Anyone interested in housing affordability in Australia (as I currently am) could do worse than to read this fascinating piece by economist Steve Keen, who I have sadly only just discovered.
In short: housing is extremely expensive in Australia; we may well be in line for a major correction in house prices; and there appears to [...]

You may have heard of Google Chrome, Google’s attempt to take on Internet Explorer and Firefox by releasing a stand alone web browser (no doubt part of Google’s secret plan to gradually take over the world).  As with most Google services, it looks interesting and well designed.
However, as this article suggests, as is also the [...]

Rather ponderously paced, but an interesting insight into the drastic effect the corporatisation of farming had in the U.S. The theme of vast, anonymous commercial organisations arbitrarily destroying productive industries and lives certainly resonates in 2009.

Cost of producing Acme Consumer Widget™ in two countries:

Item
Country A
Country B

Raw materials
$5
$5

Labour costs in compliance with local
minimum wage and employment laws
$30
$2

Cost of compliance with OH&S requirements
$5
$0

Cost of compliance with environmental laws
$3
$0

Total
$43
$7

So why do we persist in calling trade agreements with countries that lack basic labour and environmental standards “free” trade agreements?
Prediction 1: in 20 years [...]

I… don’t know what the hell is going on.  Telstra, harbinger of telecommunications doom, monopolistic behemoth extraordinaire, profit driven dinosaur which ambles across the land devouring its small, innovative mammalian competitors, has made a radically pro-human rights submission to the national human rights consultative panel.
I find it very disturbing to read words put forward by [...]

You may have read about how Apple, in its benevolence, is finally releasing its entire music catalogue in a digital rights management-free format – i.e., you can copy them freely as you see fit. Sounds great (especially from the perspective of Apple’s marketing humanoids): a stylish cutting edge tech company finally breaking the music [...]

You might remember this from a few days ago – a federal minister reading directly from the film and music industry script about the evils of piracy.
Now, in what seems not to be a coincidence (perhaps a coordinated campaign was agreed to in some Bond villain-esque meeting room), the film studios have decided to have [...]

This article highlights something which seems pretty obvious to me: it is a bad idea to leave an economic system at the mercy of frequently irrational human perception and emotion, and the current crisis is more a product of fear and anxiety as it is an actual reflection of an objective problem in the real [...]

I found this article by Francis Fukuyama to be a very worthwhile read on the subject of the current financial crisis and it’s implications for US politics at home and abroad.
It’s written with a clear-eyed understanding of modern US history, and in particular highlights the twin sources of damage to the American ‘brand’ abroad represented [...]

This is an extraordinary decision by the Industrial Relations Commission.  Telstra has had its right to sack an employee upheld, where the basis of the sacking was that she had sex with another employee (or employees, it seems) outside of work hours and then refused to tell her benevolent employer corporation the details.
In the first [...]

This has to be a new low in corporate spin, even for Telstra.  Apparently if genuine competition is allowed in the Australian broadband market, we will be more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
Conveniently this directly links Telstra’s near-monopoly position and commercial success with the safety of Australians who (rightly or wrongly) are genuinely afraid of terrorism. 
Obviously the [...]

This is a dangerous piece of circular reasoning: the solution to the problems created by an ageing population is to increase population growth.
The ‘logic’ employed appears to be that, in order to sustain the current number of wrinklies in their retirement, society requires a greater number of youngsters to be working, paying taxes, and generally [...]

This is a heartwarming little story – the process put in place to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay lacks some of the essential elements of fairness that were afforded even to the senior Nazis tried at Nuremberg. That is according to Henry King Jnr, who was chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, where a number of [...]

From the letters in The Age today:
CHANGES in the approach to work hours, in relation to family or rest time, are long overdue — but this applies to all sections of the workforce, not just those with an obvious “family” reason such as children, elderly or disabled relatives. Single, unattached members of the workforce require [...]

There is an interesting post on Samizdata (a UK blog best described as libertarian or individualist in philosophy) about the complicity of Western companies such as Google in the crimes of totalitarian regimes, and particularly China :
…one of the bees in our bonnet is collaboration of Western corporations with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes anywhere, in [...]