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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.)
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Programmers Talk About the Unethical and Illegal Things They’ve Been Asked To Do
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(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.