First ever vote involving grassroots members means Victorian rightwinger will lead Australian Labor party into opposition

Bill Shorten will take the Australian Labor party into opposition after the September election defeat, having prevailed in the first leadership ballot in the party's history that included the votes of grassroots party members.

Shorten's victory was built on strong endorsement from the ALP parliamentary caucus, where he attracted 63.95% of the vote.

The rival candidate, the New South Wales leftwinger and former deputy prime minister Anthony Albanese, was the wider party members' choice, securing almost 60% support in the grassroots ballot.

Shorten, the Victorian rightwinger, emerged on Sunday victorious with 52.02% of the combined vote. The two ballots, from caucus and the members, held equal weight.

Bugger.

A few weeks again, the opposite happened in NZ : David Cunliffe was elected leader of the NZLP. He had the support of a majority of the membership and of the affiliated unions, and is alleged to be to the left of the other main candidate, who had majority support among MPs.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

British citizens sent threatening `get out' texts by Home Office | Political Scrapbook http://t.co/4NIFS2fFx2 | Jesus wept.

— Anna H. (@drlangtry_girl) October 15, 2013

As we enter the home stretch, the dynamic is only reinforcing itself. The Tea Partiers have become steadily more delusional, reminding the pragmatists how insane it was to lock arms with them in the first place. "When I was home, I talked with people in our office that called in, I don't get the sense that 70 percent [of people blame us]," House conservative Jim Jordan told Politico last week. (Good point!) On Sunday, the loonies in the House seized on a report that a mob of patriots overran the World War II Memorial and reclaimed it for ... well, for whom isn't entirely clear. But the loons in the House promptly labeled it a "game changer," according to National Review's Robert Costa. To them, it was the latest sign that the country sees things their way.

The pragmatists are, in turn, only becoming more anxious. Costa reports that aides to Mitch McConnell now worry they'll have to make concessions on the sequester just to end the current crisis, whereas they'd previously assumed they could leave the sequester in place and trade it for entitlement cuts in a future grand bargain.

What Costa doesn't discuss is the Republican leadership's incentives, which is the final, poetic wrinkle in all of this. McConnell and Boehner, in addition to understanding how badly the Tea Partiers have hurt their party, have yet another reason to sue for peace. McConnell is facing a Tea Party primary challenge in his re-election campaign. Boehner has been repeatedly embarrassed by the Tea Partiers in his caucus, who have actively sabotaged his leadership (egged on/manipulated by Texas Senator Ted Cruz). Both men know their side has lost. Both men also know their party's fanatics are to blame. Do you think they don't want to see the Tea Party humiliated before all is said and done? Do you think they might want to see the Tea Partiers stuck with all the blame?

This was backstage, let them get into the song.

The two speaker units were on a stand facing one direction.  When the tablet computer was taken to the area where the speakers were directed, a web page introduction would instantly appear on the screen.  If you got close enough to the speakers, you could hear a narration of the research too.

The small supersonic wave speakers lined up on the panel act as transducers and are able to put together digital information as well as sound by switching from audible to inaudible ultrasonic frequencies at high speeds.

This system is known as a parametric speaker acoustical system.  Basically, SteganoSonic takes those inaudible supersonic waves and loads them with digital information, such as a website URL, and sends it to the tablet terminal.

We are the Pirates Party and we are in favour of file-sharing but obviously no one of sound mind would form a party solely for the purpose of sharing files. Now we have it and it works perfectly, however, the problem is that in this attempt to block file sharing, our basic rights have come under attack.
The European institutions, the European Commission in particular, are consulting widely and asking openly and everyone is entitled to respond and say what they think regarding the various topics ... The problem is that once all these responses have been gathered, what usually happens here in Brussels is that they start listening to the lobby groups acting on behalf of the large corporations and then, 99 times out of a 100 the Commission will go ahead and propose whatever these lobby groups say.
The Swedish Pirates Party was established on the first of January 2006. It was originally founded by Rick Falkvinge. It was enough to hear that name for me to understand that there was no way I could stay away and, given my activist background, it was perfectly natural for me to join. So I switched on the computer, I went onto the website and yes, lo and behold, the party's programme was precisely what I expected, so everything went on from there. In June 2009 we got 7% of the vote in the European elections, which entitled us to 2 seats in the European Parliament.
Our greatest success, in my opinion, was the blocking of the ACTA(*). The reasons for this success lies in the fact that hundreds of people from all over Europe took to the streets and many people sent e-mails to the members of European Parliament. It is easy to think "I'm just one citizen amongst many and whatever I do doesn't really make any difference", but that's wrong because it makes a huge difference, especially in the European Parliament since the members of the European Parliament are not answerable to any political party, they make decisions independently and when they realise that there is something that the citizens feel particularly strongly about, they take that into account. From 2009 to 2012 we worked on ACTA right here in Parliament. We carried on regardless and we tried to tell the people outside what was going on so that the interested activists could follow what was happening and that is what made the demonstrations possible at the opportune time. It's a bit like in the Disney film "Mulan", when the emperor says "The outcome of this war may depend on one individual soldier or on a grain of rice" and, in the case of ACTA, we turned out to be that grain of rice. We, beginning with the Pirates Party, have a sound proposal to legalise file-sharing and reform copyright.
When I came to the European Parliament I joined the Greens Group as an independent ... and we scored a major success by convincing the Greens Group to adopt our file-sharing policy as its official line here in Parliament. It's true, the Greens only have 7% of the seats in Parliament, however, the fact that we are here, on the inside, and that we can discuss issues with the others on a daily basis, means that we have an opportunity to share our ideas, which is the only way to get through and achieve something in politics. It is obvious that, on our own, we will never be a majority so we can only win if other parties steal our programme and copy our ideas and that's precisely what we're working on. It's very encouraging that we have achieved this with at least one of the groups. These days the Internet constitutes the largest piece of information infrastructure that we have and should be taken seriously, as part of our world, because that's what it is.
In order for democracy to work, we need citizens that question absolutely everything and that cannot happen where information is lacking.

yes

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Labour: after identifying labour supply, a measure of `equilibrium' unemployment rate, the so-called NAWRU (non-accelerating wage rate of unemployment), is used to estimate the sustainable level of employment. NAWRU is estimated with a statistical technique;

In the United States, 7.4% of total compensation of employees in 2012 went to people working in the finance and insurance industries. Whether or not that percentage is too high, the real issue is that the share is even higher among the most educated and accomplished people, whose activities may be economically and socially useless, if not harmful.

...

According to a study by Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef, much of the increase in financial activity has taken place in the more speculative fields, at the expense of traditional finance. From 1950 to 2006, credit intermediation (lending, including traditional banking) declined relative to "other finance" (including securities, commodities, venture capital, private equity, hedge funds, trusts, and other investment activities like investment banking). Moreover, wages in "other finance" skyrocketed relative to those in credit intermediation.

...

... these people's activities also impose costs on the rest of us. Indeed, a 2011 paper by Patrick Bolton, Tano Santos, and José Scheinkman argues that a significant amount of speculation and deal-making is pure rent-seeking. In other words, it is wasteful activity that achieves nothing more than enabling the collection of rents on items that might otherwise be free.