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Spam: The average amount
of spam I receive daily is presently about 250. A virtual
tide of vomit! At first my anger was focused on the bulk emailers
and marketing companies who physically spew out this crap,
but in reality it's the companies who make the products and
services being solicited that are the source. The bulk emailers
are merely the pimps (scabs beyond dealing with). Though,
it would be nice to locate any who operate locally. Wouldn't
it be great to know if your next door neighbor was one of
the bulk emailers partially responsible (next time your daughter
has to spend 20 minutes sifting through increase your
penis size ads to locate her legitimate email)? Some of these
guys operate out of their homes with DSL connections. They
must live next door to someone. I keep hoping one moves next
to me. The movie Falling Down would sum up my response. But
back to reality. How to throw this back to those responsible
for clogging the world's inboxes? One thought that comes to
mind would be to identify some of the companies pumping ads, post their physical address on a site and ask everyone to
mail a box of junk or styrofoam to them on a particular day
each month. The return address could be that of another known spammer. If just a few thousand of the millions that receive their
spam did this, the company would end up with a tractor trailer load of garbage to dispose of on a given day. Norman Douglas summed it up back in 1917 "you can tell
the ideals of a nation by its advertisements"
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Telemarketers:
The Feds setup the National No Call database a few months back,
with already some 30 million people registering. Now the marketing
companies are trying to challenge the legislation in court.
They say it will put some one million people out of work. We'll
lets hope so. If we have one million of these in-your-facers
eating up the time and productivity of 250 million people, then
the country will be mentally and financially better off with
those one million out of work. Better yet, maybe they'll have
to get a useful job, as opposed to peddling products and services
that people neither need nor want.
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Drugs: The fashion in which this issue has been dealt
with for the past 50 years is an enigma. Criminalization has
produced a wildly lucrative trade for criminal enterprises and
terrorists. It's packed our prisons with non violent users (to
the point where violent criminals are released early for lack
of cell space). Every scientific study done in the past 25 years
has shown that criminalization has had little effect on the
overall ebb and flow of drug abuse in our society. At any hint
of decriminalization, politicians are usually assaulted as un-American
(i.e. my 17 year old son died of an overdose of heroin and you
want to decriminalize drugs)? Sympathies aside, everyone has
seen the lives of some friends ruined by alcohol & drugs.
But almost without exception each of those individuals was on
a path of destruction that no law was going to alter. The U.S.
has millions of straight working people unable to afford healthcare
services, while we spend billions incarcerating drug abusers
and funding historically worthless drug enforcement activities
in foreign countries. Decriminalizing, regulating and putting
the billions spent on incarceration and enforcement into better
healthcare access (while investing in the development of long
term solutions to the sociological triggers behind drug abuse)
would seem to be a far more productive use of resources. Legislating
morality has never worked. Prohibition produced little more
than a herd of Al Capones and the current drug policies have
produced far worse.
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