Afternoon roundup

It's been a busy few days. The tabs, they've accumulated. Some worthies:

• Bans on paying surrogates are a bad idea. 


• California might break the internet. 


• Where Rob Campbell is Chair of Health NZ, do we even still pretend that we have a politically neutral public service?


• BusinessDesk on Effective Altruism in New Zealand. 


• A Newsroom roundup on population and immigration, including a bit on Clive Granger's visa difficulties. If I remember right, they'd figured they had no chance of getting through Immigration New Zealand's points system because of age, so were deterred from applying in the first place rather than being turned down after applying. If anything, that's a worse problem - who knows who else might have been deterred from even trying?


• A suggestion that learning Te Reo will become necessary for getting to the front of the queue for working in the public sector. I do remember those sorts of policies causing no small amount of discord in Western Canada, and being part of what got us the Reform Party. 


• Simeon Brown is not wrong about problems in transport policy.


• If the Rail and Maritime Transport Union is right that "KiwiRail is not going to make a profit, not in my lifetime - and probably never", isn't that an argument for ending the thing?


• Sounds like it's time to flip all vehicles onto RUC, including electrics that currently get a free ride.


• The Building Code is bigger than you thought. 1500 pages, plus 20,000 more web pages and documents. 


• The new Google News showcase is decent. Lots of coverage of regional papers I'd otherwise have missed.