Via Sacha Blumen, the Australian parliement is keeping the pallalel import restriction in place. The restriction is:

Under Australia's copyright laws, if a locally-based publisher owns the copyright on a book other companies are barred from importing copies from overseas. It is known as a parallel import restriction.

Emerson's media release reads:

The Productivity Commission report acknowledged that removing these restrictions would adversely affect Australian authors, publishers and culture. The Commission recommended extra budgetary funding of authors and publishers to compensate them for this loss.

I thought Australia was a free market economy and in favor of abolishing tariffs. The outcome is that books are very expensive in Australia, stupidly so:

The commission says the current restrictions mean Australian consumers are paying up to 35 per cent more for books than readers in other countries.

This is a nativist subsidy that should be removed.

Just read Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants. I only finished it because I started skipping through it and speed read large sections. The book was uninteresting, long winded and appeared to be someone who was outside of technology to a large extent. One of the so called technology pragmatists trying to work out why technology invades their life so much and what it means to humanity.

It could have been cool, but it read like a wank, was boring, and I think missed. Apparently the guy has a couple of TED talks which I won't be listening to based on my experiences with the book. He coins a new term Technium but there didn't appear to be a good basis for it.

Technology is a fascinating subject; without it humanity didn't rise from the African Savannah to take over the natural environment and bend it to our wills. Without technology there isn't the industrial revolution or the amazing technological pace of the digital revolution which has led to increasing liberalism, improved economic, reduction of poverty and the hope of constant progress in the human condition.

Lost chance on a subject that could have been fascinating. I couldn't finish the book and I love books on technology.

Niall Barr's Pendulum of War is on the Battle of El Alamein in North Africa in World War II. In modern British history this is the battle that swung the momentum of World War II to the allies. Along with Stalingrad and Guadalcanal it is seen as a turning point.

In British political terms it was probably necessary as the industrial and military might of the United States was starting to turn its attention to North Africa and Churchill needed some victory to lay a claim to British military competency.

Barr divides the battle into three phases. Rommel's initial advance against the British, Auchinleck's counter attack offensive and finally Montgomery's successful offensive which is what the battle is known for in British military history.

Rommel's initial success on the advance to Cairo was due to the high quality of his armoured and mechanized troops. Their tanks were superior to the British tanks and the anti-tank guns the British, Australian, New Zealand, South African and Indian forces had.

The anti-tank guns that they British had were only good at very short range and usually required the British to setup traps so that German tanks would literally go past the guns before they fired into the weakly armoured sides and rear of the tanks. With better guns and tanks starting to arrive during the second and third battles it gave the British better chances against the German armour.

One of Rommels tactics was to ruthlessly counter-attack after any Allied advance against his position. One of the problems the British had was that they would advance at night with infantry after clearing a path through the minefields. The infantry would get established, but the tanks and anti-tank guns would not get into place before morning.

When Rommel's tanks and mechanized infantry inevitably counter-attacked the next morning the British infantry would be isolated without armour and anti-tank gun support and either be annihilated or be forced to surrender. The infantry did not like this and often blamed the British tanks for being to slow and not coming forward to support them.

Under Montgomery this was overcome by increased training for the next offensive and by centralized artillery support. Both of these started under Auchinleck but Montgomery did manage to hold off Churchill's impatience until the forces were fully trained as integrated units. When the advances were made in the third battle of El Alamein the infantry was well supported by tank and anti-tank guns as well as a powerful centralized artillery that rained shells down on any counter attack attempts.

Rommel had his own difficulties. He was highly aggressive and advanced multiple times when he should not have but by the Battle of El Alamein he was running out of tanks, German infantry and worse petrol and ammunition.

After the advance from Tobruk he managed to replenish from the British ammunition and supply dumps that he captured along the way which provided him with shells and petrol. After the defeat at the first battle of El Alamein this essentially ran out. During the third battle he was unable to counter attack due to lack of fuel. There was not even enough for his German and Italian armies to retreat as a mechanized force.

Boring. Wouldn't read again or recommend. His earlier years in Vietnam were more interesting than his later recollections of running the special forces and as chief of staff. There were a couple of good anecdotes but none that were worth reading the entire book for.

This book is the recollections of John Henebry of the Third Attack Group in the Pacific during World War II which flew B25s and A20s. It is disappointing to say the least. The book is kind of light, rather trite and doesn't always stand up to historical scrutiny.

It is like he let telling a good story get in the way. This is probably wonderful to a fifteen year old who would enjoy reading a historical adventure rather than someone more interested in the history of what is an important and unique aviation group that influenced bombing doctrine.

Henebry was right there in the Third Attack Group from the very beginning of them being assigned to the South West Pacific [SWPA]. The Third Attack Group was very significant as they changed the doctrine for anti-shipping and airfield strikes in the United States Air Force, in the Pacific and later in Europe as well.

The Third Attack Group under General Kenney and Colonel Pappy Gunn fitted out the B25s with eight 50 caliber machine guns, similar to how the RAAF Beaufighters had a tonne of forward facing firepower. The main difference was that the B25 was a medium bomber and could not only strafe a target but also drop bombs on it.

The other important doctrinal change the Third Attack Group introduced was skip bombing. Again this stemmed from Kenney and Gunn deciding that bombing ships from 7,000 ft was - correctly - ineffective. Bombing them from 30 ft with a delayed fuse was far more effective and this was proven during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea.

Henebry provided some interesting details about squadron life such as the aircraft put together from scraps to do liquor and supply runs to Australia. But other things do not stack up. For instance the Battle of the Bismarck sea was trained for and practiced by RAAF and USAF units so that it was a co-ordinated attack. Henebry writes;

Larner kept strafing in close as he pulled up to clear the masts, he slapped his 500 pounders into the ship. At least one, maybe two or three of his bombs smashed into the side. ...

This sight, in this instant, of this caourageous leader in action set a tremendous example for all to see. Our first successful hit from a minimum altitude was confirmation that General Kenney's and before him Brigadier General Billy Mitchell's controversial theory of attack aviation against enemy shipping was sound. ...

Larner's run had installed in his initially skeptical squadron pilots, and I was included among the doubtful, an immediate confidence in this new tactic. "What the hell", we thought, "if he can do that, so can we." Thus sustained, we each picked a ship and went after it. I made three low level runs, attacking a damaged destroyed and two transports.

That makes it sound like Larner went in alone, hit a ship and then everyone else went in and attacked afterward. It was a coordinated attack though; with the Beaufighters going in just ahead of the Third Attack Group by seconds, strafing the ships to keep anti aircraft fire down and then the B25s that were out fitted for it, coming in directly behind them. Larner appears to be an inspiration leader and a great pilot, but from MacAuley's book, the skip bombing B25s pretty much came in as one group.

John Quiggin's book is largely about how the Great Financial Crisis [GFC] had discredited neoliberalism's excesses yet those policies are persisting despite the empirical evidence of the GFC and the ineffectiveness of neoliberalism's policies to foresee it as well as deal with it.

The book goes through each of the economic theories supporting the policies of The Great Moderation, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium, Trickle-Down Hypothesis and Privatization. I got kind of a bit dull toward the final third as the theories were repetitive. That isn't Quiggin's fault more the dry nature of the subject in creating a consistent thesis.

The book isn't against the social organization technologies of liberal democracy and free markets. The policy prescriptions are quite mild in reality and can probably be adopted without the need for public debate on them. Where that might hit a brick wall is in the United States the Republican Party is increasingly demagogic and not really interested in good governance in my opinion. Then again that is where the zombie part of his thesis appears - something that isn't unique to the American Republican Party, nor America.

Well worth the read and an excellent attempt to inform the political interested but economically dull average reader about the economic theories that have informed economic policy since the 1980s.

Would read again.

I won't be buying this book, but fair dinkum, no wonder the Bush Administration is thought of as the worst in the history of the United States.

Several officials have told me that, when the NSC was about to deal with an issue that Rumsfeld would rather avoid, he'd send to the meeting a deputy who would say that he wasn't authorized to make a decision. (Cheney would handle defeats by going to the Oval Office afterward and persuading Bush to reverse the NSC's decision.) On a number of occasions, the NSC would make a decision--sometimes with Bush present--and Rumsfeld would simply refuse to carry it out.

No-one as really in charge and it showed. The part about Bremer's decision to disband the army and ban the Baathist's from government seems to have come from Cheney as well and went against the policy determined by Bush and the NSC. The incompetence and lack of discipline is staggering.

Bob Lutz was an executive with GM through the turbulent period when they were re-organizing their product line from a series of ull failures to the collapse of the big American car companies with the GFC. His book is an interesting read. It is written in the light modern style, which is a fast read, and often short on details, but it is gripping.

Lutz's politics are a bit crude, and his economic opinions are probably jaundiced by his involvement in the car manufacturing industry but these don't protrude too much in the book. Despite the sensationalist title of the book the real issue at GM was organizational.

Lutz focused on high quality execution and design flair. It takes three and half years for the hugely complex design, engineering and manufacturing enterprise of a car to come to market. The cars that started flowing through at the end of Lutz's time and now are far more exciting, higher quality and producing better sales results that the previous generations of cars.

What Lutz found at GM was that the people there wanted to make great cars, and could make great cars once they were asked, it was just that the organizational dysfunction was so high that people were asked to achieve in such a way that the end result was the opposite of making a great car.

Probably the post child of organizational dysfunction was the Pontiac Aztek. It is a straight out ugly car and should never have been allowed to enter manufacturing once it was obvious how revolting it was. However the organization, its structure, and performance metrics conspired to make cars like the Aztek possible and the norm.

When Lutz was pointing out examples of other manufacturers cars and how thin the gap between the sheet metal was. The head of the pressing group went to the workers running that part of the manufacturing and asked if they could have the same mall gap. It was a small thing to do and apparently those workers had wondered why GM had never done that anyway.

In the later years before Spielman retired, I asked him how the miracle was performed and with so little apparent investment. His answer was an eye opener. "It didn't cost much. We had to upgrade some hemmers [presses that create the folded edge of the outer sheet metal panel over the inner one] fro a crisper hem flange, but mostly it was just explaining it to the supervisors and operators that this is what we wanted. Turns out, they knew how to do it, and actually wondered why we had never asked for that kind of precision before. They were enthusiastic!"

That example is pretty consistent with the nature of the book. When Lutz asked for certain things they came quickly and people wondered why no-one had asked them to do that before. It is an interesting quick read.