I saw this in the paper today. It tells us that Australia's own Gina Reinhart is now officially the world's richest woman. Hooray! Her fortune now stands at almost 30 billion dollars. For people like this, how much is enough? And what does she personally do that makes her worth this sort of money? Does she dig holes? Carry ore around? Serve customers? Do the books? Does she do anything useful? I know some will argue that she generates wealth for others by being an astute operator, and thus providing jobs and paying taxes. That may be so, but does that really make her worth $30 billion? That's...

Religious people often claim that atheists can't possibly have a moral compass that will guide us to behave well, since we have no God to tell us what is right and what's wrong. I find it ironic, therefore, to read in today's Age an article about a Rabbi at a Jewish college here in Melbourne who "has changed his evidence about his knowledge of alleged paedophilia and conceded he was aware in the early 2000s of rumours that a former security guard had molested children". Suffice it to say that the subject of the rumours was not immediately reported to the police. What would you do if there were...

It seems to me that a lot of the problems caused by democracy (corruption, lack of representation, mindless politicking, fear and loathing campaigns, dog-whistling, short-termism etc) are attributable to the fact that our parliamentry system is based on very old technology - the idea that the only way the voice of the people can be heard is for those people to be organised by geographical areas where all will vote for a single person who will go and represent them and their area in a parliament somewhere. What this causes is a concentration of power in the hands of a few, most of whom we actually...