Club Troppo

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This is a note to myself, which I hope to come back to. The internet has the power to revolutionise a lot of industries. Print and software are two that have been revolutionised - and, in areas that could be 'commoditised' have led to plummeting costs. In health and finance, t...

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For years I've watched people poke and prod at the internet, trying to get it to cough up enough cash to support careers in professional journalism. But in a world where even Rupert Murdoch complains about not getting paid, it's no surprise that most fail. At Crikey Margaret S...

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Yep. Ned is back for another crack at internet stardom.

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You may need to read back over the post , which is thoroughly worthwhile in itself (for eco geeks, or anyone with an interest in social science) but I lerved this comment. There are no simple mistakes in applied macro, Nick! Unless one counts asking, on a public forum, provoca...

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Paul Frijters analyses the topical economic issue facing Australia's resource industry and the public: the Federal Government's proposed Resource Super Profits Tax. He identifies all the key stakeholders and how the proposed legislation change will affect them.

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It's been raining on and off just about every day in Darwin for more than two weeks. Who cares you might ask? Well, it's the dry season. You get the occasional shower in the dry season but not rain for weeks on end. It's certainly never happened before in the 27 years I've liv...

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I discover, that while I'm on the other side of the world, the Age and SMH have published a column they asked me to write on the new resource rent tax. They've published it, but edited and garbled various bits of it. Anyway, for better or worse, here's the original. It’s stran...

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So asks Don of Ed . It's sufficiently off-topic to warrant its own thread. Here's my own first stab at the question, but it's doubtless very unsophisticated, and sure to be substantially revised after a robust discussion. Belief has a wide variety of meanings connected by fami...

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As the pseudo debate about the resources rent tax continues to vomit forth, it's striking how little we have changed even in the industrial age, and the challenges we have in protecting our philosophical gains. When humanity began farming we entered a world in which prosperity...

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Evolutionary psychologists have been busy proposing explanations for religiosity . Belief in transcendent conscious beings might promote survival, they argue, by instilling hope and optimism. Or it might be a by-product of other naturally selected susceptibilities, such as inf...

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A "lot of opinion polling is useless because it doesn’t understand its limitations" writes Graham Young . One of the major limitations of polling is the tendency of respondents to answer questions about things they know nothing about. A series of studies have shown how respond...

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White to play Smyslov vs Oll 29. ? See game for solution. And this is a cute game too.

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Courtesy of your local Republican candidate .

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I'd be surprised if any of the recommendations in Henry generate a higher internal rate of return, greater efficiency gains per unit of effort than the recommendation to simplify tax returns for five odd million Australians, something that can be done simply by offering tax cu...

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This is a quick post, I'd like to make it longer but won't have the time. It's worked up from a comment on a post by Kate Lundy which articulates why e-literacy of various kinds should be part of the national curriculum. Couldn't agree more. But a couple of things occur to me....

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"How much attention did you pay to this week’s Federal Budget?" For many respondents to this week's Essential Research Poll , the answer was not much -- 44 per cent said that they paid little or no attention to the budget. But in the same survey, 80 per cent were able to expre...

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It was always going to be a problem. What do you call your new improved version of Labour when the 'New Labour' brand has become stale and discredited? David Miliband is backing 'Next Labour', a tag coined by the New Statesman's James Macintyre in March this year . In an inter...

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