Fri, 2007 Mar 23
Ramblings of Spam
I don’t like spam. You know that. You know that already because I’m blogging on the internet, and so the exchange of largely useless content for the purposes of possible profit is clearly something I dislike. (Oops, I should get some ads back up to make that funnier). But, to an extent, I’m okay with email spam. After all, there are ways to eradicate it. An authenticated messaging system is not, I would imagine, beyond the programming abilities of, say, the NSA. Or, my cat. Or, the federal executive branch. I mean, this is not as complicated as figuring out that firing a bunch of lawyers might lead to trouble.
But the spam that really bothers me is snail mail spam. Specifically, “newspapers”. You know, the stupid things that show up more-or-less daily with one story and five hundred grocery coupons. They, like email spam, go into the trash. Except that none of it is in Russian (I assume. For all I know, there’s a million dollar check in every one of those things.). And that’s what makes me upset–the trashing, not the lack of Russian. The “news”-mail people force me to choose between being a responsible person and recycling or adding to our rather pretty landfills.
Speaking of which, how exactly are our landfills so different than, for example, the Cahokia mounds? Maybe Cahokia was less a thriving center of civilization and more a thriving garbage industry. Perhaps, a predecessor of Mobro 4000 went up and down the Mississippi for a few years and then finally somebody said, “Hey, let’s just dump it in Cleveland.” Due to Cleveland’s non-existence at the time, they just ran the thing up on shore and told the teenagers to push it until they got back from the riverboats.
This is just conjecture, of course. I’ll need a grant to further research.
On a more serious note, I highly recommend 1491.
Hey, let’s talk about Amazon.com’s inability to do pretty URIs. Or maybe how most of the URI that’s displayed serves no apparent purpose. Or, why the —- they don’t have a —-ing logout button.
But, anyway, snail mail spam. I realize the US government is unlikely to do anything about this, since it helps pay the bills of the USPS, and apparently it works for somebody. After all, I can’t believe it’s nearly as cheap as its online cousin. Okay, well, I guess I’m stuck with it. Great article. Yay.
