Club Troppo

What a lot of nonsense has been talked about the defection to French rugby of rugby league star Bobby Sue Billy Jo Sonny Bill Williams! First, the NRL isn't going to succeed in getting an injunction to restrain Sonny Bill's defection, still less get a French court to enforce i...

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Would you find lots of oval shaped stations popping up all over the place in your city an eyesore? And they have advertising on them. Still, I reckon you wouldn't. You see they're bike exchange stations and in Paris they've got them every 300 metres or so. And I just know that...

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The High Court's decision earlier today in the Blue Mud Bay case sets the cat among the pigeons (or maybe the shark among the barramundi) a little over a week out from the Northern Territory election. The Court has dismissed the NT Labor government's appeal from a decision of...

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Fresh from Krugman's blog . As usual, it can't be put much better. Economics of catastrophe Away from the headlines, theres a really important discussion going on about how to think about the economics of climate change. The key player is Marty Weitzman, who has made a simple...

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Here's today's column in the Financial Review. The interface between you and your bank used to be the branch. Today banks give your computer sufficient access to their computer over the net to let you do it all yourself. Reengineering of the interface is happening everywhere a...

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I realise this is kind of missing the main news story in the recent court victory of Max Mosley - son of Oswald who was the leader of the British Union of Fascists. (That's not to say that Max should automatically be tarred with the same brush, but he does seem to dip into tha...

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Via Beth Simone Noveck , Amex has got into the crowdsourcing game announcing an exciting and innovative philanthropic program Members Project in which you can propose projects, vote on the projects of others, and in so doing qualify them for $2.5 million of funding from Amex....

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I'm a fan of 'synergies' in policy - doing more than one thing you want done with one policy. Killing two birds, that kind of thing. These opportunities come up all the time, but we're very often too flat footed to catch them. The last time Australia was good at this kind of t...

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Am I the only newspaper reader who expects an opinion column to develop a coherent thread of argumentation, as distinct from a series of provocative comments stuck together precariously with specious howevers and therefores? The editors who approve these pieces evidently think...

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Everyone knows that egalitarians believe in equality . But what does that mean? If the core egalitarian idea is that all human beings have equal moral worth, then even Friedrich Hayek is an egalitarian . But if, as Rafe Champion insists , egalitarianism means "equal material r...

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I gather this YouTube is quite well known. I'd never seen it when I came across it.

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Andrew Bolt admonishes abusive foam flecked greens for their reaction to a grim metaphor and contrasts the obsession with AGW with a lack of concern about the coarsening of our culture. A moderator has just told me half a dozen spectacularly nasty comments have had to be snipp...

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This is really something IMO, but if you want an eerie and remarkable experience, just left click on this 1 minute movie to download it and travel in silence with Cassini around Saturn. Awesome. PS: well you'll 'left click' if you use your left hand to operate your mouse like...

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Why are left-wingers less happy than right-wingers? According to psychologists Jaime Napier and John Jost , it's because of the way they interpret inequality. American right-wingers are more likely to believe that hard work leads to success. As a result, they find inequality l...

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Well no doubt others have posted this around the traps, but Tim Watts posted this truly spooky argument for the existence of God. You might think the arguments are obvious, but that's always the case once things are pointed out.

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Read this (reproduced below the fold). Should taxpayers bail out the banking system? One of the worlds leading international macroeconomists contrasts the Larry Summers dont-scare-off-the-investors pro-bailout view with the Willem Buiter they-ran-into-a wall-with-eyes-wide-ope...

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Support for the welfare state is often based more on chauvinism than a desire for justice, says Will Wilkinson. He argues that if first-worlders really care about improving the lot of the poor we should open up our economies to trade and allow more poor foreigners to cross our...

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I'm sick of paying $100 or more every time I crank through two or three thousand pages of printing. Back in the old days, printer drums and toner cartridges were replaced separately. Drums lasted 20,000 pages or more and could be persevered with even if they weren't giving you...

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