Club Troppo

"People get on welfare because they are lazy PERIOD" says an anonymous commenter to a Wisconsin newspaper article. Last week the La Crosse Tribune ran an article about welfare reform which provoked the usual hostile sentiments. The commenter went on to complain about left wing...

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Yesterday I posted an introductory post on industry policy summarising some of the very good reasons to be suspicious of 'picking winners'. But that's only one side of the story. Here's another side. As Fred Astair says in some movie "That idea's so crazy it just might woik"....

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Industry policy â which can be anything from subsidising Research and Development to 'picking winners' and supporting some 'key industries' over others â is one of the shibboleths of the left. I'm always surprised and dismayed when ACOSS puts in its oar with other allies in th...

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From Beyond the Fringe 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad This edition of Missing Link has been delayed until today (Friday the 13th) because I got carried away with my post on performance pay for teachers...

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"Kill kill kill kill kill the poor tonight," sang the Dead Kennedys as they imagined slashing the welfare rolls by dropping neutron bombs on crime-ridden urban ghettos. The late-70s, early 80s punk band saw themselves as giving voice to a right wing fantasy -- ridding the worl...

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Performance pay for teachers is in the news at the moment, what with federal Education Minister Julie Bishop in Darwin today for a meeting with her State and Territory counterparts. Apparently she intends blustering and bullying the States about performance pay, despite an unp...

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A column from the Fin Review: During the next few weeks, the expenditure review committee (ERC) of federal cabinet will finalise the 2007-08 budget. One of the committeeâs tasks is to hunt down waste, but recent budgets show that the principal custodians for the taxpayer, the...

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"Talk to the Hand". That's the message the Prime Minister is giving the Australian people as an attempt at a cheerful smile collapses into a Dick Cheney impersonation with the results of yesterday's Newspoll What's going wrong in the house of Howard? Is the greatest politician...

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If you like an occasional straight shot of social criticism, withering satire and fine, hard, funny writing, you could do worse than dip into James Kunstler's weekly diatribes . Best known for his conviction that America's love affair with the automobile, suburbia and cheap en...

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If a (very large) tsunami hit Noosa - from FunkyPix2 (correction Beyond the Fringe ) 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S. 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad There wasn't any political issue as such that brought Ozblogistan out stoushing this...

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Vishy Anand - who has recently become the highest rated player in the world - just ahead of Kramnik and Topalov (the latter's prowess may be based on cheating) just won this game as white. See if you can see how he forced a win in this position. Over the fold is a further fact...

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I've probably missed this by a few weeks on Andrew Leigh's blog, but for those who've not seen it and want to listen to a podcast on the new economics do so here at open source radio who have put together a program on the explosion of empirical analysis being done on social ph...

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At last, a topic I can pontificate about off the top of my head. The case against PowerPoint, starting with yesterday's piece in the SMH by Anna Patty , and followed up by Dr Faustus (courtesy of today's Missing Link), is a textbook example of reasonable arguments leading to u...

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Artist's impression of Brisbane's proposed Northbank development, on which The Pencil Guy gives his thoughts (see under "life and other serious stuff") The wiki is playing up today, so no internal hyperlinks. And I only had time to insert one photo, liberated from The Pencil G...

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The Australian covered the story today of Australian finance unions teaming up with Indian finance workers to ensure that there isn't any nasty offshoring going on by banks. I can see why Australian unions might do it, but I can't quite see what's in it for the Indian union me...

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