Socialism does not scale

I was deleting some spam and reflecting on the whole issue... as I was telling someone a few weeks ago, the problem with spam will be stopped when it will become a serious issue. Right now, the problem is distributed: a few benefit and a lot have to pay for it. (Just like in politics [grin].) Worse, there is a socialism of sorts in the relationship between internet providers: the sender doesn't have to pay the carriers for the traffic it sends through them. This messes up the incentives completely.

A simple scheme like a hundredth of a cent per email would make it too expensive to send bulk emails ($100 per million emails) while not affecting regular users in any way; legitimate companies would have already a large enough internet subscription that any email charge would be drowned in the noise; finally, large, voluntary mailing lists like RISKS would need something on the order of maybe a few dollars a day - again, irrelevant when compared with the price for the actual equipment and internet service fee.

Furthermore, this scheme would create the proper incentives - the ISPs would penalize other ISPs who allow spam through them, the PC owners who don't secure them and let their PCs become spambots would suddenly have a financial interest to fix the problem, which would in turn put pressure on the OS makers (well, on Microsoft [grin]) to improve their software and so on.

Socialism works in small settings, like the family or small comunities, which is probably why it seems so natural to people. Free markets are much better at solving large-scale situations though. They can be thought of as real-life optimization machines - neural networks made of people, if you will.

Comments

SgtP_USMC said…
Spoken like a man who has lived with the nightmare of socialism but hasn't drunk the Kool-Aid. I just wish there were more clear thinking people in the world...
7:27 PM
Marcel said…
Yes... it is weird for me how many people in my country (Romania, Eastern Europe) are still socialists, even though they know pretty much first-hand how bad it is.

Thanks for visiting :)
10:19 PM
Unknown said…
Actually, that pay to send approach was proposed about ten years ago by Bill Gates. Never took off, I'm not sure exactly why.
3:31 AM
Ice Cream Recipes said…
Hi nice reading youur post
2:31 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Posting dynamic Master / Detail forms with Knockout

Image
I have the following dynamic form in my GitHub Inventory project : I created the form with KnockoutJS , using some ideas from this article . The detail view looks like this: <table id="acquisition_items" class="jtable"> <thead> <tr> <th>Product Name</th> <th>Quantity</th> <th>Price</th> <th>Value</th> <th><button data-bind="click: addItem">[+]</button></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody data-bind="foreach: items"> <tr> <td> <input data-bind="value: ProductName" type="text" value="" /> </td> <td> <input data-bind="value: Quantity" type="text" value="" /> </td> <td> ...
Read more

Comparing Excel files, take two

Image
I already wrote this project once, on GitHub , but I can't say that I like the result. I wrote that code without TDD, mostly to see if I can still work in the "normal" fashion. I can, but I had a bug that took me a while to even discover and then was difficult to write tests for. I also hate the temporal dependency in that design (if you don't call the SortBy method first, the ExcludeRecords method will return incorrect results). Anyway; here's attempt number two, writing that code using TDD. Structure I start by creating my usual structure for projects of this type - a library for the logic, a console application for the main program and a test project for tests. I also use the Enable NuGet Package Restore option (right-click on the solution node) to add the three NuGet files that will allow someone to automatically download all the packages I'm referencing without wasting space in the source code repository. (Right now I've only added the Moq pa...
Read more

EF Code First: seeding with foreign keys

This is just a quick tip, more for future reference for myself than anything else. When using Entity Framework Code First, one of the things you might want to do while developing the application is to seed your database with some test data. This can be something as easy as: protected override void Seed(InventoryDB context) { context.Products.AddOrUpdate( p => p.Name, new Product { Name = "Hammer", SalePrice = 11.99m, }, new Product { Name = "Nail Pack x100", SalePrice = 0.05m, }, new Product { Name = "Saw", SalePrice = 19.99m, }, new Product { Name = "Toolkit", SalePrice = 39.99m, } ); //... } (I am using the AddOrUpdate method so the code detects whether those products already exist and doesn't add them again if they do.) The Product class is quite simple and – most importantly – doesn't depend on any other: public class Product { public int Id { g...
Read more