The morning's worthies:
- NZ alcohol policy basically gives a veto over licensing to the Medical Officer of Health and to the Police. Sucks when you get a prohibitionist in charge of either. And why are so many NZ prohibitionists named Palmer anyway?
- Josh Gans on copyright status of AI-created works.
- Grimes set up an AI trained on her own work. It tweets. Grimes notes, "The degree to which this bot has mastered my internal monologue is terrifying to me"
- Michael Reddell on RBNZ forecasting. I think it's a damned shame we didn't get NGDP markets for NZ; Simon Bridges murdering iPredict may have cost us considerably. Thanks again Simon.
- A reminder that it was Don Lavoie who coined the term "knowledge problem" for Hayek's fundamental insight, not Hayek himself. Even if you think you're familiar with the term, please read this.
- Immigration NZ continues to be an absolute mess. It's only partially the bureaucracy's fault. They'll have had whipsawing policy directives from the Ministers. First it's clamp down and don't process visas because Labour hates immigrants. Then the inevitable bad consequences from blocking migration, so they get told to stick every employer into the high-trust accredited employer visa programme to speed up processing - which pushes actually trustworthy employers into the same queue with a bunch that really really aren't. And the inevitable consequence of that. Absolute mess. Herald, Stuff. The Stuff piece is particularly good.
- RBNZ figures that migration might now be reducing inflationary pressure rather than adding to it - easing labour supply bottlenecks.
- In today's edition of "China is actually a more stable and reliable trade partner than the US," Trump promises 10% across-the-board tariffs if elected. Shouldn't US foreign policy aim at encouraging deeper trade links with the US and reduced reliance on China?
- Action on Smoking and Health is getting fed up with BS coming from Health Coalition Aotearoa.
