Private-sector research work
Nice work if you can get it
January 10, 2012 1 comment
Happy New Year, readers! I don’t know if this even qualifies as Unspeak because it’s such a breathtaking lie, but — if you can believe it — the “Research Works Act”, currently before the US Congress, bestows the name private-sector research work on research that is publicly funded, ie not done by the “private sector”. What the “private sector” (or, as Ralph Nader prefers to call it, the “corporate sector”) actually does is to get the reports of the publicly funded research for free, publish them, and then sell the publications back to public institutions at eye-wateringly venal prices. That’s private-sector price-gouging work, maybe, or private-sector university-blood-sucking work, but not, I think, private-sector research work. What kind of work have you very blatantly not done lately, readers? ((More at Publisher’s Weekly. (Via Evgeny Morozov.) ))
When I was not doing my taxes this week I noted with interest that Dominic Mohan from The Sun said that he would make a distinction between ‘search agents’ and ‘private detectives’. So, if he had wanted to obtain an ex-directory phone number, he would have hired a search agent.
It stands to reason since The Sun don’t use private detectives.