Morning roundup

This morning's worthies on the closing of the browser tabs:

• This one was a long time coming: difficulty in insuring apartments in Wellington (NBR, maybe $). I wonder whether parametric insurance paying out a sufficient amount in the event of a Mercalli VIII event would satisfy bank mortgage requirements.


• Stuff has a new data visualisation up that they're calling the Homicide Report. They introduce a particular innovation: car crashes involving alcohol use are counted as homicides. I fully expect that this statistic will make its way into the wild without the surrounding context of that the figure is mostly car crashes. It would make complete sense to include cases where the driver was convicted of manslaughter. This isn't that. UPDATE: It is that. They only count car crash deaths where murder or manslaughter charges resulted. I need to read more carefully. 


• Glenn Herud reminds farmers that they need to win the hearts and minds of the public, and that facts won't be enough to do it. He points to Jonathan Haidt's work. Those keen on Haidt should be sure to join us in Auckland on 1 August. 


• Meanwhile, Politik ($) reports on agriculture and methane targets, and the Greens' continued opposition to GE ryegrasses that can reduce agricultural methane emissions. If you think that climate change is an emergency, banning one of the more promising ways of improving the ag sector seems a bit odd in a country where agricultural emissions matter. This kind of work has been at least nine years in the making. And we still make it impossible to use GE ryegrasses to improve pastoral emission profiles. Over in Taranaki, the government decided the best way to help folks there adjust to a hasty and badly informed decision to ban their main industry was to have James Cameron fly over and lecture Taranaki about the need to also end livestock farming. The writers for the past few episodes here have been terrible. Coughlan's reporting on it (the prior link) is excellent though. 


• Michael Reddell continues his critique of the RBNZ's proposed increase to bank capital requirements.


• Patch Notes for GoT Episode 5 (spoilers, obviously)


• If you haven't donated to the Internet Archive before, you should consider it. Remember how the Soviets used to erase people from old photographs when their presence in those pictures became politically incorrect? There is non-trivial risk of reasonable chunks of the internet being memory-holed like that. 


• Federalism allows experimentation. Denver's just had a referendum effectively decriminalising (lowest law enforcement priority) magic mushrooms. If the sky doesn't fall (except as perceived by some users during a bad trip), other places may be able to follow suit. If it does, it's easier to undo the experiment in one place. Would that New Zealand could allow more regional experimentation.


• Police Minister Stuart Nash backs a national firearms registry. Never mind that Canada's cost billions, achieved nothing, and was scrapped in an IT cost debacle the likes of which should entirely be expected given New Zealand's track history with this stuff. National might be encouraged to start by asking what unique identifier will be used to ID a firearm in the system. I know it all sounds simple. We register cars! But a car has a VIN. Firearm serial numbers are not necessarily unique. Adding a unique identifier to a firearm is non-trivial. The discussion thread here is a good starting-point. I expect National to let Labour make a serious mistake here rather than try to block or fix things, knowing that the costs of another colossal screw-up will sheet back to Labour.