sections

Action and reaction on climate change

22 May 2011

Regular guest contributer James Glover (@zebra) takes a closer look at the Coalitions climate change policy. Malcolm Turnbull, an Australian MP, did a rare and risky thing last week. He actually broke away from the political spin-cycle and explained some figures underlying the cost of the Coalition’s “Real Action on Climate Change” policy. Naturally he [...]

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Return of the Drachma?

8 May 2011

It has been reported that Greece is considering leaving the euro and re-establishing its own currency*. More than a year ago, I argued that being part of the euro seriously exacerbated Greece’s economic woes, and for the reasons given there, I do think that re-establishing sovereignty over its currency is in Greece’s interests in the [...]

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S&P being silly again

20 April 2011

The debt rating agency Standard and Poor’s (S&P) has placed their rating of the US on negative outlook. What this means is that they are giving advance warning that they may downgrade their rating of the US from its current AAA level (the highest possible rating). Their actions were motivated by concern about “very large [...]

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Irony

9 March 2011

Last year I wrote about one of the more amusingly ridiculous attempted spam comments intercepted by my blog’s spam filter. It may be genius, stupidity or just an excellent coincidence, but a comment spammer has now attempted to add the following comment to that post: There are actually loads of details like that to take [...]

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Carbon tax

8 March 2011

Our regular guest writer James Glover (@zebra) returns to the Stubborn Mule today to look at the real cost of carbon tax…and who pays the cost. It is no surprise that the latest Newspoll shows the Labor Government sinking under a concerted attack by the Opposition, and its supporters in the media, over the Carbon [...]

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Virtual currency

22 February 2011

Thanks to my new job, the rate of Stubborn Mule posts has declined somewhat over the last few weeks (to say nothing of Mule Bites podcasts!). Still, my commute has allowed me to catch up on my podcast listening and a particularly interesting one was the recent Security Now episode about the “virtual currency” Bitcoin. [...]

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Mobile coverage

12 February 2011

A friend and regular Stubborn Mule reader drew my attention to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald this week about the Australian telco Telstra. Much of the recent commentary has focused on the implications of the national broadband network (NBN) for Telstra. While the NBN certainly gets a mention here too, for me the [...]

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A gentle introduction to R

31 January 2011

Whenever a post on this blog requires some data analysis and perhaps a chart or two, my tool of choice is the versatile statistical programming package R. Developed as an open-source implementation of an engine for the S programming language, R is therefore free. Since commercial mathematical packages can costs thousands of dollars, this alone [...]

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Holiday reading

21 January 2011

My now traditional annual pilgrimage to the South coast of New South Wales saw the rainiest weather I can remember. While it was nothing on the scale seen in Queensland and Victoria over recent weeks, it did take its toll on some of the wildlife: we saw dozens of dead porcupine puffers washed up on [...]

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A way with words

4 January 2011

Sometimes the things that are unsaid are far more telling than the things said. I had cause to reflect on this when I stumbled across a book on my shelves that I have not opened for many years. The book, entitled “Deutsche Bank: Dates, facts and figures 1870-1993”, is an English translation of the year-by-year [...]

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