Club Troppo

In a recent ABC Radio National Program a psychologist said this: Looking Out for No.1, that they keep an idea sort of for the invisible hand of the market place that will somehow take your own self interest and turn it into good. That is you know from Adam Smith's famous theor...

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I put WW into my browser tabs as he's a pretty sophisticated commenter on a range of philosophical issues. I liked the way he gnawed on that bone of Layard on Happiness till he'd got something he wanted to say said. It was interesting, stimulating and rigorous stuff even if I...

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Look around any old, inner city suburb and see how little we care about kids. Compare the grounds of most private girls schools to most private boys schools and see how little we care about girls. (Though perhaps their style of socialising actually requires less space). In the...

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The latest end of Policy Magazine has an article discussing one of the latest crazes in economics happiness studies. The field usually involves working with data that has been generated by asking people how happy they are with their lives, their job, their personal circumstanc...

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For those who don't know anything about me, I used to be a regular solo blogger here . I'm now pleased to join the illustrious Troppo crew as an occasional (monthly) guest blogger. As a special treat for my first guest post, I've sworn to avoid all of my previously-known hobby...

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I think it was Barista that first pointed me towards this marvellous site . It opens up with all the other daily sites I load on my Mozilla Firefox browser - which has tabs unlike Internet Explorer unless they've done some updating and not told me about it. Jeez these guys are...

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I like sport, but I don't think you'll get many sport posts out of me. But in my opinion we're being uniquely ourselves in the way we're losing the ashes. Good on the Poms for playing so well, particularly their bowlers. And it's been amazing to watch Warnie. Warnie's never lo...

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Helen Pringle tells us that Voltaire didn't really say : 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' which is a bit sad. I hope she doesn't debunk one of my favourite 'famous last words'. Please tell me it's true. I've always believed th...

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Below is this week's column on Hurricane Katrina. It seemed to me to be a good illustration of the importance of public goods that we take for granted. I also wanted to tell the story of my days in the Canberra bush fires. As I got into it, it seemed that the example of domest...

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Read all about it here : Back in New Orleans, many of those who survived the storm were heading through the stinking flood waters towards the Superdome, now home to almost 30,000 people. Police armed with assault rifles attempted to keep order, but they were overwhelmed by she...

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An excerpt [Brendan] Nelson has said intelligent design should be available in schools because "it's about choice". That is postmodern rubbish. Schools are not about choice, they're about discrimination, about using limited time and resources to teach children what our society...

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I've commented before on my view that three or four of the best films I've seen in the last 10 years have been from New Zealand. Once were Warriors and In my Father's Den were amongst the best films I've ever seen. Then there was Whale rider . I can take or leave the Lord of t...

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Nicholas kindly suggested to me that we might like to cross post our three favourite posts from August at each other's blogs to see if commenters' reaction is different. So here's the first of mine, originally published at LP . -------------------------------------------------...

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I've been reading a fair bit of Adam Smith and stuff on him lately and will probably do some more posts on the great man. But here I just thought I'd note that my reading has enabled me to further uncover the provenance of the phrase that (I think) Alan Blinder used as the tit...

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I thought readers - well some readers - might like to see one company's - Peach Discount Mortgage Broking's - take on operating system market shares. Here it is. Linux has a long way to go! Operating System % of Total 1. Windows XP 75.30% 2. Windows 2000 11.95% 3. Windows 98 5...

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The Australian Red Cross will be accepting online donations to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina as as soon as they have clearance to issue tax deductible receipts. If getting a tax deduction isn't your first concern you can make a donation to the American Red Cross . Othe...

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I have always felt that a cold hard universe cannot explain the yumminess of a really good spaghetti marinara. And so I was pleased to see spaghetti coming centre stage in that tussle for openness of mind being waged on behalf of the theory of intelligent design. Indeed, looki...

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Looking at this story of Enceladus , the moon of Saturn of which I have never heard before, it struck me how different all the planets and particularly all the moons of the planets are - at least those big enough to have become spheres rather than large rocks. The laws governi...

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Pressing on with the Les Darcy research and the things that you find out whether you wanted to know or not. I should have mentioned that the Park/Champion book is available in paperback from quality booksellers etc. The foundation for the book was was laid by Darcy Niland (nam...

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As Mark Bahnisch said to me having read a draft of this week's Courier Mail column, "Getting pissed off is often good for one's writing". Well, I'm not sure, but it certainly works for this genre. I'm thoroughly pissed off with the latest turn of events and so am grateful that...

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