SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
martyb
on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:04PM
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.
Earlier this week, a post written by programmer and teacher Bill Sourour went viral. It's called "Code I'm Still Ashamed Of."
In it he recounts a horrible story of being a young programmer who landed a job building a website for a pharmaceutical company. The whole post is worth a read, but the upshot is he was duped into helping the company skirt drug advertising laws in order to persuade young women to take a particular drug.
He later found out the drug was known to worsen depression and at least one young woman committed suicide while taking it. He found out his sister was taking the drug and warned her off it.
By sake of comparison, take a look at the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (Adopted by ACM Council 10/16/92.)
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Programmers Talk About the Unethical and Illegal Things They’ve Been Asked To Do
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 78 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Default, n.:
The hardware's, of course.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Geotti on Wednesday November 23 2016, @01:49AM
Or we can just scapegoat "big banks"
Full stop. Thanks.
I'm all for scapegoating institutions, who make their money just by lending money (that often doesn't even exist), without actually doing shit and being ethically accountable on how and where they make their $. Money smells.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @03:48AM
You could have left out the "often".
Since we (and the rest of the world) went off the gold standard (then abandoned the silver standard), all "money" has simply been IOUs.
A bunch of times, really smart chick Ellen Brown[1] has explained this. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [commondreams.org]
[1] She ran for California state treasurer on the Green Party ticket and I voted for her.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @07:29AM
Huh, even _on_ the gold standard the money creation happened.
Since we (and the rest of the world) went off the gold standard (then abandoned the silver standard), all "money" has simply been IOUs.
Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower's bank account,
Banks could do the exact same thing with gold. Of course shit happens if everyone tries to take out the gold at the same time :). And that's the same for non-gold backed money, except it's less of a shit since the Central Reserve Bank could create some money and loan it to the bank.
Being on the gold standard would also mean that the USA can't take advantage of stuff like the US dollar being the reserve currency of the world (due to the Petrodollar scheme).
Open your eyes and see how the world really works and the real reasons why the USA can stay relatively rich and why US people talking about returning to the gold standard is silly:
For decades everybody has to buy and sell oil, CPUs, orange juice, wheat, etc in dollars. So they need to hold large amounts of US dollars. Whenever the US creates money everyone else with net positive amounts of dollars becomes poorer (basically they are taxed by the US exporting their inflation).
After buying that oil, many of them burn most of it. They keep having to buy lots of oil and up until recently* it has to be bought in US dollars (Saddam tried to sell oil in euros but after he got "regime changed" Iraq went back to selling oil in dollars: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeuro [theguardian.com] ).
http://www.businessinsider.my/russia-just-one-upped-the-saudis-in-china-2015-6/?r=US&IR=T [businessinsider.my]
As long as the rest of the world lives in the USA's "Zimbabwe" the USA can make us poorer by printing more of their dollars.
The real problem for the US citizens is that nowadays the US Gov ("Mugabe") is no longer seems to give them as good a share of the created dollars (whether directly or via projects like interstate highways), but instead gives that wealth to others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @10:10AM
Huh? Maybe I'm missing something, but that seems to be exactly what we were taught in economics class back in 1993. The term back then was "the money-creating effect of banks".
How does something that was in economics textbooks in the 1990'es become a bombshell report in 2014? Collective amnesia?