Articles from Club Troppo

The First Home Guarantee expansion: bad for buyers, good for sellers, yet again

Advice for homebuyers and citizens: housing guarantee schemes deserve your derisive laughter, whoever backs them.

A young woman who I have known for many years messaged me yesterday to ask a question. She and her partner have been saving hard for a year or so, and were planning to save for a few years more. This a pattern that millions of Australians have followed over the past two hundred years, and it has generally worked well.

People get weird about trade: an Australian trade policy history for the Trump era

Donald Trump is trying to slash his nation’s trade deficit. Australians may recognise this task: we tackled it in the late 1980s, failed, and found that it mattered less than we thought.

Hello, US readers! You’ve just started an interesting economic experiment to see whether government policy can change a trade deficit into a trade surplus.

Cheap gas? Cheap nuclear? Yeh nah

This article deals with Federal Coalition Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s election promise to force gas producers to reduce the price of gas for Australian consumers to $10 per gigajoule.However, according to a debate on last night Q &A between Labor Climate Change Minister Ed Husic and his Coalition counterpart Ted Evans, Husic stated that the cost price of most Australian gas was around $7 per gigajoule with another $4 paid by the producers for transporting it to market.

The ABC (ombudsman) stopped talking to me

There was an ostensible “news” article on the ABC news site about Trump’s executive order (EO) titled “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.” The capitalisation is not mine; it is in the executive order FFS! The Whitehouse is becoming an ALL_CAPS tweet factory.

Is the cultural revolution on gender, race and sexual orientation at risk?

Elections and Sortition: two systems, two destinies, two ways to do politics

Mime, misdirection and pyramid of code

The Gregorian revolution gave rise to a form of organisation that was gradually stamped out all over the Western world and then to its followers.

Copilot stopped talking to me

I was reading some arguments by Bettina Arndt recently about women dominating the legal profession, especially in the Family Law sphere, so I thought I would the check the facts. This is my modus operandi. Read polar views on an issue (I also consult OurWatch and White Ribbon on issues like this) but then check the facts to see who deceive and lie (which these days go under the Orwellian names of “mis” and “dis” information).

Some philosophy is probably fraud; let’s try to find it

If scientific fraud represents five per cent of scientific papers, we might well expect to have a great deal of philosophic fraud as well. But how can we detect philosophy’s fraudsters? Here’s a first attempt.

Trump would be a disaster for the world economy (and climate change)

As the US presidential election count continues, it becomes increasingly likely that Donald Trump will win. It appears that the majority of Americans believe that Trump is more trustworthy than Kamala Harris on economic issues, and they say that the economy is their principal concern.

The irony in this belief is that it is the opposite of the real situation, at least if we assume that Trump will carry out the promises that he has made.

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