Saturday, September 16, 2006

100

I'll jump right in. I've decided that people fuck up a lot, and that this is amusing, so I'm going to write about it.

Spam is good. The fuck up here is that people don't like it, but people are dumb not to like spam. Why do people not like spam? Because it's a nuisance, it fills their inbox with crap, requires a load of filters to keep out, and these filters inevitably catch some real e-mail and so you still end up sorting through all the spam yourself. How many times do you need to get a message telling you about penis enlargement, great 'investments', horny housewives, and all that other sleazy crap? You don't, and you hate it, and it sucks. But guess what, there is something worse.
Traditional junk mail. All those fliers for crap you don't need from stores you don't go to, the endless menus from generic chinese or pizza places, these things are worse. See, when you round up all your spam mail and hit the delete key, how much energy is expended? Barely any, just as it took virtually no energy to send the spam in the first place. Yeah, yeah, spam clogs the internet, creating endless useless traffic which slows down all of our useful applications, but I'm not really saying Spam is 'good' in a absolute sense.
Given a world with or a world without spam, all else being totoally equal, the world without would be mildly less aggrevating. But spam replaces the much worse traditional junk mail.
Every time they mass send one of those dumbass fliers it costs tens of thousands of dollars, wastes hundreds of hours of work time, kills trees, fills landfills, all just for the off chances you'll actually look at those flashy adds before tossing the whole lot into the garbage, (or marginally better, the recycling box). Spam is better than that. I want all the assholes in marketing companies to start using spam instead of traditional junk mail. Or better yet, maybe they could put all of their creative energy into actually making something in the world better, instead of finding a better way to flog the same old crap on us.

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