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Court Finds Spamming Not Protected By Constitution
eldavojohn writes "In a split (4-3) decision, a Virginia court has upheld the verdict against the spam king making it clear that spam is not protected by the U.S. Constitution's first amendment or even its interstate commerce clause. 'Prosecutors presented evidence of 53,000 illegal e-mails Jaynes sent over three days in July 2003. But authorities believe he was responsible for spewing 10 million e-mails a day in an enterprise that grossed up to $750,000 per month. Jaynes was charged in Virginia because the e-mails went through an AOL server in Loudoun County, where America Online is based. '"
Since when is an appellate court a jury? I don't mean to troll, but seriously, talk about confused and sensationalist headlines.
Email 2 - Order Viagra - Fast, Easy and Confidential. Special suggestion for you!
Email 3 - Most popular ma|e organ enlargement
Email 52,999 - C|al_is 20mg x 10 p1lls = $89.95
Email 53,000!
*hears a sigh of relief from the jury*
...so long as there is one corresponding piece of regular mail, sent to "Resident" if nothing else, at a distinct address in another zip code, for every email.
That would let people express themselves with all sincerity, and help keep the postal system afloat.
An all-around Win!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Your finding advocates a
( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
(My first of these; how did I do?)
When you're sending millions of messages a day to people who don't want them and other people (usually the ones footing the bandwidth bill) are paying for the connection, you are guilty of stealing at the very least... And in the case of mass spammers you're stealing a whole lot of bandwidth you're not paying for.
Can we get a little editing please? You don't have to be a lawyer to know that a jury would never be able decide on the constitutionality of a statute, so you should know something is wrong with the headline right off the bat. The Virginia Supreme Court is not a jury.
the verdict should have been announced to him over 50,000 times
The pissed off SOB whose network bandwidth is consumed, the guy who sees a 400-1 spam to signal ratio, and the one who has to actively clean this shit for everyone I host, I'm HEARTILY glad that this fucker got himself leaned over the judicial bench and was probed, rectally, with the judges' gavels.
And the dissenting judge's comments about restraining speech for political and religious spam? If a Hari Krishna or a LDS evangelist, or a Politico I don't like comes to my door, I have the right to slam the door in their face and choose not to "receive the message". And if they drop their crap on my doorstep, I get fined for littering.
People buried under torrents of spam don't get this option.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
1.) The VA Supreme Court made the ruling, not any federal court, and certainly not a jury.
2.) Because it was a state court that made the ruling, what they say about whether or not SPAM is protected free speech is completely irrelevant. State courts have no jurisdiction over federal questions. They can no more declare SPAM not protected than they can declare that you really only have to be 32 to be President.
3.) This will obviously be appealed to the Supreme Court (that's the only outlet left after traversing the State courts), and, my guess is, it'll be shot down. The defendant's attorney is correct when it states that the VA law doesn't make exceptions for explicitly protected free speech, such as political speech, and the Supreme Court's strict scrutiny standard for this kind of thing won't let it through. VA may re-write the law to prevent commercial SPAM as different from SPAM that's simply expressing an opinion, but that'd be open to a variety of challenges as well.
4.) Nine years? What the fuck?! I mean, I hate SPAM as much as the next guy, and I spend a stupid amount of time keeping it out of the inboxes of my users, but nine years?!
is how close it was. A 4-3 decision isn't very comforting. Who were the three?
Spam is not, and has never been a free-speech issue. It's a property rights issue. The spammers' right to speak does not include a right to use other people's equipment to do so.
This spammer has committed millions of counts of unauthorized use of property, along with fraud.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Do you realize that 'mail to resident' is where SPAM first got started, all those years ago? If it weren't for that then it's postulated less likely that email SPAM would have ever been conceived of in the first place. I don't know if you're in the United States or not, but what was the last time you really took a look at all the junk snail-mail you get every month? Try this experiment: save all your junk snail-mail for a whole year, and then weigh it, measure it's volume, and multiply that by every household in this country. Do you really think that the amount of money they're paying to get that unasked-for (lack of) content into your mailbox really does anybody any good? Or is it just a waste of natural resources, and furthermore making an already fat, slow, outdated U.S. Postal Service slower than it has to be?
Neither thing, or it's offshoots (telemarketing, junk FAX, etc) should exist, simply because they're all so highly abused, and it's basically impossible IMHO to regulate them.
The write-up states: "Prosecutors presented evidence of 53,000 illegal e-mails"
The e-mails can be sent in violation of the law and the person who sent them is an offender, but the e-mails themselves cannot be "illegal." Their mere existence does not constitute a violation of the law. If somebody said there were "illegal letters," "illegal phone calls," or "illegal documents," then it would be tantamount to saying that the government restricted the existence of information.
We live in a world where the flow of information is controlled, and indeed there are rational arguments on both sides about whether or not such restrictions constitute censorship. But the existence of information and the possession of it are not crimes. If such things were criminal, no rational mind could argue that the related laws weren't tantamount to censorship.
They are not "illegal e-mails." They are illegally sent e-mails.
My emails to my friends get caught in the aggressive spam filters that they are forced to use. Spamming is depriving me of my freedom of speech. Spam is shutting down email. That is a freedom of speech issue and jailing spammers protects freedom.
Yes. Sometimes there are things in the junk mail that are useful, such as ads from supermarkets. Also, people are paid money to create those ads, print them, address them and mail them. Not only that, the USPO is paid at bulk mail rates for carrying them. If it weren't for junk mail, first class mail would cost considerably more than it does. Junk mail subsidizes regular mail and helps keep costs down. The big problem with spam is that it doesn't cost the spammer anything to send, the costs are spread out among everybody receiving it and ISP fees would be lower if there weren't spam. It's not that it's junk that makes it so bad, it's the expense to the recipient.
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Your finding advocates a
( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. It worked in this instance. Here is why it won't work again. (One or more of the following may apply to this particular criminal, and (s)he may have other flaws which are not listed.)
( ) The spammer was dumb
(X) (s)he lived inside the united states
(X) They made too much money
(X) They had been doing it too long
(X) They stole from a corporation
(X) Didn't leave the country quick enough
Specifically, your technique fails to account for
(X) few spammers get caught
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) taking out one spammer, 10 more pop up
Ah, I see. I would agree with your original argument in spirit at least, but in practical terms it would never work because you'd more or less be asking spammers to self-regulate, and historically speaking it's already been proven at least a million times over that they're unwilling and incapable of doing so. That leads us right back to where we already are. Really it's a case of excesses, and this chap who is going to be doing jail time is as good a poster-boy for these sorts of excesses as any other spammer could be. Beyond that, if there was some sort of actual cost involved in mass-market direct emailing, then legitimate operators still wouldn't go for it because in their perception they'd be spending twice as much to accomplish the same thing, whereas the draw of spamming is that it costs little to nothing comparatively.
...that we can limit posting here to people who know the difference between a "jury" and the Virginia Supreme Court?
It's not a free speech issue, it's a harassment issue. We all know that there are limits to speech when someone else's livlihood is at stake (shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, to use the classic example.) To say spammers have the right to spam is like saying the first amendment gives someone the right to follow you around with a megaphone shouting advertisements into your ear.
An object at rest cannot be stopped.
Leave it to slashdot to get the headline dead wrong. Actually, this was an appeals court decision, there was no jury involved in this ruling. A jury finding of guilty was several years ago, and the spammer has been out free on appeal enjoying his ill gotten gains ever since. The ruling on interstate commerce issues and first amendment issues was not made by a jury. Curiously, there seems to be no word on him actually reporting to serve his sentence, so he may still be free.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
If you run a blaring loudspeaker van through a residential neighborhood at 4AM it doesn't matter whether the material you're playing is "constitutionally protected speech" or not. You're still subject to noise abatement laws.
The whole issue of freedom of speech is a red herring.
I hear this said a lot, could somebody please explain to me how larger, heavier mail which costs much much less could possibly subsidize smaller, lighter mail which costs much more?
Seems to me that is junk mail was eliminated, the Post Office could get rid of much of its trucks, drivers and infrastructure. Without junk mail, I'd say residential delivery could be scaled back to one delivery per week, meaning one truck could serve six different routes instead of six different drivers and trucks going out every Mon-Sat. All that overhead eliminated would raise first class rates how? And now the remaining trucks would be loaded with letter sized full-rate first class mail instead of giant heavy bundles of newsprint mailed out for a few pennies each. How is that not better revenue for the post office?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I always thought that the question of whether spam was protected speech or not was simply beside the point. Think about it. Political expression is definitely protected speech, but does that give the candidates the right to put their campaign signs up on your front lawn without permission? No. It's your lawn, their right to speak doesn't include a right to use your lawn as their venue. They want a place to speak, they get to hire their own hall or use strictly public spaces.
And no, there's not a parallel with snail-mail. With physical mail, the sender pays. I pay absolutely nothing for my mailbox, nor to receive mail, the sender's the one who has to foot the bill for the postage. With e-mail, though, I'm the one footing the bill for the mailbox it arrives in, and the bandwidth to receive it, and the storage space to hold it until I read it. The sender, by contrast, spends nothing whatsoever on postage sending the message.
AIUI, junk mail helps keep First Class rates down because that's the way the bulk mail rate was designed. It's less than First Class, but more than it costs to process, leaving some extra to help defray other expenses. The way it works is, bulk mail must be pre-sorted by zip code in order to qualify. This cuts down on the amount of work considerably, so that even at a reduced rate, bulk mail costs the Postal Service less to deliver than they charge. Also, of course, much of it is sent locally, which lowers expenses even more.
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Four years ago my wife and I moved into a house, having lived in an apartment before that, and discoverd that the amount of junk mail we were receiving was much much more. Within a short time I was getting so upset about it I was going to put a No Flyers sign out (Canada Post and many flyer delivery companys in Canada won't leave unadressed junk at your home if you simply put a sign saying "No Flyers") when my wife stopped me, explaining that while she disliked the quantity of crap we were receiving, there were certain flyers she had to have and as such a "No Flyers" sign was unacceptable.
I shudder to think of how many trees died so my wife could know what was on sale each week at Zellers and Walmart.
No, his argument is not weak, and for a reason which you yourself pointed out. We don't charge-back legitimate e-mails because they're, well, legitimate. I paid for a computer, and pay monthly for my internet access, in part, so that my friends, family, and associates can send me e-mail. I gave them my e-mail willingly and told them to write. It's a cost I willingly incur. Unsolicited e-mail uses resources that the sender does not pay for, and has not been invited to use. Hence, they have no right to use it. Also, my correspondents don't create bot-nets to hide the origin of their e-mails, forcing the infected computer's owners to foot the bill for the computing resources and bandwidth to send their messages.
Strong enough for you?
the cost of overhead is averaged among all classes of mail, reducing one class increases the expenses of the remaining classes. This is like the problem we see in business went they start closing departments, they ask who much expenses are assigned to the department to be eliminated, not how much expenses will be saved, so the overhead gets reassigned and reduces the profits of the remaining departments, wash, rinse, repeat.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This is a bad day for the first amendment, damn that bush for taking all our rights away.
Maybe the guy should attempt to argue jurisdiction like the wikkileaks guy was, maybe then he could get around it.
Seriously now, I don't like Spam as much as anyone. Well, I guess I don't like it less because I simply don't get that much but that is another story. Anyways, I find it ironic how temperamental we are with who's causes we want to support. A site leaking banking account numbers and personally identifiable information is a champion while a guy who mass mails flyer's through a computer system instead of the postal system is scum. I'm not sure where the big difference is. I have heard people claim it is because people pay for their bandwidth yet I don't see a anyone setting up a sender has to get permission first policy for all email. I mean the dork who forwards every joke he can find multiple times to everyone who already is listed in the forward marks of the email because he somehow added them all to his address book isn't getting in trouble. I don't know how many times I got that stupid Microsoft is giving you a cup holder email, I have to forward it to an account I could check in windows just to see what it does- tell me that isn't junk.
I think we are seriously going in the wrong direction here. Not because I think anyone has a right to spam, but because spam is now not covered by the first amendment and you should ask how this will play out when there is a mailing list or something for a political action commity or group. Will the leaders of that be jailed and fined because their spam isn't covered by the first amendment? You know, if the treasurer of Ohio can call five times in 2 days with a recorded message saying that Ohio will make sure you get to the polls if you vote for obama just call some number, and Sears can call me 2 or 3 times saying they are having a sale on items I am interested in, I see no different then this guy sending spam out.
> Jury Finds Spamming Not Protected By Constitution
No. The jury found him guilty. The judge disallowed his First Amendment defense. Constitutionality is not a jury question.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Before we get too uncomfortable with this, let us look at why they dissented. None of them said that spam was a good thing.
Judge Lacy wrote that the law was "...unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mail including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution."
She is trying to protect the free speech rights of non-spammers here.
I don't think you're selling people short. I think it's "obvious" that it was inevitable that it would be tried. I'll explain why...
I think where you're right is that there is a commonplace two-step meta-pattern where an idea is tried for an innocent reason and after succeeding someone tries to repurpose the idea for other purposes. So in your case, you're suggesting that if 'mail to resident' hadn't happened, variations and repurposing would not have been able to happen. Probably. But 'mail to resident' wasn't a one-time shot that if it didn't happen on a certain day wouldn't exist. It would have come another day. And even if not, other equivalently powerful and repurposable ideas would have.
For example, 'mail to many' is capable of being repurposed in the same way. Multiple-recipients could be said to be just as enabling. It wasn't in paper mail, after all--a piece of mail mostly went to one recipient (except those interoffice memo things where you could keep re-forwarding the same junk, checking off your name). So once the cost of sending to many was lowered to just naming who gets copies, that was also an enabling factor.
Many years ago (somewhere around 25 years ago, I think), when email was still young (not brand new, certainly, but still not heavily evolved) and when there were not many machines on the then-ARPANET, I obtained a piece of software written by someone at a certain texas university that was on the net. I wanted to reach the author, but had no idea how to find him. So I sent an email to smith, asmith, bsmith, etc. up to zsmith hoping to find someone at that site that knew the guy I wanted to reach. We didn't get tons of email back then, so this wouldn't have been obnoxious like it was now... There was no web back then, and no search engine. I don't even know if there was the 'postmaster' convention yet. (Maybe if there was I'd tried it and failed to get a response.) And hsmith replied, by the way, offering just the helpful info I'd hoped for. The rest of the mail bounced. I never used the technique again, but would not have hesitated to recommend it to another if they were desperate. My point in telling the story is just to say that ideas like this do present themselves when people are faced with barriers. It's the natural way things go.
So I doubt any claim that if 'mail to resident' hadn't happened, SPAM wouldn't have either. Because if someone could come up with the idea of blasting out a query for benign reasons, someone could conceive of pushing that to whatever limit made financial sense.
You could almost make the case that if 'mail for free' had not been invented, no one would have wanted to send tons of mail to people who might not care. That would have reduced volume. But there is a large and thriving junk mail industry even when stamps cost money, so even that isn't true.
I do think that "free email" is the real culprit. We all say we like it, but most of us pay more per year in time and money getting rid of spam than we would pay to deliver mail. In effect, we all subsidize spam in the guise of getting something for free... On net (pardon the pun), we don't get email free, and it would be lower cost if we charged for it.
The same is true for physmail junk mail, by the way: We subsidize it by the lower prices it gets. That's a business decision by the post office, but in the interest of the overwhelming resource usage and waste disposal concerns, I think it's ever more clear it should be at least the same price, if not much higher. But the problem isn't (any more) send to resident, since now they all swap mailing lists. The problem is, again, 'send to multiple'. And with global warming upon us, the stakes are even higher than with email spam.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
The full text of the Virginia Supreme Court's decision is available here.
Have you ever created, or even conceived of a computer that can process some 10,000 e-mail messages per hour?
Until you figure out what the costs of a real world ISP are, please, stop posting on the subject.
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Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
You dont need to sign up, our records show you already opted in.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
the "broken glass" fallacy states that a broken window is good for the economy because someone has to make a new window, someone has to make a hammer and nails to hold in the new window, someone has to install the window, etc. This destructive act - breaking a window - is a boon.
The reason that it's a fallacy is that it assumes the money spent on repairing the window wouldn't have been spent somewhere else, somewhere more productive. In an economy, it is always better for a new thing to be created than for an old thing to be replaced.
This isn't exactly what we're talking about with junk mail, but it's close. Yes, regular mail would be more costly, but the post office would also be spending a lot less on gas to lug all that junk mail around. Yes, junk mail designers would be out of a job, but their skills could be employed somewhere else, potentially somewhere more productive. The fact - and it is a fact - that junk mail has positive benefits does not mean that it is optimally beneficial.
Thomas Galvin
No they don't. They infect machines through viruses/trojans/whatever, creating botnets that proceed to send spam for a short time until they get blacklisted. My boss at work took one a few days ago, resulting in out whole network being blacklisted. Along with our mailserver (YAY!)
ISP fees would be lower?Yes, no need to set up complex antispam systems, fund independent systems that keep blacklists of hosts, use spamtraps etc etc. Most professional installations of mailservers do use paid RBL sites.
Expense to the recipient?To go back at my work example. I hadn't blocked access to port 25 through the firewall because some people in the office check/use their private mail, not passing through the company mailserver for sending stuff. Then my boss got a virus, everything got blacklisted and basically we had to sustain the following expenses:
How about coming back with some facts next time?
nbody2002:If you can read this you may be addicted to the internet
It's nowhere near a broken glass fallacy. This isn't a case of an illegal act, it's a case of a legitimate business model that employs many. If the postal service wanted to do away with it all they'd have to do is stop accepting it and it'd be over with. They don't. Why? Because it subsidizes their business model, it keeps their employees working, it fills in the gaps in their daily routes (eg; long stretches of houses that otherwise wouldn't receive any mail on a given day) thereby making the routes more predictable and efficient.
As to the inception; the ads you get in your mail are paid for by local businesses targeting specific areas of interest. A window company working in the area offering a promotion so they can employ their guys in a centralized area thereby keeping costs down and passing them along to the residents, a car dealership offering a sale for residents in their vicinity, a snow clearing service, etc. These businesses pay for this mail to be created thereby creating jobs in the printing and postal industry AND if they've done their homework and targeted properly they'll increase company revenues thereby creatinug work for their employees and increasing their own bottom line.
With recycling programs in high gear in most(?) heavily populated areas the resultant flyers are generally disposed of in the "blue bin" (or the local equivalent) and recycled to create new products and new employment opportunities.
There is no "broken window" fallacy here because the money was intended to be spent on targeted advertising in the first place. Try to do some research into retail outlets' advertising strategies and you'll see what I'm talking about.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Then nail 'em on computer intrusion. Leave my free speech alone.
Yes, no need to set up complex antispam systems, fund independent systems that keep blacklists of hosts, use spamtraps etc etc. Most professional installations of mailservers do use paid RBL sites.No need for that anyway. I can handle my own whitelist just fine, thank you very much. Charge the suckers who need managed internet more and give be a bare pipe.... oh... That's the way it works already. Ain't free market capitalism great?
To go back at my work exampleYour work example demonstrates damage done by virus... computer intrusion. Computer intrusion is illegal and not a free speech issue.
Last I looked, the Internet isn't like "the public commons - most of the networks accessed by spammers are privately owned. You have no protections for "free speech" in the co-opting of others' private property against their terms of use, and to the detriment of their customers. So, in the "spirit of free speech," take your bullshit opinion and go fuck yourself round the rim with it. Twice.
There is no defense for sending out tens of millions of pieces of spam. Both the spammer and anyone who buys crap from them needs to be punished. This is no more a free speech issue than the "right to lie" in advertising is.
Just one of my domains receives more than 400000 (as in 4E5) emails a day - all but a few dozen complete junk. If left unfiltered, this completely swamps the 5Mbit broadband connection, leaving it useless for anything but delivering viagra ads. With a complex system of auto-whitelist, auto-blacklist, bayesian filtering, SPF, domain reputation, and temporary IP banning, I get this down to a steady trickle of 56Kbit (day) to 400Kbit(4am) email traffic. This makes the internet usable, but then there are occasional false positives resulting in important mail being lost. On the other hand, delivering all the spam would result in essentially *all* the important mail being lost among all the spam. No, this is not an ISP, but just one guy with one mailbox selling stuff from a website. Every false positive means a lost sale. Furthermore, maintaining the filter to keep up with the constant arms race with spammer technology is a huge waste of developer time (even more so than reading slashdot).
So yes, receiving spam is incredibly expensive, and the perpetrators are just as much thieves as the guy robbing a bank. After all, one bank robbery doesn't cost any one person all that much ...
Spam also comes with secondary hazards. Phishing attacks, websites which are for exploiting. These, if even one is successful can cost a company great expense, from data loss, to reputation lost if any corporate machines end up as zombie servers and found responsible for an attack.
Spam is expensive in another way. Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, and other corporate regs requires E-mail to be archived for seven years. This means spam too. So, those messages about turning Vienna sausages into Titan V rockets have to take up disk space pretty much permanently.
I never said to deliver meds by email. However, snail mail, even twice a week, can work fine. I'm sure you're not receiving a new shipment every day. The scheduling problems would be minimal. If you're receiving it once a month, what's the problem with 2x a week mail delivery?
I don't know about your bank, but mine allows me to send money from my account to anyone with just their email address, and vice versa if they have the same service. Maybe its time to change banks. Its not like they keep the physical check on hand any more anyway.Daily mail service isn't needed. The original poster has a good point - moving it to once a week (or even twice a week) would save a LOT of energy and resources.
Up here, new streets don't get door-to-door mail delivery - they get a key to a lockbox within a block or two of their house. This was done as a cost-cutting measure, and it works.
I hear this said a lot, could somebody please explain to me how larger, heavier mail which costs much much less could possibly subsidize smaller, lighter mail which costs much more?
To name a few reason Bulk Mail is profitable:
presorted by zip - much less handling
doesn't use a printed stamp - no cost for stamp printing
generally mailed locally or short distances - no cross country airplane ride for the same price as a piece that goes two doors down in the same town
Seems to me that is junk mail was eliminated, the Post Office could get rid of much of its trucks, drivers and infrastructure. Without junk mail, I'd say residential delivery could be scaled back to one delivery per week, meaning one truck could serve six different routes instead of six different drivers and trucks going out every Mon-Sat. All that overhead eliminated would raise first class rates how? And now the remaining trucks would be loaded with letter sized full-rate first class mail instead of giant heavy bundles of newsprint mailed out for a few pennies each. How is that not better revenue for the post office?
The problem is you've only addressed one small part of the cost structure - drivers - and not the rest of the infrastructure needed to haul mail around the country. You still need post offices to take mail; sort mail; etc. - and in some smaller service areas two days may cover everyone - so do you close the post office the rest of the time and make all the employees part timers? Rural delivery is already done in some areas by carriers who own their own vehicle and get paid to use it; so then there are even less savings.
In addition; as people turn to electronic delivery less volume will go through the USPS; so prices need to go up to cover the large fixed costs - and tiered rates may be needed to reflect the actual delivery cost, much as is done for parcels today.
The real advantage the USPS has is they go to every house every weekday - if they could partner with FedEx / UPS to do their residential deliveries they could increase their revenues while reducing FedEx / UPS's costs for home delivery.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
As someone else replied, the broken window fallacy has nothing to do with whether the act is legal or illegal. Rather, it refers to justifying anything because it "creates jobs." This is exactly what the original poster did:
"[Can junk mail be good?] Yes. [...] people are paid money to create those ads, print them, address them and mail them. Not only that, the USPO is paid at bulk mail rates for carrying them."
Let me rephrase:
"[Cab breaking the windows of one's own house be good?] Yes. [...] people are paid money to create the replacement glass, nails, deliver them and install them. Not only that, the USPO is paid for shipping them from the factory."
How is it different? Whether or not junk mail is a "good thing," this particular justification for it is completely invalid. If the post office wasn't delivering so much junk mail, their employees could be doing something else for which they would also get paid. If businesses did not advertise with junk mail, they could be advertising in some other way that would also pay people. Junk mail (and broken windows) do not create jobs. They merely divert those jobs from doing something else.
Note: I am not arguing against junk mail, but rather this piece of "logic." The rest of the original post was quite good, identifying the main valid arguments for and against junk mail: the senders and some recipients do actually benefit, but the senders don't face the true cost, passing on a negative externality to the unwilling recipients (and in the case of spam, the delivery services).
As someone else replied, the broken window fallacy has nothing to do with whether the act is legal or illegal.
Actually, the parable opens up thusly;
In this case it was the shopkeeper's careless son but it could be attributed to any act that results in a broken window legal or otherwise. Regardless, the legality of the act is mere semantics, the point of the parable is the window and the repercussions of replacing same, not the cause of the initial breakage.
How is it different? Whether or not junk mail is a "good thing," this particular justification for it is completely invalid.
No, actually, it's not. As I said in my response the paid advertisements sent by the post office are there to serve a distinct benefit to the merchants who are sending them. The broken window is something a homeowner would not do intentionally because, yes, they would have otherwise spent the money somewhere more productive, hence the nuisance of the "little boy". The parable of the broken window is merely a way to reassure and calm the shopkeeper / homeowner that the act is in fact helping the economy so it's not so terrible. The paid, targeted advertisements are in fact helping the economy for the reasons I spelled out in my previous post;
This isn't in any way a false economy. Flyer advertsing is far less expensive than radio and television and is more targeted which nets a far better cost:benefit ratio for their advertising dollar. Now, regardless of medium, that dollar will be spent in some way or another be it flyer circulation, newspaper flyers, newspaper/magazine adverts, radio/television spots, billboards, bus/bench advertising, direct telephone campaigns, door to door representation or any of a host of other means of getting their name out to the customer base in their target (surrounding) area.
You can easily find a way to discredit any or all of the above means of advertising thereby claiming each one in particular as a false economy but the fact remains that advertising remains the best way to garner attention to your business if done right and flyer advertising works and creates many dozens or hundreds of jobs in the process. It will never go away and the postal service will never refuse to deliver these ads so they're a part of our lives. Learn to live with it or suggest a better way to target an area of customers and present it to the local businesses and the post office and see how well it goes over.
If the post office wasn't delivering so much junk mail, their employees could be doing something else for which they would also get paid.
You mean the ones who are left after the massive rounds of layoffs. "More efficient" in this case means "fewer people on the payroll".
What else besides sorting, routing and delivering mail is a postal employee supposed to do? That's their job description; end of story. If you take away one of those areas there is less work to go around therefore fewer people required to do it.
If businesses did not advertise with junk mail, they could be advertising in some other way that would also pay people. Junk mail (and broken windows) do not create jobs. They merely divert those jobs
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
I have read like 1000 posts on /. about spam. All of you so far, at least the comments I've read, seem to think that spam pays. Why? I mean, it will all be very simple if the guy that sells the spam is the one that sells the goods. But is this really the case?
I mean, to me, it seems that only really dumb people will answer to spam. And by realy dumb, I mean, complete retards. Most of the spam I get here is in Russian, and I don't even know the letters. I am thinking that, maybe the guys doing the spam are really getting paid by the guys selling the product. I mean, you go to some business, and say: "hey you want some cheap advertising? It may be illegal!". The other guy pays and it's all over. The spammer can eventually fake some clicks, it's not like his business is legal to start with!
Well, if anybody has some insight I will be happy to find out more, for my intellectual pleasure!