Thursday, June 13, 2013

Bloody Friday

Saturday mornings, I cook pancakes. While cooking pancakes, I listen to Duncan Smith and Susan Murray's Country Life programme on Radio New Zealand (as do all good Kiwis). It's often a wonderful celebration of rural entrepreneurship.

I had never heard of Bloody Friday. And so I last week learned something new.

Friday, 9 June, 1978: 300 farmers released 1300 ewes onto the streets of Invercargill, herded them through the streets, then slaughtered them right there to the surprise of onlookers.

The Meatworkers' Union had made it impossible for the farmers to get their stock to slaughter. Sheep were starving in the paddocks because the feed had run out; the farmers had planned on getting their stock to market rather earlier.

Country Life interviewed Syd Slee about it. You can listen here. I especially liked the part where the police van showed up. The protesters expected they were going to be arrested. Listen in to hear what happened instead.

I was reminded of this interview when Jaime Lee-Ross's private member's bill was drawn from the ballot. His bill makes it easier for employers to hire replacement workers in case of strike. Here's Farrar on the bill; here's Cresswell.

I support the bill, and especially if we could have it apply retrospectively to 1978 when it would have done the most good. I'm a bit puzzled about the point given that New Zealand doesn't really have closed shop any longer - we don't lose that many days to strike action any longer. 2011 had the lowest number of stoppages since they started counting in 1986; I can't find more recent numbers quickly. And the Bill will do a great job of mobilising Labour's base to get out the vote. It the game worth the candle?
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Faint hope

Reason's Nick Gillespie explains what it'll take to curb the American surveillance state given that both Democrats and Republicans are totally cool with surveillance whenever their team's guy is in the White House:
More to the point, though, the virtually unyielding preference for partisanship over principle explains why regardless of which party controls the government, the surveillance state continues to grow. It’s totally different, don’t you see, when my guy is running the show!

That same dynamic also helps to explain what is arguably the single-most important political trend over the past 40, 50, or even 70 years: the rise in the percentage of voters who flatly refuse to identify with either the Republican or Democratic Party. In 2012, more voters—38 percent—called themselves independent than admitted to being Democrat (32 percent) or Republican (24 percent).
And it points to the only place from where actual relief from an ever-bigger, ever-more-intrusive surveillance state is going to come: oddball, ad hoc coalitions formed not by party apparatchiks but by rogue elements that somehow sneak into power and are buoyed by the plurality of Americans who refuse to be cowed by party politics. It is characters such as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rand Paul (R-KY.), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mark Udall (D-CO.) and Reps. Justin Amash (R-MI.), Thomas Massie (R-KY.), and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) who are lobbying for more government transparency, accountability, and restraint.

This crew has virtually nothing in common other than an inspiring streak of ideological independence that mirrors the plurality of American voters. (Paul, who has co-sponsored legislation with Wyden, did not even thank the Republican Party on election night in 2012, choosing instead to thank the “Tea Party.”) They will doubtless find themselves on different sides of the barricades when it comes to questions of taxes, regulation, and spending. But it is impossible to imagine any of them shifting their positions on ubiquitous surveillance of Americans or kill lists or torture simply based on which party controls the White House or Congress. Which, sad to say, is a relief in the current political climate. And the reason their efforts deserve not just our sincere thanks but our vocal support.
Yeah, I put maybe 25% chance on that panning out. Those odds drop to 5% if it doesn't come in the wake of the current and ongoing NSA revelations.

My normal line here is to recommend emigration. But where could you go? If anything, being outside of the NSA / Five Eyes arrangement could make things worse rather than better.

A loyal reader who should know about these things rather strongly insists that NZ's leaving that partnership would make it much easier for NSA to snoop on Kiwis. I expect that he's right. Our pulling out of that arrangement would likely result (my guess, not his) in a snooping box being installed somewhere along the line after the termination ends of the undersea cables that connect us to the world. NZ has direct connections only to Sydney and Hawaii.

Here's Tech Liberty's submission on the Telcommunications (Interception Capability & Security) Bill. I really hope that the Select Committee moves to fix things.
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Tuesday, June 11, 2013

You have got to be freaking kidding me

So New Zealand put in mandatory bicycle helmet laws a few years back. Every study on this kind of law winds up showing strongly negative effects on the number of people who choose to cycle. And so it wasn't surprising that school-kids flipped over to using scooters instead. Scooters have existed for a long time, but I never much saw kids riding them until they mandated bike helmets. I'm not sure I trust my observational ocular least squares here, but it would be fun to study.*

Our five year old got his first scooter about a month ago. He rides it every morning from the parking lot near his sister's daycare over to Ilam School; I walk with him as my office is next door. Then I get to borrow it for the day for runs across campus. It's great.

And, predictably, when somebody sees kids having fun, we have to get a freaking movement to ban it.
Safekids director Ann Weaver said requiring children to wear a helmet would reduce the risk of serious head injuries.
"We do want children to go out and have fun and learn and develop and take risks but we want them to do that safely and the issue is, once you damage your brain you can't get it back. There's only one chance."
A Safe2Scoot campaign will be rolled out in August, providing a template safety policy for schools and urging them to introduce a "no helmet, no scooter" rule.
The call has been supported by research conducted by Waikato University social science student, Trish Wolfaardt.
Her report - Scootering on: an investigation of children's use of scooters for transport and recreation - recommended amending the cycle helmet legislation to include "all wheeled recreational devices, irrespective of the age of the rider".
It also recommended introducing a minimum age for scootering to school.
"Wearing protective gear will not exempt children from injury, but it will minimise the harm," the report said.
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!? Absolutely nothing stops Ann Weaver from bundling her kid up in a helmet and padding if she wants to. The DSM really screwed up by failing to include this particular kind of impulse to ban things in their new catalogue of mental illnesses.

At least MoT and the Police have been sane so far:
Ministry of Transport land transport safety manager Leo Mortimer said it was unlikely that legislation would be changed.
"In the same way that we have not considered compulsory helmets for skateboarders.
"Scooter riders must comply with all the rules applying to other road users, however, unlike cyclists, they don't need to wear a helmet or use a light at night."
...Waikato acting road policing manager Inspector Rob Lindsay said there had been an obvious increase in children using scooters but it hadn't become a safety issue.
Meanwhile, in Canada, some half-wit's suggested mandatory helmets for playing soccer. SOCCER. Where the biggest injuries are from people hurting themselves while pretending to have hurt themselves. Andrew Coyne re-tweeted a few dozen submissions of the things folks my age got up to when we were kids. I don't endorse each and every one of these, but I sure as hell prefer the world where these things are POSSIBLE to the one where we force kids to wear helmets when riding scooters and playing soccer. Here are some of the most fun ones from the list. Note that Monte Solberg, who has a particularly interesting submission, is a retired Member of Parliament.

First, the sad state of the current world:
I can't believe they're making them wear helmets for curling. It's whisky that should be mandatory for curling, not helmets. For those 16 and up.
We had massive snowball wars in elementary school. The school dumped all the town's collected road snow in the school yard. We dug tunnels all the way through them, hauled dozens and dozens of buckets of water from the school to the tunnels, and iced the down-tunnels. There were pop-up spots throughout. Then, snowball wars with Viet-Cong tunnels.

This is the world Ann Weaver is helping to bring into being. I moved here to get away from people like her.

But now for the better ones:

NO it wasn't bad. Parts cars out in the pasture were hella-awesome.
We built rafts at my Grandparents' place out of old rotten plywood and inner tubes, sailed on the puddled meltwater (that's maybe 4 foot deep, being Canada)


Some of the folks from Kenora in our halls of residence in undergrad talked about how they used to hunt each other in the bush with pellet guns, and then pick the pellets out of each others' backs.


Dad would hook our toboggan up to the back of the skidoo. Did the same thing with the horse except slower.





Bet he's from around Kenora.
I remember soaking hard snowballs with petrol and seeing whether we could light them.
Tractor tires, but yeah.
Um... think I agree with the teachers on this one.


That'd be a felony these days. Think I'm kidding?

And here's Monte Solberg:

Again: I'm not saying that the kids should be trying each and every one of these things. But I sure prefer the world where it's possible than one where none of them are. New Zealand is still mostly outside of the asylum on this stuff. But outfits like SafeKids are trying to end it. We shouldn't let them. There has to be ONE place in the world that doesn't succumb to the madness.

Jason Sorens's Coalition for Fun: needed now more than ever.

Update: Final word goes to Steve Sheere, restoring my faith in New Zealand.
* As ACC is reporting scooter accident claim numbers have been rising, there's at least data that could allow for this kind of test. If there's US data on scooter and bicycle injuries that we could use as proxy for rider numbers, then this could be rather fun.


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I concur

After noting that Turkey's alcohol restrictions around bar and off-licence closing hours are pretty obviously religiously motivated, Bill Kaye-Blake makes a few observations about alcohol and policy:
Once you start working through the various economic analyses and the associated social and medical literature, a few things become clear:
  • people drink booze because they like to, or because it makes things less bad. Either way, it makes them happier than the baseline
  • alcohol is a ‘problem’ for a minority of people and/or on occasion. A few people are dipsos; the average adult occasionally gets blotto. Making the problem out to be more than that is disingenuous
  • price is a stupid way to deal with the externalities. First, by definition addicts are insensitive to price. Secondly, the behavioural response of binge drinkers to increased prices is to cut out the moderate drinking sessions, not the harmful ones
  • the research that shows otherwise is flawed. Crampton’s done the heavy lifting, so go see his work, but I’ll back him up. Poor assumptions, begging the questions, faulty parameters — embarrassing, really.
Just because the alcohol activists in New Zealand aren’t banner-waving members of the CWTU doesn’t make their desire to impose their preferences on the rest of the population any better. We can see it clearly on the other side of the world. Let’s be clear about it at home, too.
I'll only dissent only very slightly by way of clarification. Addicts are only relatively insensitive to price. They still respond to price, just less so than moderate drinkers. And so price-based policies have greater marginal effect on moderate drinkers than on heavy drinkers.

Meanwhile, and as expected, New Zealand's anti-alcohol brigade is using the very large weapon given them in the alcohol reform legislation to push for local teetotalitarianism.
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These 32 hours have 20 falsifiable forecasts

Phillip Metaxas and Andrew Leigh sat through 32 hours of Australian talking-head TV.* In all that talking, they were able to find only 20 falsifiable forecasts from Australian pundits. The rest were so qualified that they were unfalsifiable.

They suggest that talk show hosts demand falsifiable predictions:
A nice start would be for Insiders host Barrie Cassidy to insist on ‘falsifiable predictions’ in his final segment, rather than the current ‘observations or predictions’ from the pundits. While such an innovation would be helpful, assessing whether a prediction has proven true or false is likely to provoke objections from the pundits involved. As Gardner (2010) notes, when predictions go awry, pundits often invoke an array of excuses to exonerate themselves. Such excuses include the ‘I was almost right’ defence, and the ‘wait and see’ defence. In our analysis, had David Marr and Lenore Taylor been incorrect about public opinion changing on the mining tax, they could easily have invoked the ‘wait and see’ option to defend themselves. 
For this reason, we advocate a Tetlock-style experiment involving Australia’s leading political pundits. Such an experiment substantially removes the ability of pundits to invoke the common defence mechanisms when their predictions go astray. An appropriate study would require our pundits to make falsifiable predictions about the political world in the future. Predictions could cover a range of topics such as the party likely to win the next federal election, the next leaders of each party, and the passage of key legislation. There would be a sufficient number of questions to ensure that lucky hits do not skew the results. We need more evidence than our analysis could provide to properly separate flukes from prescience. Furthermore, an anonymous survey like Tetlock’s would help determine whether our pundits as a group are worth the airtime they are afforded. An open survey could also give us the ability to rank our political pundits based on their predictive powers.
I'd love to see a talk show partner up with one of the betting markets to refine the opposing pundits' claims into a single falsifiable test prior to the show. Launch the contract at the start of the show, unless it's a contract that already exists, like "Who will win the next election", then have them argue about the appropriate price for the contract while the audience submits bids and asks. Let the ticker move over the course of the show, then insist that both of them put, say, $1000 on it at the conclusion of the debate if their argued price differs from the market price.

This would be really easy for things like "Who will win the next election?" or "Will Julia Gillard lead Labor into the next election?". And it isn't that much harder for combinatorials like "Labor would win more (less) seats under Gillard than under Rudd".

There would be nothing banning such things in Australia or New Zealand. There are political betting markets in both places, even if Senator Xenophon keeps trying to ban them in Oz. The constraint seems more likely to be that viewers aren't really all that interested in getting falsifiable predictions and accurate odds. Theatre and that cherished fantasies never ever be shown to be wrong - that's where it's at.


* Ok, they read transcripts.
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Monday, June 10, 2013

Bad incentives

Radio NZ this morning reported that Justice Minister Judith Collins is allocating $8.3m seized under the Proceeds of Crime legislation to drug enforcement activities and to addiction treatment.

It could be worse. In the US, individual police departments seizing assets get to keep a cut. Where police are rational and maximising, this encourages departments to shift to activities that can be profit centres rather than focus on crime-reduction activities that would yield only social benefits to the community.*

Here's Radley Balko with John Stossel on asset forfeiture. How bad can it get? Balko's been documenting cases where police departments have been demanding that bail money be paid in cash, then seize the cash from the family of an arrested person. Here's more and more. And more.

The NZ police seem to be good and honest people, but they're human too. Why make it be in their interest to do bad things?

Civil asset forfeiture is a thoroughly inside-the-asylum policy. We should know better. If Collins is determined to run civil asset forfeiture, it has to be set up such that there's zero link between the amount seized and police budgets.


* And don't get cute arguing that if the subsidy winds up being large enough, the police can wind up doing more of both. Hit the Balko links. American police are committing crimes so that they can seize assets. Here's the Institute for Justice:
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Where do they all go?

Neal Caren's put together a beautiful little infographic showing the flow of graduates from various US majors into different occupations, using data from the last two waves of the American Community Survey.

So we can see that of the 173,849 graduates in Economics:

  • 37,043 became accountants and auditors
  • 32,303 became financial managers
  • 23,872 became chief executives
  • 36,842 became managers 
  • 43,789 became lawyers
So just under 14% of the kids graduating in economics became CEOs. Now there were 160,706 people identified as chief executives in the dataset. So 14% of econ grads became just under 15% of all CEOs.  Accountants were also overrepresented among CEOs. General business majors were underrepresented among CEOs; they were more likely to be retail salespersons or first-line supervisors of non-retail sales workers than to hit the head office. 

Alas, the chart isn't great for major-selection purposes. We can't see the proportion from each major reporting unemployment, for example. But it can help with Avenue Q's question. What can you do with a B.A. in English? By plurality: go on to teach at elementary and middle schools. 

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