Afternoon roundup

The tabs!

• Universities continue to be very quick to cancel events. 
• NZ Pharmacists warn that if the $5 co-pay on prescriptions returns, customers might start using Chemist Warehouse again rather than community pharmacies. 
• David Harvey argues for a licensing regime instead of the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. I don't think it'll work either. If the fee is high enough to save the media, the platforms would probably block news links altogether. Just let the Bill die at committee.
• Reasonable Covid wave coming through; your reminder of what to do.
• Which cuisine will reign supreme? All of them, thanks to globalisation. 
• Consumer NZ wants to turn audiology into a government-enforced cartel. That outfit's becoming increasingly reliable as a "do the opposite of whatever they're on about" signal. 

Morning roundup

The morning's worthies:

• NZ alcohol policy basically gives a veto over licensing to the Medical Officer of Health and to the Police. Sucks when you get a prohibitionist in charge of either. And why are so many NZ prohibitionists named Palmer anyway?
• Josh Gans on copyright status of AI-created works. 
• Grimes set up an AI trained on her own work. It tweets. Grimes notes, "The degree to which this bot has mastered my internal monologue is terrifying to me"
• Michael Reddell on RBNZ forecasting. I think it's a damned shame we didn't get NGDP markets for NZ; Simon Bridges murdering iPredict may have cost us considerably. Thanks again Simon. 
• A reminder that it was Don Lavoie who coined the term "knowledge problem" for Hayek's fundamental insight, not Hayek himself. Even if you think you're familiar with the term, please read this. 
• Immigration NZ continues to be an absolute mess. It's only partially the bureaucracy's fault. They'll have had whipsawing policy directives from the Ministers. First it's clamp down and don't process visas because Labour hates immigrants. Then the inevitable bad consequences from blocking migration, so they get told to stick every employer into the high-trust accredited employer visa programme to speed up processing - which pushes actually trustworthy employers into the same queue with a bunch that really really aren't. And the inevitable consequence of that. Absolute mess. Herald, Stuff. The Stuff piece is particularly good. 
• RBNZ figures that migration might now be reducing inflationary pressure rather than adding to it - easing labour supply bottlenecks.
• In today's edition of "China is actually a more stable and reliable trade partner than the US," Trump promises 10% across-the-board tariffs if elected. Shouldn't US foreign policy aim at encouraging deeper trade links with the US and reduced reliance on China?
• Action on Smoking and Health is getting fed up with BS coming from Health Coalition Aotearoa.

Copyright maximalism

Ages ago, I met an odd sort of copyright maximalist. The guy figured that ideas themselves should be treated as intellectual property, not just their expression. 

One minor problem with his theory is that he couldn't fully explain it without transferring valuable IP and he wanted compensation. I wasn't that interested. 

This push from Copyright Licensing NZ has a similar feel. Just read this and imagine that it has nothing to do with AI. It's kids learning about reading and writing from books, maturing, incorporating ideas into their own framework for understanding the world, and then writing their own ideas based on all of that. It's the same thing. 

New Zealand needs to urgently regulate generative AI tools so they comply with copyright laws, otherwise thousands of Kiwis will remain unrecognised and uncompensated for their intellectual property, Copyright Licensing NZ says.

The call comes amid global scrutiny and surging use of AI tools in homes, schools and in the workforce, with rising fears of a takeover as thousands of jobs are lost to the technology worldwide.

In the United States, the Writers’ Guild of America is currently striking in part to request the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers ban the use of AI for writing and rewriting any source material, and that no AI material be trained on guild members’ work.

With the alliance rejecting the offer, Kiwi scriptwriters are keeping a close eye on the situation.

... Sam Irvine, chief executive of Copyright Licensing, said it was “absolutely concerned” about AI, and particularly large language models, using the work of Kiwi authors, visual artists, writers and publishers without credit in the production of things like text or digitally made artwork.

AI models illegally sourcing content from the internet or other sources needed to be regulated so IP holders were attributed or compensated where necessary, Irvine said.

Morning roundup

We have too many tabs open here at the Crampton Discount Browser Tab Warehouse, and we have to liquidate stock immediately. All the links you can handle at rock-bottom prices.

• Turns out that, entirely predicably, subsidising electric cars gives a pile of money to rich households while doing bugger all to reduce emissions. Just as we told them two years ago. Stupid. 


• I'm not a Ben Sheeran fan, but I'm cheering for him in this lawsuit. Another stupidity long foretold. If you haven't read Spider Robinson on Melancholy Elephants and Infinite Copyright, do attend to that. That's the stakes on the Sheeran lawsuit. 


• Meanwhile, Chris Luxon wants to follow Australia in banning vaping, if National should form government. I'm cheering for the smugglers in this one. I don't know why Luxon's pro-smuggling. On the plus side, I love having something I can cheer about no matter who wins the election!


• The government says it wants a no-frills budget. NZ's videogame sector's pretty convinced that subsidies to the videogame sector aren't a frill. I think NZ should go further than simply not playing the subsidy game. Instead, NZ should seek the equivalent of international arms control agreements banning film and videogame subsidies. The dangerous nature of these subsidies is obvious if we're even talking about having them in a year that's going to require a lot of budget restraint. 


• Looks like there's a treatment option for lakes with too much phosphorus. Of course, New Zealand doesn't seem interested. Presumably it isn't sufficiently circular. Too much like waste-to-energy plants that solve the obvious problem, but that don't solve the underlying problem of regulators wanting to tell people what to do. If the thing works, farmers ought to be able to fund remediation if that's more cost-effective than other options. 

Afternoon roundup

Oh the tabs. 

• Chris Quin is CE of Foodstuffs North Island. His chat with Morning Report on what they've been doing to get groceries through to Hawke's Bay, including helicopters....
• The nastiness is intrinsic to Dahl's work. Erasing it is a mistake. I still think that when rights-holders abandon the original works by making them unavailable, those works should enter the public domain. Especially if the author is already dead. 
• Looks like business-as-usual continues on at least one front. Government is set to impose a pile of compliance regulations on incorporated societies and there just isn't time to let them look at the regulations before they take effect. Government, despite the change at the top, is still trying to do too many things at the same time and risks making serious messes. 
• Dileepa Fonseca also points to government capacity constraints. "...Wellington's workforce is already overwhelmed coping with the central government's demands at the moment..."
• Yeah, it'd be great if it were easier to import and use plasterboard in rebuilding from a cyclone. 
• Headline says it all about building anything: "New Far North council dog pound balloons from $200,000 to $2.4m and can house fewer dogs."
• Look, if they were really serious about it, they'd have made it some kind of Commandment.
• University of Canterbury's Covid response was risible. 
• Effective Altruism in the classroom!
• Genetically modified trees that are sterile and so no wilding problem. But GE regs mean they can't be planted. 
• Bryce Wilkinson on some of the problems in the RMA replacement bills
• The perils of trying to curtail hazily defined 'disinformation'
• The Future of Long COVID
• We don't need laws against scapling. And if a platform like Viagogo can't reliably make sure it isn't selling fake tickets, people won't use it. 

Afternoon roundup

A closing of some of the browser tabs:

• Eli Dourado on NEPA - America's equivalent to the RMA. Superb seeming primer on how it all works, though I would not be one to notice any holes in it. 
• Road-building is going to get harder, thanks to a court interpretation around water consenting. Minor bits of drainage are going to hit large hurdles. 
• Chris Snowdon in conversation with Marewa Glover on New Zealand's tobacco and vaping regime. 
• Possibly the best approach for "glue ourselves to things" protestors: leave them there.
• Lindsay Mitchell picks up another aspect of the Perry child poverty report: substantial differences across regions in foodbank uptake, sorted by material deprivation. 
• "Rather than address the workforce crisis it inherited, Labour instead resorted to restructuring the health system to put it under greater central government control and make it more vertical. This was a fatal error." 
• NPR's Darian Woods and Wailin Wong on America's blocking Chinese access to higher-tech chips.
• Government may be preferring government-built housing in easing RM constraints. That, as a pattern, will make it harder to get necessary RM reform - if govt can exempt itself from the worst effects of bad RM rules...
• Older piece now, but I want to be able to find it again. Cato's critique of the US Jones Act, which prohibits foreign shippers from transporting goods between US ports. NZ shippers often want this kind of rule here too. It's been doing particular harm in Puerto Rico lately. 
• Sex work legalisation in NZ included measured aimed at protecting temporary migrants from exploitation; those rules may be doing more harm than good.
• Youth justice facilities overwhelmed by numbers.
• Emergency rooms overwhelmed by numbers and want of staff.
• Mental health system overwhelmed by numbers and want of staff.
• One reason the new Rings of Power series may not be as faithful to The Silmarillion's account as it could be: copyright. 
• Wellington: for, by, and of connected insiders. 
• MBIE is running a review of space policy. Wish there were a one-click submission option "Just leave it alone and don't break things." There are just so many submission processes on...
• Yet another area in which NZ could do well by simply recognising standards in use in other places. This time, car safety. 
• It looks like the prescription guidelines for medicines for ADHD have been designed around avoiding Ritalin flowing out into other uses rather than helping patients. And the one doctor who prescribed in accordance to patient needs rather than guidelines is in trouble for it. 

Evening roundup

I was out on leave last week, touring around Lake Taupo with the family, hoping desperately for snow that didn't come. 

We had fun anyway. 

But the browser tabs... a week's worth of emails, and stuff saved up... egads. 

Some worthies as I try to clear six different Chrome instances...

• Wikipedians don't like research on IQ. They're even slowly memory-holing the Flynn Effect.


• Time to end the Canadian Dairy Cartel


• Neat evil DMCA hack: create a fake-dated earlier version of content you don't like, then claim the original is a copy. 


• DevPolicyBlog on reducing remittance costs in the Pacific. I hadn't known that getting money from Oz/NZ to the Islands has some of the highest remittance costs in the world. But it makes sense: NZ is overly enthusiastic about AML, and that's a fixed cost in a small place. 


• John McDermott on the case for another Saturday Night Special. When credibility is lost, getting inflation back under control is costly. The RBNZ forgot its job, and we will all bear a cost. 


• Jem Traylen tries to figure out why the government won't fast-track residence for migrant nurses. There are no good answers. 


• The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration has approved Moderna's Covid vax for under-5s. Unclear that Medsafe has even started looking at it. 


• The McGuinness Institute maintains an archive of Government Department Strategies. There are 221 operational GDS and 327 archived ones. I did not know there were so many. 


• Frank Newman on a few problems in the government's Three Waters financial modelling. Oh - and the IT systems alone could cost half a billion. 


• I wonder how much income protection insurance premiums are going to go up because of Long Covid risks. Would be fun if cautious mask-wearers could get a discount...


• Survey evidence of misperceptions could just be miseducated guesses. But wouldn't that predict unbiased means?


• The flu-normal sucks.


• New Zealand's defamation law is even worse than I'd thought. Its reach extends to America.


• Prof Beaglehole on Smokefree 2025.


• Three cheers for the three Christchurch councilors who voted against the stadium.


• Infometrics warns inflation expectations look unanchored. 


• Cameron Bagrie warns of a lack of expertise on the RBNZ Board. I remember Suzanne Sniveley telling us at the NZAE meetings that all is fine. 


• This is just lovely. How the world's worst golfer kept getting to play at big golf tournaments. Great fun story. 


• Pandemic-related losses in education. New Zealand did manage to get through the early period with some of the shortest periods of school closure in the developed world. But we're still showing shocking results on literacy and numeracy - though tough to tell whether it's worse than pre-Covid. 


• Russ Roberts' chat with Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan was great while we were on our drive back from Taupo. Just such an enormous amount of core data work in that project on immigration and outcomes. Here's Noah Smith with Boustan.

Afternoon roundup

A closing of some the browser tabs brings a few worthies:

• Roland Fryer Was Railroaded
• Brian Easton on the perils of ignoring economics
• Pay for defection. It raises the cost of attacking. 
• The Canadians get stuck with a copyright term extension. Cosh is excellent here. Why does the Canadian government figure it can ignore the dairy provisions in trade agreements but bound by dumb copyright stuff?
• The extortion attempt continues. [Me on this, previously]
• Ontario's Housing Affordability Taskforce report from February has a lot of good stuff. I'll need to read through it more carefully. Looks like Ford won't be implementing it but there are ideas worth thinking through for NZ. 
• Superb BusinessDesk piece on the cost of building infrastructure in NZ. I wish Auckland could outsource both construction and all of the approvals for its transport/infrastructure projects to whoever sorts that out in Seoul. 
• Liberal Education
• Ages back, Hess & Orphanides found that discretionary wars were more likely for first term Presidents presiding over poor economic conditions. Simple little model. Re-election depends on demonstrating competence, two margins for demonstrating it, if you've failed at the one worth the punt on the other. Ashani Amarasinghe has a forthcoming piece at J. Pub that's far more extensive. Lots of governments aim to distract from domestic turmoil. But it doesn't work all that well.

Afternoon roundup

The closing of the browser tabs:

• The Niskanen Center goes through the problems with intellectual property. They remind that independent re-discovery needs to be allowed; I take it as meta-point that they mention Landes & Posner nowhere in the piece, which re-derives much of the Landes & Posner framework in different terms.
• Things have gotten really bad in US academia. (ungated link)
• The latest John Lott mess
• The case for an Australian carbon tax and dividend
• I don't know if Google's new language model can think, but it can run logical inference.
• Larry Summers chats with Ezra Klein on inflation
• The Infrastructure Commission's report on the housing crisis is excellent. I'd threaded the key figures here.

Spider Robinson as prophet

Under sane versions of copyright, it was considered homage. Musicians would grab snippets of each others' work and play with them, building new interpretations. 

That's harder nowadays. And it's being counted among the reasons that new music just isn't as interesting any longer.

In the olden days, talent scouts spent many late nights in smokey bars looking for new acts, wooing them, signing them, and then shepherding them through their first recordings. Such record people still exist, but there are precious few of them. Instead, labels employ people to troll YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, looking for trends.

Acts still send in demos directly to labels, but some are wary of listening to them. What if another act on the label writes a song that happens to have sonic similarities to something on one of those demos? There have been a number of legal actions where an artist who sent in the demo claims that their song was subsequently stolen by an act already on the label. Perhaps it’s best not to listen to any demos in order to maintain plausible deniability. How many great talents are being missed because no one listened to the music they sent to a label?

I keep being reminded of Spider Robinson's warning forty years ago about the perils of infinite copyright, and automated searches that prevent melodies from being remixed and recycled:

She paused to gather her thoughts, sipped her juice. A part of her mind noted that it harmonized with the recurrent cinnamon motif of Bulachevski's scent-symphony, which was still in progress.

"Artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create. In fact they do nothing of the sort. They discover. Inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system. For millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universe—and telling ourselves that we `created' them. To create implies infinite possibility, to discover implies finite possibility. As a species I think we will react poorly to having our noses rubbed in the fact that we are discoverers and not creators."

She stopped speaking and sat very straight. Unaccountably her feet hurt. She closed her eyes, and continued speaking.

"My husband wrote a song for me, on the occasion of our fortieth wedding anniversary. It was our love in music, unique and special and intimate, the most beautiful melody I ever heard in my live. It made him so happy to have written it. Of his last ten compositions he had burned five for being derivative, and the others had all failed copyright clearance. But this was fresh, special—he joked that my love for him had inspired him. The next day he submitted it for clearance, and learned that it had been a popular air during his early childhood, and had already been unsuccessfully submitted fourteen times since its original registration. A week later he burned all his manuscripts and working tapes and killed himself."

She was silent for a long time, and the senator did not speak.

" `Ars longa, vita brevis est,' " she said at last. "There's been comfort of a kind in that for thousands of years. But art is long, not infinite. `The Magic goes away.' One day we will use it up—unless we can learn to recycle it like any other finite resource." Her voice gained strength. "Senator, that bill has to fail, if I have to take you on to do it. Perhaps I can't win—but I'm going to fight you! A copyright must not be allowed to last more than fifty years—after which it should be flushed from the memory banks of the Copyright Office. We need selective voluntary amnesia if Discoverers of Art are to continue to work without psychic damage. Fact should be remembered—but dreams?" She shivered. ". . . Dreams should be forgotten when we wake. Or one day we will find ourselves unable to sleep. Given eight billion artists with effective working lifetimes in excess of a century, we can no longer allow individuals to own their discoveries in perpetuity. We must do it the way the human race did it for a million years—by forgetting, and rediscovering. Because one day the infinite number of monkeys will have nothing else to write except the complete works of Shakespeare. And they would probably rather not know that when it happens."

I hate that New Zealand is signing on for longer copyright terms as price of a trade deal with the UK. 

But I love this story. Casio bundled some pre-set beats into its MT-40, back in 1981, and didn't encumber them. They increased the value of the keyboards. Pay for the keyboard, use the tunes. And it helped kickstart Jamaican dancehall reggae music. 

Today, 35 years after the original song was released, the conventional version of reggae history holds that the “father” of the riddim was Wayne Smith and his producer at the Jammy’s label in Jamaica. In fact, the history of the riddim goes back further than Smith and his collaborators. It was originally a preset rhythm pattern programmed into the Casiotone MT-40, released in 1981. It was this preset that Smith and his friends used as the basic building block for their revolutionary song.

Really, read the whole thing. Excellent piece. 

Nobody needed to ask anyone's permission. They just made music.  

Casio rocks:

Some people thought that Okuda and Casio should sue for infringement of their copyright. But the company believed it was more important for people to use the keyboards in their music and create a reputation for the Casiotone keyboards around the world. Okuda wanted people to use the Casiotone to create music and hoped the keyboards would make it easier for people around the world to make their own recordings. Even today, musicians and record company representatives sometimes discover that the Sleng Teng riddim was originally an MT-40 preset and contact Casio for permission to use the file. The reply is always that the preset bassline is free for anyone to use: just credit the source and acknowledge that the tune “uses a sound file taken from a Casio MT-40.”

Afternoon roundup

The day's worthies:

• The complicated mess of regulations that make it hard for supply chains to keep up.
• Pentecostalism. According to the 2018 Census, there are 81,300 in NZ.  They outnumber Jedi 4:1. 
• Getting vax out to where people are. Robertson had promised that there would be no funding barrier to dealing with the pandemic. We supported him in taking on debt to get this job done - it's what debt is for. But he blew it on envirojob nonsense, and hasn't been funding what's been necessary in getting vax out. Just incredibly disappointing, and costly. The money that would be involved here is rats and mice stuff, and in too many places it just hasn't gotten done. 
• Wouldn't it be simpler if we stopped using general government revenue to build highways while also stopping using money from road user charges and petrol excise to pay for busses? 
• Should overstayers have been included in the general grant of a path to residence? Would have helped with this problem.
• Superb piece on the problems in copyright extension. It's at best a dead rat we have to swallow for the trade deal with the UK. But I'd hope we can make it less awful. 
• And relevant to that last one: a shift to weaker copyright during WW2 encouraged scientific discovery by making it easier for scientists to get access to scientific papers. Sci-Hub is a wonderful thing.
• Looks like early treatment for Covid with a common antidepressant with few side effects, fluvoxamine, reduces hospitalisation by a third - and to a third for those reporting optimal adherence to the protocol (people who didn't miss doses). Something that reduces hospitalisation by a third to two thirds is like increasing hospital capacity by a third to two-thirds, except way less expensive and with way less hardship. I wonder whether MoH will get orders in before the rush hits - enough to at least trial it to make sure it isn't green jellybeans. Note that this was one of the trials funded by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok at FastGrants. 
• Bit of a shame that nobody in NZ government bothered getting a vaccine passport system readied earlier. It was obvious that one would be needed at least from June 2020. AirNZ now reports the absence of one is why they can't set a vax requirement for domestic travel.

Afternoon roundup

The browser tabs...

• The Internet Archive will help improve access to a lot of books currently held by the National Library. Naturally, this upsets some people. 
• Mike Joy wins a battle over what "natural levels" of nitrate in aquifers might mean.
• Places where the local schools are funded by higher levels of government wind up trying to privatize the public schools through zoning. Everything's tradeoffs though, eh? If schools are funded by the local communities, poor places get really bad schools. It's instead a good argument against even greater anti-NIMBY vigilance.
• Potential nudges to improve compliance with scanning-in for Covid tracing. I'd add one more: put the QR codes in lots of places. Make it easy. At the entrance is great, but if your phone isn't ready and you'd be holding up a queue, maybe you won't scan and you'll forget to on the way out. Put them everywhere. 
• The EMA makes a very bad argument about unemployment rates. The point of inflation targeting and increasing rates when you're hitting capacity constraints isn't to create some stupid Marxist reserve army of unemployed, which seems to be what they're arguing for. The point instead is that if a monetary push gets you past NAIRU, you just wind up back at higher unemployment rates anyway once contracts adjust AND you have higher inflation to go with it. Anyway, because either EMA put it badly or it was reported badly, a billion tweets followed claiming the Marxists were right all along. 
• Heather du Plessis-Allan cites me here on Treasury's diminished capabilities. Worth noting: all of that was prior to the current Secretary's appointment. She may well have improved things since; I need to get OIAs in to check. 
• Shipping is a mess.
• Remember back at the Budget Economic and Fiscal Update when Treasury put in a footnote saying they couldn't produce a structural deficit figure this time round because they couldn't tell how to place some of the Covid-spend? And it seemed odd because Covid-spend is supposed to be emergency = one-off = not-structural? Well, looks like the free school lunch programme is Covid spend. I simply do not understand how this works. Shouldn't the Auditor General be going after this kind of thing as misappropriation? 
• The government isn't bothering to check on whether people got their Covid tests before travelling. Some of them get caught ex-post, with the option to go into quarantine or return to Oz, after they've been circulating in New Zealand already. If they went back to Oz and turned up positive, what hope would we have on contact tracing them? However low your expectations of government competence are, you just keep being surprised. 

Regional naming rights

Appellation d'origine contrôlée rules make some kind of sense when they prevent what might otherwise amount to false advertising because the geographic name is so intertwined with the product. 

It does seem to be getting a bit out of hand.

The European Commission recently granted exclusive use of the term 'halloumi' within Europe to cheesemakers from Cyprus, using the intellectual property rights system called "geographical indications".

The move to register halloumi follows behind the recent registrations of cheeses like havarti.

... 

In its Free Trade Agreement negotations with New Zealand, the EU is looking protect 2200 of its food and beverage GI's, including well known cheeses such as feta, gruyere and gorgonzola.

What other name are you supposed to give those cheese styles? Will somebody wind up deciding that nobody can use the word cheddar unless the cheese comes from a small village in Somerset? 

I suppose Kiwi cheesemakers could start just adding NZ to all the names, so we'd have halloumiNZ, havartiNZ, fetaNZ, and gruyeNZ. 

Maybe we could claim gorgoNZola as our own unless the Italians start referring to their own product as Chinese Gooseberry rather than Kiwifruit? It seems a lot more likely that someone would mistake something labelled Kiwifruit as being from NZ than that someone would mistake a local feta as really being from wherever the Europeans think feta is from. I have no clue where any of those cheeses are meant to be from, and I bet you don't either unless you google it. 

What a ridiculous system. 

"You can't call yourselves hip-hop artists unless you were born and trained in the hip-hop region of America. You have to call yourself something else. Oh, and K-pop has to change its name too because everyone knows pop music only comes from the 3 square block pop region of Los Angeles and it could be confusing to complete fricking idiots. But whatever they change their name to, nobody else in the world can ever use that name either. Only artists from Gangnam. We're going to have infinite numbers of names for each thing in the world, and it will be great."

I hate that accepting this nonsense seems required if NZ wants to be able to export to Europe. 

Afternoon roundup, and around the traps

The worthies on the closing of the browser tabs.

• Nice comparison of vacant housing to transitional unemployment, in an American context. Filing this one away here for the next time somebody notices a few empty houses and decides that policy should do something about it. It comes up too often. 
• Susan Edmunds over at Stuff looks at household income distributions; the piece includes a short bit from me on AHC- and BHC- incomes. 
• Universities need to lift their darned game. 
• AUT not only caved at the last minute to pressure from the Chinese Embassy to pull the rooms booked for a memorial event for the Tienanmen Massacre, they also (and I just cannot stress enough how stupid this is) failed to redact the name of the lecturer who had booked the rooms when the documents were released under OIA. I hope that lecturer does not have family living under the Communist dictatorship. Utter muppetry. Newsroom's since blanked out the name but what the hell. 
• International students at Auckland University from China cannot be expected to feel safe there unless the University takes a stronger stand in support of their international students - and especially when the Chinese embassy is lauding the pro-Communist student who shoved the student who was supporting the protesters in Hong Kong. 
• I dunno what the answer is here. Stronger emphasis on freedom of speech in international student orientation events and policies expelling students who become violent in debate with other students could be part of it. But universities are massively dependent on foreign students, disproportionately from China. Capped domestic tuition fees have the universities seek money where they can - from full-fees paying foreign students. The government has to cap tuition fee increases because students don't really pay them - the government does. The first year's free, the rest is funded by loans that are marked down by about 45% the second they're issued. Every tuition fee increase increases the government's liability through the student loan portfolio. So you get this self-reinforcing mess that the government cannot afford to cover the education costs for the volume of students it wants to go through the universities and is unwilling to have students pay their own way a bit more, so pushes the universities to get international students to cover the bill. That builds in vulnerabilities when stuff like this happens. 
• If you wanted to build a house out of straw bales and eco-friendly materials, good luck getting it signed off and consented. "Oh, the market fails to provide eco-friendly alternatives!" Yeah, well, if the government won't sign off on the standards, then you get messes. 
• Elsevier is expensive; the UC libraries no longer subscribe to them. So the excellent Ted Bergstrom is organising volunteers to put together running tables of contents of those journals with links through to faculty website copies of the final edited versions of their own papers. Superb.
• I don't get why the Reserve Bank wants to ban anyone who knows monetary and macroeconomics from serving on the monetary policy committee, but that looks to be what they're doing. It's hard to come up with good explanations. The piece at Interest has some minor comment from me.
• Running field experiments? Watch out for this: the presence of the foreigner as experimenter changes behaviour.
• Google might yet build itself a city development in Toronto. It looks pretty neat. 
• I also give a couple warnings about a 'virtual shopping' study finding that people in a fake supermarket are responsive to sugar taxes. In the real world, people stock up when things are on special, and buy less when it isn't, so short-term price responsiveness isn't the same thing as long term consumption changes. 
• A mammoth listening task: Jordan Hoffman ranks 180 Rush songs. The ranking is very defensible, though I'd have moved Dreamline and Time Stand Still up the list a bit and pushed Working Man down the list. Almost all of the songs are on Spotify; here's a playlist, from lowest to highest ranked. And Hoffman is absolutely correct in his top pick (again: 1 here is the lowest-ranked. You work your way up). UPDATE: It looks like the embedded playlist can only run the lowest-ranked 100; click through to the web player to get the full list.
• 
  
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Afternoon roundup

Posting has been light as other deadlines press. But I have accumulated too many browser tabs. Here are some worthies:

• Colby Cosh on the case for using prices to reduce carbon emissions. 

  Is there really absolutely nothing you can do, even if you’re quite lower-middle-class, to create energy savings in your life? You never go to the fried chicken place across town instead of the one on the next block? Are you sure you need to own a pickup for one home reno project or a bit of landscaping every three years? Have you even looked into smart thermostats or checked your window seals? Invested in a Snuggie? Taken the old incandescent Christmas lights off the hot tub?
  
  The real problem is that you can’t ask these questions — even hypothetically, or even just to point out that every single household might ask hundreds of them — without sounding like an obnoxious schoolmaster. A carbon tax is social engineering — it is just an optimum, consciously designed, maximally market-friendly way of going about it. Any economist will add the implied caveat that all taxes are social engineering, and other taxes are engineering society in dumb or bad ways. A “carbon tax” is meant, for better or worse, to discourage the emission of free carbon. “Income tax,” which discourages honest work, starts to look pretty ridiculous when you follow the logic just a few inches further. But those are always the hardest inches to cross in the face of a policy novelty.



• Pattrick Smellie reminds us how New Zealand's ban on Taranaki oil exploration can wind up increasing emissions globally:

  The oil and gas ban is proving to be a two-edged sword politically, particularly since no matter how often Woods denies it, the evidence is strong that the ban is more likely to increase than decrease global emissions of greenhouse gases.
  
  Especially questionable has been her claim that the vast quantities of methanol currently made from natural gas in New Zealand won't end up being produced in China, using higher-emitting coal because of China's emissions trading scheme.
  
  As climate change policy expert Christina Hood told the Environmental Defence Society's recent business and climate change conference in Auckland, the Chinese ETS is not really an ETS yet and currently only applies to the electricity sector.

  Our submission on the ban is here.


• Former NZ Ambassador to Beijing John McKinnon's speech on New Zealand's relationship with China is excellent. Recommended reading.

  China is also now, what is was only potentially in 1972, a great power. The fabric of international society is woven by the ability of the international rule of law to constrain the interests of large powers such as China. This means that New Zealand, as a country which invests in and benefits from the international rule of law, has expectations of China, as it does of other great powers. That they will comport themselves appropriately, especially towards those who have less power than themselves. That is the true mark of greatness. It is pleasing to see how China has responded to these expectations, such as through its policies on climate change, and its championing of the multilateral trading system. New Zealand, along with many other countries, will be represented at China’s international import expo, to be held in Shanghai in November, and marking the 40th anniversary of reform and opening up. There are many areas where New Zealand welcomes China’s voice and can and does work with it in international forums.



• Susan St John is entirely correct about the need to better sort out residence issues with NZ Superannuation. The government is currently considering legislation that would require people to be resident longer in New Zealand to have access to the New Zealand Superannuation scheme. St John reminds us that we also need better treatment of the private retirement plans of those who bring their 401(k) with them to New Zealand.


• New Zealand's copyright industry is trying on a push for extending the duration of copyright and messing with our current ISP notification regime for infringement; I don't wish them luck.


• Net migration has slowed. This shouldn't be surprising. Migrants are only somewhat sticky; a lot of them leave a few years after arriving. That means that net migration figures will always look stronger than they should during upswings in inbound numbers, and weaker than they should during downturns in inbound numbers. Current year net migration is a function of current year inflows and lagged departures from prior year inflows. Net migration was always going to flatten off unless inbound figures continued to grow. As soon as inbound figures level off, then the outflows from prior year waves catch up. I'd be surprised if the anti-migrant tone of the last election campaign, combined with increased restrictions on those here without a residence visa (can't buy a house), hadn't amplified this.


• Some folks are complaining that Christchurch might have 'too many' houses now. What a terrible problem to have! We should be thanking Selwyn and Waimakiriri for allowing growth and solving Christchurch's post-quake housing crisis. And for those who don't like the sprawling suburbs - perhaps the Crown could consider selling off some of its downtown land holdings using a descending bid auction to find out what the value of that land really is. It's felt like unwillingness to realise losses against inflated downtown land values has been a hold-up there, but I'm not close enough to it to really know.

Sci-Hub

If you don't have access to a university library, give Sci-Hub a shot.

It's not quite Napster for academic papers, but it's close. You don't peer. Instead, some with access to gated articles have given their keys to Sci-Hub. Whenever you download from Sci-Hub, it first checks whether the paper's available at Libgen. If it is, you get it that way. If it isn't, it uses one of those keys and uploads a copy over to Libgen for the next user.

Don't know how long it'll last. I'd suspect that the journals would start noticing pretty quickly if some userids started being used very intensely and over a much broader range of journals.

Hopefully, the lovely folks who snuck last-minute changes into TPP haven't made using it illegal. It would be nice if MFAT could have another read through the final legal drafting for this kind of thing. It would be a shame if the primers they issued in October weren't accurate any longer. I am not a lawyer; hopefully a Kiwi lawyer is looking into things.

TPPA reversals

I think it's fair to say that Brian Easton sits to the left of the NZ economist punditsphere, and that Mike Reddell sits to the right of the same. I'm not using punditsphere in any derogatory sense here: they're both serious economists worth taking seriously; they also happen to put their views out there.

In the past couple days, they've both put out their views on the TPPA. Reddell winds up arguing generally against it, though without saying it shouldn't be signed, and Easton in favour, though not that enthusiastically. Both make nuanced arguments. Easton talks about the flow-on consequences of rejecting the deal at this point. Reddell talks about how the layers of bureaucracy to which we may well be signing up will do nothing to improve New Zealand's declining productivity, though he falls short of saying NZ should reject the thing from where we're at. He notes by email that he'd agree with Easton: from where we are, it should be signed. But he's not all that enthusiastic.

I'll remain a fence-sitter as it would take just too much work to come to a strong view on it. My confidence interval on whether the thing's worth signing spans low/mid positive and low negative figures, and it wouldn't be easy to tighten that up. If Congress decided not to pass it and the other partners could then clear out the worse parts on copyright, it wouldn't bother me that much - though the deal on copyright is far better than I'd thought it could have been.

Meanwhile, Stuff polls six celebrities for their views on the thing. Unsurprisingly, Lucy Lawless doesn't like it. News!

Copyright chats

My Tuesday night chat with Bryan Crump at RadioNZ's Nights covered copyright and the digital world. The content will be familiar to readers here, and to those who'd taken my Econ 224 course at Canterbury.

My notes for the chat are up at The Initiative's Sandpit blog. An excerpt:

Consider further what infinite copyright would look like. There was a great sci fi short story in the 80s called Melancholy Elephants. In that copyright dystopia, all works have to be run through a plagiarism engine to make sure nobody is copying any prior ideas. And they’re considering making the duration of copyright infinite.

That latter part might sound nuts, but one Australian academic has suggested copyright should be infinite.

In the Melancholy Elephants story, a senator’s backing a bill that would extend copyright to being infinitely lived. Our protagonist warns him that this would mean the end of the creative world: the regime checking all works against anything that had been created within the copyright period had already killed new creation, because everything builds on everything and just about nothing is entirely novel. Extending it to infinity would mean that nothing could be new and, worse, nobody rediscovering things anew would have that joy: they’d quickly be told that somebody else had had the idea 40 years ago and that maybe they’d heard a snippet of the tune when they were a kid. Never forgetting would mean never feeling the thrill of (re)discovery.

Now that short story is fiction from the early 80s. But the lawsuit by Larrikin Music from a few years ago was not. There, Larrikin had bought the rights to an old Aussie folk tune. Men at Work payed homage to that piece of Australiana in Land Down Under in an 11-note flute sequence. And they got sued, and lost. And, subsequently, the suicide of one of the band members was attributed in part to his dismay at having been thought a plagiarist.

We also covered copyright provisions in the TPPA.

Netflix zones

A few points on the threatened Netflix crackdown on geounblocking:

1. Whether Netflix turns a blind eye to geounblockers is a matter for them to discuss with the content producers selling them the licenses for different regions. It is totally fine for Netflix to check whether its users are breaking the terms of their licenses and to decide whether to enforce those terms. It would be not fine for the government to force them to do so, as it's just parallel importation. But this isn't that.
2. In deciding whether to go hard, Netflix will have to weigh:
1. The costs imposed on legitimate users who travel and whose family activity will look a lot like geounblocking - you're on business in the UK; family's home in the US;
2. The losses from those who, like me, would unsubscribe from Netflix entirely if restricted to the content available to NZ subscribers;
3. Its position with its rights-holders;
4. Whether it is actually possible to hit VPN users and how far they really want to go: threatening account cancellation for those whose primary viewing country doesn't match the credit card might be effective for a lot of users who'd have a tough time sourcing US-based cards.
3. On the customer side, those who VPN might need to be a bit more careful and stick with one country's content for a while until we see what they're actually doing. No more flitting over to the UK for more episodes of The Thick of It, then back to the US for other stuff.
4. On the NZ government's side, they might consider whether New Zealand's doing something particularly stupid in requiring that streaming providers get NZ classification labels for streaming video. Netflix has a ton of long-tail content. The fixed costs of getting NZ labels for each title could well be unduly shortening that tail.

The Censor's Office made a big deal of that they can classify things quickly and under urgency to meet international schedules. But look at this:

Working in close cooperation with the Film and Video Labelling Body and Netflix, the Office processed these submissions from Netflix rapidly. The submitter was organised, all material was able to be viewed and they provided clear information about their commercial priorities. The total regulatory cost for Netflix of establishing themselves as a fully compliant, responsible provider of on demand video to New Zealanders was less than $150,000. 

Ok. Netflix is $10/month for the basic package in New Zealand. A customer generates $120/year in revenue. So Netflix needed over a thousand customers just to cover the regulatory compliance costs of getting the NZ-specific labels. And Netflix, here, has about a third of the tv shows as are available in the US and about a third of the movies. I don't know how much of that is rights issues, and how much of it is costs of getting labels on oddball long-tail content. The OFLC cites classification costs of $1124.40 per title. So, for anything that isn't already NZ-rated, Netflix would have to expect that the title would draw in ten more NZ annual subscriptions to recoup that cost.

Note further that this will hit smaller NZ operators like QuickFlix or Lightbox even harder: they then either lag Netflix in content, or front-foot the regulatory costs per title over (presumably) smaller subscriber bases with others then able to coat-tail.

Wouldn't it make more sense to require that streaming content providers provide the country-of-origin's rating for content, and a link to an equivalences table for those who want to know what different countries' classifications mean? The OFLC even provides one, right here. Instead of on-demand streamers having to sort out classifications for each title in New Zealand, they'd just need a couple links on the homepage. And remember: those who want more stringent censorship can always get it by subscribing to Family First's new service.

In irony watch: I also subscribe to UK's NowTV, a Sky subsidiary, via geounblocking.

Chris Keall's piece at NBR is worth reading, as is the Stuff piece on whether the crackdown is feasible.

TPP Tech

David Farrar summarises the great work NZ's IT community did in ensuring that the TPP deal was reasonable on IP. Sure, there are a few bits in there that are less than ideal - extending the duration of copyright on existing works is always absolutely nonsensical (as compared to extending it for new works, which is more debatable). But compared to the stuff that was giving me nightmares, this is pretty good.

Here's MFAT's IP summary. Key points for me:

• The copyright extension won't pull works out of the public domain but will delay new accessions to the public domain for works currently under the 50-year protection;
• The government will not criminalise uses that are currently legitimate;
• The government will maintain exemptions from TPM provisions for things not infringing or where there's an existing exception: like breaking the region-code on a DVD; breaking TPM to reformat for the disabled; breaking TPM to reverse engineer things;
• Current copyright exemption for temporary electronic copies is maintained (which could matter for some interpretations of geounblocking);
• No major changes to ISP liability;
• No changes to parallel importation.

And I'd elsewhere seen that NZ can maintain its position on software patents. 

I'd commented on TPP briefly on Radio Live earlier in the week. Talkback callers were up in arms that NZ might lose some of its current protections against that foreigners might buy things here. I noted that while it would be desirable to be rid of the overseas investment restrictions, arrangements like that were explicitly carved out of the deal:

Existing regulations inconsistent with TPP obligations are carved out of the agreement. New Zealand will therefore continue to screen foreign purchases of sensitive land, including farmland, through the Overseas Investment Office and require that these meet a “benefit to New Zealand” test. 

Labour seems mad that they'd be blocked from banning foreign purchasers from buying existing houses; hard to take seriously claims that they'd pull out of the TPP over it though.