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[Michael Winslow Czeiszperger <michael AT czeiszperger.org>]

On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 12:56  PM, Maria Winslow wrote:

> But the article (the one I read, at least) seemed to imply that the 
> terrorism
> prediction market would be public. The number given was 10,000 
> participants
> by the end of the year. If it were to be public, the problem is that 
> the
> public has almost zero intelligence on terrorism activities.

It doesn't make sense for the public, but I can see having members of 
the US intelligence community participating in such a scheme minus the 
real money aspect. The of the big problems I see with the Iraq war was 
the response was way out of whack with the threat level. There's only a 
certain amount of money and effort to be spent, and it makes sense to 
calculate a return on investment in terms of how much safer we'd be 
given the amount of money and effort to be spent.

With such a system it would be harder for the government to fake a 
security concern as a cover for spending huge sums on a war when 95% of 
the US security system thinks there's 200 other security problems that 
are larger threats and cheaper to "solve".


___________________________________________________________________
michael at czeiszperger dot org
Birdseye Maple 12-String Chapman Stick #499
Chapel Hill, NC