On Sun 23 May 2004 18:56, Katipo wrote: > David P James wrote: > >On Sat 22 May 2004 14:07, John L Fjellstad wrote: > >>David P James <dpjames@rogers.com> writes: > >> > >>Not everybody has the same buying power. A few pennies might not > >> be much for someone living in the Western World, but it might mean > >> a meal for someone from Somalia or Vietnam. Should email be > >> limited to those who can afford it? > > > >If someone is living such a hand-to-mouth existence it's highly > > unlikely they'll even have access to the internet. > > Incorrect. > There are projects in India and Extremadura,Spain for example, that > qualify for exactly that definition. No they don't. Those people are poor, no doubt about it, but they don't fit in the same category as the previous example of Somalia or to a lesser degree Vietnam either. > > If you introduce any aspect of the internet as a commodity available > for a price, you also introduce the concept of the price rise. And that's a problem because...? > > >No system is ever going to be completely accessible to the > > destitute, > > So let's make sure they stay where they belong? Take that back - right now. Take it back. I neither said nor implied any such thing. What I wrote was a statement of what I believe to be a fact, not a desireable outcome. The reasons for that is a whole other issue, but it's safe to conclude that free email access isn't going to solve their destitution (because if it would, it would already have happened or at least be underway). > > >and I doubt that the current system serves them at all anyway (if > >anything, if they have access at all, they're likely to find > > themselves on the same ISP as a spammer and consequently blocked by > > other ISPs and users using RBLs). The current state of email is > > another example proving the economic concept known as "The Tragedy > > of the Commons". > > The concept of 'The Tragedy of the Commons', was first expounded by a > biologist describing reasonably accurately, what happens at, say, the > bacterial level, and then adopted as a false universal principle, and > applied to the broad spectrum. Where did you come up with the idea that it was based on what happens at the bacteria level? About the only accurate fact there is that it was developed by a microbiologist and ecologist, although he pointed out that conceptually it had existed for a long time. > > > Any > >valuable 'free' resource (I say 'free' in the sense of free to the > >user) will be overused, in some cases to the point of exhaustion or > >depletion. > > Rubbish. This is 'The Tragedy of the Commons'. > This idea has been disproven any number of times. Really? many species of whales, fish, elephants/rhinos for ivory, erosion of pasture and farmland, depletion of forests, waterways filled with pollution, roads congested with traffic, etc etc. All of it Common or treated as such, all of it driven to depletion/exhaustion/extinction. > Economics begins with the concepts of 'rivalrous' and non-rivalrous' > resources in the commons. Uh, no it doesn't. > Please elucidate, just for example, how a > 'non-rivalrous' resource is overused to the point of depletion or > exhaustion. How is an idea depleted in the sharing of it? Ok, I'll give you credit there - a non-rivalrous resource is one not subject to scarcity, so it would have been more precise of me to say "Any valuable and scarce 'free' resource will be overused, in some cases to the point of exhaustion or depletion." > There will > be just as much of this email left over after you have finished > reading it, as when you began. No matter that you merely delete it to > rid yourself of the inconvenience of the views expounded. What are you trying to say here? What has this got to do with anything else? The resource in question here is an individual's inbox. The size of your inbox is finite at any point in time. It can only accept so much email before it is filled. This one will fill up in less than two days if I don't empty it. Most of that is spam with another good chunk being viruses. The rest is mailing list mail. At the rate things are going, and assuming no expansion of capacity, it may get to the point that my inbox won't last half a day. Once that happens the inbox will have become practically useless to me. And why is that? Because my inbox is essentially a communal resource for all the world to send to. For all intents and purpose it's being driven to exhaustion. What's true for me is also true for anyone running mail servers. -- David P James Ottawa, Ontario http://david.jamesnet.ca ICQ: #42891899, Jabber: davidpjames@jabber.org If you've lost something, you had to lose it, not loose it.
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