The boys on Poindexter’s team at the Pentagon (you remember them, the ones responsible for Total Information Awareness) have come up with another blindingly moronic plan. It’s called the Policy Analysis Market and the gist of it is that people get to play BlogShares on terrorism and Middle Eastern turmoil. You sign up at their website and lay down a bit of your own money so you can buy options on predicted events. I’m sure some of the predictions will concern mass events such as elections, but others are planned on things like assassinations.

I don’t have any training in understanding markets, but I think I can see some serious issues with this. This sort of spread betting is okay at predicting mass movements, it’s sort of like the future history predictions from the Foundation stories. But terrorism and even coups are the actions of very small numbers of people. Unless they’re inviting Osama to trade, what hope do they have of even putting up the right predictions to bet on?

Technorati tag: Terrorism