Afternoon roundup

Another long-overdue closing of the browser tabs:

• Tower Insurance is now offering parametric flood insurance. I'd love to know more, including the maximum sum insured and how they've dealt with regulatory issues. 
• New Zealand doesn't have any price gouging laws. Suppose that you can't keep up with demand for your product - everyone in the country is short of it. Normal drill would be to increase prices, right? Surely it's better to ration by willingness-to-pay than by queuing and leaving people short. Alas.
• The Climate Commission notes that, at a carbon price of $150, rebating 54% of ETS revenues back to households as a carbon dividend would fully offset the median increase in food and fuel costs. See Section 5.8. Now imagine the politics of carbon prices if they dispersed 100% of it, instead of letting Grant Robertson use it for industry subsidies. 
• Germany's fantasy energy policy. The Gods of the Copybook Headings limp up to explain it once more. 
• In praise of Corsi-Rosenthal boxes
• The short-term effects of a minimum wage hike may differ, substantially, from the longer-term effects. Hurst, Kehoe, Pastorino and Winberry over at NBER. 
• The Lake Onslow project: an analog solution in a digital age? I still wonder about allowing Korean-style small modular nuclear reactors. If an investor wanted to stick some at Huntley to plug into the existing distribution grid, would it be possible? 
• Minister David Clark wanted to push through a government flood reinsurance scheme. Subsidising people to live on flood plains encourages more people to want to live on flood plains. And then you wind up in stupid second-best worlds where Councils try to zone to keep people from living in places where they wouldn't be living in the absence of that insurance subsidy, or try to pay for flood-protection works that developers would have had incentive to put in on their own so that properties would be insurable. Dodged a bit of a bullet if that one's been avoided. 
• Remember how I said that the RUC discount scheme for diesel drivers invited rorts? The predictable has happened. 
• Take blood, run gene sequencing, predict height, BMI, educational attainment and more. 
• The CDC is failing in its response to Monkeypox. 
• Roger Bootle on the return of the Gods of the Copybook Headings in inflation.
• Smell loss seems the best current predictor of long-term post-covid cognitive impairment. Makes sense to this non-physician: the olfactory nerve is a direct pathway to the brain, right?