Club Troppo

Debates over income support are never ending. And part of the reason is that people have different ideas about what they want the income support system to achieve. When it comes to income support payments for people below retirement age who are capable of paid work, there are...

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Here's a poster seeking to raise funds for the World War One effort. As you can see, the symbol chosen was a tad ahead of its time and, given that it was for the British war effort, it was so far ahead of its time that it was decided not to use the same symbol even twenty year...

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I've always liked badminton - to play and to watch, though I do almost none of either . . . Strange. http://youtu.be/0kTxTWwkY6k

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[caption id="attachment_21207" align="alignright" width="231"] Charmanjot Singh[/caption] Not before time, a NSW Legislative Council committee is considering the possible abolition of the provocation partial defence to murder. If the defence is successful it reduces murder to...

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One of the more fascinating aspects of the current NT election campaign from an afficionado's viewpoint is the phenomenon of intersecting and overlapping fear campaigns by the two major parties. Spin doctors take exactly the same set of facts (in this case NT net debt and defi...

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Speaking of his attendance at a sermon by the Reverend Whitefield. He had a loud and clear voice, and articulated his words and sentences so perfectly, that he might be heard and understood at a great distance, especially as his auditories, however numerous, observ'd the most...

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"One punch" or "king hit" homicides have been in the news recently, especially since the killing of young Thomas Kelly in Kings Cross in Sydney a couple of weeks ago. In the Northern Territory dreadful events of that sort have been frequently discussed ever since the killing o...

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Today's Age and SMH Column. GLOBAL downturns are the fault lines around which our automotive industry has always reinvented itself. In theory, managers should restructure their businesses and businesses should change hands whenever it improves productivity. Alas human nature i...

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http://www.youtube.com/v/zmaF7Pys7OI I looked up an old post of mine tonight - and happened upon this post which had the video above embedded in it. It refused to play because NineMSM has asserted its copyright in the clip. Well it's true. NineMSN has copyright in the clip. Bu...

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Hard to Forget: Long-lasting Effects of Social Capital Accumulation Shocks By: Amodio, Francesco (Associazione Italiana per la Cultura della Cooperazione e del Non Profit) Very few contributions have dealt with the analysis of specific determinants of social capital accumulati...

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Law and order themes are always popular in NT election campaigns, even more so than other parts of Australia. It's hardly surprising given that violent crime rates are more than twice as high as the Australian average. Almost 6% of Territorians experience a violent crime every...

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Via Matt Yglesias , Ryan Cooper wonders why " why smaller countries are so much better at macroeconomic management ". Cooper suggests that smaller countries have smaller banks that are less able to distort policy debate. Yglesias suggests that larger countries get distracted b...

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Every now and again, someone resigns in a position in which someone figures out a cute way to draw. Bobby Fischer may have resigned in his first (played) game in his famous match with Boris Spassky in Reykjavik. But a few years later in Reykjavik Jaukur Angantysson who had a r...

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It wasn't enough that we were all recently exposed to the unbelievably tone-deaf talents of Craig Emerson. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1pEt7bgY2U Before that there was former Senator Mary Jo Fisher's very strange spoken rendition of the Rocky Horror Timewarp number, eerily...

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Maybe it's time for Labor and Julia Gillard to start thinking about their legacy rather than retaining government.((Note the supposedly incompetent Whitlam government's enduring legacy: - ending conscription and getting out of Vietnam, recognition of China, legal aid, Medicare...

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Social Incentives Matter: Evidence from an Online Real Effort Experiment , Tonin, Mirco (University of Southampton), Vlassopoulos, Michael (University of Southampton) Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as w...

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Via Matt Cowgill , I was pointed to this Nick Rowe post. An exerpt 1. Watch what happens on a really steep uphill bit of road. Watch what happens when the driver puts the pedal to the metal, and holds it there. Does the car slow down? If so, ironically, that confirms the theor...

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Dani Rodrik is one of the most interesting and fruitful economists of trade and development around. He's just put out a new paper on convergence in manufacturing. Not so long ago most people imagined that poor countries would converge towards the wealth of rich countries. In f...

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Here's a nice painting - which will be auctioned at Southerby's in Melbourne on the 14th Aug. More nice things to look at are here .

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New scientists Feedback page, 18th July issue, reports some recent research that has produced results so obvious that they might be brilliant. Why is it that Nigerian emails are so unbelievable ? The answer is that the extreme unbelievability of these messages automatically fi...

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