Club Troppo

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Bernice Balconey , Kim and clarencegirl review Morris and Michael's most recent public...

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One of the respondents to my earlier post on NSW electricity privatisation accuses me of a possible "ideological bias against privatisation" and proceeds to make sweeping generalisation about the benefits of privatisation.. I thought I might clear the air on this issue. I have...

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I was more than a little surprised when what I thought was a reasonably uncontroversial item in yesterday's Missing Link elicited a heated response from frequent Troppo commenter and erudite legal eagle Patrick Fitzgerald. The item concerned arch-conservative US Supreme Court...

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The AFR published a letter of mine today on this topic. It is reproduced below. It was brief so in this post I elaborate on why I think Iemma and Costa messed up their arguments very badly. M Y AFR LETTER The debate on electricity privatization in NSW has gone off the rails, w...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Tim Lambert on the fallacy inherent in yesterday's umpteenth climate change denialist "...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Gummo's New-New Political Compass Apathetic Sarah anticipates an interesting judgement...

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One of my grand kids is studying economics at the University and, to help him with an essay on current macroeconomic policy in Australia, he asked me three rather pertinent questions.. 1. If there is an inflation problem which is overwhelmingly supply-side driven, as we now se...

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"The phrase is suddenly everywhere", said the New York Times' Katharine Seelye . It was 2000 and Al Gore was running for president. In his acceptance speech , Gore used the phrase 'working families' at least eight times. In Australia, Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd seem equally kee...

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We've had web-translation for yonks. But given that podcasting is often an inefficient way to both take in and disseminate information I'd like to be able to go to a site and feed in a relevant audio or audio-visual file - or point the site to a YouTube video for instance and...

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Blogging allowed me to stumble on at least one simple description of my approach to economics. There are $100 bills lying round all over the place, in the form of perfectly simple things that we could do to improve things, that we don't. That's one of the reasons I get so anim...

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Is this a joke?

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One of the most important things that I learned at the summit was in a conversation on the Saturday night dinner. I was in the 'productivity' stream but snuck off to the economics dinner where I encountered a businessman who had barracked for the West Coast Eagles. Collingwood...

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I am not a greedy man. Ever since it was announced that the London Mayoral elections would be a contest between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, I have had to confront the fact that I would not be that happy with whoever ended up as mayor. Ken, in fairness, has done a good j...

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And, in case you're intersted, the book program is broadcasting from the Clunes Booktown, some festival in which Clunes - which is near Ballarat - invites booksellers to have a big book sale in Clunes - this weekend. And there are other attractions. Listen all about it on that...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian From Terry Sedgwick Jason Soon points out how Craig Emerson has misrepresented Alan Mor...

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As I've said ad nauseam on this blog and elsewhere, and quoting John Kay, the way we work out what's good and what's not is not by assessing it individually but by reputation. We know that Apple makes insanely great products not because we get our screwdriver out and check its...

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Previous tatooed breasts scales of justice deep-sixed to avoid bad taste distraction from a post intended to provoke serious discussion ... John Greenfield is a conservative blog commenter who occasionally fulfils a useful function, rather like a canary in a coal mine. He can...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill Politics Australian Annie Leibowitz photo of 15 year old Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus (see items under "...

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The Canberra Times published today an opinion piece of mine on a topic I have been writing about since late November and is familiar to Club Troppo readers. My original version is set out below. For various reasons, I may not be able to respond to comments quickly. Sorry. The...

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