5 ms·
The Cobra Effect
- nateabele 11y agoSee also: nearly every agency of the US government.
- georgemcbay 11y agoMore like "See also: any sufficiently large organization".
- jfoutz 11y agoI know right? Can you imagine how bad it would be if the department of defense wanted some sort of packet switched communication system that would survive a nuclear war? Geez, we really got lucky there.
- nateabele 11y agoNo... not exactly. It's interesting that you pick that one, because Alan Kay talks at length about this subject (poke around YouTube and you can find clips if you're interested). Most of that tech came about because there was a lot of paranoia, a lot of money, and not a lot of good ideas. So they took the money and threw it at universities and research labs, without very many strings attached. Once it started to look like we were winning, all the funding dried up.
- setpatchaddress 11y agoI know, right? Can you imagine how bad it would be if the department of defense blew a big wad of cash for a limited period of time on some sort of packet switched communication system that would survive a nuclear war? Geez, we really got lucky there.
- carsongross 11y agoYep, you get more of what you pay for. Apply to, for example, single motherhood: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/Screen%20Shot%202013-09-26%20at%205.30.23%20PM.png http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/Screen%20S... Gang aft agley, indeed.
- agumonkey 11y agoI don't get the graph's message. (I'm not smart)
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoMy best guess is "something something good Christian marriage something something godless liberals something."
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Steko 11y agoWhile the linker wants to make the above point about welfare, the chart appears in the below article describing one facet of income inequality. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-americas-marriage-crisis-makes-income-inequality-so-much-worse/280056/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-amer...
- mikeash 11y agoThe typical response to this sort of chart is something like: the welfare state is destroying the family unit! But I look at this graph and I think: wow, there must have been a ton of people stuck in unhappy marriages before, who could now have better choices.
- wtbob 11y ago> But I look at this graph and I think: wow, there must have been a ton of people stuck in unhappy marriages before, who could now have better choices. But at what cost to society, those around them and perhaps even themselves? There are worse things than being in an unhappy marriage!
- simonh 11y agoHousing policy in Britain is a bit like this. Houses in Britain are so expensive that many people are priced out of the market. So the government offers tax breaks and cheap loans to first time buyers. This means first time buyers can afford to offer more money to purchase a house, bidding against each other and driving house prices even higher. This has been going on for decades, but they still do it because there are no votes for letting house prices fall, and plenty of votes in offering help to first time buyers. The fact that the general taxpayer is footing the bill is just a detail.
- digi_owl 11y agoSame has been going on in Norway since the 80s. Graphing household debt and housing prices show them basically moving in lockstep.
- davidu 11y agoIt's important to think about this when crafting sales incentive plans... You will often be tempted to motivate a particular behavior but then you realize that behavior is so successful that it's actually caused a new, and potentially worse problem. Generally these are all good problems to have though. :-)
- mmanfrin 11y agoWould rent control fall under this? Rent control creates artificial pressures for people not to leave housing, which restricts housing from being opened up to people moving in to a region, which causes rents of non-occupied units to rise.
- neoCrimeLabs 11y agoThis immediately made me think of bug bounties and the vulnerability black market. How long until the money gets good enough for people to start introducing obfuscated vulnerabilities into code in order to further profit from it at a later time? With increasing financial incentive and an open market it might be an increasing risk with opportunistic or disgruntled developers.
- eCa 11y agoOne mitigating factor is that it is easier to git blame a codebase than a cobra.
- smoyer 11y agoIt's interesting that this appeared on the front page at the same time as the announcement that Amazon would stop selling competing streaming video devices.
- gweinberg 11y agoIt seems to me that the idea of the bounty wasn't bad, the problem is just that it was too high. If they just decreased the bounty to the point that raising cobras was no longer profitable rather than all the way to zero, people would still turn in the cobras they had rather than releasing them. And they might still catch an occasional cobra for a small bounty, if the opportunity presented.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoAlternately, once they realized it wasn't working, announce that the bounty would end in a month, so that the breeders would hustle to kill all their cobras and bring them in. (Or, to shift a little blame away from the British, maybe if the breeders hadn't been stupid/dickish enough to release a fuckload of live cobras in their neighbors' back yards.)
- eCa 11y agoAlso known as 'be careful what you measure'. You want rat tails? Then rat tails you get.
- Houshalter 11y agoIf they set a date where the bounty would end, this wouldn't have happened. The cobra breeders would know their cobras would become worthless in a month, and so collect the bounty while they could. The rat thing could have prevented by collecting the whole rat instead of just the tail.
- greatthanks 11y agoNRA requesting to equip more people with weapons to prevent shootings.