Showing posts with label prisoner's dilemma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prisoner's dilemma. Show all posts

03 December 2009

US ACTA Official Squirms, Talks Drivel

Great work by James Love here:

After attending the three day WTO Ministerial meeting in Geneva, I took the non-stop United Airlines Flight back to Washington, DC. On the airplane were a number of U.S. government officials including the head of USTR, Ambassador Ron Kirk. I had a chance to talk to Kirk about the secrecy of the ACTA agreement. He said the ACTA text would be made public, “when it is finished.” I told him it that was too late, and the public wanted the text out now, before it is too late to influence anything.

Kirk said he was aware there were those that wanted the text public, but the issue of transparency was “about as complicated as it can get,” and they didn't want people “walking away from the table,” which would likely happen if the text was public, he said.

*Who* exactly would walk away from the table? Why on earth would they do such a thing if there's nothing to hide, and the treaty will be made public anyway? This answer is pure and utter drivel - evidently the weak best that he could come up with after being put on the spot by the quick-thinking Love.

It basically amounts to each delegation trying to suggest that while *they* are in favour of opening up, the other delegations would go bananas, and so, regretfully, everything remains shrouded in secrecy. It's a kind of sick variant of the prisoner's dilemma, as implemented by and for self-serving delegations.

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20 May 2009

Newham and the Prisoner's Dilemma

Yesterday I had another meeting with Richard Steel, CIO of Newham, who was generous with both his time and information. After our introductory session a few weeks ago, we got down to the nitty-gritty – the server side. I was impressed by spaghetti-like complexity of the diagram showing the links between the disparate services and their databases: running a borough is clearly an incredibly complex job, and it's clear that we are still in the early days of automating that process.

Two things emerged during the morning, one good, and one bad...

On Open Enterprise blog.