Club Troppo

I just clicked on Amazon's 'add to my shopping cart' and got told that four books had changed price. Usually they have gone up. Or that's been my experience. But things are a-changing as you can see from the excerpt below. Is this deflation, increasing copying, competition fro...

Continue reading →

From Glen Dyer in today's Crikey. I agree. If you -- or ASIC or the ASX -- are looking for another example of well-informed trading affecting stock prices ahead of stockmarket announcements, look at yesterday's 5.3% drop in the price of construction giant, Leighton Holdings to...

Continue reading →

This started out as a comment on Don's recent post on Hamilton (for which I second or third -- the praise). Totting up the word count when I finally lifted my head, I realised it was an absurdly long piece to tack onto a comments thread. In any case, the points I wanted to tak...

Continue reading →

Here is today's column for the Financial Review. Patently there's a problem As Mark Twain said, It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. Its what you know for sure that just aint so. Our biggest mistakes often come when we're most untroubled by our logic even w...

Continue reading →

Brian Fitzgerald drew my attention to this sad valedictory post at The Patry Copyright Blog . 2. The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of the first reason: my fear that the blog was becom...

Continue reading →

Is the New York Philharmonic just a cover band? After all, rather than writing and performing their own material, aren't they just rehashing old tunes by Mozart, Stravinsky and Beethoven ? One of the conceits of underground music scenes, is that the performers are genuine crea...

Continue reading →

Matthew Bonson and the long-tongued Len Kiely in happier times on elevation to the Ministry in November last year The day before Saturdays unexpectedly knife-edge NT election, Chief Minister Paul Henderson gave a politically prudent and factually correct assessment of Labors c...

Continue reading →

Nothing seems to excite conservatives as much as the spectre of moral relativism. For conservatives, relativism is one of the great errors of the postmodernist left. If it is allowed to spread through the classrooms, lecture theatres and legal system, Western civilization will...

Continue reading →

When the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer threw his neighbour down a flight of stairs he said it was because she was making too much noise. He couldn't stand noise and once wrote that "when a great mind is interrupted, disturbed and distracted it is capable of no more than a co...

Continue reading →

I found this brief excerpt (courtesy 3 Quarks Daily ) hard to resist: If you want to go where people are reading Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper, Nafisi has admonished, go to Iran. Go to Iran, I would add, if you want to discover where people are reading Jürgen Habermas, Isaiah...

Continue reading →

Here's a nice looking painting what I got sent in my email - having once subscribed to the email list of the Rex Irwin Gallery which is holding an exhition of this guy from the 12th August. I'll be in the wrong city, but they look like nice paintings. Check out details here .

Continue reading →

George Kahn, 1948-2008 In late 1987, a group of 30 Australians traveled to Nicaragua to pick coffee in solidarity with the Sandinista revolution. On Christmas Day, as we waited at the airport in Mexico for our flight to Managua, we were joined by a tall, easy-going, laconic, 3...

Continue reading →

I went to a fascinating talk by Gregory Clark last night at the Melbourne Business School. As I often do - and as I often do wrongly - I had taken his book to be one of those best seller books which announce a few new interesting ideas that have been explored in an article of...

Continue reading →

This article by Stephen Bartos first appeared in the Public Sector Informant magazine, published with the Canberra Times today. This version has been slightly edited, primarily to include links. Government Information It was two steps forward, one back for access to government...

Continue reading →

This semester I'm teaching an elective unit in Cyberspace Law at CDU. Research and preparation for it has been another of the reasons for the delayed reappearance of Missing Link. However, it's also involved a certain amount of fun. In the first online tutorial last week, we h...

Continue reading →

Having already explained to Troppodillians some of the terminal shortcomings in Optus's wireless broadband service to me, I'm afraid things have not improved. Several rogue charges turned up on the statement that coincided with my taking out the wireless broadband account to t...

Continue reading →

One of the numerous tasks that's been distracting me from resuming Missing Link over the last couple of weeks is doing promotion/marketing for Jen's Missing Link Theatre production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story , playing next week in Darwin (I stole the name of the blog revi...

Continue reading →

New from the NBER : One of the advantages of going to a good college in the US - over the fold. "Among managers with the strongest connection to senior officials (same school at the same time with the same degree), the connected holdings earned an average annual 16.05 percent...

Continue reading →

A nice morning with the Age yielded two good op eds which I link to here in case you're interested. I'm thrilled the cruel and unusual way we had of welcoming boat people has been ended by the new Minister for Immigration who, though I've not been watching closely, seems to sa...

Continue reading →

Continue reading →