The future of retailing
If you want a sense of the financial pain being felt by some shopkeepers at the moment, all you need to do is peruse the submissions to the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into Australian retailing. Whether anything should be done about [...]
Robots now cheaper than Chinese labourers
It seems that the giant IT assembler Foxconn is seeking an alternative to paying its workers more – and the solution is more robots.
Rinderpest eradicated
I’d never heard of rinderpest, and I come from cattle country. And, absent human malevolence, the world will never hear of rinderpest again. Absent any cases for a decade, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization will, on June 28th, adopt [...]
Productivity Commission report on FTAs
You might remember the fuss in the leadup to the 2004 election about the Australia-USA “Free Trade Agreement”. Among the objectionable bits, the FTA locked Australia in to an intellectual property regime that combines the worst features of the Australian [...]
Craig Emerson and climate change protectionism
Sky News’s Australian Agenda (which, on first glance, appears to be The Australian Op-Ed page – Live and even more Right Wing!) had an interview with Craig Emerson in which he discussed the trade implications of climate change. Nicholas Stern [...]
Katter’s wishlist
Bob Katter has gotten into the wishlist business. I haven’t yet found the complete document, but if the aspects of it reported in the media are representative, it’s going to be pretty hard for either side of politics to give [...]
Peak phosphate?
In this recent flamefest discussion of food security on LP, the topic of Peak Phosphorus came up. Phosphorus is not an element that most people tend to spend a lot of time thinking about. If you think about it at [...]
Food security
Just as you praise a political party… Christine Milne thinks we need a food security plan. While people discuss the threat of obesity in the suburbs and in the seat of power, nobody talks about the threat of global food [...]
Hey everybody, look over there
Call me cynical, but I wonder whether the timing of the announcement about expelling some low-ranking Israeli diplomat had anything to do with tonight’s Four Corners report on the massive bribery that the Reserve Bank’s half-owned plastic note subsidiary, Securency, [...]
Save the people but cook the planet
As Fred Pearce in the New Scientist says environmental paradoxes don’t come much bigger. The world’s fleet of 100,000 ships produces two kinds of pollution. One the one hand they emit nearly a billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere [...]
Differential reporting
WTO angers farmers over apple imports Australian apple growers are angered by reports the World Trade Organisation (WTO) will overturn Australia’s 90-year ban on New Zealand apple imports. The Age, 13 April 2010
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