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Hamas stocks fell today by three points, while Al-Queda rose five

03:06 / 29.07.03

From Yahoo:

The Pentagon is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits

The Pentagon office overseeing the program, called the Policy Analysis Market, said it was part of a research effort "to investigate the broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks." It said there would be a re-evaluation before more money was committed.

The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts — essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. Holder of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of investors who put money into the market but predicted wrong.

A graphic on the market's Web page showed hypothetical futures contracts in which investors could trade on the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) would be assassinated or Jordanian King Abdullah II would be overthrown.

...if this was someone with a website, and didn't involve money it could be entertaining like 'Nation States' or something. As it is, it seems really creepy. I really don't understand the logic behind it either.

03:11 / 29.07.03

DARPA's just weird anyhow.

06:24 / 29.07.03

Could this be a plan to use greed to get The Companies involved in rebuilding where the military bomb?

12:36 / 29.07.03

'Anyone else finding it somewhat reminiscent of Brunner’s Delphi Polls?

15:07 / 29.07.03

Or are they trying to get private financing for bombings and whatnot? They get an investor who invests heavily in someone getting assasinated while at the same time finances an assasination attempt?

15:50 / 29.07.03

i think the idea is that this may provide a good barometer for the general health of political things in the same way that the financial markets are believed to provide a good barometer for the general health of economic things.

the logic being that a large number of people with money riding on certain things will do a lot of their own research, and invest accordingly, and the research and considered opinions of this pool of people will be measurable by how the futures perform.

weird shit, but that's the Pentagon for you.

15:54 / 29.07.03

It's Dead!

That was quick...

The Pentagon will abandon a plan to establish a futures market to help predict terrorist strikes, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Tuesday. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said he spoke by phone with the program's director, "and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped."

Warner announced the decision not long after Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle took to the floor to denounce the program as "an incentive actually to commit acts of terrorism."

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16:00 / 29.07.03

Sure. Predict an assassination and win big, and then have government agents knocking on your door. I doubt they're going to accept "lucky guess" or "independent research" as an answer. Especially if you're consistent.

Maybe they're hoping to catch people involved in terrorist rings who, the theory goes, will be too greedy to pass up a chance to make money from their information.

This creeps me out royally.

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16:00 / 29.07.03

Wow. That was fast.

23:47 / 29.07.03

Yeah, very fast. Democratic government is supposedly a slow process, but the machine moves quick when it feels it needs to. I guess America isn't ready to be quite so honest about it's conversion of geopolitics into gladitorial amusement for the masses. A little more prep time is obviously in order. Give it a year.

14:07 / 30.07.03

What was it Rumsfeld(?) said last year--never introduce a new product (in that case, war) in August? Guess that applies to late July, too.

This market on assassination attempts, coups, and general mayhem, idea, however, gives a whole new twist to the notion of insider trading. And all these economists saying on NPR today, "Really, this is a very good way of gathering data . . ." Seems like such a disconnect from even the vaguest sense of ethics.

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21:42 / 30.07.03

A little more prep time? A year? Maybe not so much. Yesterday all the press on this idea was horrible. It was laughable. A dangerous incentive to commit acts of terror. Now Google News actually shows a couple of stories, such as this one from Fortune claiming it's not such a bad idea after all. This one reasons that, yes, FutureMAP is morally repugnant-- but not as bad as the WTC attack, so we should give it a go!

Weird.

It's not the ethics I'm worried about, but how easily it could be abused. It's gruesome, but the main objection is not that it's gruesome, it's that we could end up paying people to make terror attacks. (oh, wait, we already do... shh.)

14:39 / 31.07.03

A lawyer friend of mine uses that method to plot strategy and tactics in between court sessions. It works pretty well, so a terrorism Delphi scheme isn't that bad an idea. The bigger danger is limiting the pool of forecasters to spooks and former spooks, thus limiting the perspective. I say cast as wide a net as possible, even if you have to put up with the bad taste of someone paying a dollar just to make jokes, e.g., Bush being assassinated by an exploding conch shell sent by Castro.

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17:10 / 31.07.03

Current spooks were supposed to be forbidden from participating, so that wouldn't have been a problem.

01:00 / 01.08.03

I say cast as wide a net as possible, even if you have to put up with the bad taste of someone paying a dollar just to make jokes

bad taste? I think that this sums up the flavour of the "Bombing for Dollars" quite nicely:
from this modern world:
Imagine if this system had been in place before 9/11: Congratulations, John Public! 3000 people are dead in lower Manhattan—and you’ve just won a million dollars!

wow. wouldn't you just feel like the luckiest person on earth.