http://chrisberg.org Every Point a Good Point Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:40:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The 80 page Senate Committee report into rude words on television is full of bizarre material. Take for instance Media Standards Australia, which believes that the problem with offensive material isn't that it offends people, it is that it exists at all: Sadly, however, the more concerned people do just switch ... http://chrisberg.org/2008/06/21/an-australian-v-chip/ The July 2008 IPA Review will be on the newsstands and in mail boxes within the next week, but a number of articles are available on the new Institute of Public Affairs website. If you're not a subscriber, please consider becoming one! I have two major pieces in this edition: ... http://chrisberg.org/2008/06/20/new-ipa-review-old-ipa-reviews/ It may well be that a third glass of wine dramatically increases the risk of accident and injury to the drinker. But what good are the federal government's new healthy drinking guidelines if they deviate so far from the norm of usual social drinking practices? Surely the purpose of official ... http://chrisberg.org/2008/06/15/devaluing-binge-drinking/ From the 1951 film Home Town Story, now apparently only famous for a minor role by Marilyn Monroe. Link via Craig Newmark. http://chrisberg.org/2008/06/14/but-you-cant-deny-that-you-are-big-business/ eBay announced yesterday that it going to fight the ACCC over its PayPal ruling. I'm not big on internet auctions. But I use the secondhand book site Abebooks a lot. It is in many ways similar to eBay - rather than selling goods directly to consumers, Abebooks just acts as ... http://chrisberg.org/2008/06/14/accc-defending-not-efficiency-but-the-status-quo/ Kevin Rudd has gone to Tokyo and managed to bring the annoucement of Toyota's green car production forward a few months, at the cost of $70 million. But from the government's perspective, what difference does it make if hybrid cars are built in Australia or in, for instance, China? If the ... http://chrisberg.org/2008/06/11/table-thumped/ This sort of makes a mockery of the idea that Melbourne's new 2am lockout is an experiment, doesn't it? Extra police are being allocated to the CDB this weekend to enforce the new laws. But those extra police will no doubt have an effect on the level of violence late ... http://chrisberg.org/2008/06/07/rigging-the-2am-lockout/ I've been forwarded this list of venues exempt from the 2am lockout, so I can't personally verify its accuracy. The list is obviously incomplete. There are nearly 100 venues exempt, but I've only got a list of the first couple of dozen. If I can find more names, I'll try ... http://chrisberg.org/2008/06/07/partial-list-of-bars-exempt-from-2am-lockout/ I have a piece in this month's Quadrant: "Regulation and the Regulatory Burden", as part of their 'How Good Was Howard' series. (It is not, unfortunately, online yet.) At the editor's request, the piece is for the most part drawn from my monograph published earlier this year, The Growth of ... http://chrisberg.org/2008/06/05/quadrant-piece-regulation-and-the-regulatory-burden/ There's a passage in the preface of Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky's classic Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland which strikes me as particularly important: Policies imply theories. Whether stated explicitly or not, policies point to a chain of causation between initial conditions and future consequences. ... http://chrisberg.org/2008/06/03/policy-making-and-binge-drinking/