I loved this reaction by Tom Butcher to my video transcript on the MMT economy. He said in a comment:
It strikes me that no-one spends any time worrying that they will run out of emails. I just type it in. The only concern is how much to write on what subject and where to send it for best effect. Same with Govt money. Just type it in. How much to create for which purpose and where to send it for best effect; .. ah, there’s the rub!
Quite. That’s why we’ve all got spam folders filled with million upon million pieces of worthless crap.
Obviously these clowns have never run into someone with north of 600GB of email; so much that other things stop working.
They’re such silly cunts, aren’t they?
No; they’re evil cunts.
So he wants a £10 note to be as worthless as a spam email? Well, that’s where his economic policies will get us, but I’d thought that was incompetence rather than a stated objective.
That’s a good analogy. Turning it around, if emails cost £10 each I doubt spam email would be a thing.
Amazingly, in the pre-internet days, Nigerian 419 scams still existed. I still have one in my files, an airmail letter, the text of which is remarkably similar to the emails I receive almost every day.. Airmail post was quite expensive in those days, so they must have had a reasonable uptake on their “generous” offers!
I too recall seeing a paper one at work, but only once. It was probably 1996 when email had largely become their vehicle of choice. My workplace was a high value target so it too might have been airmail.
I haven’t seen a 419 for years, though I recently got 3 scam emails supposedly from the DVLA about car tax not properly paid for. This is odd because I’ve just bought another car and the dealer did the tax – I just had to pay for it. Methinks some info leakage somewhere.
I have had the car tax emails as well, and have not bought a car recently, so yours may just be coincidence.
I had a car tax email, close to renewal but not quite right; if it had been January it might have been related to the previous car, if March the current one, but February? I have my own internet domain(s) and use different emails for many things so unless an email is addressed to the appropriate email it goes to the bit bin.
If emails cost 1p each, spam would stop (or, at least, be much more targeted). I hate spam, even though I hardly ever see it, because it has broken email, one of the main benefits of which was that if you sent it, you knew it had been received, unless you got an error message. Now any one of the several intermediate servers can decide your message looks like spam and simply bin it with no notification.
We need a micropayment system for the Internet.
Maybe they should go with my employer’s policy on email, retention for two years only. After that it is automatically deleted. For an individual, fine, keep years worth of emails if you have the storage. For a company, this becomes a big deal and they can’t retain stuff forever. He probably thinks the background infrastructure is zero cost. Are you paying for Internet Tom?
Mind you, the time he spends typing the email and deciding where to send it is probably a net benefit to society. Less bullshit.
That’s a sensible policy. If you keep it forever and get a legal disclosure order for some really old emails it can be an absolute pain to have to recover them. Technology does not stand still so whatever systems you used back then will probably now be long obsolete.
Andyf, the government road transport authority where I live had (may still have, I haven’t checked for a couple of years) a long standing policy of not recording their camera footage. The cameras are there for traffic monitoring, not security. That way they could respond to every subpoena with “we’ve got nothing” .
I’ve had two £25,000 copyright infringement payouts – ironically, both from the same dumb-as-a-rock government department – which I was able to prove thanks to having retained 10-year-old emails. Bang to rights.
Given that all a government has to do to avoid being kicked out of power is to ‘write money’, and given that those cunts love being in power, it is quite strange that they don’t just ‘write money’.
I’m a parish councillor. A couple of weeks ago I received a Freedom Of Information request for “every email that refers to X…” I did a brief count and replied: “I have about 5900 emails archived, I estimate it will take about 190-200 hours to go through them to check. May I bill the requestor? My usual fee is £16 per hour” The requestor was given Pressdram’s reply. 😉
There are those who use FOI as a political weapon. Pressdram is exactly the right response.
Given Murphy’s philosophy, I anticipate that he will run out of the ability to send and receive emails. After all, if property is theft and you treat your ISP like that, they won’t service you for long.
Under this logic wouldn’t Zimbabwe under ‘Bob’ Mugabe have been the world’s wealthiest country??