Afternoon roundup

Minor notes on the closing of the browser tabs:

• Andre Brett asks good questions about Auckland rail. Don't agree with some of the conclusions, but they're good questions. 
• The Onion's Amicus Brief in favour of parody is excellent.
• The tertiary education union is going on strike, seeking an 8% cost of living increase. Perhaps a bit difficult for the universities to avoid declining real wages for staff when tuition fee increases were capped at 1.7% for the year and international students might still be trying to figure out how to get visas. 
• There are way fewer nuclear warheads now than there were in the late 1980s. Dropped from over 60,000 to about 10,000. It's still a lot, and Russia has about half of them. 
• Charlie Gates interviews perennial Christchurch local government candidate, and eccentric, Tubby Hansen. 
• Stefanie Stantcheva explains how to run surveys, if you want to create identifying variation. 
• Oooh, yeah. That'll matter. Productivity measures can be upward-biased if some of the labour cost has shifted onto customers: pumping own fuel, supermarket self check-outs. It has to be more efficient than having paid staff do it, or else it wouldn't be done, but the full labour cost of producing the output includes the customer's time. 
• Dileepa Fonseca wishes we had more ghost houses. It would mean there is a surplus of houses, rather than a desperate shortage. He is absolutely correct. It's on the back of a report finally showing that there really aren't that many of them.
• John Cochrane reminds central banks that there are risks out there other than climate change. 
• British power companies are pelletising wood from old-growth forests for use in power generation. I don't know whether the economics would stack up for shipping pine pellets from NZ, but we might wind up seeing more of that kind of power generation here. 
• "What made JASON possible was the convergence of two factors: a competent research community willing to strictly act as advisors, and political officials who wanted that advice to be truthful rather than convenient." When elite physicists advised Washington.
• Inflate grades or get fired at NYU. 
• Oliver Hartwich reminds us that, unlike Truss, Thatcher started by balancing the budget. 
• Jonathan Milne on problems at Ports of Auckland. 
• Between ownership and rangatiratanga: Thomas Cranmer on the Three Waters reforms