The closing of the tabs:
- Environmental review laws have long been used for NIMBY purposes. This is a new one. The best that could come of this is a recognition that environmental review needs to be fixed.
- If Australia starts enabling nuclear power, NZ should consider a trans-Tasman approach that would let us piggyback on some of their regulatory efforts. There are economies of scale in this kind of reg. And Australia should be sure to kick NZ out of the arrangement if we start behaving like dicks.
- The simplest explanation for Labour's approach to labour-market regulation is that they base their expectations of employer behaviour on how government behaves when it is a monopsonistic employer.
- The simplest explanation for occupational regulation for medical workers is that it's a cartel arrangement that proved sticky when conditions changed.
- They've stopped pretending to be playing at anything other than extortion. “By doing things with news organisations, Facebook was attempting to reduce the risk of government hitting them with a big invoice,” one publisher said. “By pulling out, they’ve made it more likely that they will be whacked with regulation.”
- Could make for a fun test around Peltzman effects, if they gathered numbers on it.
- More reasons to be sceptical of the value of peer review, in some disciplines. The most obvious explanation for the problem (department demographics will reflect international demographics in the field, with some home-country bias, rather than home-country demographics full-stop) is ignored. But the paper's problems are bigger than that. Almost reads as a Sokal hoax. But it seems sincere. At U Manitoba, where I went for undergrad, there were more profs who were US Vietnam draft dodgers than there were in the Winnipeg population overall. An overrepresentation of them necessarily means an underrepresentation of the Canadian-born. Which is totally fine. Canadians will be overrepresented on US university faculties too.
- David Harvey on problems in proposed changes to hate speech regs.
