The Obvious Solution to Spam

By the way, if any pro-gun types feel like commenting, bear in mind that (1) This is absolutely the best argument I can come up with for gun control, (2) I’m deadly serious, and (3) Liberals have no sense of humor.

Kieran… yawn.

Moving off gun control for a moment:

A friend of mine once suggested a solution to spam that, I am convinced, would end it completely. It works like this:

It costs you a nickel to send me an e-mail.

No need to enforce this; you just make it a setting on your e-mail client, perfectly optional. If I leave it off, you can send me e-mail for free. If I turn it on, it costs you a nickel.

Since most legitimate correspondence is roughly symmetric, most of those nickel payments will cancel out. In the case of highly asymmetric transactions like spamming, though, the costs would very quickly outweigh the benefits.

Even now, the average return on a spam e-mail is in the tiny fractions of a cent. Wouldn’t take much to tip that balance.

bear in mind that… (3) Liberals have no sense of humor.

a point that can not be stressed enough.

Nice smackdown, Kieran :)

In the meantime, read this.

I seem to recall chun suggesting an exception in the hypocratic oath. It’s no FUSSP, but hey, it’s worth a try.

Jason’s scheme, while hardly novel, is similar to schemes many economists and policy people are considering. Filtering spam is HARD, and introducing payments is the sort of thing mechanism designers love to do. It is probably more technically viable to do this than filter spam.

That said, the segway to discussing spam was a little out of left field. I think in the US, the gun nuts are a strange combination of survivalists with constitution worshippers. Reason is something I’d steer clear of in discussions with either group.

Well I’ve taken classes from Kieran and let me say that he’s just WONDERFUL! And always right, too, despite what those awful liberals might say. Kieran has just LOTTS of indsputably correct data.

Inexplicably, areas that have loosened gun laws have seen a lowering of the type of crime gun ownership would seemingly prevent.

I see no reason why this wouldn’t hold true for spam as well. Good call Kieran, and a very brave departure from your normally left leaning stances ;)

Spam (freedom of speech) is a right spelled out in the US Constitution. Its ironic that the ideology out of power would propose a weakening of the Bill of Rights as a solution to a possible misuse of a guaranteed right. After all, that ideology may wish to write to large groups of Americans extolling them to change their mind. Heaven forbid, email is chosen as the speech medium.

If the following statement were something that could happen, then it might actually be true: “The resulting deterrent effect would reduce the flood of spam to almost nothing, as no rational spammer would risk immediate retaliation in kind”. I say this because I think that if spammers could be easily hit back by those they targeted, as in, if anyone they spammed could return fire, then the result likely would be a massive reduction of spam. This would occur after a couple of days of every email server on the net being locked up from over use, but after that, the only spammers who could continue would be those whose computers could handle the incoming mail without crashing. That would get rid of most of the small time guys, and the bigger ones would be easy to target with other market forces.

Unfortunately, this is not realistic with spam, as the perpetrators can operate through others’ machines, thereby making the impact on themselves negligeable. It may, however, be viable in the case of gun ownership. Therefore the argument is not a bad one. :Þ

Sex can be consolatory as well as celebratory. There could be a Democratic baby boomlet. And of course Ken’s point is correct.

What fun! A joke against the gun owners!

Sadly for the extreme arguments of the gun owners, there does not appear to be any measurable benefit from loosening gun laws – except on freedom of choice.

Equally sadly for the gun ban proponents, there is little evidence that there are benefits from banning guns either. Tim Lambert’s site (linked and with a comment from Tim above too!) mentions this in the course of debunking the positive claims from Lott and cronies.

Of course, the benefits of guns might be best measured in the level of spending on them in a year, plus the ancillary spending on politics and the capital value of the civilian inventory – thus explicitly having the users measure the value.

One is under the impression that by “indoor plumbing” is meant an indoor commode, or toilet.
This distinction is paramount, there being no question that cooking facilities virtually necessitate quantities of water that plumbed-in access provides simply and on demand.
The commode being indoors, however, is primarily a convenience and of benefit to the infirm, the elderly, and the busy – as opposed to piped-in water’s beneficial necessity to the vital heart of any home, the cook.
However, any meal’s end result will eventually be a trip to the necessary, and anyone who’s lived for any time with an outdoor facility, what rural Americans still call an “outhouse”, can tell you there is a substantial olfactory difference between the two locations, a lingering one in the modern setting.
In addition, doing one’s business in an outdoor setting can be most conducive to contemplation, and the sight and scent of trees and natural flora can be metabolically facilitating and therapeutic.
This is countered by the urban and suburban with the relatively minor inconvenience of it’s requiring a longer walk to achieve the relief station – but what is that? A matter of a mere few yards. The benefits far outweigh the inconvenience unless one is ill or otherwise handicapped, or the weather being so inclement as to be adverse.
The cumulative effect on local water tables of a responsible community’s use of outhouse technologies can be minimized far past that of community use of great volumes of fresh water in sewage “sanitation”. Depending on the sizes of the communities of course.
But then that’s also kind of the point about the bearing of arms by the average citizen. The way we live now it’s probably not a good thing for most people to do; the overwhelming mass of humanity in ever-concentrated numbers precludes an armed civilian populace, by virtue of the necessity for enforced passivity amidst the pressures and constraints of such concentrated living; as also the outhouse is inappropriate and impossible in the heart of Manhattan or Chicago.
The way we live now we can’t all dig holes out back – many of us don’t even have an “out back”.
Yet the same gesture that dispatches the outhouse without a moment’s thought as primitive and unbearably inconvenient welcomes the unbreathable air of summertime Los Angeles as modern, and necessary to “progress”.
There may be more to this than simple knee-jerk ridiculing of so-called primitive facilities. Considering the elimination of solid waste is something the regular among us accomplish daily, it may behoove the thoughtful person to consider the disappearance of outdoor plumbing as somewhat of a loss, inasmuch as the experience al fresco (or nearly) is far more satisfying generally than that accomplished in any cramped water closet will ever be.

“the experience al fresco (or nearly) is far more satisfying generally than that accomplished in any cramped water closet will ever be.”

You are welcome to contemplate a full bladder on a cold Michigan winter morning without indoor plumbing, watching your urine crystalize in mid-air before it hits that snowbank . . .

“the incidence of drive-by shootings in Amish neigborhoods might suggest that gun control is working in those areas”

Amish gangbangers tried drive-by shootings in my rural neighborhood, but for some reason, the police were always able to catch up to their buggies before they got away . . .

Sure, minus a few orders of magnitude. I think it’s a dumb idea re. bullets—I’d just reload my own, if they were that expensive—but that opinion isn’t likely to get much traction here.

I can tell you this, though: before I installed spam filters on my mail server, the 10-20 legitimate e-mail messages I get every day were routinely buried under a couple of thousand articles of spam. I spent an hour a day sorting through this junk, and still missed important stuff a few times a week.

It’s a problem. Do I think we should solve it by passing a bunch of laws? Draw your conclusions from the effectivess of gun control legislation. I say let the market solve the problem in the same very efficient way it solves most other problems that people—with the possible exception of carreer academics and other busybodies who can’t stand to mind their own business—actually care about.