Rat farming? How about bedbugs? They're making a comeback.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Spencer" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 2:30 PM
Subject: [Futurework] Re: Professional Ethics (of economists)
>
> Last night, I commented on Tom's reference:
>
>>> http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.com/2011/09/professional-ethics.html
>>
>> Over the past 30 years, the economics discipline has been
>> systematically subverted....Many of the most prominent economists
>> in America are now paid to testify in Congress, to serve on boards
>> of directors, testify in antitrust cases and regulatory
>> proceedings, and to give speeches to the companies and industries
>> they study and write about with supposed objectivity. This is not
>> a marginal activity; it is now an industry, run by a half dozen
>> large companies.
>>
>> I didn't know that. Why does that remind me somehow of the privatized
>> prison industry?
>
> Saw this on Slash/dot:
>
> How Bug Bounties Are Like Rat Farming 104
>
> Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 20, @11:00AM
> from the first-we-hypothesize-a-problem dept.
>
> Gunkerty Jeb writes "In a keynote speech at the United Security
> Summit, Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, drew parallels
> between the increasingly popular (and successful) practice of
> software vendors offering bug bounties and a new industry
> springing up in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the population
> has recently found itself beset with a growing rat problem. In
> order to help mitigate their rodent problem, officials in
> Johannesburg began offering a small monetary rewards for each dead
> rat turned in. It was wildly successful, and it didn't take long
> for fresh batch of entrepreneurs to pop up and exploit the
> situation. Of course, I'm talking about rat farming. Evidently,
> business minded individuals have taken to breeding rats, only to
> kill them and turn them in for rewards. Obviously, rat farming is
> somewhat unscrupulous, but security researchers are doing the same
> thing: breeding bugs in the lab, then leading them to the
> slaughter for a nice payday. And it's a good thing."
>
> Which probably isn't a totally new thing [1] but a reminder about how
> that works with prisons, weapon systems and (allegedly) economists.
>
> The way it works out for (software-) bug hunting -- the relevance for
> Slash-dotters -- seems to be free of the malignancy/fraudulence of rat
> farming:
>
> http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/how-bug-bounties-are-rat-farming-092011
>
> as one commenter there (somewhat intemperately) observes.
>
> So the question is: how do you structure privatization of prisons,
> corporatized for-fee economics consulting or any such activity so that
> it works like bug-hunting and not like rat-farming? Do we need to
> somehow extract or sequester such activities completely from
> capitalist incentives?
>
>
> - Mike
>
>
> [1] The Paris rat-catcher of circa 1689 in Stephenson's _Quicksilver_
> was already (and quite entertainingly) into rat farming.
>
> --
> Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
> /V\
> [email protected] /( )\
> http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
>
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