Some happy instructions for a good bzr setup.

bzr actually rocks. It's just that so far it's been a little flaky. Which I'm sure is attributable to me.

I love Libby so much.

Someone made this happy point the other day, but I've forgotten who. Apparently union membership is now so low that it no longer represents the broader community of workers. You have union leaders making decisions that have much greater ramifications than just their membership. They obviously have far too much power in the modern context. But what's even worse is that the deals unions negotiate also affect non-union workers. So they're making agreements on pay rises and work safety that end up affecting everyone. So everyone ends up being represented by the unions. The whole community. Ridiculous.

I hadn't even thought about this until now. Which is odd, because I've pondered the IR reforms quite a bit. But one of the effects will be, in theory and probably in practice, to transfer all the worker surplus to the employer. They've effectively allowed companies to price discriminate perfectly, so everyone who doesn't have the power to negotiate will end up working for their reservation price. Unless, of course, John and Peter are right and people will bargain some of it back. Although there's nothing stopping people from bargaining their wage up now, so they still haven't gained anything.

The effect isn't just going to be lower wages for everyone. It will probably be that everyone works for the minimum they are willing to work for. Unless they would earn less than the fabulous new Lower™ Minimum Wage, in which case they'll get that. All the difference will fund community development for the very wealthy.

Partial privatisation represents the worst of both worlds, having all the costs of public ownership and few of the benefits.

John Quiggin (who I like) reckons that partial privatisation is the worst of both worlds. He claims that the Telstra management doesn't have a clear goal, because its biggest shareholder makes demands of it beyond making lots of money. The idea is that people have to have one objective, and only one, if they hope to be effective at something.

I'd like to disagree with him. While, conceptually the idea of having only one objective is appealing, I don't think it's realistic or even that important. Managers regularly juggle the mixed demands of ethics and profit-making. Or balancing fund-raising and fund-spending, in the case of NGOs. And the demands of customers, employees and shareholders. In the grander scheme of things the interests of customers, employees and shareholders might be aligned, but on a day to day level they aren't. You can always choose to raise wages and price less aggressively at the expense of shareholders. Even balancing the short-term interests against and long-term interests is a difficult but inevitable task. In theory, any short-term compromise of shareholders interest could be framed as benefiting them in the long-term. So not only is impossible for agents to have one dominant agenda, but I think they also have ample practice as juggling many agendas. The job is made especially easy in this instance, because the government doesn't get involved in Telstra as a shareholder. The government restricts itself to regulating, and doesn't seem to throw its weight around in board meetings. In this case the government has a much harder juggling act than Sol Trujillo does. Any independent giant monopoly, such as Telstra, would have tussles with regulators, regardless of how much of it the government owns.

I'd suggest that partial privatisation is actually the best of several worlds. The company is run as a private company - the government is effectively a silent partner. The government attempts to regulate it as best it can. That's an unending, thankless task, that will never be simple. But the government's ownership interest acts as a sort of hedge against bad regulatory decisions. It makes the consequence of under-regulation less severe, since half the monopoly profits go to the government anyway. It's also far less dramatic if the government decides to renationalise it. Any minority investors have to be aware that they are always entirely at the whim of a majority shareholder, even if the majority shareholder usually sits quietly in corner. But that risk should be factored in by markets anyway, particularly in the case of critical industries such as telecommunications. Partial government ownership just makes the process smoother.

Yes, it does tie up government capital that could be used productively elsewhere. But who really cares. The governments of industrialised countries don't suffer from a lack of capital. It strikes me that there are far more important, and delicate problems, than ensuring that every tax dollar is spent optimally.

Output growth in the core of Europe, the Euro-area, has been well below that of the U.S. and Asia for some time now, including on a per-capita basis. ... The flip-side of this weak growth, of course, has been high unemployment�in the 8-percent range in recent years, with only moderate improvement in sight. The picture looks even dimmer when one considers the related but more economically relevant concept of labor utilization, where the core of Europe is showing a steady decline in the number of hours worked per person, both in absolute terms and relative to the other two engines of world growth�the U.S. and Asia. IMF Speech

Do they not understand that Europeans apparently want to work less? If they've made a conscious choice to spend more time eating nice cheese, than how is that conceivably an "even dimmer" picture. The IMF can talk about how terrible it must be to live amongst all that delicious cheese and wine in Europe if they like, but if they go in and screw things up I'm going to be very annoyed. I might have to move there if John wins again.

I did real good in my statistics mid-session. I used a whole A4 page to get one question completely wrong. But he gave me half marks "for the effort". Professors are the best.

Update: I ended up doing pretty well in my tutorial assignments. I got 75. So I need to get about 90 in my final exam to get an HD.

Ian is visiting me today. He's just stopping by in Sydney for the day. I haven't seen him yet, but he's around. I was going to pick him up from the airport last night, but rang into some hassles at customs I am guessing. I sent him a message asking him what was up and I got this.

I cutting trees. Distillation was not success. Well little fuel. Reasons i can explain... Busy busy busy deforestating

I just did my first one by hand. I felt very proud. It was a gamma distribution too, which always confuse me.

Tombom, Anmol and I all trotted off to X-Men 3 last night. It was pretty good. Especially for a big-budget, third-in-a-trilogy, mainstream film that isn't Lord of the Rings. Sydney Morning Herald is dumb, and doesn't know anything about films. This one wasn't quite as good as the second, but still interesting and it had good fights. I wish they got Magneto to smash more stuff though. I liked the end, and that's not something I feel about the ends of most films. I watched The Shining the other night with Lib and Robyn, and I decided the ending to that was much better than I remembered. But in general, endings are a let down. I think our imaginations tend to expect too much. And I think film-makers encourage that tendency to make the rest of the film more fun. Except our imaginations don't really know exactly what to expect, or what would satisfy them. And film-makers often don't either. But this ending was pretty good. I don't want to build it up too much. I just started yakking on about expectations and stuff.

There were lots of good little things they did, which took more than a giant studio to think up I reckon. Someone with a real fondness for it had input. And Stan Lee has a half-second part in it. He was the watering hose man in the very first scene. Stan is a champ. And there's a nifty scene at the very end after the credits.

Sketchup is the most blissfully intuitive piece of software you'll ever use.

I hardly ever write about love and people and community anymore. Have I become cynical? Or have I finally turned into the economist cliche? The thought of becoming an economist has been scaring me of late. Reading the L'Arche website got me thinking. What I really want is a L'Arche-style community of economists, all talking and baking scones together. Those sorts of economists must be out there somewhere. If you are out there, then consider this an invitation to join/start a community with me. And maybe some other sorts of people. Or even mostly other sorts of people.

Australia is in Google Maps. Weeee. Driving directions don't seem to work yet, but it's only a matter of time. You can look at the the major an minor roads in Australia. So snifty.

I am fully in love with Google Calendar. It all works so happily and nicely. They think about things those Google folk.

The way most researchers measure obesity is by looking at someone's BMI. A doctor wouldn't because it's not very accurate, but researchers don't have time to do a whole lot of tests, so they use something that's simple and quick to measure. The problem with this is that if people suddenly start doing a lot of exercise their muscle bulk is is likely to increase. If there's an increase in average muscle bulk then the average BMI goes up. And if that goes up, then suddenly you have researchers telling you that there's an obesity epidemic. So you need to be careful about which researchers you listen to.

What would happen if, instead of taxing this year's income, you taxed an average of the last five years income? Stupid politicians and economists say that high marginal tax rates reduce the incentive to work. If they're right, would weakening the immediate link between work and tax encourage people to work more? If you know that you'll get to keep 1-(0.47/5)=90% of extra income in a year, and not have to pay the difference until later. It would also defer payment to a point when incomes were higher, so the effective rate in any given year would be less than the true rate. The government would get the same amount of money (apart from time value losses), and people might work more. Not that I really want people to work more. It would probably also make marginal-rate fiddling types of tax-avoidance harder.

The big problem would be if/when incomes went down. Yes. I can't think of any solution to that problem. Maybe you let people defer the bill. So I pay the maximum of the true rate (47%) and the effective rate (some averaged out number that is usually less, but might be more than 47%). I have to make up the difference when my income increases again. You really just need something that doesn't create perverse incentives to earn very small amounts, and doesn't put too much hardship on people who lose their jobs.

Voting should be compulsory. Voting is the cost of living in a society that is a democracy. The cost is a couple of hours of our time every few years. The benefit would be worth more, I believe, than the most of us would earn in many years. I think the people who do vote could remind everyone of its value by boycotting an election one year, and letting us all see the mess power vacuums make of the world.

I hate it. I hate it. How many times recently have I heard someone refer to "cash-strapped governments" or "these lean times" to explain why health care and education are failing. These times aren't strapped for anything but compassion. We have more wealth than our grandparents would ever have dreamed, and yet we spend half our time talking about how tough we have it. We suck bad.

The least controversial measure of health is mortality. Janet Currie

Nice one.

The only way a society can use it's resources optimally is through perfect price discrimination or if the government is in charge. It's impossible for a profit driven system to invest and produce at the right levels unless businesses are able to charge every individual the most they are willing to pay. If there's imperfect price discrimination, then investment will be too low. If there's no price discrimination, but the business earns profits by raising prices then investment will be too low, and production will be too low. The government can capture all the benefits of any investment (since theoretically the government and the rest of us are the same agent). Effectively, it can price discriminate perfectly. So the reality is that the government is the only institution that will ever be able to afford to invest at the right level. And I haven't used anything but classical economic theory to conclude that.

That isn't to say at all that the government should be in charge of everything. If it knew what the right level was, it could do it. But it will never know. My point is that capitalism has a large amount of friction, in the form of profits. They slow everything down. And mean there is less of every good thing than there probably should be. I don't believe government control is a good option. But capitalism needs to prove itself in every market. Profits mean it's starting from behind, and there's no reason that the extra information it brings will enable to overcome that handicap. From experience we would generally say that capitalism can overcome it, but we can't take that for granted. Even though I think we mostly do.

Then there's the issue of social equity, which is a whole other bowl of tofu.

Some study I read a few months ago found that employees were far more likely to use a voluntary superannuation scheme if they were enrolled by default, rather than being required to enroll. The schemes had significant benefits, so it wasn't because they were just apathetic about something of no importance. It would have a large impact on their retirement income. I suspect you could find thousands of examples of similar things. We economist sorts will say that people should make their own choices because only they know what is best. People have learnt, through evolution and experience, to find the optimal outcome given their circumstances. I think that's bollocks. People should make their own choices because the only alternative is abhorrent, not because it achieves more efficient outcomes.

Someone will rock up and try to model "the desire for rationality" and say that irrational decisions actually are rational, because becoming perfectly rational would require spending too much time at university. For example, someone earning $20,000 a year won't go and learn about the best superannuation plan because they'd have to spend more time learning than they'd gain from finding a better super plan. That's just dumb, because it's impossible to disprove. If you deconstruct it enough, you realise that you're no longer saying anything at all. And the only proof you need that humans are rational is that we beat the dinosaurs, tigers and bears and are still here. But we don't have to be perfectly rational to beat a bear. Just marginally more rational. And fortunately, that isn't very hard.

Update: I've just read that a big problem with Medicaid in the US is that parents don't actually realise they are eligible for health care. They expanded it because they realised that child mortality was significantly higher than in other developed countries, but it didn't work as well as they'd hoped because lot's of parents still never took their kids to the doctor. A US child on Medicaid is twice as likely to have been to the doctor in the last year, as a child with no health insurance. I love France.

Statistics is so snifty. I don't understand most of it, but when I do understand a piece of it I'm always so impressed which how clever those old boys were. And I figure that if the easy stuff is this great, then the complex stuff (which I'll never understand) must be simply amazing. Maybe when they invent brain transfers I'll be able to see just how amazing.

Lib and I have had big problems with cockroaches since we got here. We didn't know what to do. We didn't want to kill them using baits or bombs, because both are pretty awful. Every suggestion we found was either nasty or didn't actually work.

But the other day I was browsing through the supermarket shelves and I found one cockroach spray that didn't say "kill" anywhere on the front. It was "Baygon Cockroach Stopper". I wasn't keen on killing, but stopping cockroaches is something I heartily support (at least in our house). I read the back of the bottle, and I talked vaguely about stopping the female cockroaches reproductive cycle, which is exactly the sort of solution I'd been hoping someone would come up with. It's like an analogy between condoms and genocide. Libby had ethical concerns about the female cockroach's right to control her own body, and thought it might be even more inhumane than killing them outright. She certainly had a point, but we decided that we should give it a try.

And it seems to have worked. I've been trying not to actually spray it on them, since it's main function is meant to be a surface barrier thing that stops them from moving around. But a couple I accidentily sprayed it on didn't seem to mind, which I found very reassuring. Our cockroaches have almost completely gone, and I haven't found any dead bodies, so I'm hoping they've just moved outside. There were thousands of the little guys, so if they'd all just been dying I think we would have noticed. But who knows, maybe one day we'll uncover a mass grave, and all of this will be for naught.

Lib and I cooked dosas last night. They were less delicious that I had hoped. Although I think they were precisely as delicious as Lib had anticipated.

I've got so many bank fines for being overdrawn in the last while. I must have paid about $100 in fines in the last six months. So annoying. It's not always because of Centrelink, but it was this time. They don't like you to have a partner, or more than one job. They get all flustered and impulsively cut off payments. So I didn't have enough for rent, and so ANZ fined me.

I don't have enough money to buy bread for lunch. You'd think having two jobs and Centrelink would make things pretty cushy.

Perhaps Amazon S3 can be used to make thin devices more effective. You have only a 8mb flash for basic bootstrapping, a bigger chunk of RAM and an S3 account. All the configuration and software packages are kept on S3, and get downloaded into memory each time the device starts. It would be faster, simpler, cheaper and more reliable than setting up your own storage network. And I'll surely bet that Amazon will start putting S3 mirrors all over the world, so the latency will start to get pretty low.

I'm thinking about this specifically in reference to my wireless network company.

The Marriott Hotel in Jakarta was still burning when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia's Co-ordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs, explained the implications of the day's attack: "Those who criticise about human rights being breached must understand that all the bombing victims are more important than any human rights issue." War on dissent

Golly. He'd struck me as less dodgy than that. He must have cleaned up his image for the election.

It's remarkable how exciting it can be just watching numbers trickle past and slowly converge.

The government is providing more money to combat social security fraud. They intend to:

Increase in the number of cases Centrelink refers to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions for consideration for prosecution action. Centrelink

Surely they mean "increase the proportion of cases referred". You would hope that they don't have direct control over the number of fraud cases that occur. Unless they want to start referring fraud cases before they have occurred. It would be a very Liberal sort of thing to do.

In other news, Centrelink won't let me report my income this week. I have a sneaking suspicion it's going to be one of those fortnights when I don't get paid anything. I blame the budget. Lousy economists.

I just made the best scones I've ever made. They were so soft and warm and tasty. Even Libby said she liked them.

I rather like Libby. She is sitting next to me demanding I stroke her hair. Although that's not why I like her.