Sociable Ducks etc, Dunedin, Land-Rents and Socialism, +1 Interesting.

Attended Simon Lay's Peiking Duck restaurant last week with caseopaya, recumbenteer, Louise B, Robyn M. and Anthony L.. Had the opportunity to practise a little Tetum. Followed up latter with a dinnner with Brendan E., which included watching Contact and The Walking Dead.

Settlement for our planned retirement home in Dunedin finally achieved after quite a saga. Now we know the cost of not implementing the resource rents as originally proposed. $60 billion over the next ten years extracted from useful labour, and productive investment and reductions in public goods and services. BHP is laughing all the way to the bank. Even as a landowner, I still vastly prefer the socialisation of land-rents over any taxation. It is a thoroughly just form of socialism as it concentrates on what is common property by birthrate and collects the value in an equitable manner; those moral justifications are aside to its efficiency and effectiveness.

Neglected to mention in the last post my attendance at the Melbourne Atheist Society to hear Rick Barkers excellent talk on changes to the Australian "fitness landscape" and specifically the extinction of the megafauna (including everyone's favourite, the diprotodon optatum). Apropos, last two services at the Unitarians consisted of a rather conspiratorial talk on HAARP and a somewhat lightweight discussion on US military bases and independence. Discussion on Russia: The First Socialist Country continues. Livejournal socialists group has its own debate on the nature and character of the Soviet Union.

Very interesting talk on how to by-pass password-locked screensavers... on Linux (recumbenteer). Wikipedia protects your right to evil (from reddragdiva). Somewhat amusing article on the Nine Traits of a veteran UNIX admin (sounds rather like Buddha's "eightfold path" or similar).