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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

A single email will waste anywhere between 3-30 seconds of my life.

On aggregate, junk email, enabled by disrespecting marketers and ongoing minimisation such as your comment, will waste months.

Yes. My time is highly valuable. As is my ISP pipe and my thought processing. Spam steals that, and you'll find no quarter with most tech folks because this is the societal default.

That is like saying if I steal a dollar from your pocket do you really care about that but I can steal a dollar from millions of people and get rich.

A single one - barely any. Although you have to be a Superman to be able to entirely process it in 1ms.

At scale, it might take up to a few minutes off your day and under certain circumstances (heavy spam) even start contributing to a mental fatigue. It's a minor nuisance but a nuisance nonetheless.

don't forget that that the presence of spam makes it quite a bit more difficult to manage your own email

regardless, it introduces a non-zero chance that legitimate email might be misclassified

it seems like everyone in the ad industry has this opinion - if you don't like it, just delete it and move on. but there are thousands of them, and somewhere in there is that job offer I really need.

So just because the harm "feels small" to you personally, that means it's not really harm?

When you go to sue Visa to get them to pay for the harm they caused you I imagine a $0.01 of harm is not worth the trouble.

Edit: I forgot the context. I should have said the FTC.

From the URL in the root comment:

> Each separate email in violation of the law is subject to penalties of up to $46,517

The economic harm spam causes is in the billions every year. Plenty of articles and reports on the negative impacts of spam. It's no small thing.

We are talking about the "Lack of FTC action is causing you material harm." It's not causing you specifically billions of dollars.

>How much harm does a marketing email even do. Waste 0.001 seconds of your time?

I can't get myself into a frame of mind where I'd find myself defending spam. I'm genuinely fascinated. Why are you taking this angle?

If you don't like it perhaps you can petition the government to get rid of the can spam act?

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