Club Troppo

The Senate Economic References Committee has this week released its findings on the supermarket milk discounting war . The main findings, blessedly, were that cheaper milk really is good for consumers and that there was nothing obviously awry with the competitive market that g...

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Un-occupy: Nearly 70 students walked out of Greg Mankiw's economics class at Harvard on Wednesday afternoon. According to the Harvard Crimson's Jose Delreal , "The walkout was meant to be a show of support for the 'Occupy' movement’s principal criticism that conservative econo...

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Perhaps it's the Christian roots of our civilisation. Perhaps it's innate in many of us, but I've never understood the business about to forgive is divine. It's natural. Even if people have done really bad things, if you think they are genuinely sorry, your heart goes out to t...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PoD84TVdD-4 I know you're all on the edges of your seats about how Kaggle is going. The answer is "very well". We've just announced the closure of Series A funding. And you can read all about it in the New York Times , the...

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Human beings only play when they are in the full sense of the word human and they are only fully human when they play. Friedrich Shiller Games seem frivolous. They can stand as metaphors for life, but typically, the outcome of games doesn't really matter. I wanted Collingwood...

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Yesterday I followed this mellifluously titled article on why the author hadn't been able to write a best selling 'ideas book'. This is what I had to do. First, I needed to have a platform. A platform is something you stand on. It makes you taller than you are. In trade publis...

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Another Ignite Melbourne is on! What is that? Ignite is a format for public speaking which emerged from the tech sector. You get exactly 5 minutes to speak and you must speak to slides that move forward at a preset rate every 15 seconds. It's quite hard to do well, which is pa...

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[caption id="attachment_17826" align="alignright" width="500" caption="Photo credit: Matt McDermott"] [/caption] Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a message for the Occupy Wall Street protesters : Keep focusing on gross inequality of outcomes and you'll get nowhere. Haidt and hi...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w833cAs9EN0 My previous post on the right led to my discovery of this great clip. Many will already have seen it. Anyway, enjoy.

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Update - Tweets placed in a more coherent context in In search of Qanilingus at CDU Law and Business Online . NB Australian Financial Review arguably has the best coverage and has no paywall for the weekend. downesy Stephen Downes by CDUlawschool Alan Joyce's secret ambition i...

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John Quiggin reprises an old theme of his - which I recall supporting previously (I'd forgotten that my post " the stupid party " was actually in response to another of John's posts/columns). In any event, I was talking to a CIS person the other day and mentioning that for me...

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Edit - I really want opposing views. Anyone who thinks there is a strong case for a concerted push for more literacy, please give it in comments At the Lowy Interpreter Andrew Carr says "One policy guaranteed to feature in the ' Australia in the Asian Century' White Paper is t...

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[caption id="attachment_17786" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Today's NT News front page (28 October) - a true classic of the genre even for that august journal of record"] [/caption]

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I didn't really expect that my recent posts about the somewhat indeterminate aims of the "Occupy ..." protest movement would result in a lively discussion thread about what I imagined was the entirely uncontroversial proposition that the limited liability corporation is by and...

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Moving backwards? Opposition leader Tony Abbott's project is "oriented to the past rather than the future, and it seeks to reinstate the past by projectively erasing the present", writes Mark Bahnisch . Bringing back tram conductors: The Greens want to bring back Melbourne's t...

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Twitter even allows you to convey complex if slightly tongue-in-cheek ideas, but possibly only to people who bother to follow the links: 11 hours ago CDUlawschool CDU Law School 1/2 Houses not o/priced tiny.cc/iwt9a but will fall over time due boomer retirement tiny.cc/2sw9b H...

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[caption id="attachment_17754" align="alignright" width="199" caption="Celebrity lawyer Chris Murphy"] [/caption] Twitter is a much more useful social media tool than I had imagined. I've been using it for several weeks now to produce the daily links to interesting legal stori...

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[caption id="attachment_17751" align="aligncenter" width="612" caption="Occupy Brisbane signage: Vaccines? And what are "chemtrails"? What about whales or nukes or live cattle exports? Must be getting old ..."] [/caption]

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Back in 2006 UK rumour-monger Guido Fawkes boasted that the news is no longer defined by big media . Laurie Oakes is afraid he's right. In his 2011 Andrew Olle Media Lecture , Oakes predicts that bloggers will soon be determining what is news. He says that political commentato...

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Now it may or may not have any connection with the debate about the pros and cons of the "Occupy ..." movement in Australia or elsewhere, but the following story by Cory Doctorow from techblog BoingBoing is both fascinating and disturbing, as much for the superb associated ima...

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