Afternoon roundup

So many tabs across so many windows. A selection:

• Tauranga has a gang problem. Cat burglars. And the problem is growing.


• Fun field experiment: telling people to discriminate less can do more harm than good. 


• Henry Cooke went through the Emissions Reduction Plan. He finds that, of 284 total actions, 158 are plans to have plans, 121 are policies, and 5 are 'barely relevant'. Check his work.


• Rather silly from Business NZ. They took the ILO "Preliminary list of cases as submitted by the social partners Committee on the Application of Standards", where they've raised complaint about the Fair Pay Agreements, and retitled it "Worst cases' breaches of international labour treaties." 


• Rent controls in St Paul, Minnesota, wound up not having the intended distributional effect. "...the tenants who gained the most from rent control had higher incomes and were more likely to be white, while the owners who lost the most had lower incomes and were more likely to be minorities."


• New Zealand has a massive shortage of housing. We have no shortage of land, agricultural or otherwise. If a developer is willing to pay enough for a paddock to convince the farmer to forgo all the net future value of all the future crop production on it, that's hard evidence it's worth more in housing. Mayors begging for government to ban development on agricultural land... well, it ain't going to help solve the housing shortage. All of this is being made worse by the pushes with the Emissions Reduction Plan. This government will wind up wrecking its housing supply agenda.


• Robin Hanson's guess for the best bang-for-buck altruistic research on a low(ish) budget? Better trials on figuring out how to boost uptake of prediction markets. 


• We'd caught a great podcast on the scandal around the 1950s rigging of American game show Twenty-One. The contestant had the answers, and was told when to take a dive. Meanwhile, Australia's election debate...