Club Troppo

Well I'm sure there was, but you wouldn't know by reading this bit of nostalgic Weekend Age fluff by someone who's apparently planning to turn her reminiscences into a book. I had the same response to this that I had reading Virginia Trioli's little debut in the book market. A...

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Here's a resurrection of Don's post of a couple of days ago just before the great unbacked up server crash. I put it up because, having read the Wolfers piece I wanted to offer a comment on it. Over the fold is Don's post and my response. I could do the same work Im doing now...

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"I don’t think of myself as a ‘heterodox’ economist," writes John Quiggin . Despite his left wing views, Quiggin defends the methods and assumptions of mainstream economics. As he sees it, the mainstream is broader than most people think. In a recent article for The Nation , C...

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The mailing costs of small US magazines like Mother Jones , The Nation and National Review will rise sharply after July 15. The United States Postal Service is set to adopt a new rate formula based on proposals by Time Warner -- the publishers of mass circulation magazines lik...

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Close on the heels of the latest ABS publication on Working Time Arrangements , the subject of a long blog discussion on Andrew Nortons site, the ABS has followed up with Preferred Working Hours of Wage and Salary Earners, Queensland. This Survey found that, of people surveyed...

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Political movements develop around policies rather than belief systems. And as support for the Bush administration's policy agenda crumbles, so too does America's conservative movement -- an unstable alliance of conservatives and libertarians. In the Wall Street Journal Peter...

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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad First up, an apology from the Missing Link crew for failing to produce a Monday edition. To make up for it, we've prepared a bumper issue for today, in the hope that y'al...

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In various columns and articles (pdf) Ive pointed out the irony of the fact that, at a time when were deregulating the labour market, were paying next to no attention to the problem of getting information to prospective employees about the quality of workplaces. Though workpla...

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I was in Washington DC yesterday renewing my passport. The US is still imperial, so to comply with Australian metric standards I had to order A4 paper and the photos took two goes before they were within the bounds of the 'biometric' software reader. But the passport is just a...

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About fifteen, perhaps twenty years ago I was talking to a good friend who is an academic in maths education. He was saying that Casio was interested in getting input into the educational potential of their graphical calculators. I thought there was a real opportunity here. On...

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Lets think constructively about the environment and lets try to think 10 years ahead in global environmental debates. There are many global environmental problems, and these are likely to get worse. The best known one is of course global warming likely due to greenhouse gas em...

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Well I just cant stop gnawing at the bone. I saw an interesting post on Joshua Gans site on feature creep (Bottom line we want more features when we buy products and fewer when we get them home). Anyway in responding to it in the comments thread I challenged Joshua to a shooto...

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I spoke with my accountant today and asked her if my company could lend me money - it's got more money than it needs and I've got less than I want. Actually having written that I realise it's not accurate. The point of borrowing money from my company is that I'm borrowing lots...

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Well, things have been a bit lively on the technology side, so no internal hyperlinks (and no wiki, alas). Nonetheless your faithful Missing Link Editorial team (tm) have done their bit to bring you lots of bloggy goodness to enjoy. Kicking off today's issue is a variety of di...

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Im feeling cranky today, so readers beware. A must-read article for all those interested in global warming and CO2 emissions is the recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by our very own Michael Raupach from CSIRO and co-authors, to be found here ....

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Well, this may not look like a picture of the trade balance, but it was certainly the nicest pickie that Google Images came up with when I was searching for a picture of the trade balance. Yum. I reworked this former post of mine for the Age Business section which published it...

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Steven Pearlstein has written an article in the WaPo [reg] arguing that the oil companies in the US require a nationalised competitor in order to make the market, especially refineries and trading desks, efficient. He writes: Standard's first order of business would be to expa...

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From Colin Wicking I'm not sure what's happened to Colin Wicking's excellent Ned the Bear cartoon series. Maybe Ned's gone into hibernation for the dry season, which just hit Darwin belatedly this morning. For readers (including me) suffering Wicking withdrawals, here's a rece...

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What would you do with an academic economic journal if you were given control over it? What innovations would you enforce designed to make the journal more to your liking? Below I list some ideas talked about in the corridors of academia and ask you to give your opinion on the...

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What if I go to Italy and my mother comes here looking for me? How will she find me? So asks Vanya, a six-year-old boy in a depressing orphanage in the middle of Russian nowhere. A nice Italian couple have applied to adopt him. This ought to be a profitable transaction for eve...

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