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Mining Tax SNAFU
Wayne Swan is pitching it as “…a way in which all Australians share in the bounty of the mining boom,” but Alan Kohler destroys any illusion of that: There was, and is, a fundamental disconnect between the terms of trade boom that was killing manufacturing and tourism and the tax revenue governments were getting from […]
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Video Game Values
Overthinking It reviews L.A. Noire, and realises it isn’t your run-of-the-mill sandbox game: There are a few ways to play L.A. Noire: Do your best on the fly, looking for clues at crime scenes and making your best guesses, maybe taking advantage of the in-game help, but mostly just playing at the pace of the story to […]
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How the GOP Became The Party of the Rich
Astonishing reading for anyone who realises the November 23 deadline for the “supercomittee” is coming up, and they’re not doing anything about it – the malaise set in a while ago: In November 2002, at a meeting in the White House, the president and his top economic advisers packed tightly around a mahogany table in […]
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Book Review: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
If there’s ever a book that you can say is pure geek indulgence, it’s Cryptonomicon. No other book I’ve seen takes the abstract concepts of topics as varied as UNIX, cryptography and normalising preferences between siblings for Grandma’s inheritance through a distribution on a cartesian plane formed in a parking lot. You can tell this isn’t […]