Bishop verses the professor. In her March 27 Fairfax column, Julie Bishop cites Canadian professor Simon Donner on climate change and the role of China. Donner has responded on his blog:

“Now had the Deputy Leader or her staff or whomever writes the posts in her name contacted me or, say, done more than typed ‘china’s emissions pledge’ into Google (the post comes up #3, at least from here), she may have learned that many international policy experts think it is reasonable to allow nations with developing economies to set targets based on emissions intensity. I’ve written numerous posts arguing just that…

“The moral here is not what I wrote. The moral here is that Australians should be just horrified that by the lack of research and analysis being done by the opposition parties on the carbon tax proposal. They should not be citing a two-year old blog post written by a Canadian university professor for which the data is now out of date. I’d guess it took me about 20 minutes to do the analysis and write that post. Certainly that’s not too much time to spend working on your position on a critical policy proposal.”

Stacking the shelves: one story. I worked for a chap several years back who thought all his Christmases had come at once when he got a contract with one of the big retail chains. Within 12 months he was bleeding from every orifice. The deal struck with the big chain had wafer thin margins, lots of penalty clauses on delivery, etc. Nothing wrong with that in a lot of regards, he went in with his eyes wide open but it dominated his business so much that his “real” business got squeezed until it pretty much disappeared and he had become reliant on the chain business. And then they pulled the pin without warning.

BigPond bill? Don’t believe it. This is the second spam message I’ve had from “BigPond” in the past week or so. I presume it’s gone to other BigPond users too. You’d think the filters might stop fake billing messages going to their customers…