Club Troppo

I've been a fan of Warren Buffett for some time . I've been reading a big fat bio of him - The Snowball by Alice Schroeder. It's well written but the content is a bit too pedestrian to really make me think it's worth reading over 800 pages. Anyway, I've just finished the best...

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So Obama got his modest and compromised health care bill through Congress. For those who are more interested in policy than process, there's a pretty helpful summary of the legislation here . However, I hold the desirabilty of the reforms to be self-evident. The only serious i...

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I'm a bit conflicted about Rudd's health plan. On the one hand, it's fairly clear that the States engage in a degree of cost-shifting and even cynical pork-barrelling over health. I'm sure it isn't a coincidence that the two NSW hospitals most often in the news for their decre...

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Fear Strikes Out, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times The day before Sunday’s health care vote, President Obama gave an unscripted talk to House Democrats. Near the end, he spoke about why his party should pass reform: “Every once in a while a moment comes where you have a c...

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We do have a few advantages, perhaps the greatest being that we don’t have a strategic plan Warren Buffett Obliquity . . . or indirectness of means is a subject to which it turns out I've given a lot of thought over the years going back at least to Charles Lindblom's attacks f...

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They don't get much better than this. HT Three Quarks Well for the umpteeth time, WordPress has spat out the 'embedding' code I put into it. But this link is fabulous. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFabjc6mFk4&feature=player_embedded PS - I find on reviewing the site that it...

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White to play Carlsen vs J Smeets 33. ? See game for solution. From the Amberchess blindfold comp. I couldn't work it out - and I could see! And a nice little immortal game by Kasparov here .

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"Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds". Miranda Devine opens yesterday's column with a quote from Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 . Apparently National Party leader Warren Truss has been quoting Shakespeare to make a point about the Prime Minister's declining popularity. A s...

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3. Home Computer Use and the Development of Human Capital by Ofer Malamud, Cristian Pop-Eleches - #15814 (ED HE CH) This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of home computers on child and adolescent outcomes. We collected survey data from househ...

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SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ? Magnus Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise. If you enjoy a bit of chess, Amberchess could be your kind of tourney. All games are over in about an hour and each day two games...

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"Hug a hoodie" -- For years Conservative leader David Cameron has struggled to live down the catchphrase. In 2006 he made a speech about crime and young people in "hoodies" . While bad behaviour must be punished, he insisted, we also need to show a lot more love and understand...

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Justin Madden - boofhead, retired AFL hero, Labor Minister and perhaps soon to be unwitting definer of the bounds of Westminster democracy A dispute has arisen in Victoria's Upper House of Parliament which seems to show some promise of throwing legal light on a dim aspect of A...

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Gather round and listen to this tale. One of the promises made by the current government in opposition that they managed to get in place without much difficulty was the Lobbyists Register . This was to make the whole lobbying process more transparent. Any firms wanting to lobb...

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Well, I probably won't be there, but I must say this is coooool. Very cool. An auction of old old radios . They're little bundles of nostalgia these little guys. What about this one! Or perhaps you'd like it in blue. Blue we can do. Joel's, the auctioneer reckons they'll go fo...

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The other day I was at Toby's Estate's Wooloomooloo outlet when I became inordinately interested in the menu pricing. From my notes (I did mean inordinately) : Short Black/Ristretto : $2.20 Long Black/Piccolo Latte : $3.00 Latte/Flat White/Cappuccino : $3.50 Here's my puzzleme...

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Most of the initial reactions to Tony Abbott's maternity leave proposal have focussed on its political motivation , on how it squares with his personal ideology , and on reactions of the business lobby . As far as the politics are concerned, it looks like standard Howard era p...

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On Sunday I wrote: " It’s never been easier to check quotations ". It's time for an update. While checking some of my own words on Monday, I discovered that many of my old blog posts had been attributed to Danger Mouse and Admin . A part of my online identity had been sucked d...

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It's always nice to get a name for something that is rummaging round in one's mind. Autoantonymy has - believe it or not been doing that in my tiny brain for many years. So I'm greatful to the great Three Quarks website for giving me the word (and grateful to Ingolf for tellin...

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It's never been easier to check quotations. With tools like Google Books and the Yale Book of Quotations there's no need to publish spurious or out of context quotes. But even today, books, newspapers and academic papers are full of quotes that are just wrong. Here's an exampl...

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For some time now I've been arguing that we should do for information what we did for competition in the 1990s - adopt a national information policy in the image of national competition policy. National competition policy was a trawl through our economic institutions presuming...

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