Thursday 26 November 2015

Inside The Asylum

I'd cited iPredict as an example of New Zealand's cherished "Outside of the Asylum" status. While other countries did stupid things banning socially useful prediction markets, either at behest of gambling interests or because of anti-gambling politicians, or the bootleggers-and-baptists combination of the two, New Zealand was sane.

Simon Bridges just killed iPredict. The because is potential money laundering. But that's just the proximate cause. The ultimate cause is absolute Vogon-scale bloody-minded bureaucratic idiocy. Applying bank-style money laundering regs to a tiny non-profit with minuscule financial turnover -and that was always a dubious proposition for the University in the first place - that could never do anything but kill the thing. And it takes absolute Vogon-level bloody-mindedness to do that.

Idealog has the best write-up on it.

Can somebody set "Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly" to music? We might need a new national anthem.

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