There is an interesting interview with Richard Wilkinson on ted.com about the damage to society that is caused by excessive inequality [1]. The conclusion is interesting, it seems that one part of the solution is to send the message that excessive greed is anti-social. The demonstrations against the greedy 1% seem likely to do some […]
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Today I attended the Stop HRL demonstration [1]. The government plans to spend $100,000,000 of federal money and $50,000,000 of Victorian state money to build a new coal power station. The state government has imposed some unreasonable restrictions on renewable energy which includes allowing a single person who objects within 2Km of a wind […] The Occupy Wall St blog has an informative summary of attempts to reclaim the American political process which has been pwned badly by financiers in recent times [1]. The basic concept is that people who represent the 99% of the population who aren’t super rich have protests in Wall St and now other business areas. […] It’s not that common to have a rally in favor of creating a new tax, but today I attended the Melbourne rally in favor of a “carbon tax” [1], it was the second such event this year. The rally was held in front of the state library, there is a reasonable size park there and […] The Event I just attended a lecture by Dr Ziggy Switkowski (see the above picture) on the topic of nuclear power, for a long time Ziggy has been the most prominent advocate of nuclear power in Australia, so naturally the talk was pro-nuclear. The lecture was free for alumni of Swinburne University and introduced […] What do Assholes do? Rusty just wrote a post titled “If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot” [1] about some of the anti-social tendencies demonstrated by programmers, including some that are implied to be fairly important. His post seems to imply that there are really great programmers who are anti-social […] Some crazy people led by Harold Camping who call themselves Christian claimed that the world was going to end yesterday [1]. Harold had previously done this in 1994 so he’s got form for predictions that don’t come true. The bible says that “the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night” […] After almost 10 years the Americans finally found Osama bin Laden, unfortunately they were unable to take him alive. The Reid Report has a good summary of what happened [1]. Sam Varghese wrote an interesting analysis of the political aspects of this event in Pakistan [2], and he’s a lot less positive about it than […] Tomorrow Prince William will marry Kate Middleton. If we don’t change anything he will probably become the King of Australia at some future time, so I think that now is the time to start discussing the options. Walter Block makes some interesting points in favor of longer terms for politicians and for having a monarch […] TED is offering an audition for future TED.com talks in New York on the 24th of May [1]. It would be good if we could have someone advocate Free Software there. The audition is a 1 minute talk, the speakers who pass the audition may be offered full ~17 minute lecture slots at the next […] |
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