Club Troppo

At John P. Boerschig Ranches , they 'do have an organized Black Buck hunting package. This hunt is available at our Brackettville Ranch, which has excellent accommodations with all the comforts of home.' Is it ethical to hunt feral pigs for fun? James Valentine thinks so. He d...

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To the right are a couple of graphs of nominal share prices on the American stock market. What is odd about them? The fact that there is such a strong nominal anchor for share prices. Though the price of goods and services tends to keep going up reflecting inflation or down re...

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For those who've read the essay below and have no desire to re-read it, my apologies. I didn't post it at the time out of deference to the original publisher - the AFR. However with a couple of years having passed, I thought I'd post it here. It is below the fold and I occasio...

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I cannot really understand how such a talentless and unlikable person as Kyle Sandilands ends up earning m$4 per year . But then, I am not part of the Idol or 2dayfm demographic. I would rather listen to the ABC or watch the SciFi channel. I am also the kind of person who like...

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Technically speaking it was a tricked up cover band knocking out a few old Beatles numbers for a bunch of grey haireds on a nostalgia kick. But for those of us actually living the nostagia kick in Hamer Hall this evening, we were living the dream. It was the Beatles' White Alb...

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I think the Dave Beeton Special, hereafter known as the DBS was the greatest concession Dave ever made to how things actually are in the world. Consequences were not his strong point which meant that every moment came to him as a sort of surprise. This genuine innocence and de...

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Last days in the sanctuary of a loving family Body still and quiet now the great loving generous funny-if-infuriating spirit has left it behind ... When the doctor telling Dave he was about to die started crying, he placed his hand gently on her shoulder saying "Don't worry Do...

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If you take an interest in the 'free trade versus protection' debate - which I've tried to use a rather more general formulation of in the heading above - and you are alive to the possibility that the debate might be about something rather than just the ranting of people who j...

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Cross Posted from Gov2.net.au . Its a truism that the public sector is risk averse and that thats one of the things holding up the adoption of Web 2.0 approaches and indeed quite a few Web 1.0 approaches. I dont think this is inaccurate, but its also too general a statement to...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="399" caption="Dr Gruen insisting that he only appear within photo borders which theme with his tie "] [/caption] Over a month ago I gave a paper at a conference organised by Brian Fitzgerald which I reproduced earlier on Troppo here . T...

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Michael Stutchbury addresses Rudds assault on neo-liberalism in The Australian, 28/7/09. Stutchbury has some good points to make but he is, like everyone else in The Australian, obsessed with the debt question and the justification for active (discretionary) government interve...

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From Universe Today Ice loss in Barrow Alaska from 2006 to 2007. Credit: US Geological Survey Last week the US government released more than a thousand intelligence images of Arctic ice that have been used to help scientists study the impact of climate change. The images were...

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I attended the third and final session in the public forum series Getting to Grips with the Economy , organised by the Whitlam Institute at the Riverside Theatre in glorious Parramatta. This one featured John Quiggin , Steve Keen and the confessed non-blogger Guy Debelle from...

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There is a thoughtful article in the Financial Times by Paul De Grauwe which is found in http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/478de136-762b-11de-9e59-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss It notes the big disagreement between two opposing camps on macro-economics (the Ricardians versus Keynesians...

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A late call on the departure of the distinguished scholar Leszek Kolakowski. A short obituary . Starting off as an orthodox Marxist in postwar Poland, Kolakowski became progressively disenchanted and his calls for a more democratic version of socialism led him into conflicts w...

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From Three Quarks : Here's the speech Nixon had ready in case things didn't go according to plan. "Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there...

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James Morris is 15 years old, and he's bloody good at chess. He's just become an International Master . He's so much better than me, it's sad (for me that is.) But from all us patzers, congratulations James. I love it when people do something amazing! Should be encouraged!

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Chartered Secretaries Australia are putting on a show called a Public Sector Update in which I'm talking on Public Sector Innovation under the unnecessarily pessimistic title of "Can innovation in the public sector exist?" How to harness your intrinsic motivation to drive inno...

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I first learned how to work a computer on an Apple Mac. Marvellous things they were - I've still got my old Apple Mac 128K in my garage. I didn't want to learn on a DOS machine. It looked like the effort might be considerable and for the limited reward of rather clunky word pr...

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The Joy of Sachs By PAUL KRUGMAN The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits and its preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the c...

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