Re: [OT] Yahoo's Antispam proposal
David P James wrote:
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.
I'm afraid you are sadly misinformed.
You need to live in India to appreciate what you just said.
Begging is a profession there.
Fathers mutilate their children so that they can bring in more money.
They cut off their legs, so that they skate around on trolleys.
A friend knew of a boy that had his arm oxy welded to the side of his
body, bringing about scar tissue inches thick, to create the kind of
reaction that would bring in a few pennies/day.
A social experiment was arranged whereby a computer was mounted into a
wall, with internet access, to see what these people would make of it.
Some had mastered it within a day, including email. They have made it a
permanent project now. And you want to charge them money for it?
I have many friends from Vietnam, some have gone back to initiate
business ventures.
They have asked if I would like to go there to live, and invest (You
have to be Asian to understand an invitation like that).
These people want me to share in the rebuilding of their country.
I have a number of personal acquaintances from Somalia.
One is the eldest son of the ex-prime minister.
I know the situations with respect to both Vietnam and Somalia.
I wonder if you see the common factor with them?
I say again, you are sadly misinformed.
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...?
This is inane.
I'm sorry. I simply cannot believe you are an economist.
(1)Pricing brings a requirement for control.
(2)Control limits accessibility.
(3)Given the time factor, open access ceases to exist.
You're a one man army determined to bring about your 'Tragedy of the
Commons.'
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.
No, in the terminologies you employ, you accept the situation and
thereby condone it.
What I wrote was a statement of what I believe to be a
fact, not a desireable outcome.
It is a fact.
Something can be done about it.
All it takes is a change in mental attitude.
These people are not merely to be written off as 'Collateral Damage.'
They are one of the many costs not incorporated into economic theory.
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).
Communication is the beginning of every solution.
It *is* under way, e.g:-
http://www.globalcn.org/es/article.ntd?id=178&sort=1.11
http://europa.eu.int/comm/regional_policy/innovation/pdf/award/extremadura.pdf
The implementation of open source software, along with internet access
and associated email, is creating the basis for an economic (in the
comprehensively true sense of the word) revolution in Extremadura.
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.
It is not a concept.
At the microbiological level it is a reality. A bacterial colony on an
orange will only expand to the size where it is killed off by its own
effluent.
My point is that in being more highly evolved, human beings are capable
of discerning where the point of suicide lies. This is where the
'Tragedy' scenario fails. When a shared dependency upon a particular set
of environmental circumstances exists, it has been established in the
past that we are capable of curbing destructive activity by way of
common consensus. This is Nietzsches' definition of justice ('A
Genealogy of Morals'). This is how the commons works.
Just because we distance and insulate ourselves from that set of
environmental circumstances, doesn't mean that we have separated
ourselves from the situation. As E.F. Schumacher, one of the few
economists born with any intelligence said, "If man ever finds himself
in the position of winning his battle with nature, he will automatically
find himself on the losing side."
This is germane. The environment here is the web. An aspect of the
commons is being wastefully overused and abused. We need to speak up,
yes. We even need to deliver an ultimatum. We have the right, it is our
commons too. We do not need to charge them money for the privilege of
continuing to abuse our shared environment, to continue to encroach upon
it, to the point where they possess it, and the commons no longer
exists. Your tragedy is a reality then, yes, but only because of
complacency and a preoccupation with placing band aids on tumours.
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.
All of it was *supposed* to be a commons. And at at least one stage, it
was. Dominant interests displaced the mechanism of the commons so that
the vast majority of the common administrators had no vote in
proceedings. Corporate greed, ably assisted by misinformed and corrupt
political entities, misappropriated the commons from the majority of its
rightful community owners, allowing only one factor of the community to
usurp the common ground. This is not a failure of the commons, how can
it be? The environment of the commons was not permitted to operate, it
answers more to the definition of grand larceny on a national and
international scale. All rationalised at the time, by economics.
Economics begins with the concepts of 'rivalrous' and non-rivalrous'
resources in the commons.
Uh, no it doesn't.
In this context it is. We are O.T. enough. Let's not introduce an
expansion into the entire evolution of economic theory.
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.
No, I'm afraid the resource here is the open accessibilty of the web.
Placing mechanisms of control within the network, instead of maintaining
it in a simple state, and retaining the technology at the 'edge' of the
net, and therefore in the possession of the enduser, compromises the
freedom and the creative innovation that belongs to *all* of us. Not
_just_ corporate interests.
Any control concept that the large 'anti-communities' wish to introduce,
will be double-edged, and the back edge will be the sharpest. Yahoo,
AOL, and MSN are only interested in maintaining their captive
audience/market. With the introduction of any control mechanism, they
will seize the opportunity to employ it to expand and exclude. This will
be a tragedy, but only if through short-sightedness we leap to
inaccurate conclusion. And they are ever observant for opportunity. We
have the right to maintain possession of our own.
Regards,
David.
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