Niall Ferguson, the Scottish economic historian, often talks about people who see economies as balanced ecosystems ignoring the fact that these ecosystems are always teetering on the edge of chaos. The thing that takes the system out of balance and into chaos is often something that has been ignored or discounted as impossible – like [...]
Every so often I visit the James Howard Kunstler blog to see what he has been thinking about… I noticed some mail to James about his prognostications about Y2K way back in the last century. Over the last ten years I have had conversation with a few people about my pre-Y2K book… A lot of [...]
Last weekend I went to some friends for lunch. There were two other couples there. One of the guys was in his mid to late 60's and was an ex-Senator from South Australia. I didn't realize that he was a Liberal at the outset, but should have figured it out. I tried to avoid getting [...]
When young men reach the age of 17, (in Australia) they obtain their driving licenses. Then they buy a cool car (death trap) that isn’t worth the money that they or their parents paid for it. The next three years of their lives are spent “tricking” out the car with the best mag wheels, [...]
Depending on your point of view, it would appear that Government Departments are either very good or very bad at cooking the books. (Although possibly they didnt forsee independant analysis of the data….) For the last few days I have been researching for an article that I am writing on Perceptric. There are various [...]
The current war in Iraq has been going on longer than World War II. It was 2003 when the US and its allies invaded Iraq. It is now 2010. WWII went from 1939 to 1945 – 6 years. The Iraq war is now over 7 years old. The current government in Australia and the current [...]
In 1993, I wrote a paper entitled, How Ubiquitous Free Communication will Alter the Status Quo. I noted that because of electronic chat rooms [Prodigy, AOL and Compuserve] as more women became enamoured of the connectivity options available to them via a ubiquitous global network, that the divorce rate would rise dramatically. I [...]
A few months ago I blogged about the cost of entertainment and how even a weekend surf at the beach was likely to cost car parking fees, barbeque facilities use fees and of course, GST on the ice, petrol, esky contents, (surf) board wax and zinc cream. In other words it’s hard for the [...]
Sometimes it is useful to remember that countries, particularly those countries that see themselves as world powers, have people that sit around and dream about scenarios that may take place… They think of “what if” situations based on the best intelligence that they can get. The best intelligence was clearly not available when the US [...]
(Something a little different to amaze and amuse.) We are familiar with the term the tyranny of distance. Although these days, it applies mainly to the long walk from the deplaning area to the customs and immigration counters and the queues awaiting. In 1874, Jules Verne wrote a play, Eighty Days Around the [...]