I just found a whole drawer of clothes I'd forgotten I had. Hurray.

Two days ago I finished uni for the semester. Today I went back to work at uni. My boss told me that was my next task was to check the new project for next semester's introductory statistics course and "do it" as a test run. Arrrhghrrrrrr.

It's actually OK. I feel like I've been given responsibility. Somehow.

I just got an electricity bill. It was $30 more than our last one. I freaked out, even though we should have used more because it's winter. Then I tried to work out the little graph at the back that gives you a comparison of your electricity. Working out little graphs is my job, so you'd think I'd have got pretty good at it. Sadly, I have not. But after enough nutting, I got it. And it turns out we've used exactly the same amount of electricity as last quarter. Or $3 more. But because we have the power of the wind, we have to pay a little extra. But that's such an awesome bargain. $27 for total wind powered hot watery, toastery, kettley, brilliant little bar heatery goodness. Good on you Tru Energy. You've done it again.

The teapot has gone. If I were to descend into a fit of panicky misery at the sadness of the house, I would have no recourse. The teapot truly was the heart of our little community.

Today we killed our poor sad house. I can't help but feel resented by it.

Well. Off to my exam I go. Let's hope all these extra blog posts haven't been wasted.

Update: Here I am at home, an hour before it's even due to finish. It was pretty hard, although I think I did OK. But gee whiz. If you were, like, good at maths, maths exams would be fully easy. You'd get 100% no worries, if you weren't crap at multiplying and subtracting like me. It's the subtracting where I really have problems actually. My multiplication is getting much better.

Why would anyone use it? It's an awful, awful thing. Ugly. Reminds me of Hornsby Slot Cars. I can't figure out how to use it. It's slow. Um. Yep. Just horrible.

Dead Prez rock. I get the feeling that they want us to go out and kill policemen and other oppressors, which isn't something I would normally condone. Their music is cool though. Good study rap.

Besides, what else are you going to rap about except killing oppressors? Rapping about love would be kind of lame.

Oooh. I wonder if listening to this shit is going to make me anti-social. I'm feeling it coming already just sitting here.

I've had so much tea in the last week. I'm starting to feel a little tea-woozy.

iTunes is pretty awesome. Everything you want it to do, it seems to do. It's so easy to use it's practically coerced me into importing my CD collection.

WaterFix is the thing that Sydney Water does where they came and make your whole house water efficient for $22. Awesome. I wonder if they could do this house by the time I leave.

A miserable end to a fun old Australian World Cup. The most annoying thing was that the Aussies had been getting away with fouls far worse than that one all game. We tried to philosophise about it, but ultimately it's just crap.

From Sydney Morning Herald:

Babysitter applied 240 volts to toddler
Family barbecue turns to tragedy

I haven't any soy milk. Nor have I any money to buy more. No tea til Tuesday it seems.

Unless I could visit someone with milk. I'll have to think on that for a while. The community house would seem like the obvious choice. They may start to suspect me if I show up there every few hours, make some tea and then leave. I need a group of houses that I can move around between to reduce the chance of being discovered.

I just had 30 people walk through my little unit. It was the biggest house inspection I've ever been to, and I've been to quite a few. Fortunately I wasn't one of the people competing for it. It's weird. The rent has gone from $180 to $195, and there were about 20 people really keen to have it. When I looked at it, there was one other girl.

Some of the people were funny. They'd talk about the mildew smell, and the yucky kitchen. "It was cute though." It's a very strange dynamic. I offered people tea, but I didn't really expect them to accept. And they didn't.

Does anyone want to go on a West Timor field trip with Opportunity International at the end of August? I've never been to West Timor before.

Jarhead was an interesting film. It wasn't what I expected; it was much more serious. Although it was cheerful as well. It reminded me a lot of Full Metal Jacket. This wasn't a war film at all. It was a soldier film. It was amazing to see what the 1990 war was actually like. I didn't realise that had 575,000 troops in Iraq for that war. If they had that many for a war they decided not to bother with, why did they send 180,000 for a war they wanted to "win". It also hammers home why you never win wars like that. Machines destroy far more humanity than they eliminate aggression. And soldiers don't do much better. If I'd been an Iraqi in that first war, I'd be fighting against them now.

America's federal minimum wage is $5.15/hour. That apparently the lowest level, in terms of what you can buy, since 1955. The Economist

But it's lovely to hear Down Under is going crazy … I think today, over there, it's Friday morning, so the work presence will be very low in Australia. It's damaging the Australian economy, and I'm sorry about that. Guus

ALDI rice is uniquely bad. It's so disappointing. Because their White Flakes are do delicious.

I did the exam and it was fine and now I'm celebrating with food and drink and modern technologies.

I just got a call from a number I didn't recognise. I picked up and heard a man chatting away to someone else. I said "Hello?" a couple of times. After a moment he said "Oh hello. Is that mum?" very hopefully. I apologised for not being his mum and told him he could have the wrong number. I said "bye". He said "ta ta". And we hung up.

For some reason I'm really nervous about this exam. I think it's because you have to draw so many graphs and stuff, and they're pretty hard. I haven't had much practice drawing them. I should have drawn more and read less. And I should get one of those little metal rulers that the asian boys all seem to have.

Paraphrasing my micro textbook:

So how can we explain arbitrary wage discrimination by employers against women? Consider that an employer who employs only women will have lower labour costs than any employer who employs men. Lower costs means higher profits. And that means that firms that employ a high proportion of women will drive other firms out of the market until there is no discrimination. Therefore unfair wage discrimination cannot exist.

Which is great! If there's no discrimination then all those people who have been fighting for years to equalise wages can all go home.

My house smells like poor people. Or, rather like the good old days of Jem and I living together at Michigan Ave and deep frying chips. I've never actually smelt poor people, so I wouldn't know about that.

Poor people smell aside, I really am very fond of this house. I will miss it a lot when I leave. It's so spacious. And so much my home. It's the first proper home I've had since I left home.

We got a distinction for our group project. How good is group work!

Somewhere along the line I started blogging again. I'm not sure what changed. I'm mostly blogging about economics, which is a shame. I used to have all these crazy things to say about love and community. They're much more interesting to read back over than my rants about some economic thing I don't really understand.

Some economists, like the idea of economic changes coming with quick, sharp shocks. Jeffery Sachs was one of them, but it's a fairly popular idea. That's all very well. It doesn't seem to have worked very effectively at all, but I don't really understand the process well enough to criticise it from an economic perspective.

But what really frustrates me when economists try to justify shocks by using the analogy of pulling off a bandaid. Supposedly, you have economies that have a lot of bandaid solutions, and they need to "reform" themselves to grow. On the other hand you have a kid with a bandaid on a cut, and the bandaid needs to come off because it's doing more harm than good. There's a nice friendly analogy here, and everyone's nodding and starting to understand that a broken poor-world economy has a lot in common with a kid's cut. And everyone knows that with bandaids you have to pull them off quickly. It's better to get it over and done with. So obviously, if economies have so much in common with cuts, economic reforms need to be just as quick.

Or this is how the reasoning goes. Maybe there's more sophisticated thinking behind it, and the bandaid analogy is reserved for the non-economists. But no one, however little they understand about economics, should be convinced by an argument like that. And I find it incredibly depressing that people responsible for persuading leaders and changing economies will actually put this sort of idea forward.

Anecdotally, it appears that the main reason for human success is our ability to adapt and form institutions. But those things happen slowly. With "shocks" you're tearing down institutions and making existing social adaptations virtually useless. These shockers are just hoping that better institutions and adaptations form quickly once they've dismantled the old ones. Because those are the building blocks of society, not Reserve Bank policy or the export-GDP ratio.

An economy is not like a cut with a bandaid. And even if it were, how often have I ripped of a bandaid too early and quickly and knocked off the scab. It starts bleeding everywhere and you have this raw, vulnerable wound that usually looks worse than the original. That bleeding mess is perhaps a good metaphor for the "post-shock" economies that I've heard about.

At the moment I'm working two days a week - one day for uni and one for Hornsby. I get paid the same amount every week at uni, which I always get at the end of the fortnight. For my other job I invoice them however much I work, which gets paid some time in the next following months. That used to work OK. I'd invoice them 6 or 7 hours a day, and it didn't really matter when I got paid. Now I have two jobs, every dollar I earn at Hornsby only counts for about 30 cents after Centrelink and tax. Which is all fine because I don't think Centrelink should pay me they same regardless of how much I earn. But the problem is that when there are expensive weeks, like these last few with the higher rent, I have to choose between working and getting some money months down the track, or not working and getting paid this week. I've been gradually invoicing them less and less each week. It's not down to about 2 hours a week, even though I usually work 8. Even though it's kind of against my principles, to take extra money from the government rather than get paid hours I've actually work, that's what happens. When I have to fill out the invoice and aren't sure if I'll have enough for rent that week, it's so hard not to just put down less.

The other thing is that it has meant I've ended up working less. Even though I mostly like the job, and it pays well when the money eventually arrives.

I think there's a lesson in it for both employers and the government. I don't know if it would be the same for other people in my position, but I would imagine so. My job would get more hours if they paid sooner, and if the government didn't cut payments this week for income that won't actually arrive for several months. The government would obviously have to pay out a lot less if I invoiced them eight hours a day instead of one, and the economy would be better off for the additional incentive there is to actually show up at work. I guess they assume that most jobs will pay straight away, which is a fair assumption.

These things are only an issue when I'm worried there won't be enough money. I probably don't even think about it at other times.

After some minor encouragement with sharp knives and abuse, the fridge is finally defrosted. Bar fridges had always seemed like such a good idea.