From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: George Michaelson <ggm@apnic.net>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Cc: geoff@collyer.net
Subject: Re: [9fans] spam (was "pathetic")
Message-Id: <20040229105805.4f272ec6@garlic>
In-Reply-To: <2e53d0b955987afff06292756dc7e4c9@collyer.net>
References: <20040228144033.1227.qmail@mail.dirac.net>
	<2e53d0b955987afff06292756dc7e4c9@collyer.net>
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Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 10:58:05 +0900
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Paper spam, just like e-spam, is in the eye of the beholder.

I get and *use* quite a lot of paper spam. it makes for some financial sense
to track the price specials on commodities I live off. (I means 'my family')
based on this read, we can track the marketing practices of the distributors
who move their 10c off specials amongst the three competing chains of supermarkets
on a bi-weekly basis (to avoid collusive pricing issues I infer)

When I need to buy whitegoods, I choose to keep the catalogs I otherwise chuck
away unread, until I have enough *current* ones to know where the price breaks are
and to feed into my engineering choices should go to look at quality/price issues

the spam I never use, is the ones where the post office fronts for the agencies
and asks me to profile myself, so they can tailor their spam. Strange, because
if they did a better job, my filtering would be easier. I suspect the jewellers
would want to stop spamming me, if they knew I will not be buying their rings.

of course, there is a problem here: the cheapest distribution channel here is
not the post office, but hand delivery. and they ARE the bottom of the foodchain,
otherwise unemployed home-workers, children, refugees. they have no time to
filter or target, their pay is based on volume and footprint only.

if we want to fix this social problem, then its best we institute better
minimum wage and social policy. If people didn't have to hand this bumwad
out for peanuts, then the paper spammers would not send as much.

so I call on my fellow socialists (liberals for the yanks, who do not seem to know
that down here, the liberal party is to the right of the john birch society) to
formally refuse to accept their spam in the letterbox until they know its delivered
by dolphin-friendly, tree hugging minimum-wage earners, and at that point, accept
spam aggressively.

you know it makes sense.

-George