>His
>rational is that time spent dealing with spam rapidly exceeds the
>man-years of a human life span, and is thus tantamount to committing
>murder. (I know a few authors who probably qualify with their
>over-promoted poor quality books.)
imprimus:
i've spent years fighting tooth and nail against arguments of
this sort from pseudo-efficiency-experts. i don't consider it
any more valid here, even if it's being used against something i
vehemently dislike.
this is exactly the kind of reasoning that gets mouthed by
managers who are afraid to give their employees network access.
there have been hundreds of articles to the effect that "if
every employee in a 6000 person company loses five minutes a day
to unnecessary email, the company is effectively paying 62.5
full-time positions to do nothing but waste time on email (web
surfing/whatever)."
refutation: big deal.. they already pay three times that many
people to spend all day in the bathroom, and significantly more
to spend all day writing progress reports that will never be read.
to be a bit more technical, the assumption of 100% efficient
time usage is fallacious. *nobody* uses all their time
productively, or even as they'd like to, so arguments based on
that premise are wrong from the start. by the same argument,
doing a 30-second commercial for the Superbowl should be a
capital offense. one night of prime-time television (including
cable) would probably double the population of death row.
secundus:
the best summation of murder i've seen yet was in the movie
_Unforgiven_: "when you kill a man, you take away everything he
has, and everything he ever will have." i don't like
advertising much, and i really dislike spam, but i won't say
they're that bad, because they're not.
it's a scaling thing.. i just recently saw the emergency room
photos of a friend of mine, who took a speedboat propellor in
the face some years ago. not exactly appetizing. i'd much
rather look at ten million paper cuts than see something like
that happen again.
given the choice, i'd rather delete a piece of spam than see
someone get a papercut, so i'm thinking 10-20 million pieces of
spam don't even rack up to seeing a friend get half their face
peeled off and live.. and that's just from *my* perspective as
an onlooker.
give your friend this scenario.. the spam kings of the world
will agree to reduce their number of postings this year by X
messages, as long as your friend is willing to take a bullet in
the head. *now* how big does X have to be to equal one human
life?
lives are always cheaper when they're someone else's, and cheaper
still when it's someone you don't like much.
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
been there, done that, have network, will travel.
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