Afternoon roundup

The morning's worthies:

• A virtual art gallery of DALL-E created works. My favourite:
  
  The link gets you the annotated guide, as well as a link through into the gallery so you can walk around for a look.
• A stress test run for the ECB shows that climate change really isn't a prudential issue for central banks. Doubt it will encourage Adrian Orr to stop tilting at this windmill.
• More experts warning about MoH's advice on Covid testing. MoH currently only notes that a negative test isn't required for ending isolation. MoH should be advising people that there's substantial risk they're still infectious if they're testing positive. It was about two months ago that Anne Wyllie was describing the Ministry of Health's advice as 'dangerous misinformation'...
• Dodger Stadium is banning Roger Owen from throwing peanuts to punters.
• Aged care facilities are short on nurses and having to shut down beds. Labour seems generally of the view that it's bad for the sector to rely on migrant nurses. It'll be interesting to see how this one ends; it has a lot of potential to end badly. How many people will be pushed out of care?
• Marc Daalder has a modest proposal.
• Some fun and absurd trolley problems.
• The Gods of the Copybook Headings return to Germany.
  
• Lindsay Tedds works out the implications of Alberta ending its indexation of tax brackets. NZ really really should start indexing its tax brackets, or insist that the RBNZ do its one big actual job so it doesn't matter as much.
• Immigration restrictions don't just impinge on the liberty of those abroad. They are also a substantial hindrance on the liberties of those already here. Just ask Ilya Somin.
• Chloe Swarbrick is pushing for a lot more controls on alcohol. She's citing the BERL figure as part of the motivation. I wish people would remember that BERL's $7b+ figure isn't from a report. Their old $4.9b figure was from a report, which was severely flawed. They then multiplied that old figure by GDP growth over the period to get the new number. That's it. The initial number was nonsense but even if it had been right, the inflation requires that alcohol harm be a constant proportion of GDP. Wouldn't you even want to check whether consumption had dropped over the interval? The Greens like to claim to be evidence-based...
• Starting salary for lifeguards in Wellington, requiring a 40-credit certificate that can be done from age 16 on the job, is $51,663. It matches the starting salary for teachers with a Bachelor in Teaching. The lowest rung on the Lecturer scale at Canterbury is $82,882 and would generally require a PhD. So spending 8 years training for a PhD, after finishing NCEA at age 18, means forgoing half a million dollars in lifeguard salary as compared to starting lifeguarding at age 16.