A rather silly article in the Fin (Gloria Jean’s, purveyor of crap coffee in paper cups is described as ‘the leader in the specialty coffee market’, on the strength of its 140 food-court outlets), contains the gratifying news that Starbucks’ assault on the Australian market has been a failure so far. After opening 37 stores out of a promised 50 the purchaser of the franchise has given up and handed it back to Starbucks Central.

A couple of indicators of the problems ahead of Starbucks here.

First, the Qantas in-flight magazine I read on a recent trip had lots of restaurant reviews for visitors to Australian cities. Most included advice on both the brand of coffee served and the quality of preparation and service – the wine list was mentioned only occasionally.

Second, there’s the ubiquity of high-quality espresso. The Fin article I mentioned claimed that the number of cafes had declined marginally in the last couple of years, but if that’s true it’s only because espresso machines have become a universal feature the landscape. In my little corner of Brisbane I have a choice of buying my coffee at the Faculty rooftop cafe, the fish-and-chip shop, the bakery, the deli, the bookshop and the garden centre, not to mention a couple of dozen cafes and restaurants. Meanwhile, judging by the average news story on the subject, Starbucks thinks it’s competing with Gloria Jeans and McCafe.

I’ve just had my first experience of public WiFi (I’ve had a little home Airport network for some time) and I think this may be, as others have suggested, the Next Big Thing. (First poster to say “Huh! I was doing this five years ago!” does not get a prize!)

It’s still expensive (though I understand there are ways of getting access for free if you know what to do) and coverage is still very limited. The other problem in getting properly untethered is the limited battery life of full-scale laptops – alternatives with miniature screens and keyboards/keypads are not for me.

Having got enthusiastic over one technology, I have to maintain my generally technosceptic stance by debunking another, and what better than yet another Internet-enabled fridge story. This is one about a proposed fridge with a webcam inside it. I’ve got used to the idea of bedroom and bathroom webcams by now, but a fridge webcam sounds as if it could be truly gross!

In any case, this got me thinking: What is it with gee-whiz technology journalists and fridges ? I suppose the answer is that it’s marginally less implausible than an Internet-ready microwave oven. But as a public service, I’m going to attempt a once-for-all debunking of the idea of Internet-enabled white goods and similar appliances.

There are two potential applications worth considering. The first is the idea of a fridge that will check its contents, note shortfalls and time-expired items and order replacements from the supermarket. This is silly for two reasons. First, the fridge can’t tell whether the milk is all gone or whether the kids forgot to put it back after making their breakfast cereal. Second, a superior technology is available now if anyone wants it. All you need is a barcode scanner and off-the-shelf inventory software. You swipe items as they enter the inventory and again when they are used. Assuming the existence of stores set up for automated phone orders, the last bit would be easy.

This approach covers all grocery items not just refrigerated goods, and is cheap and relatively easy. If you’re prepared to work a bit harder you can home-brew the software, do the data entry manually and you get the whole thing for free. My Dad actually implemented such a system a decade or so ago and ran it for several years, but got tired of it in the end. For most people, even cheap and off the shelf, this would not be worth the effort.

The other possibility is remote control – telling the oven to turn on an hour before you get home for dinner and so on. Again this is pretty much feasible already, using home automation systems such as X-10 and again very few people bother. The problem is that a disciplined person can achieve most of the required functionality with simple timers and a disorganised person will generally find it easier to wait until they get home.

The big exception to all of this is communications and entertainment. I’m not talking here about the silly idea of convergence in which the TV set, computer and phone would merge (if you think about, the potential benefit of this is the saving of one screen). Rather its the idea that instead of having to negotiate a badly-designed interface, different for each system, whenever you want to control, say, a video, you should be able to manage all your digital media from a system designed for flexible control, that is, a computer.

Thanks to the magic of Trackback, I’ve been prematurely alerted to a new blog setup by Chris Sheil, late of Troppo Armadillo. The name Back Pages, and the fact that at least some of the posts are recycled suggests that this is still in the testing phase and may be some sort of “Best Of” site, but hopefully the fact that it’s on air means that Chris will be back in full voice shortly.

Update It was, as I speculated, a test site, and I’ve removed the link at Chris’ request. The Real Thing, he promises will be coming Real Soon Now.

I was stunned by this piece from The Economist when it came out, and expected a furore. But, with the inevitable exception of Tim Dunlop and the unsurprising exception of Nathan Newman, no-one else seems to have noticed (Nathan’s post did get one link, from abulsme.com).

I find this startling. Far more than debates about imminence or WMDs, and even more than the daily drip of guerilla attack and counterattack, the success or failure of the US policy in Iraq depends on getting the economy moving. Any attempts in this direction are doomed to failure, if, as The Economist asserts, the occupying forces have a policy of not employing Iraqis

If this story is correct, and representative of the policies of the occupation forces in general, it’s time to abandon the “you broke it, you own it” stance I’ve advocated previously. Rather than pursue a strategy that is doomed to be an expensive failure, it would be better to pull out immediately, and let the chips fall where they may.

UpdateSteve Edwards also has a good comment on this, and on the US Democrats proposal to turn half the aid to Iraq into loans (I anticipated this some time ago, but not that it would come from the Dems).

The debate on road safety has been lively, and has certainly helped me to sharpen my ideas on the subject. In particular, I’ve gone back to the most recent source of controversy, the proposal for banks of speed cameras on the Victorian section of the Hume Highway which would be able to check a driver’s average speed over sections of the Highway. The main effect would be to make it impossible to speed consistently (given fixed locations, the cameras don’t have much affect on such things as speeding up to overtake and so on).

This is a relatively straightforward case for cost-benefit analysis. People who formerly travelled at above the speed limit will go slower and take more time. On the other hand, since this will reduce both average speed and speed variance, there will be less accidents.

For the costs, I’ve assumed 15 000 cars per year, 20 per cent of whom speed consistently, maintaining an average of 130km/h (vs a limit of 110). I’ve given them a value of time saved of $20/hour (higher than is standard), and I estimate an annual cost of $10 million per year from enforcing the limit.

As already noted, the cost per life lost is above $20 million, between $5 million and $10 million so we only need to prevent one or two fatalities per year to get benefits>costs (there have been about 8 deaths per year in the last five years).

A slightly more involved calculation shows that the net externality generated by speeders and other dangerous drivers on the Hume is around half the total damage incurred from accidents (the actual cost incurred by safe drivers + the extra costs of defensive driving). On standard “pollution tax” arguments, the fine revenue that ought to be collected from the Hume, net of enforcement costs is therefore around $50 million per year.

This post has been updated to correct for an erroneous value-of-life calculation in the original version

My column in today’s Fin (subscription required) is about work and work intensity. The takeaway

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Average working hours for full-time employees increased from 42 to 45 hours a week between 1982 and the mid-1990s, levelled out, and have declined slightly over the past two years. It is reasonable to assume that work intensity has followed a broadly similar pattern.

The productivity statistics reflect the easing-off in effort. The best single measure is multifactor productivity, which takes account of capital inputs and working hours, but not of changes in work intensity. After two decades of fairly poor performance, ABS estimates of showed a strong increase in multifactor productivity from the end of the recession in 1992 to the late 1990s, when work hours and work intensity reached their peak.

In the last few years, however, as work intensity has eased off, so has (measured) productivity growth. The figures have bounced about, but the average rate of multifactor productivity growth since 1998-99 has been below 1 per cent.

Can the Howard government claim, then, to have delivered a relaxed and comfortable Australia? Certainly it could not do so on the basis of its first term in office. The government ditched its pre-election commitments as Înon-coreâ and used the Black Hole and the Commission of Audit to justify a new round of reforms and Budget cuts. But the pace of reform has eased significantly since then.

Many commentators have criticised the slowing pace of reform, arguing that it has contributed to slower productivity growth. They may be right, but a slowing pace of reform, along with worker resistance to the erosion of leisure time, has also contributed to more Îrelaxation and comfortâ.

The news seems to be particularly bleak at present with continuing bushfires, impending war, the rail crash of a few days ago with nine people dead and now the loss of the Space Shuttle with all on board. As this list indicates, the news tends to made up mostly of the bad things that are happening at any given time, while good things tend not to be news.

Rereading the comments thread from this post on Australia and Indonesia three months ago, I was struck by the universally gloomy tone regarding the prospects for Indonesian democracy and the survival of Indonesia as a state.

Only three months later prospects seem a lot better. As Scott Wickstein has noted, the Indonesian police have confounded expectations with their success in catching not only those directly involved in the Bali bombing, but those further up the hierarchy (no-one convicted yet, but the evidence seems pretty damning).

In the process, the whole trend towards militant Islamism seems to have been halted. Not only has much of Abu Bashir’s JI network been arrested but the equally nasty Laskar Jihad group, responsible for thousands of deaths in communal rioting announced its disbandment shortly after Bali. Disappointingly, its leader was just acquitted on a charge of inciting religious violence but the disbandment seems to have been permanent.

Even more surprisingly, the cease-fire in Aceh seems to be holding for the most part, though there have been the inevitable incidents.

The economy is still in a mess, but the crisis period is past. An essential part of the transition to stable democracy is the recognition that the economy is going to be in a mess a good deal of the time and that neither generals nor revolutionaries are likely to fix it. It’s my optimistic impression that this fact is beginning to sink in with the Indonesian public and, equally importantly, with the military. Demonstrations against recent cuts in subsidies are, or at least should be, part of the democratic process.

In the end, it seems impossible to balance good and bad news. We must grieve for those who have lost loved ones in the latest tragedies without giving way to despair or giving up the hope of making things better.

Nick Minchin doesn’t seem like a fool to me. So why is he the latest to push the idea of reducing the size of the Senate in the hope of securing majority control? This Fin Report (subscription required) has

Federal Finance Minister Nick Minchin has suggested reducing the size of the Senate to make it easier for the coalition to get controversial pieces of legislation through the upper house.

A smaller Senate, and even more, a return to the winner-takes-all system that prevailed for the first few decades after Federation would guarantee that a major party would control the Senate, but this is a lousy idea for a government to proposed. It’s pretty much an even-money bet that the opposition, and not the government, would be the party controlling the Senate.

Whatever complaints Minchin may have about the current Senate, it’s nothing to the situation that previaled last time we had an Opposition-controlled Senate (between 1972 and 1975). Apart from twice forcing the Whitlam government to elections by blocking or threatening to block supply, the Senate was routinely obstructionist to an extent that makes the frustrations Minchin is experiencing seem like fleabites.

Why then is Minchin pushing the idea? In general, proposals to strengthen the executive come from governments that have been in office too long, and forget they will one day be in Opposition. This proposal actually has more dangers for governments than for oppositions, but I suspect it derives from the same mindset.

I’ve been using Barnes & Noble’s online bookstore for a while, but now I’m going to switch to Amazon. The reason is simple and annoying. B&N have changed their search facility to give approximate matches. For example a search for “Quiggin” produces over 1000 matches, the top ones being books by/about Quinn, Quin-Harkin, Queen Noor and so on. “John Quiggin” works better, but I don’t always know the first names of authors whose books I want to buy. In any case, I don’t like being treated like a moron

You might think from typing “Quinzii” that you want Magill and Quinzii’s Theory of Incomplete Markets, but our computer says you probably meant Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, illustrated by Quentin Blake. Well, no, I already have that one, I really did mean Quinzii

I tried voice, writing a complaint the first time I ran into this, but I got no response and the system is still the same. so I’m opting for exit.

By contrast, Amazon gives a listing of exact matches and gives alternatives only if there aren’t any exact matches. This is the kind of treatment I prefer.

I spent much of last week in the Snowy Mountains with my family (the Powerbook came too, of course, so I kept up at least some blogging). It was the first time we’d been back since the devastating fires in January. Large areas are still closed off, and signs of fire are everywhere. Fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of a eucalypt forest, and signs of regeneration were already evident in many of the places we visited. But some of my favorite spots, such as the mountain ash forests around Round Mountain, are probably gone for good. This is the second fire in twenty years and it’s unlikely that new seed has been set. Even if they do come back, it will be decades before they regain anything like their former state.

As is inevitable with such a disaster, fingers have been pointed in all directions, notably at the National Parks and Wildlife Service for not burning off vigorously enough and at global warming for the extreme severity of the drought and hot weather conditions that led to the fire disaster. I’m keeping an open mind on the relationship between drought and global warming. Looking at the way the fire burnt through grassland as well as bush, I’m doubtful that any regime of controlled burning could have mitigated this fire much, unless it was so extreme as to fundamentally change the character of the Park.