Among their many good qualities, Australians have little respect for authority and can be refreshingly blunt. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft is trying to get internet service providers to crack down on illegal downloaders by sending them warning notices and if they continue, disconnect them. Amusingly, the industry […]
Read more...This is quite a departure from the usual subject matter of this blog, but it was such a bizarre story that I had to pass it along. And I suppose it can be regarded as a public service warning: if you must have an exotic pet, make sure it’s the sort that doesn’t grow up […]
Read more...The Journal has a not-too-bad page one story on Australia’s drought and the government efforts to address it, but it’s wrong enough so as to merit comment. I lived in Australia for a couple of years not too long ago and have met Malcolm Turnbull, who is now the environmental minister for Australia. The story […]
Read more...Kash Mansouri at The Street Light has an excellent post, “Income Inequality, International Comparisons,” which goes a long way towards debunking the myth that income inequality is the result of education, or technology, or globalization. Note how the debate over inequality has evolved. We’ve (largely) gone from the denial phase to the “we have to […]
Read more...For those of you who (understandably) don’t follow this matter, Australia is in the midst of a six year drought that shows no signs of abating. It has gotten so serious that agricultural irrigation may be severely curtailed, which will not only further damage badly depressed agricultural areas, but will destroy fruit trees that take […]
Read more...Mark Thoma’s blog featured The Commonwealth Fund’s latest comparative survey of health care in six countries – Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the UK and the US – and the US comes out dead last. Having lived in Australia, which gets a rank of 3 at a cost less than half of America’s (also true […]
Read more...A study at the University of Melbourne found that “intelligent” cars, meaning ones outfitted with telematics which enabled them to sense the cars around them and make more gradual adjustments to driving speeds than humans would make, yielded the same 15-20% fuel savings that hybrid cars offer, at considerably lower cost. The study did not […]
Read more...Kudos for an excellent post, “Inflation Targeting is Flawed,” by Michael Shedlock at Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis. Like many other observers, we’ve criticized the Fed’s failure to consider, or even acknowledge, asset price inflation in its monetary policy decisions. Instead, the Fed and other central bankers focus on traditional price inflation, and stick their […]
Read more...Australian economist John Quiggin posted a high level event chart of the how Seriously Bad scenarios might play themselves out (from a talk by sustainability expert Chris Moran) and what the policy response might be. It includes probability estimates from 80 students. However, as the chart shows, the rational calculus doesn’t bode well for forestalling […]
Read more...If you want to get a look at what the future might look like, consider Australia. A mere 3 years ago, its CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) published the results of a ten-year study, a model of the physical inputs and outputs of the country. One of its conclusions was that it would […]
Read more...I don’t know how to characterize the state of the media in the US. A controlled press? Self-censorship? Whatever the cause, the result is that important stories are so often watered down that the kid-gloves treatment comes perilously close to misreporting. This isn’t news to any close reader of the US press. But it is […]
Read more...A blistering piece by John Pilger in The New Statesman,”Australia: the new 51st state” shows how far prime minister John Howard has gone in pandering to US interests, whether or not they serve Australia. An illustration: Australia joined the “coalition of the willing” even though 93% of the population was opposed to the war. Pilger […]
Read more...Australian Prime Minister John Howard is beginning to sound green. He has put forward a program to spend A$10 billion to conserve water in the face of a multi-year, no-end-in-sight drought, and now has announced a plan to phase out the traditional, highly inefficient incandescent light bulb with florescents (see Syndey Morning Herald and the […]
Read more...Unless you are in the advertising business or in England, the A$180 million advertising campaign, “So Where the Bloody Hell Are You?” probably went unnoticed. It was a creative success and commercial failure, since tourism to Australia fell while the ads ran. Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s latest stunt, criticizing Barack Obama for criticizing the […]
Read more...This story hasn’t gotten much coverage in the US, but Australia, which has never had abundant water, has gone through a prolonged drought which appears to be becoming semi-permanent. This is particularly problematic, not simply in terms of quality of living, but also because Australia is a major agricultural exporter (wheat and cattle), and a […]
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