Guess which crackpot started his article on covid in that notorious right-wing publication 'The Guardian' with the sentence "The virus has been used as a pretext in many countries to crush dissent, criminalise freedoms and silence reporting"? It's that obvious conspiracy-nutte...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pf4u3eyTCk I thought I posted this talk from some time ago on Troppo when I gave it back in October, but I can't find it. So here it is. Apologies if it's already here. As ever, a raw machine read transcription is over the fold. In my first cal...

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News Corp is telling us what Google should really pay for linking to its sites. It's telling us in code – HTML code. And the answer is ... $0.00. What is an Internet link worth to the linker? For most of the Internet's life, this question has been pointless. On the Internet, l...

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The legislated "bargaining" process between Google and News Corp is unmoored from reality. Its "final offer arbitration" is unsuited to the task. [caption id="attachment_34634" align="alignleft" width="300"] He's loaded the gun. (Photo provided by Eva Rinaldi on Flickr; CC BY-...

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[caption id="attachment_34619" align="alignleft" width="1600"] From Encyclopaedia Brittanica: " Australian ballot: Voters participating in the secret ballot, or Australian ballot, system in the British general elections of April 17, 1880. Hulton Archive[/caption] Though I have...

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In 2005 I did my first economic projections of the major powers (published in a textbook ) and concluded from the trends then that China would have a larger economy in purchasing power terms than the US in 2017, which is exactly what happened. In 2012, I wrote about the inevit...

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The federal government has overpromised and underdelivered on the COVID-19 vaccine. It deserves to be criticised for that. But delaying immunisation means that Australia may -- albeit inadvertently -- be doing the right thing. Vaccine nationalism was always to be expected – an...

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While the hysteria marches on here in Europe, an interesting economics article came out in a decent journal on the political economy of that mass hysteria. Their abstract: In this article, we aim to develop a political economy of mass hysteria. Using the background of COVID-19...

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We may be headed for a world of endless moral bubbles, where targets for outrage can be identified and turned into bogeymen in record time, with record audiences. It would be QAnon, but for anything you can think of and some stuff you can't. Author's note: What follows is spec...

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Consider the picture below of two hypothetical Accident and Emergency departments (A&E), one that has no covid-regulations and simply has the available nurses trying to help all comers as fast as possible. In the other one the nurses try to prevent mingling by testing newcomer...

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Back in the day, (which is to say for most of the 20th century until things began changing in the 1980s, each of the major political parties had a few percentage points of the population as members. In addition to the intrinsic rewards of being part of one’s country’s social a...

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