Club Troppo

Hugh Pavletch has sent me this exchange on 'corporate social responsibility'. The two parties arguing the standard Friedman case against CSR (one of them is Friedman) are much less interesting than the party arguing the case for - John Mackey. That's not because Friedman et al...

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I thought of a post on this film, and then thought it wasn't worth the effort. Suffice it to say, it is very pleasurable to look at, and everything clicked into place when I saw on a bus stop poster that it was by the producer of Bridget Jones Diary and Love Actually and Notti...

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Saturn, it's rings and one of its many moons, Dionne.

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Courtesy of Ric Simes and Yahoo: October 20, 2005 OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- A man got a prison term longer than prosecutors and defense attorneys had agreed to -- all because of Larry Bird. The lawyers reached a plea agreement Tuesday for a 30-year term for a man accused of shooti...

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Great news from Mattel Toys , and not before time. But why does the most recent Ken doll look like a Madame Tussauds effigy of Princess Diana? And the 1990s version like Boy George after a fright but before he lost his hair? I'm certainly available if they're looking for a mor...

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On October 19, in 1899, a 17 year-old Robert Goddard climbed a cherry tree on a beautiful autumn afternoon in Worcester, Massachusetts. Inspired by H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds and gazing out across a meadow, young Goddard imagined it would be wonderful to make a device that...

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Have a look at this article on Trolltech . In short it explains a nice little bit of price (and product) discrimination by which software is developed simultaneously as a proprietory commercial product and as a GPL licenced open source product. This is not particularly new, bu...

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Abraham Lincoln is one of the great politicians of all time. A man who confessed he was at sea in the chaos of politics and war, that events controlled him more than he events. And yet Lincoln did that thing that a great politician does like the alchemist. To fashion something...

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Here's this week's column in the Courier Mail . And here's the devastating graph which shows how poorly correlated with poverty low wages and minimum wages are. There is almost no relation between these jobs and household income. So, at considerable cost and while it generates...

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I was reading Tim Colebatch's column on IR reform thinking it was a bit overblown. He argues that IR reform could be a lingering threat to the Coalition's electoral prospects. My own thinking was that it would be more like the GST - something for an Opposition to conjour with...

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Peter Kemp has an interesting post at Mark Bahnisch's place , in which he argues that the "preventative detention orders" to be created under the Howard government's proposed new Anti-Terrorism Bill 2005 may be unconstitutional, in that the provisions repose non-judicial funct...

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Our institutions are constantly evolving and so we are faced with a challenge, a promise and a responsibility. The challenge is to join the eternal task of critical appraisal and piecemeal reform, the promise is the hope of unending progress and the responsibility is to mainta...

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I've been trying to get Tony Harris, friend, some time colleague, Auditor General and Fin Review columnists to post on Troppo for some time. He sent me the fantastic piece you see below the fold - which he published in the Fin on Saturday. So I've created a profile for him her...

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. . . instead make them listen to the latest novelty ring-tone, on endless loop I'm not sure if such an idea has yet crossed the minds of this Indonesian/American odd couple , but once you start using music in the services of ideology which is what Abdurrahman Wahid and C Holl...

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How come this article by David Marr and Nick O'Malley is in the national news section of the Sydney Morning Herald , and not the opinion section? Compare the nakedly partisan polemic of Marr and O'Malley with the balanced, careful analysis of Nicholas Gruen here at Troppo, or...

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I've been meaning for ages to give a plug to Colin Wicking's blog . Wicking is the long-time chief cartoonist for the Northern Territory News and Sunday Territorian (the local Murdoch rags here in Darwin). People tend to either love Wicking's cartoons or hate them. I'm unasham...

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The figure above is a curve which was all the rage after it was published by two European economists in 1988 the Calmfors and Driffill curve. Calmfors and Driffill's idea was that you could get caught between two stools. The curve models unemployment against the kind collectiv...

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Topalov, known affectionately on tihs site as Troppolov is World Champion . In a personal message to Troppodillians, Veselin said "Comrades, I couldn't have done it without you". Apparently in his darkest hours Troppolov took great comfort from Rafe Champion's notes on the tri...

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On Tuesday, IBM Research celebrated it's 60th Birthday. IBM inventions and discoveries include the programming language Fortran (1957), magnetic storage (1955), the relational database (1970), DRAM (dynamic random access memory) cells (1962), the RISC (reduced instruction set...

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Among a few others were Babbage, and Lyell, both of whom liked to talk. Carlyle, however, silenced everyone by haranguing during the whole dinner on the advantages of silence. After dinner, Babbage, in his grimmest manner, thanked Carlyle for his very interesting Lecture on Si...

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