Criminal profiling is easy, apparently. According to this fascinating article in New Yorker, it uses the same tricks as stage psychics and other cons. Hat-tip to denialism blog.
Flickr’s 2 billionth photo
I suppose it’s nice that the 2 billionth photo on Flickr is from Sydney, but does it have to be a picture of that stupid gold-plated dead tree in Chinatown? As an aside, there are now 4.1 billion photos on Facebook. Hat-tip to Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ.
Greens to support computer games industry
Today The Greens are launching a policy to support the computer games industry in Australia.
There was a story earlier this year that the gaming industry is now bigger than the film industry. That’s only true if you compare the whole gaming industry with just film box-office sales and ignore DVD sales and rentals, exports and other non-cinema income. Still, it does make a point: gaming is a lot bigger than most people realise.
The gaming industry wants the same tax breaks as the film industry. I figure that to be consistent, yes, either they both get these breaks or they both don’t.
Principles help win over panic
“Everything looks like a failure in the middle,” warns Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Any new enterprise encounters roadblocks. As the obstacles multiply, the situation looks hopeless. That’s precisely when you need to hold onto your principles, your long-term view, to help get you past that panic. Read more at Long Views.
The Narrowing, (not) by Dean Koontz
The Narrowing. The idea that during an election campaign voters return to the incumbent government. Supposedly the reality of an actual vote, as opposed to mere opinion polls, triggers voters’ fear of the unknown. As this graph shows, if there is a Narrowing, it’s bloody tiny this time around.
The Narrowing is nothing but mythology.
In the 2001 campaign, Kim Beazley started from behind and gained 5% before voting day — not enough to win, but enough to give him hope for next time. That’s a shift against the incumbent party, of course.
Of course that loose-mouthed thug Mark Latham went and screwed all that up. But this time we can see what the electorate really thinks of Howard now that they’ve got a credible alternative.
As the graph from Possums Pollytics shows, yes, you can sort of see a little sign of The Narrowing. But that gentle glidepath has to cross that line marked “50”.
Yes, the Coalition might be able to claw back enough support to win. As long as the election is on 28 July 2008.
I gather the election is sooner than that.
Rediscovering the language of moderation
I’m a big fan of joined-up thinking. You know, not just looking at each individual piece, but looking at how they fit together (or not) and what that tells us about The Big Picture. But there doesn’t seem to be much joined-up thinking in contemporary Australian politics.
Take, for example, “economic management”. Senator Andrew Bartlett wrote about this very point yesterday:
The battle for bragging rights about which party is supposedly the best economic manager is faintly ludicrous, given that both sides at various times have made a point of emphasising how similar their basic tax and economic policies are to the other – with the partial exception of workplace relations. The posturing about supposedly conservative good economic management is even more absurd – and indeed somewhat alarming – when one realises that these almost identical economic policies are neither conservative nor even very coherent.
Yes. I don’t understand how these facts all fit into one coherent picture:
- Lots of money coming in from big mining boom.
- Schools, hospitals, roads, trains, ports all in need of “urgent” fixes.
- Reserve Bank worried about inflationary measures.
- $34 billion in tax cuts! Spend, spend, spend!
Bartlett quotes a piece from George Megalogenis in The Australian which ends:
The task for Australia’s political class is to rediscover the language of moderation. Leadership at this stage of a 17-year growth cycle means telling voters that they can’t have it all.
But how do you tell Howard’s Battlers, the Kath & Kims of Australia, they they can’t have it all, and that the world isn’t just about them repeating the mantra of “I want! I want!”? The answers, it seems, is that you don’t. You just stay in your state of denial and hope for the best.
The Coalition launches its re-election campaign today — yes, I know that the entire year so far therefore has not been a campaign, just some sort of cheese grater. So it’ll be interesting to see whether they’ll propose a coherent plan for Australia’s future that actually addresses these core economic issues. My money is on the “No” vote for that one.