View From the Bushes

I have a meeting at one today to discuss what to do about the SPAM problem the company is having. I've gotten so used to a flood of spam in my in-box that it's difficult for me to imagine what it might be like to come in in the morning and look at an in-box that only had stuff I wanted... Obviously, one of the reasons that SPAM continues is that people buy things based on it. I would theorize that another reason spam continues is that in a certain co-dependent sense, people like it. Every morning when I wake up I have hundreds of e-mails. And it seems that with that many, one of them would have to be something cool and exciting (from someone I actually know...)

And if by the time I got to the end there was nothing particularly special, there's always tomorrow morning or ten minutes from now, when I'm sure I'll have a few more messages to sort through. Of course, the biggest problem of all with stopping spam is that capitalism will always find a way through, so rather than trying to plug the holes of commerce, they need to open up a large well-defined hole and put it in a central location so that everyone knows where it is. I think my favorite of all the proposed solutions is a sender pays set-up (exactly like how normal mail works). I think of everything I've seen that has the best chance of making the kind of systematic change necessary.

So I'm back from the meeting -- it was part of the Continuous Quality Improvement program we have at the company. What this means is that instead of a normal meeting, this is a "process." We spent the hour doing introductions (there was a game involved where everyone had to tell two true things about themselves and one lie) and getting halfway through a mission statement. The mission statement broke down over what we were going to call the group... Finally, it looks like Armstrong has decided to do the Tour again. I'm actually a little disappointed, and my gut prediction? He won't win again.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross