Tie-breaker

In this week's column in our Insights newsletter, I wonder a bit about whether T20 matches really need tie-breakers. 

I’m not convinced there’s anything wrong with a tie. Why are we always trying to break them?

We left Friday’s T20 match between the Black Caps and India after the 16th over. New Zealand needed only 26 runs from 24 balls with plenty of wickets in hand. The WASP had New Zealand almost certain to win. It was well past 11 pm, and our 9-year-old was dozing off.

I read CricInfo’s commentary aloud to my rather more awake son and his friend as we walked to the car. Back at the stadium, the roars we heard from a crowd heavy with India’s supporters during the final over probably meant wickets rather than boundaries, as CricInfo eventually confirmed.

So they were off to another Super Over that would take the game to a too-familiar outcome, well past midnight. And we were off to get the kids to bed.

The drive home had me wondering about tiebreakers.

If both teams end a match with an identical score, is there any fair way of determining which side deserved to win?

Deciding a match on the number of boundaries tends to reward the flashier team over a patient one grinding forward on ones and twos. Is the former really better than the latter?

Equally, handing a win to the team with more wickets in hand says that it’s worse to run out of wickets than to run out of overs in a limited-overs game. Both are surely valuable, so why set the one above the other?

But going to a Super Over is plainly a mistake – not simply because of any recent and repeated unpleasantness. You might think that, because an extra over in a twenty-over game gives us 5% more information about which team is really the better one, it is a fair way of resolving a tie. But this format privileges the team with top-heavy talent over the side with talent spread across its order.

Ties are more likely to happen when both teams have comparable skill, so it is no surprise that picking a winner between them involves some arbitrariness. Worse, every method of choosing can skew the pitch.

Yet nothing in cricket demands every match have a winner or loser. We could just accept that both teams were equally decent on the night.

At least that's better than being forced to consider New Zealand’s performance in the Super Overs. 

I tend to run cricket stuff past Scott Brooker to make sure I'm not beclowning myself too badly as a relatively recent convert to the game. 

Scott had an excellent suggestion for a way of avoiding ties, should one wish to avoid ties. 

At the start of the second innings, flip a coin. The coin flip determines whether the chasing team needs to meet the defending team's score to win, or exceed that score. Both teams then have the full inning to chase or defend a known target. No chance of a tie. And nothing that skews play. I rather like it. If you don't want to allow ties.

And this idea also has merit:

Maybe the side that wins the toss should always has to have one more run than the opponent to win. The side that loses must only be equal to the opposition to win, thereby balancing the winner’s advantage in being able to decide whether to bat first or not.

— Russell Hutchinson (@russellhutchins) February 6, 2020

Purity Spirals

This really isn't a bad explanation for why parts of Twitter seem utterly, utterly mad. 

Lately we’ve been witnessing more and more small worlds fall apart under the weight of their vast moral centre of gravity. In the past year, the middle-class, middle-aged, overwhelmingly female knitters of Instagram have descended into internecine conflict over racism allegations. Young adult fiction has exploded into an ethical gazumping war over who is allowed to write about what colour of character. In Canada, the music business has become so consumed by ethical etiquette that a juror who submitted the band Viet Cong for the nation’s top music prize was compelled to write a lengthy apology over how culturally insensitive his action was.

I’ve become fascinated by the link between what we see in examples like these, and a dynamic we’ve seen play out through history.

In 1967, Mao’s Red Guards took to the streets determined to root out the ‘four olds’ of traditional Chinese culture, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. By 1968, they had fallen apart as factions fought each other to represent the truest version of Maoism. In 1794, Robespierre found himself on the same tumbrel he had prescribed for so many other problematic persons. In both cases, a bidding war for morality turned into a proxy war for power.

In my new BBC Radio 4 documentary I wanted to join the psychological dots between history’s pinnacle nightmares and what happens at the end of your road. I decided to call both the phenomenon and the documentary, “The Purity Spiral”. A purity spiral occurs when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and no single agreed interpretation. The result is a moral feeding frenzy.

But while a purity spiral often concerns morality, it is not about morality. It’s about purity — a very different concept. Morality doesn’t need to exist with reference to anything other than itself. Purity, on the other hand, is an inherently relative value — the game is always one of purer-than-thou.

Read the whole thing. And catch the BBC podcast as well.

The entire dynamic may also have consequences for dating markets.

Ports and Portability

Alas, Bernard didn't keep the headline I'd picked for this week's Newsroom column. 

It's about whether it makes sense to move Auckland's Port. I don't know whether it makes sense to move it or not, but I do think that the first step is figuring out just how much value could be unlocked by turning 55 hectares of waterfront real estate over to other uses, whether residential, commercial, or anything else other than a stadium.

So: Ports and Portability.

Bernard went with "Hard numbers needed before 'blue sky' Port talk".

Ah well. I still like Ports and Portability. He's the expert though.

A snippet:

Moving Auckland’s port might make sense – someday.

But I do wonder about some of the talk of moving Auckland’s port to put in a waterfront stadium, or museum, or other large, iconic, and expensive facility.

Stadium maths are almost invariably bad. Rather than revitalising cities, stadiums more typically become white elephants needing ongoing financial support. Putting one on some of the city’s most valuable property would not only ensure it could never cover its own real costs, but would also forgo far better uses for prime commercial and residential land.

If you owned a quarter-acre section in Epsom, with a sprawling ramshackle workshop and shed in the back yard, rising property prices might eventually convince you to make some changes. Clearing the workshop out could be a bit expensive – and especially if you needed to find some other facilities for your projects. But subdividing could let you clear the mortgage and pay off a few other bills.

Unless you had money to burn, deciding to take on all the expense of clearing out the shed and finding another place to work might be a bit silly if you decided instead to put in a swimming pool. It could be nice on a warm evening, but it certainly would not help with the problem of covering the mortgage. And the bank might have something to say about it.

As downtown property values rise, eventually the Council-owned Port’s fifty-five hectares of land and wharves will be valuable enough in other uses to cover the cost of clearing the land and building new facilities elsewhere. Those costs will not be small, with consultancy reports battling over just how close to $10 billion the bill might wind up being. But the value of the underlying property will not be small either.

I worry that where the government wants to decide on whether to move the port before deciding on what to do with the waterfront land, we could too easily wind up with a waterfront stadium.

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote of how numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow normal the laws of normal mathematics but instead follow Bistromathics. He imagined spaceships powered by this new math. Numbers used in economic impact assessments of stadiums are even stranger than bistromaths. To put the academic economic consensus simply, public investments in stadiums do not deliver the promised benefits.

A waterfront stadium the size of Eden Park would sit on about $600 million dollars’ worth of property, if that waterfront land winds up being worth about $10,000 per square metre; construction and running costs of a stadium would be additional. If the stadium had zero running cost and zero construction cost, it would still need to generate revenues of almost $50 million per year to cover the capital cost of the land alone.

And Eden Park’s total operating income last year was just short of $16 million. A stadium might not be the best possible use of waterfront land. It is just too easy to imagine combined governments spending billions of dollars to move the port based on business cases involving selling the port’s land, only to then spend easily over a billion dollars on a new stadium for the site instead.

26,337 pieces of wellbeing

Late last year, I told you about the government's guide on how to fit in, have everyone like you and always be happy.



They called it "A Guide for Maintaining Health and Wellbeing". It has helpful instructions on the importance of making your bed, eating right (including checking the use-by date when buying food!), having a 'growth mindset' and all that.

I kinda wondered about how it is that folks who need to be told not to hit the snooze button too often get to set the rules about how everyone else runs their lives.

And I also wondered a bit about the cost - the hard copies are very nice; it would be a bit surprising if they were less than $20 a pop. Glossy thick pages (134 of them), spiral bound, and with those cuts at the edge so that you can quickly thumb to the different sections. What are those called anyway?

A loyal reader put in an OIA request to find out how many copies of the guide had been ordered.

The total spend on this won't have been small.

I'm also now a bit curious about orders adjusted by Ministry and Agency staffing. The Ministry of Education has a huge staff, but didn't need to order many copies - 2 in total. MBIE has more staff, and ordered 5800.

I also wonder whether those agencies who put in more orders per staff member experienced any greater increase in wellbeing as consequence.

Many thanks to the anonymous reader who put in the request.

Asset forfeiture WTF?

New Zealand's civil asset forfeiture regime still isn't as bad as America's. Seized assets don't go directly into the pockets of the police department making the seizure.

But this is a bit odd:

It was not fair and just in a community if people saw someone they knew was spending more money than they would have legitimately.

Most of the cases the unit dealt with were about disrupting organised crime, especially drug dealing, but it also looked at the proceeds of other types of crime such as tax cases, fishing offences, customs scams, and social welfare fraud.

One was about seizing the proceeds from people who had been making and fitting dentures but were not properly qualified.

Asset forfeiture as a backup to an occupational licensing regime? Really?

Class and fish

Suppose you grew up in a place where only the well-to-do were ever allowed to fish for trout, where the working class only had access to 'rough fish', and you were a committed communist.

If you moved to a place where trout had been introduced and were protected through fishing licenses while some native species were in trouble and generally unprotected, what would you do?

Charlie Mitchell tells us over in the Stuff newspapers. The story almost seems unbelievable. But here it is.

The life of J. Stewart Smith was long, colourful, and driven by an uncommonly strong sense of purpose.

By the time he died in 2008, aged 95, Smith had left a permanent legacy in his adopted country's bloodstream – its network of ponds, rivers and lakes.

This account of Smith's life and legacy is based on official documents and hundreds of pages of Smith's personal notes obtained by Stuff, as well as interviews with people who knew him. several of whom requested anonymity.

They reveal an enigmatic figure largely forgotten in New Zealand's recent history, but one who has had an outsized, and permanent, impact on the country's environment.

"Imagine if one guy was responsible for the introduction of rats, possums, rabbits, stoats and pigs to New Zealand," one former official familiar with Smith's activities says.

"Stewart Smith was pretty much that guy, but he just did it to freshwater ecosystems around the country."

He was pretty clearly a Marxist eco-terrorist.

To understand why Smith did what he did, it pays to understand the long-simmering battle over who gets to fish what.

New Zealand has several dozen native freshwater fish, most of which are nocturnal, discrete, and tucked away in streams far from civilisation. Few of them grow larger than 10cm; they don't make for great angling.

Recognising this, early European settlers decided to bring their favourite sports fish with them: Trout. Trout flourished in New Zealand's cooler waters, with limited competition from native species. The trout fishery is now so prosperous it attracts anglers from around the world.

Some immigrants, including Smith, did not grow up trout fishing, which in England was a sport reserved for the elite. They fished for the so-called "coarse fish" – among them rudd, perch, tench and carp, named for their rough skin.

This class divide bled into New Zealand. While trout soon followed the immigrants, attempts to bring in coarse fish were rebuffed, largely because they would compete with trout.

And so Smith, who paid dues to New Zealand's communist party for much of his life and had a pathological dislike for social hierarchy, sought to equalise the playing field.

You really need to read the whole thing.

Sound advice - if we'll take it.

Some sound-looking advice at Foreign Policy on the coming pandemic.

During the SARS epidemic, I traveled all over China and Hong Kong, interviewed people infected with the virus, doctors and nurses treating the disease, government officials, police—everybody. I was never concerned that I would become infected, despite being in the room with sick individuals. And that’s because I knew what precautions to take. Here are the most important ones to know:

1. When you leave your home, wear gloves—winter mittens or outdoor gloves—and keep them on in subways, buses, and public spaces.

2. If you are in a social situation where you should remove your gloves, perhaps to shake hands or dine, do not touch your face or eyes, no matter how much something itches. Keep your hands away from contact with your face. And before you put your gloves back on, wash your hands thoroughly with soap and warm water, scrubbing the fingers. Put your gloves on.

3. Change gloves daily, washing them thoroughly, and avoid wearing damp gloves.

4. Masks are useless when worn outdoors and may not be very helpful even indoors. Most masks deteriorate after one or two wearings. Using the same mask day after day is worse than useless—it’s disgusting, as the contents of your mouth and nose eventually coat the inside of the mask with a smelly veneer that is attractive to bacteria. I rarely wear a face mask in an epidemic, and I have been in more than 30 outbreaks. Instead, I stay away from crowds, and I keep my distance from individual people—a half meter, about 1.5 feet, is a good standard. If someone is coughing or sneezing, I ask them to put on a mask—to protect me from their potentially contaminated fluids. If they decline, I step a meter (about 3 feet) away from them, or I leave. Don’t shake hands or hug people—politely beg off, saying it’s better for both of you not to come in close contact during an epidemic.

5. Inside your household, remove all of the towels from your bathrooms and kitchen immediately, and replace them with clean towels that have the names of each family member on them. Instruct everybody in your home to only use their own towels and never touch another family member’s. Wash all towels twice a week. Damp towels provide terrific homes for viruses, like common colds, flus, and, yes, coronaviruses.

6. Be careful with doorknobs. If it’s possible to open and close doors using your elbows or shoulders, do so. Wear gloves to turn a doorknob—or wash your hands after touching it. If anybody in your home takes sick, wash your doorknobs regularly. Similarly, be cautious with stairway banisters, desktops, cell phones, toys, laptops—any objects that are hand-held. As long as you handle only your own personal objects, you will be ok—but if you need to pick up someone else’s cell phone or cooking tools or use someone else’s computer keyboard, be mindful of not touching your face and wash your hands immediately after touching the object.

7. If you share meals, do not use your personal chopsticks and utensils to remove food from a serving bowl or plate and, of course, tell your children to never drink out of anybody else’s cups or from a container of shared fluid. It is customary in China to prepare several dishes for a meal and then allow everybody at the table to use their personal chopsticks to pull food from the common dishes: Don’t do this until the epidemic is over. Place serving spoons in each dish and instruct everybody at the table to scoop what they want from the serving dishes onto their personal plates or bowls, return the serving spoon to the main dish, and then use their personal chopsticks only to pick food from their personal plate or bowl into their mouth. Wash all food and kitchenware thoroughly between meals and avoid restaurants that have poor hygiene practices.

8. Absolutely do not buy, slaughter, or consume any live animal or fish until it is known what species was the source of the virus.

9. When the weather allows, open your windows at home or work, letting your space air out. The virus cannot linger in a well-ventilated space. But of course, if it is cold or the weather is inclement, keep warm and close those windows.

10. Finally, if you are caring for a friend or family member who is running a fever, always wear a tight-fitting mask when you are near them, and place one on the ailing person (unless they are nauseated). When you replace an old, dirty mask from the face of your friend or loved one be very, very careful—assume, for the sake of your protection, that it is covered in viruses, and handle it while wearing latex gloves, place it inside of a disposable container, seal it, and then put it in the trash. While wearing those latex gloves, gently wash the patient’s face with warm soap and water, using a disposable paper towel or cotton swab, and seal it after use in a container or plastic bag before placing it in your household trash. Wear long-sleeved shirts and clothing that covers your body when you are caring for your ailing friend or relative. Clean everything your patient wears or touches very thoroughly in hot soapy water, including sheets, towels, and utensils. If you have space, isolate the sick person in your household in a room, or a corner of a room, where they are comfortable, but separated from the rest of the household. If the weather is tolerable, open a window that is on the opposite side of the room, so that air gently blows past the patient’s face and then outdoors. Of course, don’t do this if it is very cold, as your friend or loved one will be made sicker if uncomfortably cold.

I hope somebody's running the numbers on a temporary halt to air travel from China to NZ. I expect that the cost of a temporary ban would be increasing at an increasing rate in the duration of a ban; the benefits would be increasing but at a decreasing rate. How contagious and fatal need the virus be for the marginal benefit curve to sit above the marginal cost one for a limited-duration travel hiatus? If it's contagious before there are symptoms, and each case infects more than 2 others (who each then go on to infect others), and the fatality rate is somewhere around 2%...

Anyway, be careful out there. And don't be offended if I decline any offered handshakes for a while.