Club Troppo

Grollo's Amazing Melbourne Tower was lambasted by the soft left as phallic. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it's because I'm a boy, but I just lerve things that are so big it makes me go 'Wow!'. (Unless they're unusually ugly, which they usually aren't). And we seem to get towards fin...

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This New Yorker cartoon by Australian cartoonist once plying her trade in the Good Weekend and now made good in the Big Apple is good fun on it's own. Turns out it's also a comp . I presume a caption comp. No reason we can't participate.

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Today's Canberra Times has a very pertinent article by John Pitchford on the benefits of the fiscal stimulus (no links). He makes three points: (1) Rudd's anti-recession economic stimulus package has effectively prevented much lower output, profits and employment (200,000 Aust...

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From Mark Thoma . Click through to his site or read over the fold. Bill Easterly sent me a link to the post The Vortex of Vacuousness that I posted the other day, but I like this one better: Maybe we should put rats in charge of foreign aid research, by William Easterly : Labo...

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With black to move, the threat of white capturing the f7 pawn in this position makes for an inevtiably wild ride. Even Fischer has lost as white in a good looking position. But I've never seen anything like this madness. The guys who fight this game out seem to have form. Here...

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I recently linked to designer Milton Glaser's ten point credo about life one of the points of which was this. PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT. Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life b...

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Ken: G'day Tab. Tab: G'day Ken. What are ya doin'? Ken: Just sitting here reading the Sunday paper and eating these squid satays ... Tab: Mind if I join you? Ken: Not at all. Pull up a chair ... Tab: What are you doing these days? (I represented him at one stage in one of his...

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I had a knee operated on last Thursday. Having had almost exactly the same thing done on the other knee a couple of years ago, I told my doctor I wasn't that happy with the way I was treated, and asked if he could suggest anyone else. Though it's a very minor procedure, it's s...

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Peter Thiel is a super-smart, super-successful businessman and libertarian activist. He co-founded PayPal , invested in Facebook and has pledged three and half million dollars to a project searching for the key to human immortality . He also thinks it was a bad idea to give wo...

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Remember how Luke Skywalker destroyed the Death Star ? At the crucial moment, the young Jedi switched off his targeting computer and used the Force to aim his laser torpedoes. It was one of the most important decisions of his life, and he made it, not on the numbers, but on in...

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HT Michael Neilson

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Strength through joy wasn't such a big hit in the end, but fun through stupidity - now that's an inexhaustible well. Michael Neilson links to ten videos of chairs being used in various silly 'extreme' sports. Except for the very first office do, virtually everyone is a young m...

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HT Three Quarks

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The finish of this game is pretty cool. I would in fact go so far as to call it tres cool . Indeed, Adoph Andersson won plaudits in the nineteenth century infancy of the modern game of chess for his 'immortal game' against Lionel Adalbert Bagration Felix Kieseritsky(!) in whic...

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Paul Collier has finally 'nailed it' as they say on Australian Idol. Climate change is, in fact, infested with ethical baggage, much of it unhelpful. Lets get rid of some of it now. First, climate change has been hijacked by the environmentalist hatred of industrialized modern...

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Black to play A Yurgis vs Botvinnik 34. ...? See game for solution. about our puzzles

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"I must admit to having no compence in economics whatsoever" wrote Robert Manne in the Introduction to The New Conservatism in Australia (1982). He proceeded to demonstrate the truth of that admission by turning his face against economic reform and advocating the kind of polic...

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Mark Blaug (1937- ) was born in the Netherlands, raised in the US and became a naturalised Briton in 1982. He made far reaching contributions to a range of topics in economic thought. In addition to work on the economics of art and the economics of education, he is best known...

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Every cycle of monetary policy seems to bring forward some piece of confused thinking that somehow turns up centre stage. It's not as if monetary policy is easy - given the inevitable level of ignorance and the long and variable lags in the effect of monetary policy. But centr...

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