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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

In New Zealand, there are old swamplands filled with swamp Kauri. Around a year ago, construction workers found a 16 m (52 ft) long log which had been buried underground for 40,000 years [1]

They used to dig up $200 million worth of timber a year, mostly exported to China, until the government cracked down on exports. It's illegal to export unfinished native timber, so exporters exploited a loophole by cutting the trunks into "tabletops", or adding basic carvings and labelling them as "totem poles", and then shipping the logs to China for further processing.

[1] https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/giant-ngawha-swamp-kauri-log-d...

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For those that aren’t aware, there was also a scandal when the main fuel line for Auckland airport was ruptured by a digger looking for swamp kauri. To make it all more complicated, the company that did it had a director married to a high ranking MP. It all got murky fast.

https://thestandard.org.nz/the-strange-case-of-oravida-and-t...

That high ranking MP is currently the leader of the opposition National party.

The limits of regulation. There is no way to plug all loopholes.

That said, the added labor ensures a more finished product is exported. Was that the intent, or was the intent to force the wood to stay in NZ?

Certainly the former, but clearly not in the spirit of it. However as long as the tax man got his share maybe that’s all that matters. Presumably the more finished product is taxed higher.

Both the letter of the law and the spirit seem to point to just using the regulation around finished furniture as a way to limit over harvesting. Why do you see it differently?

Not here in NZ. The wetlands were being plundered and trashed with all the raw logs shipped to China. The tax wasn’t the issue, it was getting paid.

>The limits of regulation. There is no way to plug all loopholes.

Sure there is. Just ban export of wood and wooden items.

Then you find wood called "cellulose products" and the cycle starts again. It's impossible to limit creativity, and also why would a government want to pursue a ban as it impacts negatively woodworkers?

>Then you find wood called "cellulose products" and the cycle starts again.

Inventing new words doesn't magically absolve you of crimes, you know.

Actually it does. Consider "bribe" versus "campaign donor." "Execution" versus "murder". Many cases exist. But that is beside the point.

Laws have to be specific, and that is the issue. If you can perform a minimal treatment to the object under the law, then it can be transmuted under the law and the spirit of the regulation is sidestepped.

Laws cannot be specific for this exact reason.

Reason, judgement, and consensus must be part of the process.

To ban the export of unprocessed domestic wood, is it preferable to pre-define and include every possible "process" or is it better to have judges who asses whether any given would-be export is "processed"?

Also, lets skip the argument of regulatory capture/neglect by just agreeing that government transparency/accessibility and voter enfranchisement are critically important to maintaining any reasonable consensus-based system.

I really want to agree with you; this is how law should work (and why "law is like software" analogies are so fundamentally wrong, software doesn't make judgement calls). The problem is that people are involved, which means some of the judges will show poor judgement, including possibly okay'ing something if their friends do it but not if other do, or other less obviously unfair things.

I don't see a solution; the obvious choice of trying to make the law more specific and thus less reliant on judgement gets us back to the idea you are opposing.

A bribe is a donation made with an overt expectation of quid pro quo.

A murder is an unlawful killing.

The points stand. Campaign donations can have undocumented quid pro quos. Legality is what we agree it is, so if some consider an execution unlawful then it is murder. Consider how many innocents given death penalty and exonerated earlier (for a simple case, Salem witch trials).

Lawmakers are slow and playing defense all of the time. You're always a step behind when you have to react to moves.

Yes, but still better than no regulations. It's an arms race.

Why is that better, specific to this instance?

I would venture to guess the regulation, weak as it was, still slowed the exports.

I would imagine so, if only a minor amount. Seems like it increased the price I would gather, unless the international market for unique wood doesn't behave as I'm speculating :)

Right, but I'd argue this export was beneficial, both to NZ and China.

There is also an environmental aspect. Limits on the export of unfinished wood/logs ensures that the wood isn't being sold to become firewood.

Firewood is a thing. Something like 8-10% of UK electricity (2017) came from firewood harvested in the US.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-06-20/uk-s-move-away-coal-m...

The wood dug out of swamps in NZ is far too valuable to be firewood, but wrecking wetland does have a massive negative impact.

It’s worth googling images of swamp kauri if woodworking is your thing, the logs are truely massive.

I did just that... and found this interesting article about swamp kauri and how they helped understand what happened last time the Earth's magnetic poles reversed, 42,000 years ago: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/ancient-no...

The Earth's magnetic poles last permanently reversed about 780,000 years ago. The magnetic event that happened ~41,000-42,000 years ago is called the Laschamps excursion. An excursion is when the magnetic field gets very weak, becomes non-dipolar, but then returns to the original polarity that the field was before the excursion. Occasionally durning these excursions the field flips directions and becomes stable in the opposite direction. That did not happen for the Laschamps. Many of these excursions have occurred since the last reversal of the field.

The article you linked to is a bit woo-woo, especially with all the Douglas Adam's stuff and the number 42. The article did not link to the scientific paper, which is an interesting read. It seems to be open access, so check it out[1].

[1]https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/811

Seems like another case of "this should have been a tax instead of an easily circumventable kverly-specific regulation".

The intent of finished goods laws like this almost invariably is to protect domestic jobs. Many other countries have variations on these type of laws.

The concern is that a raw material export based economy is bad for the people who live in the country because most of the value is extracted from the country and only the most unskilled jobs are left.

This type of resource extraction was a hallmark of the colonial era, which is one reason governments are very wary of it.

So the job market in NZ for chainsaw artists is picking up?

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