Sydney’s water crisis is over, for the moment. Our dams are now 65.5% full – up from 33.9% on the 8th February 2007. That will last us around two to three years without any more rain, at the current rate, which feels like a reasonable cushion. Not coincidentally, Sydney’s water consumption went from anContinue Reading
The Sydney Tele yesterday had a front page screamer about Glenn Stevens, Governor of the Reserve Bank – Is this man Australia’s most useless? There were two main parts to the critique. First, that the Reserve Bank should be stopping the banks from raising interest rates beyond the official cash rate;Continue Reading
Many column inches have been spent in the past couple of days analysing the Fed’s decision to prop up Bear Stearns while it found a buyer – in the end JP Morgan agreed to buy it for around 10% of the trading price a week before. What the Fed didContinue Reading
When you have a new baby, suddenly you notice them everywhere. Certainly, that’s how I felt with Chatterboy. I assumed that in my formerly childless state, they’d always been there, but I hadn’t noticed them before. But I’ve just been looking at the census statistics for my local area, andContinue Reading
The Eye family (99% Mr Eye) does a fair bit of volunteering around the place. But we also live in a quite affluent area, where there is a strong sense of entitlement, and willingess to pay for things. It’s interesting to watch the intersection of those two things. Freakonomics hasContinue Reading
Hugh McKay has a very grumpy rant in the SMH today about the excessiveness of children’s birthday parties. He starts with a description of a two year old’s party, which is more extreme than any two year old’s party I’ve ever been to (I must move in the wrong circles),Continue Reading
Today’s book review is Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, by Philippe Legrain. Legrain is a British journalist (but with a complex heritage involving Estonia, the US and France) who started writing this book just after the July 2005 terrorist attacks on London. The book’s introduction is titled “It’s time for freshContinue Reading
Today’s review is The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. This is a book I never would have read without my blogging habit. When she died last year, several of my favourite bloggers wrote about her. The book is an indictment of pretty much everything aboutContinue Reading
A friend of mine pointed out to me (you really should get your own blog, Brian!) that the discussion of who is a better economic manager by reference to absolute levels of interest rates misses some fairly fundamental points about how much is inside the control of the people managingContinue Reading
Paul Frijters at Club Troppo has a post up about maternity leave – a disucssion of the recent policy announcement from the Greens and the Democrats to guarantee 14 weeks of maternity leave (at minimum wage) and the pros and cons from an economic perspective. I commented there that IContinue Reading
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