A sick daughter who can’t go to daycare for two days, a move from one side of the company campus to the other, two doctor’s appointments, being attached to a rapid-fire-schedule-is-everything-get-it-done-three-weeks-ago-never-mind-yesterday project, plus starting the week with houseguests and ending it with helping friends move makes for a very, very crazy and utterly exhausting week.
"You will not always be in power.”
Last week, AOL and Yahoo announced that they were going to start charging email marketers to bypass their spam filters. The idea is that legitimate email sellers will be willing to pay something like 0.1 cents in order to bypass spam filters and that illegitimate spammers who rely on free email distribution to make a profit won’t pay the cost. The people at AOL and Yahoo have a good idea, and it’ll probably work.
But I wonder if this is actually far enough. The Internet was founded on an idealistic dream – that everyone could get free access to everything. Information of all kinds is supposedly free on the Internet, be that information be in the form of Wikipedia, Mirriam-Webster on-line, or simply the ability to communicate long-distance via Skype or Trillian. All you pay is an access fee to, in my case, Comcast.net, and you effectively get an infinite number of emails and Mbytes of bandwidth. The physical equivalents of these features are an encyclopedia, a purchased or borrowed dictionary and thesaurus, and long-distance phone and snail-mail, and as much as you want for a flat rate regardless of usage (there are exceptions to this). This isn’t how the physical world works, and IMO, it’s not how the Internet should work either.
We all get junk mail in our physical mailboxes. Junk mail is the physical equivalent of spam. But every piece of junk mail you or I get is from someone with the monetary resources to mail scores, hundreds, or even thousands of pieces of mail at bulk rates. This requires monetary resources, and as such it defines a minimum level for mailing snail spam. AOL and Yahoo are doing pretty much the same thing as they charge for spam filter bypassing. But because email is effectively free, the monetary resources required to make money are almost nil if you already own a computer and have a high-speed Internet connection. It’s not that transmitting the email is free – the access providers like Comcast or AOL pay quite a bit for storage, processor time, spam filtering, even electricity and server security – but rather that the user only rarely sees the actual costs of the emails they send. Which essentially means that those of us users who use less than our bandwidth and storage “allotment” from our providers are subsidizing the very spammers who email us penis enlargement, illegal drug, and Nigerian bank schemes, er, “opportunities.”
I propose that we apply a .1 cent or so surcharge on every single email that’s sent, and possibly an additional charge for transmitting large files over a certain size. Access providers could easily build these costs into their monthly fees so that the vast majority of standard users never see the extra costs. But spammers, who rely on being able to transmit 100,000 emails per hour or day at effectively no cost in order to make money, would get hammered with monthly charges. Legitimate marketers have deep enough pockets to pay these charges and can easily roll the extra costs into their processing fees, credit card fees, etc. but many spammers would be put out of business. And the extra fees could be used to offset the extra costs to low-income Internet users and to subsidize the rest of the free content we all take for granted.
I’m planning on introducing an entirely new blog here at the Daedalnexus. Something that isn’t political in any way. And it may take enough time to get up and running that I’ll be blogging a little less because of it. Of course, part of that is the fact that it’ll need a whole new tab at the main Daedalnexus page, and so I might as well do some interface upgrades at the same time. But I think you’ll like it when it’s ready.
I’ll blog as much as I can, but if I’m a little slow blogging on the important issues of the day, please cut me a little slack. I think most of you will agree that the new changes will be well worth a small amount of slowdown here.
Political Axiom: “If you don’t want your political opponents to use your tactics on you in the future, you shouldn’t use said tactics on your opponents.”
We’ve been in Afghanistan since October, 2001. We’ve been in Iraq since March 2003. Since October, 2001, we’ve spent approximately $76 billion on military action in Afghanistan and about $226 billion on Iraq. On average, this works out to about $1.5 billion per month for Afghanistan and about $6.5 billion per month for Iraq. Simple averages. Nothing too exotic, right? And with over four years of spending history in Afghanistan and very nearly three years in Iraq, you’d think that the Pentagon could project likely spending requirements for both theatres without too much difficulty. In fact, Joel Kaplan of the Office of Management and Budget was quoted in a NYTimes.com article as saying that “the costs of military operations this year ‘will be roughly similar’ to last year’s costs.”
Well, apparently, President Bush was so shocked by the idea that Iraq and Afghanistan will cost about as much this year as last year that he had to ask Congress to approve an emergency “supplemental spending request.” All the President’s men couldn’t forecast the costs of Iraq well enough to budget for it? I’m sorry, but that’s complete, total, and utter bullshit.
How the hell does Bush get away with this? And why the hell does Congress let him get away with it? I’ll tell you why – Bush and his cronies and his allies in Congress don’t want the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan budgeted. If you put the occupation costs into the real budget, where it really belongs, then you have to justify the costs to the people. If you put the occupation costs into the real budget, you can’t trumpet $39 billion in cuts as a deficit cutting measure that “the people” demand because you just added $70 billion or more in military expenses to the deficit and the national debt. If you put the occupation costs into the real budget, you can’t claim to be fiscal conservatives any more when you let the debt and deficit skyrocket.
Congress doesn’t’ have the balls to confront the real issue here, namely that paying for the war on terror will cause serious long-term political and economic pain. The only way to handle the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan long term is to raise taxes and cut benefits. And, quite frankly, Congresscritters are to God-damned scared to face the voters and say “in order to pay for Iraq, Afghanistan, and other projects, I’m proposing that the federal government roll back all of President Bush’s tax cuts, increase taxes further on the wealthiest Americans, cancel the new Medicare drug benefit, increase the retirement age for Social Security to 70 and cut payments to the wealthiest retirees who don’t need the money.” Until we have a Congress willing to handle these issue and risk the wrath of their constituents (and until we have voters who realize that all of this needs to happen even if they hate these ideas with a passion bordering on fanaticism), we’re totally screwed.
It’s become blazingly obvious (and by “blazing” I mean written in mile-tall letters made of fire towering over Washington D.C.) that President Bush isn’t up to the task of being honest about the budget. It’s similarly obvious that a Repugnican controlled Congress won’t force Bush II to actually BE honest. Political suicide be damned - I’d vote for someone who held the President to account on his bullshit “supplemental spending requests.” And these days, I suspect I’m not the only one.
[Crossposted to The 5th Estate]
James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, claims that NASA administrators and the Bush administration are intimidating him by demanding his papers and lectures for review and claiming the right to replace him in interviews (article). Now, NASA claims that this is not the case. Not a surprise.
Now, I don’t know if there really is intimidation or not. But it fits a pattern of the Bush administration using ideology and corporate special interests to drive policy instead of good science (for an example, see this blog), and while two occurrences are coincidence, three is a pattern, and the Bush administration has demonstrated a lot more than three occurrences.
Representative Sherwood Boehlert, Republican of New York wrote to NASA: “Good science cannot long persist in an atmosphere of intimidation.” It seems more and more likely that this is actually the point.