MCJ Posted on Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 23:02
Updated on Saturday, May 28, 2011 at 21:17 by
MCJ
As everyone does at some point, I have some chemical waste of which to dispose (batteries and fluoro lightbulbs). Being a good little greenie, I asked the New South Wales Environment Department what the recommended procedure is:
MCJ Posted on Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 18:50 Under current employment law (presumably for most of the western world), it’s possible to have a high nominal salary and little leave but to essentially “buy” more time off by taking unpaid leave. This, however, depends on your employer approving said leave; depending on your employer, this could be difficult.
What if, in your employment contract, you stipulated the right to unpaid leave? One or two weeks per year, say – the idea would be to make it as close to paid leave in treatment as possible, except without actually receiving any money. (Perhaps make it non-accruing between years would make it easier for employers to accept, too.)
The thrust of my idea is to make the concept of unpaid leave more palatable; at the moment I still get the sense that many people (both employers and employees) treat it as something to be avoided, or at least a far worse alternative than paid leave.
MCJ Posted on Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 18:45 For reasons of which I’m not entirely sure, I came up with this little verse yesterday:
Resource rent taxes, emissions reduction;
Sovereign wealth funds, NBN construction;
Henry’s review, letting refugees in;
These are few of my favourite things.
More public transport and Oz: The Republic;
Welfare for jobless not middle-class yuppies;
Euthanasia and plain cigs packaging;
These are few of my favourite things.
MCJ Posted on Tuesday, March 22, 2011 at 13:00 Follow me, gentle reader, through some introductory environmental economics as I explain how carbon taxes and ETSs work — and how they differ.
MCJ Posted on Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 12:22 If you were hoping for some policy debate in federal politics last week, you were wasting your time. Our federal politicians were operating in a content-free zone, with nary the shadow of an intellectual framework in sight.
MCJ Posted on Friday, February 25, 2011 at 14:11
Updated on Friday, March 4, 2011 at 20:44 by
MCJ
So, I work as an environmental economist, right? I vote for The Greens, cycle everywhere, buy organic food, turn all my appliances off when I’m not using them, reuse my shower water, and generally try to follow the reduce/reuse/recycle motto. But, since 2006, I’ve flown from Australia to Germany (and back), between Germany and London several times, and between Melbourne and Sydney even more often. Oh, and driven Melbourne-Sydney and back. Against all those emissions (particularly the Australia-Germany flights), the marginal changes I’ve made to my life are paltry.
MCJ Posted on Monday, February 21, 2011 at 20:40 Several times when I’ve bought tickets to concerts recently, I’ve noticed that the bands offer “Meet and Greet” packages; these usually cost ~$50 more than just admission to the concert (which is itself ~$50), and get you:
From an economist’s perspective, this is a fairly sensible idea: the people who will want these things – colloquially “hardcore” fans – have an increased willingness to pay relative to the rest of the public, and insituting a tiered pricing system is an excellent way for the band to capture more of this willingness to pay in the form of money.
MCJ Posted on Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 12:39
Updated on Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 13:56 by
MCJ
Accompanying the Twitter commentary of the Queensland floods (see #QLDfloods) I’ve noticed a number of people writing that they’ll donate $1 every time their message gets “retweeted” (RTed; forwarded, in Twitter, parlance). The first message I saw was from @lilithia. I can’t say for certain whether she started the trend, and once I started looking I found several others – e.g. @AUSteambieberr, @bree_101, @xander85 –, but they all seemed to share two initial characteristics:
The second point, especially, struck me: late last year Daniel Keogh, a science presenter on the ABC, promised to donate $5 to beyondblue(1) for every time he was retweeted (until 10pm), but his offer took off and he ended up with a nominal figure of over $17,000 dollars. That was far above Keogh’s self-imposed limit, but he ended up donating $5000 and the story made it into the papers.
MCJ Posted on Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 11:17 In my least proud internet banking moment, I once entered the “wrong” password so often that the account was suspended, only to realise that I’d mistyped my client number and had thus accidentally caused someone else’s account to be suspended.
Happy new year.
life MCJ Posted on Monday, September 13, 2010 at 19:17 In an short piece entitle “Pitfalls of Passion” in the August 29 issue of “Sunday Life”, Bella Ellwood-Clayton writes that “[t]he type of love Westerners chase doesn’t, by and large, last. Arranged marriages, on the other hand, have a global divorce rate of about four per cent compared to Australian, American and Canadian figures, which place us at about the 40% figure. So what do do countries such as Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India – where most marriages are arranged – know that we don’t?”
This statistic is not only rubbish, it is insults (through ignorance) the plight of those women who are forced into arranged marriages.
