Club Troppo

Today's Age and SMH column - on the great business tax mix switch - imputation for a 19% company tax rate. REMEMBER Kevin Rudd's mining tax? It needed some tweaking in industry's favour, but even then it would have hauled in massive revenue without harming investment, which is...

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It is easy to circumvent news and information written on paper entirely. I for instance solely read online foreign newspapers. My wife does the same. Until very recently, I also cut back on any subscriptions to hard copies of anything, including academic journals. The family’s...

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[caption id="attachment_21438" align="alignnone" width="500"] What do you reckon this is? The first correct entry will be flown first class to the uprising of their choice with the Troppo Mercedes waiting on the tarmac on their arrival.[/caption]

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In part I , I discussed the general geo-political situation that we are moving towards in the coming decades, which is a world in which China will be the single most powerful country for a long time, constrained by a more diffuse West that is nevertheless wealthier and more po...

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Herewith the column of two reports for the Australian Digital Alliance on copyright exceptions. Sounds abstruse but it's quite engaging methinks. On December 17, 1903, after years of tinkering with his brother Wilbur, Orville Wright took to the skies at Kitty Hawk, North Carol...

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One of the most puzzling features of the world in the aftermath of the financial crisis is that so far, populism has taken primarily a right-wing form, not a left- wing one. In the United States, for example, although the Tea Party is anti-elitist in its rhetoric, its members...

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Quite an interesting finding - which also roughly confirms what I would have guessed before I saw the data. The returns to education for opportunity entrepreneurs, necessity entrepreneurs, and paid employees Date: 2012 By: Fossen, Frank M. Büttner, Tobias J. M. URL: http://d.r...

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The Italian head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, last week announced he would like to help certain countries in the south of Europe to borrow more cheaply. Subject to ‘strict conditions’, which were instantaneously refused by the Spanish prime minister, countries in Europe would now...

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Fairfax asked for an op ed on the Herald/Age Lateral Economics Index of Wellbeing (the HALE) one year on from its launch and that's what appears below and, in a slightly edited form in the SMH . There’s plenty wrong with GDP as a measure of national wellbeing. As Bobby Kennedy...

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9/11 is over ten years ago now, and after two take-overs of Islamic countries ( Iraq and Afghanistan ) and internal turmoil in the Middle East and Pakistan , the contours of where the conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and ‘the rest of the world’ is going to is becoming c...

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A good while back I wrote about carve-outs or exceptions - and how they're made. It's an important, if much ignored topic. One area I didn't mention was exceptions for the powerful. Like those queues at the airport where 'VIPs' and those flying business and first get to go ahe...

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In the comments of Paul's post on face I mentioned a hypothesis I had never published that I felt overlapped with, or at least was tangental to the ideas he was using. I'm still very unhappy with the piece and the reasoning, but I thought I may as well publish the last version...

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Well it's off to the footy tonight. Wish me (and outsider Collingwood) luck. Do we have a chance against the mighty Hawks? Not much. Why? Let me count the ways! We seem to have been down on form lately - but that might turn round in a final. We are surprisingly low on skill. W...

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We live in an interregnum, wherein the position of most-powerful single country is going from the US to China , with all major international players knowing this and no-one is seriously hindering its occurrence. The world has learned from the disastrous attempts in the last 2...

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Here's my column in response to the Manufacturing Industry Taskforce's proposal for 'smarter workplaces' - some transparency to enable us to determine what workplaces are - at least in the opinion of their workforce engaging places to work. AMID the endless alarums and excursi...

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I have been part of a research group looking into Chinese migration for about 5 years now (see rumici . anu .edu.au/ ), and the main cultural difference one has to get used to as a Westerner in interactions with the East is the notion of 'face'. This Asian cultural trait has b...

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I just came across an impressive philanthropic venture that nevertheless felt the need to articulate its 'values'. I won't go into it at any length here, but the more I think of formal articulations of values the less impressed I am. So many organisations do it that perhaps it...

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(re-worked from the conversation) Linking Australia to the European Union carbon emissions trading scheme by 2015 will undoubtedly affect the revenue gained from carbon trading. The question is, how much? My best guess is that it will cost around 50% less revenue than original...

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(cross-posted from Core) Though the Assad regime is still brutalising the Syrian population in a desperate attempt to hold onto power, the post-Spring contours of the Middle East are becoming visible. It is now clear that the Assad regime cannot hold on ( see the betting marke...

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http://youtu.be/hOI7G2j_pRM

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