Ministerial cars going electric is a great idea. The range limitations and range anxiety inherent to electric cars would mean ministers will find it much more difficult to do their jobs and therefore will have less time each day to mess up the economy and regulate unnecessarily.
One of the most productive things I ever saw the Green MPs do in Wellington was taking the bus to and from work.
I could not be happier when I saw Green coleaders Russel Norman and Metiria Turei waiting at a bus stop. They are just waiting, they will not working with a colleague, they were not working on their phones. They were just standing there doing nothing. That was the most productive moments of their times in parliament.
Every second a Green MP spends waiting for a bus and travelling on a bus and arranging to fit in with bus timetables is one second less spent making New Zealand a poorer country and deterring investment from coming to New Zealand through their high tax and heavy regulation policies.
The New Zealand Labour Party and New Zealand Greens both make much of the fact that when you privatise a state-owned enterprise the taxpayer is no longer entitled to dividends from the privatised business. The fact that the sale price is the net present value of those future dividends is a rating fallacy that is not the subject of this post.
Source: New Zealand Treasury – data released under the Official Information Act.
What is the subject of this post is whether there are indeed any dividends paid to taxpayers after capital injections. 2007 was the last year in which dividends to the taxpayer exceeded capital injections. The reason was that dog called KiwiRail.
Bugger all Aucklanders take the bus (6.5%) or train (1.8%) to work. More Wellingtonians take the train (6.4%) or the public bus (7.9%) than in Auckland but more walk or jog than take either of those two publicly funded and subsidised conveyances. Hardly anybody takes a bike to work these days.
In responding to demands for police to crack down on windscreen washers, some of whom intimidate motorists to pay, the deputy mayor of Christchurch showed a cultured ignorance of youth courts. She has never read newspaper reports that show that youth court defendants are never named and their convictions are not held against them as adults. Furthermore, she is unaware of the spent convictions law in New Zealand that expunges most convictions after seven years, especially petty convictions.
If bikes were not invented until today, would they ever be allowed on the road by road safety regulators. Here is the business case: allow pedestrians to move around at high speed on the road including at night with poor visibility as long as they travel on a metal contraption.
I am surprised that the Guardian did not do this graphical analysis themselves. My analysis below shows the quite a few people were unarmed but many more were carrying guns, knives or other weapons.
You have to read through every individual data entry to work out how many of those killed had guns, and the many of these were shooting at police when they were shot dead. The same legwork is required to find out how many officers are on murder charges after killing civilians.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
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