last one. intriguing to think of all the changes, and in many ways how much steam has gone out of blogging, and yet how resilient it ha...

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The mass hysteria of the corona crisis is raging, with the resulting self-isolation of whole economies and populations. The loss seems greater with every new forecast on the economic collapse than I initially though t, and the benefit of imprisoning and terrorizing the populat...

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