Afternoon roundup

The afternoon's worthies on the closing of a week's worth of browser tabs:

• Hamish Rutherford explains why, despite Keith Ng's insistence that any mildly clever move in a Google Search that gets you something that somebody didn't want you to see is indeed a hack, the inappropriate use of the term kinda matters. Keith now recommends we use the term cyberbadtouch instead of hack - I like it. 


• Environmental monitoring and reporting at a few of our Councils could stand improvement.


• Is there any good reason that the RMA makes it hard to put up new wind farms? When oh When will have a fit-for-purpose RMA?


• The Irish Central Bank's recruitment process for its next Governor cost €70,236. I wonder whether their headhunter talked to any senior economists around town.


• Great piece from Damien Grant at NBR on the coming regulation of the insolvency industry. I'd be using it in my Public Choice class were I still in that world. A snippet:

  ...the Ministry of Economic Development proposed, in 2010, a simple bill allowing the Ministry to ban those who were acting dishonestly from being liquidators.
  
  The industry body at the time, known as INSOL, sought a far more intrusive regulatory model. It has succeeded.
  
  Parliament has adopted a ‘co-regulatory’ regime, where the coercive power of the state is delegated to approved industry bodies who will issue licences to those who want to be insolvency practitioners.
  
  This is a terrible result. In a field with 50 active firms dominated by a handful of large players, the industry will set its own guidelines, decide who can and cannot practice and will investigate complaints against themselves.

• Tom Chivers has a very nice piece reminding everyone of the risks of replacing GDP with dodgy metrics.


• I completely fail to understand a public health establishment that spends all its time campaigning to ban anything with sugar in it while it seems there's zero consequence for ignoring doctor's quarantine advice and flying from Auckland to Christchurch, round-trip, while infectious with the measles. Could the New Zealand airlines at least ban this clown from their flights in future?