From: Vernon Schryver [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Nathaniel Borenstein
...you
can't afford an expensive connection ...
... it's not
primarily about property rights, it's about our right to choose to
communicate with each other.
If the second were true, the first would be irrelevant. That
the first is relevant shows the right to choose to communicate
is nonsense, except in the same sense as the costs of gasoline
and real estate limit your right to travel, live, and work where
you want.
The essence of your analogies to gasoline and real estate seems to be
that all of these problems are of a sort that a person having and
willing to spend more money could work around. The essence of your
morality, it follows, is that since a person of means can choose to
work around them, then there is no further societal interest in the
problems -- they are non-problems. I suspect that if we discussed the
issues at length, you'd be incapable of not using a phrase equal or
equivalent to efficiency of markets with all of the depth of meaning
given to it in a freshman economics course.
It doesn't matter to you how the problems are created or why. The
material differences between the commodities you compare matter not.
It doesn't matter what the problems imply for the overall health of
society. It doesn't matter what the foreseeable or probable evolution
of the problems is in the future. It doesn't matter what individual
human choices determine or could change these problems. You say:
Those who can pay may and nothing else matters -- solution enough.
That's awfully tidy. Certainly saves taking a systemic view of human
society -- messy swamp of uncertainty that would be. By gosh I think
that by analogy you've found a nice little calculus for generating
solutions to: lack of access to potable water, edible food, fuel and
energy in other forms, shelter, health care, education, privacy,
personal safety, and security in old age. You should run for
office, or something.
I think, though, that nsb is thinking about the problem like an
engineer. I know, I know... what craziness such wacky idealism as
engineering can lead to. You know there's that nutty sense that
engineering skills are a form of power which is separate from
political and economic power -- that if in possession of such skills
there comes a responsibility to apply them and relate them to other
forms of power in a manner commensurate with the privilege of
possessing them. Yadda yadda yadda -- nobody takes such nonsense
seriously, right? Once the rockets go up / who cares _where_ they
come down / that's not my department, / says Wernher von Braun -- Tom
Leher
(Where I come from, there is a name for people with the skills of an
engineer but not a sense of the responsibility. The name is tool.)
PS -- Are you really rejecting all mail from comcast.net? Just
curious, that's a lot of people. And if it's guppylake.com, it would
have been nice if someone had told me when I was blacklisted, seeing as
how I'm the administrator.
I suspect it is Comcast, but in the same hypothetical, contrary to
facts spirit as your other questions, let's assume that it is
guppylake.com. How would you be entitled to or even just expect
notification?
I don't see how you could get entitled from would be nice.
I can see how you get just expect from would be nice but also why
it falls flat on you.
If I set my (non-existent) caller-ID filters to reject
phone calls from you, would you be entitled to or expect a
notice?
Wouldn't that rather depend on oh, yeah details of
circumstance. But the money solution to all problems spares us from
thinking about those. Nsb could just pay for as many additional
outgoing numbers as it takes to annoy you. And you can just pay to
figure out how to block that effort.
Even if you were a telemarketer, why would you care?
He's not. What's your counter-factual objection to guppylake?
What if Qwest did the rejecting for me? I suspect your answers
for the two media differ and that you have not considered your
position on Internet access except from an emotional sense of
entitlement and of hurt and outrage at being snubbed by various
blacklists.
I suspect that your suspicion is childish rationalization of your easy
moral calculus that conveniently spares you from the responsibilities
of engineering.
-t
