Tom, Martin and I watched Cars last night. It was the coolest G rated film I've ever seen for sure. Those Pixar chaps don't know how to make bad cinema. It was so exciting, and funny, and well made and good for all ages. It's definitely up there with way of the gun for my favourite recent films.

Tom said it, but I'll say it again. Last night was super cool. It was mostly thanks to Jo who cooked the vegie stacks and got the evening's ball rolling. It was one of the best dinners I've had since I moved here and we got dessert. It was this apple pie log danish thing, which we buried in whipped cream. Pretty damn good.

I got sick of all the other Wordpress RSS plugins, so I wrote another one. It doesn't use Magpie, because that's been pretty buggy for me. And it doesn't let you have different cache times for different feeds on the same page. This one uses PEAR, which I like more, but it's obviously a shame to throw in the whole of PEAR when Wordpress has tried to avoid it. Wordpress also stays away from classes, and plugins are kind of meant to, but configuring most RSS plugins is an arse.

I think I'm hoping that this will be easier for people to fiddle with than some of the others. I suspect that writing your own function for this could be easier than configuring the ones I've tried so far.

$feed = new Feed('http://del.icio.us/rss/');
$feed->limit(5);
$feed->lifetime(3600);
$feed->simple(); // Or $feed->extended()

There's a shortcut function to make things a bit neater.

feed($url, $limit, $lifetime, $extended);

You'll need XML_RSS and Cache_Lite. It doesn't support anything except RSS either.

wp-feeds.zip

We appreciate the company, we really do.

Christopher Hill grateful that Australian soldiers are fighting in Iraq.

Tonight was my first proper Rough Edges team lead, and it went pretty well. I had a really fun time doing. I've worked there for 7 years, but I had no idea how involved the relationship politics were. I got to spend the whole evening talking to people. It felt like it was a marginally more crazy night than usual, but that's probably just because the craziness was my responsibility for the first time.

I ended up watching Laurel Canyon by myself tonight, after everyone else watched it last night. I heard all these awful stories today from folks about how pornographic it was, and how disturbing and confronting. Some thought it was terrible, and some thought it was pretty good. So of course I was really keen to watch it. And I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a nice film even. It's probably the most merry film about adultery I've ever seen actually. I usually hate adultery films. This one didn't really feel like it somehow. Maybe it was because both partners were equally adulterous, and neither of them were very adulterous. I liked all the characters in it too - even the ones driving the adultering. Sam was a bit annoying, but he made up for it by being nice to his patients and not shagging the girl he wanted to shag.

It's probably not a film you'd want to see with your mother or father, or if you get uncomfortable about sex, or if you don't think Kate Beckinsale is a spunk. But otherwise, it's definitely worth it.

I've fixed up Blogfeed to use RSS. If someone doesn't have that then it can still do it the old way. But everyone seems to have RSS already. If your site is currently working on Blogfeed, then you can remove the old comments from your blog.

I watched way of the gun last night after coming home from the theatre. I suppose I should be talking about It Just Stopped here shouldn't I.

The theatre was OK. Annoying American accents, a lot of very unsubtle points about what's wrong with the world. There was a cool jelly bean wall. Rebecca Massey and John Wood were great. Some of it was very funny.

But way of the gun, now that was art. One of the coolest films ever. So many guns, and so many gunfights. And two such happy seeming fellows so willing to kill innocent people for money. They're the best kidnappers I've ever seen in a film. And they could have been a lot better. It doesn't say much for Hollywood kidnappers. I think kidnappers are too reviled for screenwriters give them brains or guts. Ryan Phillippe has sure come a long way since Cruel Intentions.

I don't know why I like violent movies so ever much. Um..... no don't know.

Firefox 2.0 is delicious. So spelling checkery, and pretty sortable tabbery.

I got the new version of Firefox when I upgraded to Ubuntu Edgy, which I am also enjoying a lot. It's all just better, and slicker and faster. Maybe almost time to swap back to Ubuntu. Thank goodness I haven't bought any iTunes music.

My conversation with Centrelink the other day went a bit like this.

Them: This document you've provided doesn't count. It's just a print out. Anyone could have made that up and printed it out.
Me: Those are the only records my boss has. Everything is kept in MYOB.
Them: You need to provide us with more proof than this.
Me: I've got everything from them that they have. They are happy to talk with you if you need to confirm this.
Them: Oh... we don't do that. It's up to you to provide us with the information. If we wanted to talk to your employer we would have just rung them in the first place.

I can't really blame them for being confused about my job. It just shows that freelance work and Centrelink shouldn't mix.

My uni income went up by $8.50 a fortnight the other week. My Centrelink went down by $7 a fortnight. Bum.

There is nobody at home to hang out with. Oh. I know. They are at commie dinner. Never mind. Forget I said anything.

According to Growing Up, approximately 94% of Australian parents consider themselves to an average or better than average parent.

We had the funnest BBQ ever last night. Our wine-quaffing neighbours donated their old BBQ to us because they pitied us our darling little Webster. They must have watched us lose our frail vegie burgers through the holes of the grill designed for steaks. Our vegie sausages dried out, and we never even bothered trying onions.

But now we have a four-burner Jumbuck and a 9kg gas bottle so we can BBQ all night. Martin and I spent an hour or two cleaning it yesterday, and it's looking super posh. We had some folks over, and we cooked tofu and vegie sausages and onion and it was brilliant. Most of the flaking rust come off with the onions, so the sausages and tofu were perfect. And I reckon the more we use it, the less rusty it will be. We were a little doubtful about the rust at first, but I just tried to conjure up comforting images of dad dragging a rusty old BBQ hotplate out of a bush at a nice park. We used a lot of Windex and dishwashing liquid and bleach, although Haley was more worried those than the rust. I reckon we pulled a couple of kilos of rusted BBQ components out of it. I was worried structural or gas-leak-preventing parts would have rusted, but it goes great.

Our neighbours even came round with a bottle of their wine. It was so delicious. Eating a BBQed marinated tofu burger with a glass of gourment wine is as good as it gets. I look forward to many, many future BBQs this summer.

Some of us watched Scarface last night after our awesomely fun vegie BBQ. It wasn't very good. At first I liked it, but Tony was too bloody stupid to be cool, and too bloody violent to be endearing. The whole second half, all I thought about what why everyone in his life didn't leave him. There were a couple of moments in the film where you got glimpses of vaguely competent Tony, but they were few.

Maybe I was just in the wrong mood, but I sure was relieved when he finally fell into that pool.

Putin called [the Israeli Prime Minister] a "mighty guy" and said: "Raped 10 women! I would never have expected that from him. He surprised us all. We all envy him."

From SMH

Goodness me. A Kremlin spokesman confirmed the comments and said that Russian humour doesn't always travel well overseas. Bush and Blair seem to get caught making inappropriate but kind of endearing comments. Nothing endearing about that.

I often have problems with CSS floats, because I'm pretty average at all that stuff. I've never liked clearing lines or paragraphs after floated list items, because you end up with space that you don't always want. overflow:hidden often works in Firefox, but not in IE, and I never check anything in IE, so I need to completely abandon that one.

So this is my favourite option.

<style>
hr.clear { background:none; margin-top:-5px; }
</style>
<hr class="clear"/>

Works in IE and Firefox, and you can virtually get rid of the extra space altogether.

Update: This doesn't work quite as well in IE as I thought. Bugger.

Mil, Martin and I went to Blue King Brown last night. It was pretty much the best $15 concert in the history of ever. So naturally, as with most of the awesomest moments in anyone's life, it was at the RSL Club. They were supported by this leet Aboriginal chick called Mihirangi who had a loop pedal which rocked.

Blue King Brown will be famous one day.

I am such wanker. Why does it take me a whole week to write 2000 words of the sort of pretentious drivel I just handed in?

Imagine that you lived in a poor nation and you happened to be lucky enough to have some wealth to invest; you might well decide that putting it in a safe country like the United States was your best option, even if capital is less valuable there than in your home country.

From Gregory Mankiw's Macroeconomics

This is the most compassionate explanation for capital flight I've ever heard. Mostly explanations consist of something like this:

Amoral fuckheads in the government, military or business community steal a shitload of money from the poor and/or some aid organisation and then send it overseas so it won't get stolen back.

The poor old Central Bank of Kazakh has mispelled bank on its latest of notes. That's got to be pretty embarassing for somebody. And the whole country I suppose. Although I wonder if demand for those notes will increase. I reckon I'd buy one. It's not every central banks do stuff like that.

It's a freaking scam. The stock market can't grow faster than the economy forever.

They all say it will, and I got confused but then I drew boxes for the stock market and the economy, and imagined them growing. The stock market can't be bigger than the economy so it can't grow faster than the economy for ever.

I should go and rewrite some chunks of this essay now, but I'm not going to. It does make me feel dirty though.

Families with few children have made a quantity-quality trade-off and are likely to invest more heavily in the health and education of each child, both privately and publically.

From Averting the Old Age Crisis

I find it bizarre the way the IMF talks about the importance of improving "country ownership" of its programs. Apparently it's one of the ways in which the IMF is modernising itself, and becoming even more relevant. It talks as though this is an amazing discovery.

But, I wonder, what the hell have they been doing for the past 50 years. Shouldn't admitting that country ownership hasn't been a priority all that time be a horridly embarassing thing, not a cause for celebration? It's like they read some management book that has told them that a room full of economists ruining the lives of millions of people on an economic modelling whim is possibly a bad thing. So... you mean... democracy is important. And we should listen to people when they talk to us. Gee. Why didn't you say so earlier?

You'll never hear anyone say that they've ever done anything wrong. People only ever get more right than they already were.

Why are governments the least risky people to give your money to when it comes to bonds, and the most risky people to give your money to when it comes to superannuation?

Jem and I watched Viva Zapata! tonight. It was good. Marlon Brando was a good Zapata, even though he had an American accent. At times the pro-American la dee da was a bit over the top, but I suppose being reasonably free and democratic is one thing America has been good at.

What happens if a 21 year-old priest has sex with a girl who is 14, but nobody finds out about it? They end up getting married 10 years later. They have children together, and build a relatively normal life. Then the police find out, and are encouraged to press charges by the media. Should the man go to jail? Maybe he should because the point about child abuse isn't that the child is harmed, but that the child is a child. I just read that the 14 year-old girl who had a relationship with one of Peter Hollingworth's priests continued the relationship with the man again later in her life. It's possible that this was because she was so damaged that she never moved on, but that definitely wasn't the impression I got. And it won't always be the case. After all, no one is saying it's impossible for a 14 year-old to have a normal sexual interest in an older person. We're just saying we don't want them to pursue it until they're older.

In this case maybe it's more important to express society's moral preferences by imprisoning the husband and father, than it is to follow the wishes of the woman and her children. I imagine there are "respectable" men all over the place who slept with their current wives before their wives were legally allowed to. Why is no one suggesting we go and find out who they are so we can imprison them? Unless we really are more interested in the crime of harmful sex with children than the crime of any sex with children.

I was reading The Economist yesterday and looking at some of their graphs in the growth of private equity investment. As I understand it, private equity investment is like stock market investment except less transparent. And presumably you can only be a private equity investor if you have a large enough chunk of money. I can't really think of any legitimate reason for there to be a large shift to private equity funding, but apparently it has happened anyway. The graph of it (from The Economist looks a little like a logistical growth line.

I have a theory about this. I've made previous predictions that superannuation schemes all over the world would reduce the returns to capital. I was happy about it, because I was hoping that maybe poor people would start getting rich at the same rate as the wealthy. Since they all have to throw their investment money in the same pot, and superannuation funds provide some nifty economics of scale, no one can tell the difference between the poor money from the rich money. I didn't really think the rich would let that happen. The rich have mostly been happy about the idea of trillions of dollars flooding into their precious markets, and you wouldn't be happy about that unless you had a scheme.

I wonder if maybe that scheme is something like this. Let the poor put all their money into stocks. The stock prices get inflated so they think they're getting a good deal for a while, even though no wealth has actually been generated. A lot of that spare money ends up as CEO salaries and consulting fees for investment banks and management fees for the super funds. The rich take their money out of the inflated stock markets and start investing in private equity markets, where the returns are higher.

I'm guessing that when the pendulum swings back from capital to labour (as it should), and wages grab back some of those profits, the stock market is suddenly going to look like a pretty poor deal. Since the mid-1990s only 28% of productivity growth has gone to workers, so profits have gone through the roof. However, the average P/E ratio has stayed constant. I've previously tried to figure out how the P/E ratio had stayed the same despite buckets of superannuation money and fairly constant productivity growth. It seems like it can mostly be explained by the increase of profits relative to wages.

So telling workers that slow wage growth doesn't matter because they're getting great returns on their stock portfolio isn't very honest if their dividends are coming straight out of the wage increases they aren't getting. It's particularly unencouraging for the very large number of workers who haven't ever had enough money to get themselves a stock portfolio.

I'm not very happy with my theory, because I'd expect that there's going to be money to be made in smuggling poor people's money into the rich people's private equity markets. The fabulous thing about rich people is they're usually happy to stab each other in the back for a quick buck.

“Pack rape of white girls is an initiation rite of passage for a small section of young male Muslim youth, said Jean Jacques Rassial, a psychotherapist at Villetaneuse University. ‘Fraternal bonding now dominates. It is the law of the gang, shorn of any sexual morals’, he said.�

Janet Albrechtsen made this claim in "Talking race not racism" from The Australian (which has since been removed). Unfortunately, she changed "girls" to "white girls" and "young male" to "young male Muslim". The Rassial fellow was rather unimpressed by her paraphrasing and said in response:

There is absolutely no connection between the cultural background, even less between the ethnic one, and this practice [of ritual gang rape].

Journalists like that Janet make me feel not so bad embarassed about all the bad left-wing journalism. And I love Media Watch despite their tendency to patronise people they disagree with.

I have often have ideas about things the government could do to help people, and ways people could have more control over the way their government treats them. And it isn't so much to do with better treatment or worse treatment, but with individual preferences. A lot of stuff isn't done because of the logistical problems with founding out if people actually want it to be done. For instance, a lot of fairly low-income workers might prefer not to have mandatory superannuation and at the moment are forced to have it. At the same time a lot of extremely low-income works might like to have superannuation, but don't because the government has decided they are too poor to save for retirement. It would be better if preferences like this could be recorded by the government and remembered, whilst still allowing people to change their minds. You could even record the preference for superannuation levels so works could choose a 15% contribution rate instead of 9%.

It's related to the silliness of representative democracy. We have a very low level of participation in our own governments purely for logistical reasons. I reckon that excuse is getting worse and worse as time goes by.

A Japanese woman gave birth to her own grandchild.

The woman agreed to in vitro fertilisation because her daughter, in her 30s, had her uterus removed and was unable to bear children, the Yomiuri said, quoting Dr Yahiro Netsu, director of the Suwa maternity Clinic in Nagano in central Japan.

That is really cool. I love science.