Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: A Big Idea, in reply to Gareth Ward,
I like some of this. The variable savings rate is a very curious and interesting idea. I don’t think we can foresee how it would be used clearly. Since it is essentially imposing a tax, it gives the Reserve Bank the ability to bring inflation down by raising it. It’s a much more powerful tool than the OCR because it works directly on the people spending the money, rather than indirectly through the banks printing it through debt.
It’s a very good idea to address inflation directly through economic policy. It should never be left to the Reserve Bank to do it all, because they just don’t have enough power. With economic policy changes actually targeting inflation, they will only have to smooth out things.
I’m not entirely clear on how they intend to tackle the high dollar, though. I’m guessing that by putting the risk free rate down it should bring the dollar down, and they might have the freedom to do that if they can tackle inflation via variable savings. But since the key inflation driver is house prices at the moment, a low cash rate encourages more debt, which drives prices up.
So controlling property investment directly seems like the only answer. They’ve got a bunch of ideas. I’d expect every last one of them to be unpopular with property owners. It’s bold though, I give it that. Glad to see some movement here.
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Cracker: The Colorado Experiment, in reply to linger,
Well one advantage to the glacial pace at which the American system moves is that it probably will be allowed to.
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Civil servants can't legalize cannabis. That has to come from politicians. And at this point, we're looking like it's at least an election cycle before we can even start talking rationally. First they have to ban everything, and see how that works. Presumably, it will be like it was last time, before the explosion of chemicals left the lawmakers behind. Now they've caught up and even jumped in the lead by the amazing expedient of extinguishing the rights of every NZer to any unprescribed substance, even ones that haven't been invented, that is psychoactive. Except, of course, for those that are already excepted (regardless of the known harms). These kinds of things can be done in NZ, because when you don't have a constitution, you don't even know what you're missing out on when you lose a fundamental right. You weren't even consulted.
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Cracker: The Colorado Experiment, in reply to Steve Curtis,
A big mistake, to further decriminalise pot
I guess we're now in a position to find out if that is true, in Colorado, rather than a guess. You got your prediction. I got mine. Which is that Colorado won't change much at all. But millions of people in Colorado can now be honest about what they do. Which is worth a great deal to them.
Time will tell.
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Any extra tools are good, really. I was glad we brought in LVRs, not because I thought it would help, but because there should at least be tools in the toolbox. It could take a long time to work out how to use them. Or maybe it will be continual learning, because conditions continually change. But at least they have them. At the moment, it's like we are trying to swim using only one arm and one leg. Getting control of all 4 limbs isn't going to mean the economy suddenly launches into a perfect Australian Crawl, but it can at least begin to learn the Crawl.
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Good post Damian. Exciting times in the US. Crazy times here.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Yes, a headline say the numbers are soaring. But that often happens with small numbers. It would be kind of nice to see this problem in perspective with other problems.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Russell Brown,
Just a thought here, too. The MoH may not have considered it a particularly high priority. They're also in the business of harm assessment, and emergency services very much so. While it might be something that they'd note, a rise in this kind of problem, how does it really stack up against the constant flow of people they have to treat? So far, no one has died, nor does it sound like there's even been any kind of ongoing treatment. Most night in A&Es they're treating people who actually have suffered serious and obvious harms - broken bones, head injuries, poisonings, serious bouts of infectious illness, massive lacerations, burst eardrums, injuries sustained in drunken brawls, car crashes and so on. Did up to 4 cases nationwide per week, involving lying the patient down and monitoring them for a few hours, even show up on the serious harm radar?
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Yes, I'd give them some slack that it's probably quite a difficult thing to do. They could surely have got a partial result going, though - target the biggest sellers, look at their purity first, because they have the greatest chance to do harm. Then others that have any reliable connection to reported harms actually occurring. That does require some kind of reporting procedure though, which I've never heard of actually happening in A&Es. Whatever supplies the patients had could at the very least have been analyzed. Christ, at the very least of all they could have been kept. We're not talking about hundreds of thousands of incidents. Data would have begun to flow about the honesty of the suppliers and the danger of the actual substances. We're currently in a moral panic about "synthetic cannabis", when we're talking about hundreds of different substances in reality, many of which aren't synthetic cannabis at all.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
OK, I get it. So you’re saying it could be that possession plays no part whatsoever in the time that people get, despite there being a conviction for it that does actually carry jail time. Or at the least that the amount of time it contributes is unknown?
ETA: Leaving aside the question of whether the search for the drugs was a major contributing factor in the other conviction actually happening. If the Misuse of Drugs Act can be invoked at the whiff of cannabis, then finding the received stolen property is a lot easier. But it was stolen property.
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