May 19, 2005
Acceptable Risk
Posted by Gordon Smith

Here is an elaborate spoof of Dow Chemical by The Yes Men ("Honest people impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.") You can see that the website isn't written in quite the way the company would have written it:

Acceptable Risk™ and the ARC were launched on April 28, 2005 at the International Payments 2005 conference, London, in solemn commemoration of the April 30 anniversary of the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Dow owes a debt of gratitude to the people of Vietnam for helping Dow define the limits of Acceptable Risk™. Dow's contribution to the War effort was very profitable, and recent appeals for damages by Vietnamese people who received coatings of special Dow herbicides   were rejected by US courts two weeks ago, proving the Dow adage: "A skeleton in the closet is quite often golden."

The golden skeleton is nicknamed "Gilda," by the way. The site includes an "Acceptable Risk Calculator" (that's the ARC referenced above), which allows you to input potential profits and "casualties" for your project. You then enter the locations you are considering for the project, along with estimates of the area's daily income, litigiousness, and and potential problems (e.g., "widespread civil unrest"). The output is a rating based on skeleton heads.

Check out the "launch" at the International Payments 2005 conference, including a video (near the bottom). Hat tip to Metafilter.

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