Abolish coroners

Edgeler nails this one.

Abolish coroners https://t.co/BgPdDb2mDv

— Graeme Edgeler (@GraemeEdgeler) July 30, 2019

Recall that coroners in NZ operate under crappy legislation that invites them to speculate about measures that might prevent identical cases in future, but putting zero weight on practicability or cost-effectiveness or sanity.

NZ coroners have made a lot of nutty calls based on this. I'd put together a list a few years ago:

Search Google NZ for "Coroner recommends" and you'll find:

• Coroner recommends quad-bikes be equipped with rotational towballs

• Coroner recommends that all farm houses be fenced off. "Mr Scott called for farmers and Labour Department officials to lobby the government to make fencing compulsory on all farms"

• Coroner recommends age restrictions on butane and other possible inhalants. 

• Coroner recommends people wear hard hats when climbing ladders to prune trees (whether they should be required when doing other things on ladders is not discussed)

• Coroner recommends that the refrigeration industry develop guidelines for safe storage of explosive refrigerants.

• Coroner recommends compulsory spot checks of children up to the age of 5.

• Coroner recommends the Government urgently assess media guidelines on reporting of suicide.

• Coroner recommends changes to design of future prisons

• Coroner recommends MoH strengthen guidelines on safe sleeping practices for newborns.

• Coroner recommends review of CT scans (to use them more often)

• Coroner recommends respite care review

• Coroner recommends that you should have to have a licence to rent a nail gun.

• Coroner recommends licensing of outdoor education / adventure tourism operators.

• Coroner recommends clearing trees near train crossings.

• Coroner recommends changes to privacy laws.

• Coroner recommends restrictions on access to glaciers

• Coroner recommends DHB review suicide assessment procedures

• Coroner recommends more training for mechanics

• Coroner recommends national manhole safety guidelines.

• Coroner recommends helmets for riders of motorised skateboards.

• Coroner recommends crowd control training for all airport staff.

• Coroner recommends warning labels on Coke.

• Coroner recommends mandatory high visibility clothing (not just vests) for cyclists. 

This case is worse. The coroner here blames grieving parents for letting their daughter walk to school. This is not the parents' fault. Fear of other parents casting a side-eye drives a lot of cotton-woolling of kids elsewhere. We shouldn't start this here.

Abolish coroners. And especially abolish Coroner Tim Scott. 

Plastic and landfill

I expand on this weekend's post over at Newsroom Pro ($).

A snippet:

Modern landfills are constructed to deal with any leachate from the disposal of plastics. Fees charged at the tip are designed to ensure that the landfill covers its costs. When those fees are set properly, all of the costs of waste disposal are incorporated into the price each of us pays for a council rubbish bag or for a trip to the dump – including the cost of the land purchased for the tip.

Contrary to the usual stories of shortages of land for landfill, fairly simple back-of-the-envelope calculations show it would take thousands and thousands of years before lack of land for landfill became anything close to a problem. The more relevant problem is ensuring that tips are properly constructed – land is a small part of the overall cost of a new site. And at the end of their useful lives, landfills do not have to be a blight. Hamilton’s superb gardens, for example, are built over its old rubbish dump.

Rather than using the waste disposal levy to encourage waste minimisation, we might instead use it to help councils deal with legacy issues from ancient landfills built to inadequate standards with insufficient provision for whole-of-life contingencies, and to improve the filtration of storm-water outflows to keep litter from flowing out to the sea.

But there may now be an even better solution that has some rather serious backing:

One startup wants to eliminate the pollution by essentially vaporizing garbage to turn it into clean energy and fuel. The company, called Sierra Energy, just raised a $33 million Series A investment round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the Bill Gates-led fund that also includes investors like Marc Benioff, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos.

The company isn’t aiming to replace recycling or composting, but to handle the millions of tons of waste that currently goes to landfills. “We take what’s leftover,” says CEO Mike Hart. The technology can process nearly anything, including medical waste and hazardous waste. “It allows you to recycle the entire waste stream,” he says. “The way we do that is by bringing the temperature of waste up to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, twice the temperature at the core of a volcano. At that temperature, everything breaks down molecularly.”

The technology, called FastOx, uses a modified blast furnace, the same basic equipment typically used to make steel. By injecting pure oxygen into the furnace, the new process starts a chemical reaction with carbon in the waste, heating up the furnace. “This doesn’t require external energy,” Hart says. “It’s just a chemical reaction of carbon and oxygen.” The process also adds steam to regulate the temperature, which sustains itself as the system keeps feeding in more trash. Any metal inside the garbage melts and can later be reused.

Another nice feature of landfills: if this kind of tech pans out, you can pop one of these units next to the old dump and you've a great source of feedstock for it. Garbage goes in, energy comes out. Read the whole thing over at Fast Company.

Haidt comes to the Outside of the Asylum.

I'm looking forward to Jonathan Haidt's visit to New Zealand. Sounds like he's also looking forward to it too.

I'm on my way to New Zealand. Looking forward to learning about the only English speaking country that seems to not overprotect its kids. I'm giving a talk thurs eve in Auckland, tickets here:https://t.co/CzWfrMHbQ1

— Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) July 29, 2019

We're still the Outside of the Asylum.

Why you've had to dumb down your syllabus

From the latest issue of Intelligence:

We examined trends over time in vocabulary, a key component of verbal intelligence, in the nationally representative General Social Survey of U.S. adults (n = 29,912). Participants answered multiple-choice questions about the definitions of 10 specific words. When controlled for educational attainment, the vocabulary of the average U.S. adult declined between the mid-1970s and the 2010s. Vocabulary declined across all levels of educational attainment (less than high school, high school or 2-year college graduate, bachelor's or graduate degree), with the largest declines among those with a bachelor's or graduate degree. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses separating the effects of age, time period, and cohort suggest that the decline is primarily a time period effect. Increasing educational attainment has apparently not improved verbal ability among Americans. Instead, as educational attainment has increased, those at each educational level are less verbally skilled even though the vocabulary skills of the whole population are unchanged.

Vocabulary skills of the whole population are unchanged. As more people go to university, the average vocabulary skills of the college-educated go down - those going to uni who otherwise wouldn't have gone to uni aren't picking up more words.

There are consequences of this for the quality of university education for those who would have gone to university during the prior era.

Plastics and health

The Royal Society has a short report out on plastics. I don't think the takeaways I've gotten from it are quite what they'd have wanted.

My takeaways:

1. Plastics in the ocean are bad (duh).
2. Synthetic fibres and fragments coming out of polyester and such in the laundry - I'd never thought of this before. Similarly, tyre wear winds up in storm drains and then to the ocean. No obvious ways of dealing with this. 
3. Well-constructed landfills are the absolute safest place for plastics. When we send plastics abroad for recycling, they risk blowing off the boats into the ocean, or being dumped and winding up in the ocean. I take from this that it is strictly better to put my plastic waste into the council rubbish bag for the landfill rather than risk its heading into recycling streams that may head overseas. 
4. Cruddy old legacy landfills are a problem, so it makes sense both to ensure that new ones have an appropriate post-closure plan, and that councils keep an eye on old ones that might be in need of some love. 
5. The report could have been far more helpful. There's tons of information on global flows of plastic into the ocean, and on NZ consumption of plastic, but little on how much NZ waste plastic makes it into the oceans instead of into well-managed landfills. How many landfills are out there like the long-closed one that spilled into Fox River during a flood? No mention. Odds that any current landfills under current regulatory setting could ever have that outcome? My prior is that the likelihood is exceptionally low, but again, no mention. It does note that much of the plastic pollution that accumulates here is lost equipment from the local fishing industry - but again, no numbers. It almost feels like the report wants people to draw inferences from global averages so have folks here worried about plastic consumption per se rather than the volume of plastic that winds up in the ocean. Some of the details are there if you're paying attention to what you're reading, but it feels like the report's authors were aiming for different inferences to be drawn. 

I was surprised by this quip from the incoming President of the Royal Society on the report launch:

“We have all seen the piles of plastics in rivers and on beaches or seen images of the immense ocean garbage patches. Through reading this report, it is incredible to learn that we have only been creating plastics in any quantity since the 1930s."

Emphasis added.

I wouldn't have thought it incredible to learn that plastics didn't really get going until the 1930s. I don't keep any detailed history of this stuff in my head, but I'd thought that everybody knew that commercial plastics of any significance didn't really get going until Bakelite (remember the old radios and telephones at the museums? Bakelite.). And that was early 20th century, Art Deco stuff. So if you'd gotten the card "Bakelite telephones" in a game of Timeline, you'd pick 1920s/30s for the Art Deco styling. Not really incredible.

Would it be incredible to learn that nylon didn't really pick up until the Second World War, or that oral contraceptives have only been around since the 60s? I guess folks are surprised by different things.

Great Kleiman quote

The New York Times obit for Mark Kleiman is excellent. Here's the conclusion:

“If you do drug policy and you’re asked whether you use drugs, you’ve got two choices,” he replied. “You can say, ‘Yes, I’m a lawbreaker. Please come arrest me and ignore everything I say, because I’m a bad person.’ Or ‘No, actually, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.’

“Since neither of those is an advantageous admission,” he added, “I don’t answer the question.”

The Drug Foundation hosted Kleiman a few years ago; it's where I first heard about the 24/7 programme that seems rather effective in reducing the harms caused by harmful drinkers. 

Youth Parliament and fixing the housing market

New Zealand's Youth Parliament called me in to provide testimony about policies that could improve economic growth without worsening disparities in wealth. 

I suggested that they take a close look at housing markets - as well as regulatory structures that work to stymie competition and entrench existing interests. The Committee of the Youth Parliament took up some of my recommendations in their report - along with some of the recommendations from the presenter from Living Wage Aotearoa.

The hearing was a lot of fun. Since the witness from Victoria University of Wellington failed to show up, the Committee prodded me and the other witness into arguing with each other - I had a blast.

I went through the case on housing in my inaugural fortnightly column over at the Dom Post; I expect it's running more broadly across the Fairfax/Stuff stable.

New Zealand's income inequality statistics, by the Ministry for Social Development's figures, have been roughly flat for 15 to 20 years, depending on the measure.

But concern about inequality, at least as measured by the number of newspaper headlines, followed the rise in Auckland house prices rather than the flat inequality statistics.

The real experience of inequality comes in household budgets strained by too-high housing costs and in worries about whether they or their kids will ever be able to afford a home. The latest report from the Ministry of Social Development tells us that almost 40 per centof our poorest renting households are now spending more than 50 per cent of their income on housing costs.

Fixing the housing mess will directly work to mitigate those inequities. Doing so will also improve, rather than hinder, economic growth. Here is why. 

Read the whole thing!

I should be showing up there fortnightly; Oliver or someone else on the team here may jump in in my place from time to time depending on other commitments.