Club Troppo

Here are a few of the links I've been clicking over the past few days: When is economic growth good for the poor? At Consider the Evidence Lane Kenworthy reveals the awful truth -- governments can make poor people better off by giving them money. Money and happiness . When peo...

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Orpheus and Eurydice by Carlo Cignani (1628-1719) O everlasting gods! I see your lovely eyes and your beautiful face, and yet I cannot believe my own eyes! These are the sentiments of Orpheus on being reunited with Eurydice in Hades, but they are also the standard reaction to...

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The publication of an edited version of my Troppo post about abolition of mandatory universal detention of asylum seekers at the ABC Unleashed site has certainly been an interesting experience. Fairly predictably it attracted the sort of polarised "howling into the darkness" c...

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I'm looking for a good web designer who can integrate a web presence with Facebook and Twitter and who also has a working familiarity with higher education learning management systems and in particular Blackboard. Can someone point me towards a suitable candidate?

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RBA governor Glenn Stevens always goes to the big issues. His latest speech notes that we are becoming more dependent on China and India buying our resources, and adds that these countries will probably have their ups and downs over the next quarter-century. So then he asks: h...

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Occasionally a report comes along which should give people a whole new way of looking at a public policy debate. A new report on universal high-speed broadband (UHSB) via fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), titled "Superfast: Is It Really Worth a Subsidy?" , does just that. Written...

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From: Nicholas Gruen (Lateral Economics) Sent: Saturday, 20 November 2010 3:12 PM To: Assistant Subject: Qantas Booking Hi there, I purchased the ticket with details below at Mascot Airport and they said they'd send me my invoice by e-mail, but they've not done so. Can you che...

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In a recent post, Troppo's Ken Parish suggested that quality newspapers serve a gatekeeping role, ensuring "at least some measure of quality assurance". So what's happening at the Australian? In a recent piece on wind farms, environment editor Graham Lloyd attempted to explain...

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If you regularly copy and paste headlines or paragraphs from newspapers, you'll have run into Tynt Insight . It's the software that inserts the irritating "Read More" URL into your blog posts, emails and documents. As John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes , Insight "is a servi...

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There's more to reporting than quoting from media releases or explaining statistics you've downloaded from the ABS -- or at least there ought to be. And that's why it's so worrying to read this from Alan Kohler : It is now possible for anyone to find out almost anything. Someo...

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Journalists love nothing better than to navel gaze about the future of newspapers and the mainstream media in the Age of Social Media. Some journalists even see social media as threatening their long-term career prospects. It's probably inevitable given the struggle newspapers...

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This NT story might bear watching for its possible national implications: The Northern Territory's attorney-general is seeking an investigation into claims Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and his NT counterpart tried to bribe a candidate not to run in the 2010 federal el...

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This week's Missing Link Friday looks at who's to blame for the toxic waste in your garage, asks whether car drivers and Tasmanians are paying their way and investigates the latest public policy fad -- social investment bonds. Help! Rich guys in top hats are filling my garage...

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This afternoon I returned home from a day out doing various things Kaggle , and on the stairwell was a fancy black, clear wrapped package. I thought it was some fancy bit of nonsense for their frequent fliers points. Well it kind of was. It was their latest special card. I'd b...

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Well it's not a new topic for me, but if anyone's interested Lateral Economics got quite a bit of coverage for a study for Western Sydney showing that had the toll roads of Sydney been funded by governments rather than the private sector the NSW public sector would be worth ov...

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The release in federal Parliament yesterday of the report into last year's Montara oil spill off Australia's north-west coast is just the latest chapter in a saga of NT government incompetence: "Industry, government and regulators must be absolutely committed to a culture of h...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-3hL9FfQFc&feature=player_embedded Well, North Korea, this is stemming from I think, a greater problem when we’re all, you know, sittin’ around askin’, ‘Oh, no, what are we gonna do,’ and we’re not having a lotta faith that the White House is go...

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http://vimeo.com/16917950

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(Hat-tip Dale from Faith in Honest Doubt ) Although I intensely dislike the rabid intolerant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, it's certainly no worse than the propaganda of some of the more cretinous American God-botherers: http://www.youtube.co...

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