Bart, are you saying that you won't buy access to a bundle of great journalists because you'd prefer separate contracts for each of them?

I'm not sure how you read that into Jordan's comments Paula. The internet is a great distribution channel and plenty of firms use it to earn revenue. Sports organisations are permitted to post free material on the internet, but they aren't obliged to. As owners of the distribution rights to their own content, they will continue to sell in the most profitable way. The most profitable way might be a bit different next time rights come up for sale, but I'm really struggling to understand how you can interpret this decision as limiting the revenue opportunities of sports organisations.

Nothing in this decision limits the ability of sport codes to derive maximum revenue from selling rights.

As one of the economists to whom Jordan refers (four of my Covec reports are on the ComCom website) I generally agree with this analysis. The statutory test requires that the ComCom be satisfied that there will be no substantial lessening of competition, and the self-favouring that underpins Jordan's first concern was a very serious risk.

All the more so since

(a) NZ has no effective "abuse of market power" law, so if this merger proceeded we'd have no way of stopping them from discriminating against other telcos;
(b) it's not just fixed broadband - the trend towards video to mobile devices is not going away; and
(c) people who can afford sky sports are unusually valuable customers, not just average customers.

So, well done ComCom.

i'm struggling to understand the panic. there are lots of ways microcephaly can occur and it appears that the link between zika & microcephaly is really pretty weak. https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/page/2/

Great post Keith - thank you very much. One comment: I think we can rule out this one:

"Or maybe Key is right that people only care about tangible things, not wishy-washy things like integrity. Maybe they expect no integrity from politicians."

People do care about integrity. We know that because the ratfuckers target the integrity of ordinary people, and it works.

Its rare we see such selfish & petulant attitudes dressed up as coherent argument. The "flaws" he demanded people identify have been clearly identified. Where is his coherent response? Absent: buried so deeply by his own self-image that he can't think straight.

Thanks for the very interesting post & comments. Here's my 2c worth.

First, Bart's approach is only one line of scientific inquiry that might help mitigate agricultural emissions. Another would be to work on farming methods that sequester carbon by building the soil rather than depleting it. Not as sexy as GM but there are some great results being achieved already by NZ farmers who are disillusioned with the urea + super approach to fertiliser. Of course they are actively maligned as being unscientific, by the very people who could fund scientific research into this stuff but won't because it threatens the existing business models.

Second, if we apply Russell's approach to climate change (follow the money) to the GM world, it looks a tad less brilliant. This guy (pdf) seems to have a lot of cred as an investor in GM and he's arguing that the whole enterprise is at risk, for a range of reasons. A big one is that the fancy GM stuff like making drought resistant and more nitrogen-efficient plants is just not doable because genetics are far more complex than was previously thought.

I'd be genuinely interested to know whether Bart's burps are in the same category.

The calculations are at the back of the Covec report, which is here: http://www.covec.co.nz/pdf/Covec_Telco_Act_Review_Economic_Issues.pdf