The Rugby State of Origin game was last night. You can tell the tourists are in town, from the number of cars with interstate numberplates rolling unwittingly down Swanston Street Walk, and the confused questions on the tram about using the ticket machines, and getting to St Kilda Beach.

Oh yeah, I just got a camera phone. So now I’ll have a camera with me virtually everywhere I go.

Ten years ago, I was in the States for a few weeks, and I recall a big concert to raise funds to give citizens camcorders, to capture the next big Rodney King beating-style incident. To help bring justice to the masses. Funny to think these days the technology’s so cheap many people have cameras in their phones.

Has it brought justice to the masses? Well increasingly images make the news these days, and the media are certainly making more and more use of pictures provided by the general public.

Stephen J Dubner writes on the Freakonomics blog:

He [Warren Buffett] was explaining why he wanted to give so much money [US$31 billion] to a foundation that mainly tries to alleviate poverty. “A market system has not worked in terms of poor people,” Buffett said.

Coming from Buffett, this statement isn’t much of a shock. But it certainly is an indictment—of the free-market system that has made so many people like Buffett very, very rich (though not as rich as him), of the system that so many economists and businesspeople and politicians and journalists believe in on so many dimensions, including its ability to help poor people stop being poor.

So much for trickle-down economics.

It would be nice to think that in Australia the safety net provided by Medicare and Social Security is a little better, but you still see the homeless out and about (even in winter), so it’s apparent that the worst-off in our society still need some help from the citizenry. Not to mention the impoverished nations of the world.

Warren Buffett I ain’t, but I could probably do better with my donation regime (currently outsourced to Community Aid Abroad/Oxfam, and the Salvation Army).