Tag Archives: Boneheaded stupidity

The combination of budget cuts and market ideology has been a disaster for vocational education in Australia. That’s the shorter version of a piece for Inside story based on my submission to the SA TAFE Senate inquiry. Update: On the same day this article appeared, Labor has come out with a call for a major inquiry encompassing both unis and TAFEs. Whether or not my past advocacy had anything to do with this, it’s a welcome outcome.

I can remember when the @NationalFarmers Federation was an intellectual force to be reckoned with. Now, its response to a detailed critique of the Murray Darling Basin Plan is lame abuse. It reminds me of this classic Monty Python skit

I have a piece in Crikey (reproduced over the fold) under the title ‘Our spy agencies know less about cybersecurity than the Daily Mail‘. The central point is that our leading cybersecurity agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, has just rolled out a policy requiring users of government agency websites to change their passwords every 90 days and to use composition rules based on a mix of alphanumeric and special characters. As even the Daily Mail has pointed out, these practices are...

Fighting zombies is a tiresome business. Even when you think you’ve finally killed them, they bounce back as often as not. But it has to be done, and there are some benefits. When you see a supposedly serious person or organization pushing zombie ideas, it’s an indication that nothing they put out should be presumed to be serious. There can be few zombies more thoroughly undead than nuclear power in general, except for the idea that nuclear power is a sensible option for Australia. The...

Home > Boneheaded stupidity, World Events > Millennials are people, not clones Millennials are people, not clones August 11th, 2017 John Quiggin Leave a comment Go to comments The Washington Post has an article on millennial attitudes to Trump, broken down by race/ethnicity. The results won’t surprise anybody who’s been paying even minimal attention. Other things equal, millennials are even more hostile to Trump than Americans...