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http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,24793674-23109,00.html As a fellow Australian citizen, let me be the first to say, Fuck Hugh Jackman.

Huh? The guy was hilarious when he hosted SNL. They should make Steve Martin the permanent host, he was excellent. I also liked Ellen He's a media whore over here constantly telling our Government how to run the country. He's an asshole. Good actor though.

New AC/DC song, so you know what to expect: Rock N Roll Train

*cough cough* And honestly, if you make minimum wage, I don't think the failing economy is going to hurt you that much. If you were making $7 two years ago at Burger King, chances are, you're still making $7 at Burger King now. $7.25 next July. The main thing that pissed me off about the article is that someone who works hard to try and get a raise is being told "You shouldn't ask for/take a raise this year to help the economy" and yet the government just gave people who don't do anything to try and improve their situation 2 70 cent raises and another 70 cents in 11 months. If getting raises is going to hurt the economy so much, why don't they put that last 70 cent minimum wage increase on hold? As an economics student, let me take a guess on this question: The minimum wage is a government mandated wage. The market doesn't control it. Bernanke is concerned with market wages, which have the potential to spiral upward if several industries receive wage rises (one job sector sees another job sector getting a wage increase, so now they want a wage rise too, etc). This scenario cannot happen to a minimum wage, which is fixed at the will of the government and is not susceptible to market forces.

The interlude in 'To Live is To Die' is pretty cool.

"Big" by Tom Hanks

Medal Count: 1. China: 35-13-13 2. USA: 19-21-25 3. Australia: 11-10-12 4. Great Britain: 11-7-8 5. Germany: 9-6-7 For interests sake, here are the populations for the top 5 countries: 1. China: 1.33 billion 2. USA: 303 million 3. Australia: 20 million 4. Great Britain: 60 million 5. Germany: 82 million On a per capita basis, Australia is easily the top sporting country.

Someone told me about this incident, and I was waiting for the punchline. Apparently it actually happened. Damn.

Just saw the film. Excellent. If you like Batman, you'll enjoy this film. If not, stay clear.

Awesome. Did everyone in the theatre stand up and applaud, chanting your name and lifting you up onto their shoulders?

Paul gets points for selling the Austrian Business Cycle Theory as the explanation of possible recession. Ludwig Von Mises should be proud.

True enough, but you have to choose from the candidates you're given, and McCain is probably the best out of all the republican candidates. They'll probably play him as the old warrior, and he'll probably lose, but it'll be good for the republican party to have someone like McCain as their figurehead for the next year than anyone else.

I'm not an American-hater like so many foreigners are becoming these days, but for GOD'S SAKE, fucking do something about your god damn gun problem. Fuck.

A psycho with a gun can kill more people than with a knife. There will always be gun deaths in countries, regardless of the existing gun laws. Surely the aim however would be to stop half-witted suicidal morons from acquiring a gun. In Australia, gun control was boosted heavily after the Port Arthur Massacre which saw about 30+ people get killed. There are still gun deaths, but so far there haven't been any incidents where an idiot was able to easily acquire a gun and start firing at whoever crossed his/her path.

Worst President ever? I don't know, which is the one that can claim chief responsibility for turning a reasonably secular, democratic country into a hotbed of religious dicks?

Fair enough. In Australia we're having our federal election in a couple of weeks, and Iraq is not even an issue, its all economics. If one of the major political parties espoused Paul's ideas, then it would kill the party off completely.

Dude. Ron Paul's supporters had their big fundraising push on GUY FAWKES DAY. That's the guy who tried to blow up Parliament. 9/11 Truthers. The gold standard. Eliminating the federal reserve system. Joel Stein is dead on. That's the stuff I find most interesting about the attention that Paul gets. Here is a guy who makes Milton Friedman look like Karl Marx, yet liberals are cheering him on like some kind of messiah who is trying to deliver the GOP from evil. Same with the 9/11 truthers and anarchists who are so in love with his anti-washington rhetoric, but forget that he only really wants to transfer powers back to the states. This whole phenomenon epitomizes the reality that policy substance is irrelevant to so many people. Though having said that, the case for a gold standard was pretty good at a time before computers.

There's a new video up on amazon of 'Long Way Home'. A better track than Radio Nowhere I think. Here

I've had a listen to the whole album, it's a solid collection of good rock tunes. They all have some kind of climax to them so the first 30 second previews won't do them justice. Devil's Arcade is the most interesting by far, possible the best song on the album. Gypsy Biker is perhaps the catchiest (he also uses his old 80s style of singing on this one, that is, higher pitched). A good effort, though having the E Street Band record their tracks individually and at different times has made the songs slightly less developed and well rounded.

I might as well mention it for a third time. STOP TALKING ABOUT NOMINAL PRICE RISES. A 'cheap' house that costs $500 in 1900 is not cheap at all if no one has the money. If you want to argue that the standard of living was somehow better and cheaper in the US more than a hundred years ago, then please continue this argument. I'm going to choose to ignore it, so will every history professor in the world. And like he said earlier, you still haven't come up with any actual examples of where outsourcing makes anything cheaper for the consumer. So effectively your argument is to ignore the extraordinary differences in net job growth, not only domestically, but in international comparisons with countries like France and Germany, on the basis that the formal definition of employment is inadequate. If you want to get into specifics, there are plenty of estimates of high job growth in high-value employment sectors. As for for your friend doing masters' in finance, good on him. I could quote Greg Mankiw, PHD in Economics and senior professor at Harvard, who writes Economic 101 textbooks for Universities all over the world, who would disagree with your friend. But I won't do that. Actually I will. His study, which I get my numbers from, is here http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/m...%207%202006.pdf He also draws on dozens of other empirical work by other economist. Feel free to to bring up your qualms and concerns of the methodology in the papers available.

Been there, done that. My Mission to 1000

From Jingus' previous post. Obviously they outsource because production costs a lower. No one is arguing against that. What you don't seem to understand is why so many Mexicans, and not just Mexicans, but other people in Latin America, South East Asia, Africa, who find a western company factory opening up in their town, literally push each other over to get a job there. It's because relative to the alternative jobs in their country (I presume you've never visited a third world country, I have) are far worse. Earning US$3 a day in the will make you starve to death if you live in America, but earning US$3 in Africa gives you a livable wage. Comparing exchange rates as if they're one and the same is silly. Firstly, R&D and 'technological' advances are purely the result of economic growth. That's why they're a recent phenomenon. You act like the current way of life has always been the norm, but 'technology' as we know it only started since the Industrial Revolution. It was called the Industrial Revolution because for the first time, restrictions on business practices were relaxed. As for necesesity goods always rising in price, you confusing nominal price rises with real price rises. Food is certainly more accessable. I haven't yet read a history about how early 20th century America was flowing with bread and vegetables and everyone had enough to eat. Bread may have been 5 cents a hundred or so years ago, but incorporate inflation and the fact that people today have more resources than before, and the overall cost of living has actually fallen. No economist in the world will agree with your argument on prices. No 'price historian' will ever agree with you. What proportion of Americans could afford a two-story, four bedroom house in 1900? How many today? I keep repeating myself about how people need to take a look at the overall picture. No one has done that yet. When studies on outsorcing are done which project that 3.4 million jobs will move overseas in 2015, that sounds pretty bad. But it sounds less concerning when you take into account the projection of 160,000,000 jobs expected to exist by 2015, or the 35 million new jobs that have been created in the past decade. The call-centre jobs being lost to India was mentioned. But what wasn't mentioned was the overall growth in computer-employment. Contrary to what's said, service imports WILL decrease in price from outsourcing, which helps complimentary industries in the domestic market. There have been SO many studies on this, but they fall on deaf ears because actual empirical evidence just isn't sexy. Anecdotes are.

1. Some companies do, yes. What proportion close down in America and move to Mexico. How many new companies start up in the US each year? Is this less than the amount that close down and move to Mexico? The plural of anecdote is data. That's what's missing from this debate. No one is looking at the bigger picture. 2. If someone offered you a job below the minimum wage, you wouldn't take. Unless, ofcourse, there is no alternative. Often, there is no alternative in Mexico, which is why some businesses get thousands of applications for a single job that doesn't pay great. It's called climbing the ladder. Again, read a history book. Learn about the amount of sweatshops that lined the streets of New York. 3. Except the ones that get those outsourced jobs ofcourse. 4. There are no 'fixed' amount of jobs. God doesn't emerge from the heavens on the weekend and proclaim that there shall be hence forth 3 million jobs up for grabs on Wedneday. Some sectors come and go. I hear Haiti now has a monopoly on the horse and buggy. You guys should do something about that. America once had that market NAILED. I have travelled there, and I do know that the North American continent generally doesn't defy the standard economic laws that encompass most of the world. If you have a pocket calculator on the desk your typing at, take a good look at it. You probably paid around $5 - $20 for it. If you were a student in the 60s, it probably would have cost you a couple of hundred dollars and been twice as big. Sentences like 'prices never go down in America' typify the economic ignorance of this whole argument. And I haven't even touched on the whole distinction between nominal and real prices yet. And again, for all the jobs that are flowing out of your country, your job rate seems to suggest that relative to most countries, you guys seem to have MORE jobs. Weird.

Ok firstly, have you seen your unemployment rate? Have you seen the unemployment rate of France or Germany, two of the most protectionist countries in the developed world? You guys are in the mid 4s, France is about 8 and Germany is about 9. France and Germany do not like their businesses moving out of the country, and so production costs are invariably higher. The United States allows greater competition. Some move entirely overseas, like the call centres. You're right in saying that this case doesn't reflect on better living standards for consumers or workers. But what percentage of American jobs are call-centre jobs? Most 'outsourcing' is done by businesses purchasing intermediete goods from overseas so that their final products are cheaper. If you honestly can't identify cheaper products then you need to read a fucking history book. Quality is worse? How old are you? How fucking old are you? Perhaps because I don't live in the US I have a more dispassionate opinion. Frankly, starving Africans or Indians who have a family history of misery and death being allowed into Western markets, to me at least, is a good thing.

I don't think most people are against out-sourcing all together, however what we are told is that when companies outsource jobs, it is good for American workers. I am just eagerly awaiting to see how it is good for us. Like I said, in theory it is the bad jobs we are sending overseas in order to make room for good jobs over here, but it doesn't seem like that is what is happening. Instead it seems like the companies are taking the extra profit and investing it overseas and opening everything out of america in order to avoid taxes. The correct argument is that it has long term benefits for American workers. As companies and other businesses move to countries where their production costs are the smallest, it means their products will be cheaper for Americans to consume. As goods become cheaper, people are able to obtain a better standard of living by being able to purchase more goods, and so new markets are created, and hence new jobs a created to meet the demand of these new markets. It's extraordinarily easy to identify jobs that move out of the country. It's damn near impossible to identify which businesses opened because of freer trade. That's why it is politically difficult to make the argument for outsourcing without going into the economic logic of it all. All a protectionist has to do is point to a closed down steel mill and play a Springsteen song, and the whole room is sobbing.