Bishops, Cobras and the law of unintended consequences
by Gavin Ashenden: [,,,] When the British ruled India, there was a real problem with cobras in Delhi. Some well-meaning pen pusher had a bright idea. ‘Lets offer a bounty for every dead cobra people turn in to the police stations.’ It started off working very well. After a while some enterprising people began to breed cobras just of the purpose of killing them, turning them in and collecting the reward. So when the authorities got wind of this the responded by scrapping the scheme. This led to...
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