Eric Crampton
@EricCrampton
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Chief Economist at the NZ Initiative. Adjunct Senior Fellow, Economics, @ucnz . If this ship sinks: @EricCrampton @mastodon .social or @ericcrampton .bsky.social
Wellington, New Zealand
Joined June 2009
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A useful counterpoint to the "But NZ and Taiwan are islands!" people.
I still can't get over how stark the divide in COVID-19 cases between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is. It's been like this for *months*.
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Love the answer from Bloomfield. If a 15 year old shows up at a vax centre without a parent and wants to be vaccinated, the kid will be encouraged to get parental consent, but will be allowed to be vaccinated without it.
Kids shouldn't be blocked vax for having crazy parents.
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Not sure the boy's answer on 8 is quite what they were looking for.
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@LMcLachlan60
@BushelsPerAcre
I suspect this guy would not be dumping milk if it were legal for him to supply it to anyone other than DFO. Seems very odd to say government has nothing to do with it, when government makes it illegal for him to sell to anyone else.
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The energy cost to desalinate enough seawater for the typical US household is on par with the energy cost of running that household's refrigerator.
Sufficiently cheap energy means no water scarcity in places close to coastlines. And even at normal energy cost, it's feasible.
desalination is already supplying nearly all the drinking water in places like israel and saudi arabia — and yet it is still massively under-discussed and misunderstood
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Israeli embassy is upstairs.
Building maintenance guy cleaning eggs off the front of the building this morning and hosing down the sidewalk.
If you're egging on the anniversary of the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, you're not anti-Zionist. You're anti-semitic.
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The December Journal of Economic Literature has a review of the Kelton book on MMT. I expect I'll be using this tweet in reply to that stuff for some time to come.
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A petition from every person in NZ who will RT this, to
@jacindaardern
, please help us.
@NZNationalParty
took away the only cold medication that works. The ban did nothing to stop meth.
You could give us back pseudoephedrine. It would cost you nothing.
Please?
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NZ is a tiny trading country that depends on open sea lanes.
We are making a tiny contribution toward keeping the Suez route open.
Labour and the Greens, along with RNZ's preferred experts, are opposed. FFS.
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New Zealand deployed 200 firefighters to help in the bushfires there. I think the last of them came home in January.
You really are a bunch of utter arseholes, Australia, aren't you?
Coronavirus: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says no change in Australia's stance to New Zealanders
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@FiqhTabayyun
I had the distinct honour of meeting Shrek, the King of All Sheep, at the Woolly Munchers Festival a few years ago.
But there are no wolves in New Zealand. Maybe one of the zoos has a wolf, but there are zero predators for sheep here other than particularly ambitious parrots.
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Dear
@auditor_general
,
Can your office please check just what the hell is going on with the Mahuta family and public sector contracting?
If
@kehetauhauaga
and
@MacnamaraKate
's work bears up, New Zealand is a fundamentally corrupt country.
If it doesn't, the air needs clearing.
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New Zealand's public health people are engaging in a bit of revisionist history about Labour's tobacco prohibition, now that it's being reversed by the incoming government.
A couple aide memoires here.
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You may not be surprised to hear this is a Jones Act story...
All across Alaska, people are seeing signs like this in stores.
Why? Because a single ship, the North Star, is temporarily down for repairs.
Why would a single ship being down cause a shortage crisis for an entire state?
Because thanks to a ridiculous law that passed 104 years
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It will be worth paying extraordinarily close attention to the content regulation regime that's due to be announced very soon.
I understand it went to Cabinet yesterday then got punted back to to Dept Internal Affairs as some were nervous about it.
We should be nervous about it.
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It should not be illegal for the victim of a crime to truthfully state the name of the person who assaulted her.
1/2 Incredibly the young man who assaulted a 70 year-old grandma at the Posie Parker event has been discharged today, without conviction, and has received permanent name suppression.
The inability for a victim to speak about assault and name the offender is salt in a raw wound.
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Ignore the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Unwinding Labour's planned tobacco prohibition is excellent.
We will have one fewer prohibition than we otherwise might have had.
Prohibition doesn't work well.
Those on the left normally recognise this.
C'mon people.
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Man I love this place.
Old grouchy looking guy walking down Lambton Quay with a giant placard on a stick.
But the placard had a big picture of the PM, partner and baby, inscribed, "Good Luck Jacinda and Clarke!"
I love happy placards.
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As expected. Unfortunately.
Aotearoa New Zealand 🇳🇿is deeply concerned at the outbreak of conflict between Israel and Gaza. We call for the immediate cessation of violence. The protection of all civilians, and upholding of international humanitarian law is essential.
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Vic Uni is looking to fire about 250 staff.
One simple thing govt could do to support the uni, which would cost ZERO DOLLARS: remove the heritage designation from the Gordon Wilson Flats and rezone.
Then Uni could accept bids from developers to put up student residences.
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Before the 80s reforms, NZ had rules banning moving freight more than 150km by truck.
It was a particularly dumb and costly way of subsidising rail. We'd point to it in lectures as example of the obvious awfulness of the pre-80s NZ rules.
And yet...
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Oh my this is good.
Now think about whether the typical soundbite from an economist is as long as a short cab ride, or a long one.
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Not for the first time, I plead that news outlets provide this kind of context when reporting on potential cuts at various Ministries and Agencies. It isn't that hard.
Oh man how will the Ministry for Pacific People cope with a 50% reduction in staff
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Sepuloni wonders if 40% staff cuts at Min Pacific Peoples is a prelude to abolishing the department.
A public broadcaster worth public funding might have mentioned that that cut would still leave the Ministry with way more staff than it had in 2019.
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Mike Hosking asked Immigration Minister
@KrisinMana
why we can't just give residence to everyone who has been here with us since last year's lockdown.
The Minister said it's a balancing act with MIQ.
The question was about people who are already here.
Par for this course.
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RNZ news bulletin reporting on massive increases in tobacco smuggling and increasing sophistication of smuggling techniques, quoting NZ Customs.
Thought two weeks ago RNZ had been claiming that such reports were just tobacco industry disinformation.
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Imagine if a braver New Zealand Prime Minister had made a similar statement during NZ's cannabis referendum.
Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. Hear from
@POTUS
on the three steps he is taking to right these wrongs.
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@AlecStapp
@calebwatney
Your candy desk is filled with actual candy.
New Zealand's Biscuit Tin of Democracy no longer contains actual biscuits.
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Today's 1pm Presser making it even clearer that the unvaccinated could hold the country to ransom.
At 80% vaccinated, lockdowns still likely to avoid catastrophic hospital outcomes.
At 90%, likely not.
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The price of meth was about $700/gram when John Key banned cold medicine.
It's now around $400/gram.
Pretty hard to claim that the ban on cold medicine affects meth availability.
We have been stuck with this useless ban for over a decade.
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I'm not stealing the car that Bloomfield ordered and paid for. I'm just consolidating his order from the dealership into my stock, and will distribute it to whoever I think worthy sometime down the track.
Bloomfield says the Govt is not "requisitioning" tests but that "forward orders" are being "consolidated into the Government's stock". But will then be distributed back to businesses.
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Why do Wellington journalists seem to care way more about getting a copy of National's internal report on how the party runs itself than in getting a copy of the workings underpinning the Climate Commission's proposed restructuring of the entire economy?
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New Zealand Housing Minister
@cjsbishop
has signaled that corner stores and cafes are going to be authorised everywhere in every major and semi-major city in the country.
In my latest
@DNewsOpinion
, I talk about the property rights we have lost, including the right to build corner stores, home-based businesses, and starter homes.
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Either Hipkins is an idiot, or Hipkins thinks voters are idiots.
Watch as Chris Hipkins shares details about Labour's new tax policy and plans to boost Working for Families.
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Next time, do not fill in your census on time.
Wait two months.
@Stats_NZ
will give you some kind of prize if you wait to fill it in, rather than doing it on time.
Warriors tickets for stragglers as StatsNZ tries for 90 percent Census
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Affordable housing means people can settle down in their 20s and start families.
Boomers who exist thanks to the ability to get more housing built in the 40s and 50s now block new housing and, in doing so, prevent potential great-grandchildren from coming into existence.
The Baby Boom was not caused by WW2 ending. It began before that.
So what did cause it? Easier domestic life, better maternal healthcase, and cheaper houses, say
@PMArslanagic
and
@ASarygulov
.
And we can learn from that about how to boost births today.
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Queenstown is a stupid place.
1. Planners block apartments in Queenstown because the developer wanted to build too many apartments going too high.
2. There's nowhere to live in Queenstown so workers leaving.
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Damned shame that we don't get to see Tremain's work in the papers any more.
This one's spot on.
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+1 for rule of law in NZ, where the police arrested the Justice Minister.
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If Labour had recommended ending the ban on GE, would RNZ have asked anti-GMO activists for comment? Or would they have gone to the current or former Chief Science Advisor?
Pushback against National's genetic modification plans
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I do not understand how a convention centre is higher in the priority queue than fixing the water and wastewater pipes.
With construction resuming under Level 3, we'll soon be getting stuck into some exciting infrastructure projects including the Convention and Exhibition Centre, Town Hall and St James. Read about progress of our key projects here:
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Hi
@nzherald
. Is there any way I can pay you a monthly online subscription fee and, in exchange, you never ever autoplay a video ever again?
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Long thought extinct, hunted by relentless introduced predators that also destroy the habitat, a single conservative-leaning council staffer has been found in the wild.
The proper authorities have duly tagged this endangered specimen, largely for the predators' benefit.
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This week's column
@NewsroomNZ
is now ungated.
It was pretty obvious that they'd really taken no advice about how to deal with diesel.
So I put in a request.
And found that officials were given about 20 hours to work up details, Sunday afternoon.
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Lotta people damning economists for pointing out that getting inflation back under control is likely going to be painful.
Wish that some of them had listened to the economists warning, with foresight, that RBNZ was going off the rails and that fixing the mess would hurt.
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New Zealand's justice system is a farce. Absolute farce.
Mentally ill man beaten, stabbed by Black Power in McDonald's for wearing red
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I hear so much fatalistic "Oh we're all going to get it. Might as well give up on even trying."
We don't all have to get it.
I also managed to stop covid inside my home last month. Roommate positive; I never caught it. In case it’s useful this is what I did:
1. Kept window open 24/7 in shared living space
2. Texted to coordinate use of kitchen
3. Wore N95 or KF94 when cooking
4. Was triple-vaccinated
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Please don't do this. The baseline risk in NZ is trivial, and the training itself is a harm.
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80% of Kiwis say the government got the level of Covid restrictions basically right - more than any other surveyed country.
And NZ also has the largest proportion of people saying Covid hasn't much affected their lives: 67%.
Some interesting results from the latest Pew survey of advanced countries attitudes re Covid - policy, economics etc - with NZ included in the sample.
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The best time to end prohibition is before starting it.
Excellent that NZ will not be going ahead with tobacco prohibition.
This week's column:
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Immigration NZ may in fact be evil.
Ivett Kerekes has been running a thriving family-run cafe and catering company for six years, but isn't making enough money to satisfy immigration officials.
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There is nothing special about handing someone a bottle opener.
There is something very very special about living in a place where you don't even notice that it's the PM sitting across from you until she hands you the bottle opener.
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New Zealand has a longstanding housing shortage. It's a giant mess, but fundamentally it comes down to constraints against getting more housing built.
The current price inflation is the intersection of that mess and RBNZ money printing.
Subsidising buyers will not help.
Jacinda Ardern has hinted that extra help for first home buyers could be on the way - live updates
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Stupidest thing Robertson has done.
Breaking: Adrian Orr reappointed Reserve Bank Governor for another 5 year term.
@TodayFM_nz
@NewsroomNZ
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Immigration NZ and govt policy have put nonresidents in terrible, impossible situations.
But we can go some way to making it right.
First apologize.
Then extend residence to everyone who was here legally through lockdown, and who has stuck with us.
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Excellent.
ACT's medicines policy includes this bit which would automatically approve drugs and devices that have already been approved by at least two reputable approval agencies abroad, unless Medsafe has extraordinary reason to not follow suit.
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When Trump was elected, I was not particularly worried. America's institutions would constrain him. And a GOP that loathed him and cared for its long-term interest would not fail to discipline him.
I don't think I have ever been more wrong.
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Horrible, but great that
@NZIER
checked the numbers.
Large proportions of recent primary school teachers had failed basic high school exams.
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$45 for a hundred thousand litres of clean, delivered water doesn't seem like that big of a charge.
“I water the garden in the summer. I have a vegetable garden and a flower garden and I’m not going to stop watering it,” says Garden City resident Heather Law.
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I dint know what's more depressing. That Trump has very good odds of winning this even if he doesn't play it through the courts, or that heavily Trump places are *still* more liberal than NZ on drug policy.
South Dakota, a state that Trump won tonight by more than 30 points, has voted to legalise cannabis – live updates
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Man this is grim.
Might have hoped that if police have gotten 15 calls and Kainga Ora 30 calls about a violent social housing tenant in a house with a two year old...
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"Choo choo I'm a train!"
Love the signs on the train-replacement busses.
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Couldn't happen in NZ.
How the heck would the volcano get resource consent?
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If you want to know why Wellington's pipes are falling apart, Nikki Mandow explained it a couple years ago.
Councils failed to put necessary money into underground water assets, and instead diverted that money over into BS.
And local voters cheered.
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Great story of Kiwi ingenuity. A new form of clover that can reduce pastoral methane emissions by up to 20% while reducing bloat risk.
Shame it's illegal in NZ; they have to run the field trials in Virgina because NZ policy is a mess.
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Encouraging vandalism may not be the best idea.
Te Papa will leave the painted Tiriti artwork up over the summer break.
It's the correct decision. I spoke with the co-leaders last week and emphasised how popular the Tiriti exhibit had become. It has started conversations, learning, and healing. Now is the time for wānanga.
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NZ could have signed up to this one. Tripling our nuclear generation would be simple. Could even quadruple it without much bother at all.
CANADA JOINS PLEDGE TO TRIPLE NUCLEAR CAPACITY BY 2030.
At COP28 we have joined 22 countries including the USA, France & the UK in this unprecedented move.
We’ve come a long way from COP26 where I confronted Canada’s Minister of the Environment and former Greenpeace activist
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As reminder, the vast majority of economists agree on this one.
Rent controls do not help.
At best, they do little.
At worst, they privilege the already-privileged.
When rental markets do not clear on prices, they clear on landlords' non-price preferences.
Is that what you want?
@IainLG
@MichelleEBlau
There are one or two fringe economists who'll argue in favour of rent controls. The vast majority of the profession disagrees.
Survey here.
Same in NZ.
And some reasons:
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Wouldn't it be wonderful if we just didn't have a Minister for Racing?
There's absolutely no good reason to have one, is there?
Like, do we have a Minister for Apple Trees? Or a Minister for Sheep Shearing?
The government has no business in the racecourses of the nation.
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An incoming government must not give in to these kinds of people.
Three cheers for Simplicity for building.
No cheers for the guy whining about it.
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In America, the cops use truncheons and smoke bombs to chase a priest out of his own church so the President can have a photo-op with a Bible he's never read.
In Australia, the PM will stay the hell off your lawn, and you don't even have to ask him politely.
A home-owner telling the 🇦🇺 prime minister and the media to move off his just re-seeded lawn is hilarious and, especially on this day and in this week, that they all dutifully did so is also deeply democratic.
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That Mahuta has not been fired leaves two options.
Either the PM has been informed on this matter all the way through (less likely), or Mahuta is untouchable and can do whatever she damned well pleases - including shredding constitutional norms.
Revealed: Mahuta received officials' advice month before Three Waters entrenchment vote
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1. Wear masks when indoors, or outdoors in crowded spaces;
2. Avoid places that attract unmasked people;
3. Prefer places that enforce vax passes, because those places will attract safer people;
3. Do not dine indoors unless you know that ventilation is superb.
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When $145m to strengthen Town Hall turned into $182m, it was a cost blowout.
Now they think it'll be up to $329m.
There are about 213,000 people in Wellington.
$329m over 213,000 people is just over $1500 for each and every person in Wellington.
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Sigh.
Did nobody have The Talk with Kiwis?
Inflation isn't made by minimum wages going up.
Neither is it made by supermarkets.
Nor did the stork bring it from overseas.
Inflation is made when a Reserve Bank Governor loves a Minister of Finance very much and prints lots of money.
Stop blaming inflation on the working poor - Only 7% of the working population are minimum wage earners - Around $260,000 - Supermarkets make profits of around $1 million a day, & they're still putting prices up. Corporate Greed causes inflation
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Everyone will focus on the specific policies in the agreement.
But look too at the Principles guiding later decision-making.
Efficiency. Cost-benefit assessment.
No wellbeing mushheadedness.
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Letting inflation run very hot while not inflation-indexing tax rate thresholds is a tax increase.
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Wayne Brown cuts through the cant.
If you want to block something, pretending there are insurmountable equity concerns is a first go-to.
High time that folks call bollocks on it.
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Ok. So we don't have enough power generation, and people get mad about landfills.
And so a waste-to-energy plant gets blocked because it didn't have a good-enough cultural impact assessment.
NZ is a silly place.
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Great stuff from
@ChrisPenknz
on freeing up use of overseas-certified building materials.
To really make this work though, need to make sure councils aren't left holding the bag if anything goes wrong.
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Why is it that I always read about this stuff from Thomas Cranmer and never from Transparency International?
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Well this is grim. IMF expects NZ real GDP growth to be right at the bottom of the pack.
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90 years ago this week, America ended alcohol prohibition. Prohibition had reduced drinking, but at terrible cost. I expect that those repealing wished they'd never tried it in the first place.
The best time to end prohibition is before starting it.
Kudos to the incoming govt.
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There is as much Covid in Wellington wastewater samples now as there was in March - at least on eyeballing the thing.
It's a log scale on the left so small differences can matter.
There must be massive underreporting on RATs compared to March.
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I despair at the populist garbage in NZ econ discussion here.
People on the left wanting to break GST, clueless of what they're doing. Hundred RTs.
People the right wanting gas-tax holidays, when inelastic supply means it'll mainly bid up the pre-tax price of petrol.
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The latest NIMBY push I heard on RNZ on the drive in this morning: the urban intensification legislation should be opposed because they haven't considered how much demolition waste there might be when rotting old shacks get bowled to put up new townhouses.
Madness.
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@JordNZ
Somewhat odd for Herald to complain of doxxing, when a Herald-owned publication doxxed Cranmer.
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@BrianCAlbrecht
@DAcemogluMIT
I'd never understood the Hayek knowledge critique as being about computational power.
It was rather that the basic knowledge necessary to start the computations cannot be brought into existence except through its emergence in market interaction.
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Kids can't be vaccinated yet. Mandate it for teachers. How is this contentious.
Debate over mandatory teacher vaccination continues ahead of government decision
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Central government should remember this when Wellington pleads poverty and balance sheet issues around fixing the pipes.
Council apparently has room on the balance sheet to bank a movie theatre.
Sorry guys but by 7-9 the council decided NOT to stop the Reading Deal. A majority still support Reading International as the beneficiary of the latest bad Council deal but at least the public know.
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In early 2020, there was strong support across Parliament for government to issue a lot of debt for the Covid response.
Now, $350m of that fund is being used for a petrol excise holiday in response to a bad poll for Labour.
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Embarrassing for Vic Uni if they can't manage to allow people to hear an invited speaker.
Story here.
“Embarrassing for New Zealand”
Laura Trask responds to the protestors shutting down a speech from a US diplomat:
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The curriculum docs are ...something....
“Ideological experiment”
@actparty
slams Government's "completely nuts" plan to teach maths for social justice
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@henrycooke
Also helpful for those claiming that vaccines kill a lot of people. Plot the excess death timeline from that source for NZ by date. There is no increase in deaths corresponding to vax rollout, and there was no covid here to hide any adverse vax effect.
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High odds that RNZ is holding fire until they've lawyer-proofed this thing.
But it's still pretty funny to compare the front pages.
Front page of RNZ: "Seymour labelled an idiot"
Front page of The Post: Incredibly serious story about corruption with broad implications.
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Obvious at Budget that Robertson had not long-term funded a pile of projects that Labour was bound to renew, so his claims of a path to surplus were utter BS.
It oughtn't have been a surprise to Willis.
But it would be good to have all of these listed in one place and tallied.
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Count of mentions of various terms in the 2024 RBNZ annual report:
Climate: 39
Carbon: 4
Inflation: 33
Price stability: 8
Recession: 0
Meanwhile, the bloat continues. Total staff numbers up 20% in a year that was more than half under the current govt. The govt was so pleased with stewardship they reappointed the Board chair.
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Before John Key banned pseudoephedrine, meth cost over $700/gram.
The price of everything, on average, is up by just under 40% since then.
The price of meth is down by over 40% in nominal dollars.
It's time to legalise cold medicine.
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