Club Troppo

Many years ago now, Steve Sedgwick the Australian Public Service Commission explained to me that it wouldn't be right to publish the hoard of information the APSC has on APS employees' attitudes to their workplaces agency by agency because that would undermine the relationship...

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A brief note - with a long appendix - about my recent re-reading of Frankfurt's " On Bullshit " in the writing of a recent post . I remembered the article fondly, but on re-reading it I found it was mostly bullshit - Srsly! It wasn't the most odious of bullshit - which comes w...

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Does increasing the legal drinking age reduce traffic accidents caused by young drivers? The idea is that if you increase the legal age at which people can drink, young people are going to quietly abide by the law, not do anything stupid, read the bible, contemplate their sinf...

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Some people engage in socially disruptive behaviour on their own, such as when they free-ride on paying taxes. Others cooperate with others though when they are socially disruptive: cronyism, corruption, nepotism, gangsterism, and favouritism are all examples of cooperative be...

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Geo-engineering is increasingly looking like the only politically viable way of averting temperature rises above 2 degrees in the coming century. This is for three interlocking reasons: i) Any mayor country can try geo-engineering on its own without permission from anyone else...

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[caption id="attachment_26684" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Junction Oval[/caption] Victorian Premier Dennis Napthine announces a “plan” to spend $20 million upgrading Junction Oval at St Kilda to accommodate the AFL team named after the suburb, even though it hasn’t playe...

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In a submission to the Forrest Review of Indigenous jobs and training , the Australian Bankers’ Association (ABA) rejects Andrew Forrest's Healthy Welfare Card proposal. The card was one of the review's key recommendations and is meant to be cheaper and easier to administer th...

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It may be devoted to 70's nostalgia, but Björn Ulvaeus sees Stockholm's ABBA The Museum as a harbinger of the future. The museum doesn't accept cash . Since his son's home was burgled a while ago, the former ABBA member has been campaigning for a cash-free future arguing that...

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The announcement by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull that the ABC’s budget will be cut by $50 million per year for the next five years has generated predictable kerfuffle in mainstream and social media circles. Whether it will have any real effect on the broader voting...

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http://youtu.be/jzG293KCitk I Some readers may recall an earlier post which I christened an 'untheory' of innovation . It argued that there's not much use in 'theories' of innovation if they're taken as recipe books for senior managers to 'drive down' innovation through organi...

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SENDING ALIENS TO AUSTRALIA. CANBERRA, Tuesday. In the House of Representatives this afternoon Mr. Martens (Lab., Qld.), said that the Government's acquiescence in Britain's proposal to send alien internees to Australia for safe custody was causing great alarm to many people....

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But maybe it doesn't matter ... Hardly anyone seemed to notice at last weekend’s G20 meeting in Brisbane that the Climate Emperor had no clothes. Nor did I hear anyone remark on the obvious contradiction involved in issuing a communiqué which simultaneously committed participa...

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Actually the magnitude of the effect is a bit of an eye-opener . Empirical Linkages between Good Government and National Well-being by John F. Helliwell, Haifang Huang, Shawn Grover, Shun Wang Abstract: This paper first reviews existing studies of the links between good govern...

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http://youtu.be/vmHPUtHlIXU Funny how, even though you've developed the mental skill and discipline to be the World Chess Champion, you can make a simple mistake. But what's much more intriguing is how, once you've actually made the mistake, you immediately know you've made it...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="668"] Exploiting the natural experiment of the unification of East and West Germany, researchers found that the past absenteeism of those applying for the public service was significantly higher than those applying for private sector job...

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The legal misadventures of some colourful Darwin characters in A Territory Testamentary Tale at Parish McCulloch website.

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The NIMBY Brigade is a blight on urban civil society. These people have never seen a new development that they don't oppose, unless it's a community vegetable garden or possibly a Montessori preschool built from mud bricks (although only if they're very quiet middle class kidd...

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Gray Matters: Fetal Pollution Exposure and Human Capital Formation by Prashant Bharadwaj, Joshua Graff Zivin, Matthew Gibson, Christopher A. Neilson Abstract: This paper examines the impact of fetal exposure to air pollution on 4th grade test scores in Santiago, Chile. We rely...

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For some time I have been posting specifically legal articles/posts over at the bloggy part of the Parish McCulloch, Barristers & Solicitors website. I cross-post some of them here at Club Troppo. I have just posted quite a long article there which discusses yesterday's High C...

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There are reports today (12 November 2014) from Fairfax and News Ltd that Prime Minister Abbott is urging Vladimir Putin to follow the example of the US government after the Iran Air Flight 655 shootdown — and that he has said the US both paid compensation and apologised. In p...

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