Betting on Terrorism

[Griff]

This struck me as an odd use of market forces.

The latest brainchild of a contentious Pentagon program — an online gambling parlor that allows anonymous investors to make money predicting assassinations and terrorist attacks — is drawing fire from Capitol Hill.

They were going to use a program called Futures Markets Applied to Prediction to try to assess terrorist threats. tw could profit from his Manhattan scenerio or bin Laden could lay a bet and blow something up. hmmm... maybe it was just a sting operation.

[arz]

I'd call it a honeypot.

[Undertoad]

Aaaaaaaaaaand it's cancelled.

[Griff]

Yep, thats why I used the past tense, seems they're taking a powder over at Capitol Hill even as we speak.

[arz]

I think we should just have a simple algorithm that automatically cancels anything and everything John Poindexter touches over there at the Pentagon.

[russotto]

Analog magazine had a story (maybe a "Probability Zero") about the same idea applied to the weather.

The problem there, as with the problem in using it for terrorism prediction, is people tend to cheat. Now, if you use pari-mutual betting, there's not much profit in bombing a place like Manhattan or D.C.(because everyone's expecting it). But watch out in East Bumfuck, KS, that ten-million-to-one shot.

[warch]

Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?

[tw]

I don't understand all the emotion about a financial instrument to share or minimize the negative effects of terrorism ... or flood, or earthquake, or shipwreck. Farmers use future contracts to spin off risk onto other financial markets so that they don't suffer a 'sink or swim' situation every year. Unfortunately, insurance markets - even Lloyds - refuse to enter this needed market.

But here is the rub. If such markets are used, like flood insurance does today, to maintain a bad situation, then government will become the insurer of last resort - an unacceptable situation.

World markets are more than just distributing capital - creditors and debtors. Future's markets and risk markets are also essential to a productive world economy. Look what happened to CA when idiot corporate electric utility executives (lawyers and MBAs rather than people with electric utility experience) eliminated access to and use of future's contracts.

Heaven or hell will be defined in the details - how such a market sets up. But this is not something to be emotional about. This is a market made necessary by rare events called terrorism - like earthquakes, floods, tornados, crop losses, mine failures, etc.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Seems like a boon to terrorists. Use this attack to finance the next attack. You sure this isn't a sting?

[Griff]

I haven't read much on it (dangerous radio news territory to follow) but I don't think there is an insurance angle. The only payout goes to folks who correctly predict an attack. The idea is that you'd get a lot of outside the box thinking about potential terrorist targets/methods.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Or the inside track for the perp.

[Griff]

Ron Bailey liked the idea.

[russotto]

Originally posted by Griff
Ron Bailey liked the idea.

Ron's missing the problem with the system. A terrorist organization can get money AND mislead at the same time. All they do is observe the prices of the futures contracts. Those which get expensive, they _don't_ do. Instead, they buy some cheap contracts on targets which the traders think are less likely to be killed. Then they assassinate said target while everyone is looking the other way.

[Griff]

I think Bailey got caught up in the moment. All those congressmen bloviating makes you really want to be on the other side. Unfortunately, for Ron, the blowhards got one right.

[tw]

Blowhards only demonstrated another definition of an anti-America. A person who fears change. One who is so driven by their emotions, or by imposing their moral values on others (same crappy mential process) that they "fear to innovate".

Those who lined up in protestation did not even have a clue what the program was really about. They were classic anti-Americans. They used emotion to make a decision and could not even be bothered to learn enough facts to make a logical decision. Same reasoning used to justify the recent Iraq war and to claim that those aluminum tubes were for weapons of mass destruction. Just the people that George Jr needs to promote his adjenda. Get some people emotional and they will forget what intelligence really is. If watching the Watergate hearings summary on PBS; same type people Nixon needed to corrupt the US government. He could openly commit crimes and we thought that so acceptable as to vote for him in 49 states.

This is a discussion about those who are quick to decide based upon emotion verses those who meet an essential critieria of a patriotic American - one who first learns the facts.