How a simple numerical concept exerts outsized influence over institutional operations and economic thought.
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If one had to choose one reason for why things are not going well in academic life, the managerial, top-down style of governance that reigns in many universities would be a top candidate (with budget cuts as a close competitor). But what is a better way of running universities? For me, this is a question […]
WOOLGOOLGA has been named the top beach on the Australian mainland in Tourism Australia’s official 2025 Best Australian Beaches list. The top spot nationwide went to the Bay of Fires in Tasmania. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it for your business. Message us. Phone us – (02) 4981 8882. Email us...
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WELL known Coffs Harbour resident Ron Powell passed away Thursday, 30 January 2025, aged 94. Ron was a senior area manager with the Waltons chain when he planned, purchased space and built a Coffs Harbour store in the early 1970s – managing it for many years. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth...
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COFFS Harbour Chamber of Commerce members met on Thursday 13 February to hear from several prominent local speakers, including a keynote speech by Mayor Nikki Williams. Opening the breakfast-time meeting, Chamber President Ray Smith welcomed attendees and introduced Coffs Harbour MP Gurmesh Singh to the stage. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth...
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WOOLGOOLGA day and evening VIEW clubs are hosting a combined International Women’s Day event at the C.ex Club. Taking place on Friday 7 March, the fundraising event supports The Smith Family Learning for Life Program. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it for your business. Message us. Phone us – (02) 4981...
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QUALITY Hotel City Centre in Coffs Harbour has been named a 2024 Gold Award winner by leading hotel franchise group Choice Hotels Asia-Pac. These annual awards recognise exceptional performance and an unmatched dedication to the guest experience across properties in Australia and New Zealand. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it for...
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I know …Valentine’s Day was yesterday. But at least I remembered. OK, I’m on the couch. Anyway. I’ve combed through my review archives of the last decade or so and assembled a “top 10 list” of romantic comedies that may not have set the box office on fire, but are definitely worth seeking out. You may even fall in love with a few of these. Alphabetically: Blind Date – Is there a level of humor below “deadpan”? If so, I’d say that this film from Georgian director Levan Koguashvili has it in spades. A minimalist meditation on the state of modern love in Tbilisi (in case you’d been wondering), the story focuses on the romantic travails of a sad sack Everyman named Sandro (Andro Sakhvarelidze), a 40-ish schoolteacher who still lives with his parents. Sandro and his best bud (Archil Kikodze) spend their spare time arranging double dates via singles websites, with underwhelming results. Then it happens…Sandro meets his dream woman (Ia Sukhitashvili). There’s a mutual attraction, but one catch. Her husband’s getting out of jail…very soon.
Snake oil freak RFK Jr was confirmed this week and has laid out his first 100 days: Hours after being confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a statement that laid out sweeping plans for his first 100 days in office. Chief among his goals, he wrote, was to combat what he called a “growing health crisis” of chronic disease. The document called for the federal government to investigate the “root causes” of a broad range of conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, obesity, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis. Conspicuously absent was any explicit mention of childhood vaccines, which Kennedy has long railed against as the head of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense. But the document did zero in on another one of his fixations: a class of widely prescribed drugs that treat depression, anxiety, and mood disorders.
Newly-leaked documents reveal a crew of military academics pitching the US National Security Council a series of extreme strategies for Ukraine, from IED’s inspired by Iraqi insurgents to sabotaging Russia’s infrastructure to propaganda “from ISIS’ playbook.” Conceived under the auspices of the UK’s University of St. Andrews, the plans were outsourced through third parties to ensure “plausible deniability.” Explosive leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone show how a shady transatlantic collective of academics and military-intelligence operatives conceived schemes which would […]
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The post Secret terror blueprints for US NSC to ‘help Ukraine resist’ exposed appeared first on The Grayzone.
Grocery prices are going up, we may be dealing with another pandemic, Trump is threatening draconian tariffs and we’re on the verge of deporting the vast majority of the agriculture workforce. So the economy is getting more fragile by the day. One of Trump’s answer to all that is “drill, baby, drill.” Krugman takes a look at that in his newsletter today: Basically, any large decline in energy prices would lead to a fall in production, driving prices right back up. In today’s world, U.S. shale oil drillers are the marginal producers — the producers whose decisions set both a floor and a ceiling on overall oil prices. As I write this, the benchmark price of U.S. crude oil — the West Texas Intermediate price — is just over $70 a barrel. And here’s the thing: any substantial decline in prices from this point would make drilling new wells unprofitable in many U.S. oilfields: This doesn’t mean that production would stagnate; it would decline, as older fields get exhausted.
“We knew they were going to do this. They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” He seems nice. And frankly, it’s clear they don’t give a damn about starving kids in Scranton or Birmingham either. In fact, I think they’re getting off on it. Trump said last week that he campaigned on this. He did not. He would mention “waste and fraud in passing but his pitch was all about “growth” and tariffs taking care of deficits. He ostentatiously ran away from Project 2025 which is the exact blueprint they are following for firing massive numbers of federal workers. It was a bait and switch. So far it doesn’t seem to be bothering the non-MAGA cult members who voted for Trump and the Republicans too much. I guess nothing’s happened to them personally yet. If it’s just some starving kid in Sudan it’s no biggie, amirite?
Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper are returning as the Ninth Doctor and Rose for Big Finish's Doctor Who – The Ninth Doctor Adventures.
I’m trying to imagine what I would have thought if I’d looked into the future and saw this happening even a decade ago. I think I would have assumed it was some kind of dark joke: Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany on Saturday accused Vice President JD Vance of unacceptably interfering in his country’s imminent elections on behalf of a party that has played down the atrocities committed by the Nazis 80 years ago. A day after Mr. Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference by telling German leaders to drop their so-called firewall and allow the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to enter their federal government, Mr. Scholz accused Mr. Vance of effectively violating a commitment to never again allow Germany to be led by fascists who could repeat the horrors of the Holocaust. “A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Mr. Scholz said at the conference on Saturday morning, in an address opening the gathering’s second day. Mr. Scholz said the AfD had trivialized Nazi atrocities like the concentration camp at Dachau, which Mr. Vance visited on Friday.
Trump has created what he calls a ‘Faith Office’ within the White House and appointed a Pentecostal pastor from Florida, Paula White, to lead it. Ms White, widely described in mainstream Christianity as a heretic, teaches a transactional faith. In other words, faith is demonstrated in prosperity. Blessed are you who are poor, for yours Continue reading »
I know you don’t like X posts on here and neither do I. But Bluesky still doesn’t have the capability of rendering videos in the blog so there’s not much I can do about it. I would never expect you to sit through a full JD Vance speech but it’s important to at least see some of the clips. It’s just shocking , even for him: He’s saying this in Europe, not Arkansas. Apparently, he really wants to reassure China and Russia that we are with them and encouraging them to do whatever’s necessary to keep them in power in case Americans or Europeans might have other ideas. You really should watch this one: The Trump administration is demanding that everyone in the government say that the 2020 election was stolen and firing people who held the J6 insurrectionists to account. I know hypocrisy has been retired as a concept but this is too much. There’s more unfortunately: JD Vance's speech in Munich sounds like it was literally written by the Kremlin pic.twitter.com/YV1hJlyS48 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 14, 2025 Then there’s this clown: REPORTER: You have focused on what Ukraine is giving up.
Trump likes them intimidated. They eagerly comply. Me and my sharpie are signing a ‘zecutive order changing the name of Donald Trump to Donald Toadstool. You will henceforth use my preferred designation. His Insecure Highness has enacted several measures since reentering the Oval Office as non-joking tests of fealty. By your bending the knee to his mighty will he shall know you either as loser or foe. It’s Toadstool’s way of getting you to blurt out, “Thank you, sir! May I have another.” Like loyalty oaths and insisting followers publicly declaring that he won the 2020 election, it’s about getting people to submit to his dominance moves. Or as I picture it, getting littler dogs to roll over on their backs and pee in the air in submission. Toadstool’s mind is so far gone that it’s not clear if he really gives a rat’s ass if the world accepts that with a few strokes of his sharpie he’s changed the 400-year-old name of the Gulf of Mexico. What matters is whether he can compel your obedience by uttering “Gulf of America.” For that, he doesn’t need to think. It’s all instinct.
Back in 1991, when yours truly earned his first PhD with a dissertation on decision making and rationality in social choice theory and game theory, I concluded that “repeatedly it seems as though mathematical tractability and elegance — rather than realism and relevance — have been the most applied guidelines for the behavioural assumptions being […]