Crikey Blogs

Citizen policy juries, selected by random sampling of the electorate, with access to experts making public recommendations on policy. Even if they don't have formal authority to legislate or execute policy, politicians enacting laws in conflict with those recommendations would have to at least explain why. Some Australian experiences: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/croakey/2010/08/10/behind-the-scenes-of-a-c… http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/jury-still-out-but-the-idea-… http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/citizen-power…

This is one example of statistical sloppiness in reporting, comprising: (a) sloppiness about the quantity or proportion being asserted (e.g. "many" rather than "at least 4000" or "10%" or "24"), and (b) sloppiness about the confidence interval. I'd love to see a sidebar to articles asserting trends providing both a clear quantity estimate and the confidence interval around it. I'd even settle, in early articles on a supposed trend, for something like "We're asserting that this has happened more than N times." where N might be as small as 0. I'm aware that my proposed standard could even be applied to this comment:), so I'm simply asserting that this sloppiness exists. Here's one exemplary takedown: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/2010/03/27/did-the-media-get-…

The problem is that planes, afaik, do not continuously broadcast their position and health. If you don’t find the black boxes, you can’t figure out what happened. The investigators of MH370 were so desperate for any information of the possible flight path, they had to turn to the pings the jet engines sent to the manufacturer as part of their monitoring [1]. All we need is for passenger planes to broadcast regularly and in short intervals. No indiscriminate high-resolution global monitoring and data processing needed. [1] https://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2014/03/25/mh370-last-incompl…

I misremembered. That was the cost in the middle of Barcelona, which is a big city: https://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2012/02/15/why-do-subways-cost…

23x sounded pretty high, and indeed the GP's Wikipedia article cites 23x as one option from the original 1979 work, or 11.5x as a more recent one. The latter seems much more reasonable, and a quick look at stats for Australia suggests current stats put it at something like 6-10x. But the more interesting article to me was [0] which presents a study that says around 30% of "cycling" deaths are due to natural causes such as heart disease. [0]: https://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2015/09/01/is-it-just-vehicles…

Yes, because unlike a lot of 'new world' cities, there are huge areas of Paris that are a consistent 2-4 stories high. See e.g. the Google Maps images in this article [0] discussing Australian vs. European cities. [0]: https://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2015/11/30/how-dense-are-our-c…

The fires occur after the installation, 50% occur within 10 days of installation, here is a very long and detailed analysis (with some CSIRO analysis as well): https://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2011/04/24/the-csiro-gets-hip-to…

Here's a better report. https://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2016/09/07/atsb-reports-cockp… The Guardian article misses the bits that are probably most interesting to HN: This kind of thing happens about once a month. The procedure that was supposed to prevent it was to use the up and down arrows instead of the keypad, because that way you can only stuff up a little bit. It took until 2013 for Airbus to patch the A330 navigation system to reject manually entered latitudes and longitudes that are inconsistent with the current GPS fix. Only a minority of the airliners in service installed the patch.

There's a reason this guy (and story) showed up three times on /r/badlinguistics in the last two days [1], [2], [3]. Because what he's saying is rubbish. The discussion at [3] links to the refutation [4]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/3qh1jj/gday_mate_lazy… [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/3qmt1l/australia_we_n… [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/3qo63v/linguists_resp… [4] http://blogs.crikey.com.au/fullysic/2015/10/29/when-media-gets-drunk-o…

Another one is Poll Bludger which also has running analysis: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/

Australian journalist does not agree with this story: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2015/02/24/was-mh370s-flight-s…

I'd like to see a smart city with grand infrastructure (subways designed ahead of time, the garbage system outlined in this article, etc) but designed on a human scale. That is, not bulked out by endless roads and parking allowances. There are many charming and walkable cities around the world but so often these "designed" cities are created on the scale of cars and end up feeling so wrong. If you need service roads and parking, hide them underground perhaps. Images of Houston are often used to demonstrate the sprawl you get from giving way to the convenience of cars and parking: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/files/2012/06/Houston-parking1.…

It's not pure capitalism, of course. But America is undeniably more capitalistic than the majority of OECD countries and even goes so far as to consider capitalism an ideal, and capitalistic policies to be more virtuous. And the US is very much a low-tax country, in aggregate. See this graph: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/files/2011/12/taxasgdp2.png From source: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2011/12/08/australian-exceptional…

It isn't that hard to see satellites in the sky. The ISS, in particular, can be very bright, to the point where you can see it in daylight (http://www.hobbyspace.com/SatWatching/, http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2009/06/18/how-to-see-the-iss-… The 1950 ones would have been a lot harder to spot, of course, but might at times have reflected the light of the below-the-horizon sun.

On the contrary, I saved a couple of hundred dollars by getting a Macbook Pro from Japan. There's an Inquiry going on right now into IT-related pricing by Apple, Adobe and Microsoft: http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=I… http://blogs.crikey.com.au/thestump/2012/04/15/parliamentary-inquiry-l…

I'm fairly partial to http://www.abc.net.au/news Also worth checking out are: http://grogsgamut.blogspot.com/ http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/ http://newmatilda.com/ http://www.thepunch.com.au/ (Full disclosure: I work for the ABC)

At least one person on Barr's list as one of 'leaders' of Anonymous has responded: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/thestump/2011/02/07/i-confess-im-a-member-o…

From my observational experience, and limited study on the issue, markets don't seem to be solving this optimally, at least in Melbourne, Australia. Overall, the market for apartments seems to be supply constrained. The main factors: 1. Government approval is required to build large apartment buildings. In general, this seems to lag behind demand. 2. Large buildings take a long time to build 3. There have been a number of years of high immigration, especially in and around the CBD. All of these factors combine to cause high prices. In a high price environment, many residents are stretched for cash. They essentially have to pick the lowest price apartment available. It's not uncommon to have multiple people sharing a room in order to decrease costs. This creates a high price floor. Mid range apartments don't tend to be much more expensive, simply because many residents are already super stretched financially and unable to afford the extra marginal cost. As a property developer in a high floor, low marginal payoff environment your financial incentive is now to build as many low cost apartments as possible. >> The majority of Victoria’s newest apartments are so small they would be considered unliveable in Sydney…More than three-quarters of new one-bedroom apartments built across the state are 50 square metres or less, which means they probably would have been illegal in Sydney, London and Adelaide. [1] Making these apartments meet a reasonable minimum standard could…

Absolutely! Here's a simple example: I'm a recovering information addict who used to perceive myself as having a deep need to know things, which was actually anxiety around and fear of uncertainty or not knowing. In recovery, I've learned there's very little I need to know, learning to tap into my intuition, instead. One indigenous story dealt with exactly this. I used to think of myths and mythology as ancient outdated beliefs. I now view them as learning opportunities. I've found it useful to view literally everything this way, which is another teaching I've encountered in indigenous stories & I learned on my own beforehand. I now view beliefs as tools for configuring cognitive biases and can find many useful ways to prime my brain this way. So yeah...crazy useful and totally counter to modern society's teachings, probably because these lessons work against the more toxic/limiting aspects of modern life. Thanks for asking! There are timeless teachings about how nature works (at least until nature evolves away from them) in indigenous cultures, which includes how to care for ourselves. That's stuff that was for sure missing from my upbringing and education. Also, here's another example of how what I consider Western science is only just now catching up to some indigenous teachings: https://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2015/11/08/ornithogenic-fire-rapt… The local indigenous tribes in that area told of birds that were…