I was at Rough Edges a while back. It was a football night and a good night. Laurie, Ben & Amy were away so it was a bit of a mixed team. But even so, and even the pro-Queensland didn't get what they came for it all went well.

I decided that I like being a team leader. I like the way it forces me to be available to people. It stops me from just muddling along in my own head and makes me conscious of the people around me. I start to care more about how everyone feels, mostly because you need to know when something is about to happen.

I haven't been a team leader much lately - I think mostly because I was too daffy and unassertive - but it was good. I suppose it doesn't matter that much now I'm leaving. Next week is my last week. But I had always assumed that I would hate leading or being in charge of anything. And I tend to act like I don't enjoy it a bit. But I do.

We had our Woodcourt St house warming party last night. It was a little ripper. We probably had 100 people here over the evening. And the house was no where near full. For the first couple of hours there were whole rooms almost empty, even though there were a tonne of people here. You'd still wonder aimlessly around looking for someone. We could have fit so many more. Dinner was a little congested, but we didn't put a lot of planning into the logistics of it. The congestion was also mitigated but the kind of rolling dinner we had running. People would just find food and start making it dinner when they felt hungry. It was good.

And there were so many good people. I mostly had short conversations because I was running around a little stupidly, but they were nice ones.

The house really feels like it was designed for enormously grand parties. I love it.

Emmeline and I spent our Valentine's Days eating suburban pizza at No. 1 Alberto's Pizza and watching Vanishing Point. It's my third seeing of it, and it doesn't get any worse. What a lovely film. And there are a few great scenes that I really love. Even Emmeline thought it was reasonably alright I think.

Migrants from non-English speaking countries are less likely to be volunteers than Australian-born people or migrants from English-speaking nations, a new study shows.

The study, by Ernest Healy, senior research fellow at the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, challenges the notion that ethnic diversity leads to a stronger, more cohesive society.

Using levels of volunteering as an indicator of social cohesion, the study shows that suburbs with a high degree of ethnic diversity have markedly lower rates of volunteering than more homogenous localities.

Freaking ridiculous! Let's use a Western tradition like "volunteering" as an indicator for social cohesion across any community. Even communities who probably think volunteering is an odd way of spending time with people. Having been a volunteer for many years I would attest that it is thoroughly strange, but better than not spending time with people at all.

Isn't it possible that volunteering is the West's totally flawed response to our failure to build community organically? We need managers to tell us how to help people, because we're not sufficiently in touch with community to just go and help them. Volunteering is really the corporatisation of social cohesion. I'm not convinced it even serves as a good measure of cohesion even in Western societies.

I reckon a much better indicator of cohesion would be to measure the number of times you have had tea with your neighbours grandparents in the last few days. Then we'll really know who cares the most.

Fewer volunteers in migrant suburbs (SMH)

I'm not a big fan of the Mardi Gras, because I don't like big crowds.

I've listened to Kevin Rudd talk more than normal lately. I've realised that every time I hear him talk I get worried that he's about to cry. Do you know that smooth, deliberate tone that people get in uni tutorial debates just before they run out of the room crying? That is Kevin Rudd and he sounds like that all the time.

Sometimes I feel like merry discussions on gender equality tend to deteriorate into discussions about the crapness and general inadequacy of men. Regardless of how much truth there is in these discussions they aren't that much fun. Do you think there is a way we could pep these conversations up a bit and make them a little more entertaining? Sci-fi movies about possible futures where men are slaves or entirely eradicated are the kind of thing I'm thinking of. We all still get to put the boot it, but we can have a lot more fun doing it.

Bob Dylan is pretty much the best poem-writer in the world. When he's not writing lyrics he's more open and you get a better sense of how brilliant he actually is.

When somebody kicks in a store window, gather everyone around, get everyone to share with the person why they feel hurt by that and then get each person to give the person who had been violent a hug.

Thanks to Gem, thanks to Dave.

It's kind of like Mandela's South Africa I suppose. Forgiveness and accountability are all the rage these days, but still good.

Hey libs, if you're at home sometime today I can drop off your scarf, jumper and pear nectar.

Libby just got this SMS.

Jo Kemp came around for dinner tonight and it was well fun. We made basil pesto pumpkin and pasta. Emily burnt the eggplant but it didn't matter. I didn't take out enough of the pesto oil and it did matter. But it was all kind of OK. Jo Kemp is a good egg.

Having the [private] title to something is the key to your sense of individuality; it’s the key to your capacity to achieve, and to care for your family and I don’t believe that indigenous Australians should be treated any differently in this respect.

John Howard

My goodness that fellow is slow. Has he ever actually spoken to an indigenous person? Does he understand that for quite a while before white people arrived things worked differently and things also worked OK? Thank goodness we've arrived here to divvy up the country so that finally, after 40,000 years, Aborigines will be able to care for their families.

...newspaper headlines still display: "No right to interfere in our internal affairs!" Whereas there are no INTERNAL AFFAIRS left on our crowded Earth! And mankind's sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel prize address

I like what this fellow says. One of the things I most love about communities is that they are nosy and care what happens in the lives of the people around them.

I have to understand how transitivity works for the project I'm currently doing for work. Luckily it isn't very tricky. Preference transitivity is the assumption that if you think an orange is better than an apple and a pear is better than an orange, then you would also choose to have a pear over an apple.

Economists basically accept the principle of transitivity as an unequivocally reasonable assumption, but there are some others who say it's controversial. They present some theoretical arguments against it. But the only arguments I've found require you to approximate virtual or observed indifference as perfect indifference. One example is to think about how many grains of sugar you might want in your coffee. You're indifferent between one grain and two grains and you're indifferent between 999 grains and 1000 grains, but you would definitely rather have 1 grain than 1000 grains.

It comes down to the definition of indifference and I'd suggest that there is no such thing as perfect indifference between two different things. Sometimes we observe "indifference" because our ability to evaluate the alternatives is too crude, but it strikes me that this is more an issue of measurement than preferences.

All I'm saying is that, for once, I agree with the economists. I think assuming that preferences are transitive is fine.

I did the online Myers-Briggs test that James found. I was the same as James, but I'm like James Lite. The letters don't seem to match up that well with what I think I said in the test, or how I think I actually am. For instance, I'm totally judgemental and definitely think more than feel. I think I ended up being introverted because I'm scared of people, not because I don't like them. Because I like people a lot. But I guess those old fellows know what they're doing.

Your personality type is INFP.

Sometimes, being a male, gives me a little bit of an idea of what it must feel like to be of middle-eastern appearance. I thought it was meant to take Hannah from school to Burdett St this afternoon. I showed up there 15 minutes early, because I'd had to take the car to the NRMA assessor beforehand. It seemed very quiet and while I waited I started moving all the junk out of the back seat into the boot so there would be room for Hannah. Mum rung me about the car and while I was chatting to her a man came up and stood beside me. I felt a bit nervous so I stopped talking to mum and started talking to him. He interrogated me for a minute or so and told me that it was a student-free day and that it was weird that I had showed up there. He asked me if I was related to Hannah, which I get asked a lot. In that context saying you're a "friend" sounds so molestery, but that's what I always say. Since most abuse is done by members of the family, it is kind of a funny question. But I suppose it's much harder for people to stop abuse from a family member. They can't tell creepy members of the family to bugger off, but they can say that to creepy people who claim to be "friends".

I can understand why they are paranoid about men around schools. And assuming a man is a child molester is probably a more logical predjudice that assuming a Muslim is a terrorist. I'd reckon the proportion of Muslims who are terrorists would be less 0.01%. The proportion of males who molest children must be a whole bunch higher than that.

David turned 25 last night at a merry Spanish tapas bar on King St. It had really good sangria and potatoes. Actually that was all I ate and luckily they were delicious. We had a fun time with a funny collection of different people. Robert, Keith and I got a little scolded for our adhoc courtyard renovations. Not that you can call it a courtyard, but people were smoking so it must have been.

We complained a lot about how expensive it would be, even though it wasn't in the end. We complained a lot about hungry we would be, which we slightly were in the end. But not hungry enough to spontaneously die of malnutrition so I don't think it matters that much.

After most people abandoned us, Tom joined us and we went to the Duke. We made Tom walk all the way through Newtown to meet us, just to walk all the way back again. Tom foresaw that happening, but I was unmoved by his pleas. He didn't seem to mind that much anyway.

We sat around in the Duke and micro-managed our friend's relationship for a while. I'm not sure that SMS by consensus is an improvement, but I hope it is. It's definitely more fun.

Then we walked back to our house so the bulk of the remainder could play Wii. I didn't play, because as I told David, so far Godfather is the only good thing I've seen on the Wii. And it would be almost as good on something else. But I did drive Jo Kemp home. We had a very good chat about what is wrong with people and ourselves. Although we're both still unconvinced there is that much wrong with ourselves.

Then I drove home, drank some water and fell asleep. The sleep was instantaneous too, which was a lovely change. Maybe it's the lack of uni stress. Maybe going to bed at 2am is just better that way.

Happy Birthday Mil. Twenty-five is a pretty good age. Although tough to say if it's better than twenty-four. Definitely better than twenty-two.

I've read a few different places that one of the "problems" Centrelink has with payments to Aboriginal communities is that people tend to give their money away or spend it all at once. That isn't necessarily a bad sort of wealth-management. If you get new wealth every day, as Aborigines did for a long while before whities arrived, then eating it all at once and spreading around particularly large amounts of wealth is a pretty sensible idea. And for people with enough to live each day, giving away large amounts of money is fine also. It probably strengthens communities and is a productive form of mutual insurance. However, if you don't have a enough to live each day you need to hoard wealth to survive. All a bank does is enable us to easily hoard wealth for themselves. And fortnightly Centrelink payments dictate a hoarding mentality if you want to live reasonably for the whole period. But what would be wrong with daily or twice-daily payments? It's not going to cost them any more - it's all electronic. If people use the fortnightly payments as a way of forcing themselves to save (like I do), you could easily offer people loan schemes or saving schemes by reducing their daily payment slightly. Someone who saves a percent of their fortnightly payment and then spends the remainder slowly is doing the same thing.

It would also require partners who steal/drink/gamble money to be stealing, drinking or gambling it every day. They can't just show up once a fortnight and take the whole lot. It probably also smooths out slightly drinking binges. If you wanted to have a really good binge, you'd actually have to save up specially for it. And that probably isn't going to happen.

I reckon it might also be quite good if for kids more food was never more than 24 hours away. I've known families who weren't even that poor, where the kids were hungry by the end of the week/fortnight because the family had mis-budgeted.

This doesn't just apply to Aborigines. I would find it helpful. Especially if there weren't transaction costs, which there needn't be. Perhaps it could apply to everyone unless they requested fortnightly payments instead, and possibly explained why fortnightly payments would be better.

My main point though is that the wealth management paradigm white people respect is only one sort. And not even a particularly brilliant one. But because the paradigm we like chosen doesn't fit that well with the one used by Aborigines, we label them as bad at managing wealth. The system they used was almost definitely optimal in historical communities and may still well be if the income patterns weren't chosen by the government for its own convenience.

I'd be really interested to know how much communal spending on alcohol occurs. I wonder if there is social pressure to spend "windfall" income on whatever it is that the social group most wants at the time. It's possible that daily payments would just ensure that every single dollar got spent on alcohol, because it would be physiologically feasible to drink every dollar as it arrived.

I don't understand it. Why would anyone want to use it? It seems like MySpace except maybe it does less in exchange for being less ugly. I read their little Facebook tour. It says you can meet friends. And post photos. And put notes on a wall. I don't know why people would need Facebook to do that. I would happily ignore it except that people I used to respect are all talking about it.

I found this rather spectacular story on a massive forced removal operation that covertly repatriated 32 failed asylum seekers to countries all over the world. It was released during an unfair dismissal dispute between the second-in-charge of the operation and Australasian Correctional Management (ACM). It's fascinating. Most of the staff involved had no training and no real idea of what they were trying to do. They had chartered a Malaysian Airlines flight and filled it with handcuffs and restraining equipment because so many of the deportees were at risk of self-harm. They got harassed by officials in the countries that stopped at because people were so suspicious of all their equipment (and presumably all their prisoners). The man in charge of the operation got so frustrated with one of the prisoners refusing to drink that he grabbed the guys head and forced a cup of water into his mouth. Truly bizarre.

One of the economics blogs I read led me to this lovely story about a couple who adopts a 1-year-old girl from China.

How can a stranger tell if two people are married?
You might have to guess, based on whether they seem to be yelling at the same kids. -- Derrick, age 8

I found this on Van's blog.

Beyond the finger on the trigger

Miranda Devine has a good article about the boy who shot those students in Virginia. His story is so familiar, and mostly me makes me wonder why attacks like his don't happen more often. I could have been him when I was younger. Leaving school was one of the best decisions I've made. I had a couple of other friends when I was 13, but my social experiences were predominantly at school. Students hide out in libraries and bathrooms to minimise the number of interactions they have with other students. I suppose I took that minimisation problem to the logical extreme.

Schools suck and I wouldn't argue with anyone who thought that spending 22 hours a day in their bedroom by themselves was less harmful to their psyche than going to school.

Tonight at Rough Edges was really brilliant. We were a bit sneaky and gave away free tea and coffee for the first half hour. I had lobbied for it to be all night, but I had to defer to Emily because she was technically in charge. I was partly curious about what would happen to demand if drinks were suddenly free, and partly looking forward to doing some damage to the institution. As it turns out the price elasticity of demand for tea and coffee amongst the homeless seems to be quite low. We only made 5 pots of coffee tonight, which is fairly normal for a Sunday night. Although it was a quiet night, so it must have had some impact. Possibly if we'd yelled out on the street about our new prices things would have been different. As it was, however, things were very quiet. No one came up asking for seven coffees at once. We'd already agreed to say no to that sort of mischief, but it's always nicer when you don't have to. In fact, I so dislike saying no to people that I've started offering free coffees to people I suspect are going to ask for one.

It was nice too, because I took quite a lot of drinks out to people at their tables. That's one of the things I'd really love to do at Rough Edges. There are quite a few things actually, but that is definitely one of them. Having a standardised cordial strength would also be at the top of the list. There's no dignity in drinking weak cordial or in strong cordial. You feel like a chump. Properly made cordial, on the other hand, is an profoundly pleasant experience, especially when it's cold right out of the fridge.

I had some nice chats with some fellows. People really are quite good.

Helen and Jon came around for dinner tonight. It was pretty fun but those two sleepy kittens always have to go nap just when the party's getting started. Jon always inspires me to not worry so much about feelings of inadequacy concerning social appropriateness.

We had curry which was hot but pretty tasty. We should have put less curry paste in.

I watched the very end of The Departed after months of wondering and was well satisfied. Scorcese is pure brilliance.

Oh dear. Apparently, when Australian men get into bed with a woman, they only make things worse. Doctors think that men are an unwelcome "distraction". I suppose we shouldn't really be surprised.

Parental Employment in 2004

This is the sort of graph that makes me sad. I used it in a presentation last year and I was just looking back through it.

Single mother families are only ones that start going back to work as their kids grow up. Mothers with partners don't start working, although the number of married mothers working when their children are young starts out very high.

I think at least one parent should stay at home. Preferably two. That's probably why I like farms. Everyone's always at home.

All I ever learned from love, is how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.

Jeff

Boy oh boy. How true is this for me. I blogged it years ago, but I haven't got any better.

Today was so much fun. One of my favourite days. These are all the photos and these are some of the ones I like most.