A video recording of my 2020 Cunningham Lecture, "Do We Need Intellectuals", is now online, open access, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ycEQDEFyfo&feature=youtu.be
All welcome!
Reading
Can you remember with your leg, and is that part of who you are? An interesting piece by Ben Platts-Mills in Psyche suggests it might be so. This is not Psyche the good old journal that went under in 2010, … Continue reading
Vitamin D personal experiment - update after initial 8 week supplementation
Online DWCA Annual General Meeting Continue reading
As part of my PhD thesis, I did some statistical analysis in which I asked the question: “Do higher social assistance benefit levels lead to higher caseloads?” I have recently updated the data and had it published in a journal. Here’s a short summary of the journal article’s main findings.
The Internet Archive has over 90 employees in the United States, but they reside in 17 different states and even more counties. While distributed workforces are becoming common, it has become so painful to deal with the federal, state, and … Continue reading
BC Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson today announced a plan to completely eliminate the provincial sales tax (currently 7%) for 1 year, and then cut it by 4 points (or 57%) after that. Conservatives are prone to make expensive tax cut promises during elections, a tendency which contradicts their other touch-stone of perpetually promising to get tough on deficits and debt. [...]
I am currently writing a report for Employment and Social Development Canada looking at the long-term impact of the current recession on homelessness. It should be ready by early November. In the meantime, a teaser blog post I’ve just written on the same topic is available here.
I have read a book review by Steven Pressman in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (JPKE). The book he reviewed is “Rethinking the theory of money, credit, and macroeconomics: A new statement for the twenty-first century” by John Smithin. I am sure the book is just as interesting as the book review, but I […]
The Guardian recently featured an article produced by ‘GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator’. It’s an essay intended to reassure us humans that AIs do not want to take over, still less kill all humans. GPT-3 also produced a kind … Continue reading
Any Australian who has paid even cursory attention to this country’s poisonous politics over climate change these past two decades will be familiar with this long and sorry story, but to see it all laid out in sequence, in every depressing detail, is breath-taking. In ‘The Carbon Club’ (Allen& Unwin), […]
Suggesting Britain could sign the withdrawal agreement with its fingers crossed makes perfect sense for a government of liars
Everybody knows Boris Johnson can lie for England. To his supporters, it was one of his best assets. They believed he could bamboozle the European Union into giving him the only Brexit deal that is really acceptable – one that gives Britain all the advantages of being in the EU without any of the botheration of being a member. The problem is that congenital mendacity isn’t just for foreigners. If you lie for England, you will also lie to England.
This week, these two streams of fabrication finally became one. In openly admitting that it signed the withdrawal agreement with the EU in bad faith, Johnson’s Vote Leave government also implicitly confessed that it lied wholesale to the electorate in December’s general election. The cross-contamination of domestic politics by the deceit that is Brexit’s DNA is now complete.
The phrase ‘money printing’ is shorthand for ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about’
US-born former TV journalist and news producer Gerald Stone in his biography of Sydney advertising man John Singleton describes Singleton’s seemingly unlikely friendship with the Reverend Bill Crews: ‘John hates to admit it but in a funny way, he is quite religious,’ Crews smiles. ‘He reminds me a lot of King David. We’re told David […]
Encouraged by a recent return of energy, I have recklessly started a second blog, Seen and Done, where I will talk about creative stuff I have either experienced or produced. Please check it out!
Demonstrating how the Job Guarantee precisely offsets the drain to savings
The long lost classic Fury from the Deep is set to return with a three disc Blu-ray release containing all new animation set to the original audio track. The set will contain the surviving clips from the original 1968 production as well as full colour and black and white versions of the animated story. Three of the original cast members, Frazer Hines, June Murphy and Brian Cullingford, revisit the filming locations with production assistant Michael Briant, assistant floor manager Margot Hayhoe and helicopter pilot Mike Smith in a special feature about the making of the show. There are also archive… Continue reading
While the short-lived tenure of Christopher Eccleston’s much loved Ninth Doctor has been revisited in comics, audios and even on the small screen through cameos in The Name of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor, the man himself has thus far resisted the invitation to return to the role. Until now! “After 15 years it will be exciting to revisit the Ninth Doctor’s world, bringing back to life a character I love playing,” Eccleston commented as the news broke that Big Finish would be releasing twelve full-cast audio adventures across four audio box-sets. The first box-set is due to be… Continue reading
Why the UK tax and benefits infrastructure is ready to implement a full Job Guarantee for all.
Adding a Job Guarantee to the peer reviewed mainstream agent model
Algorithm changes required to the Baseline Model to support a Job Guarantee
What would it take to make an app that would work like Uber, but without the corporate entity? And without the high percentage that goes to Uber. Hum… Let’s take some of the needed parts… Hailing a driver: a … Continue reading