Comment by chadillac83 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chadillac83 | Hacker News Reader

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Spam in your e-mail that is slightly annoying but not terribly terrible outside of excess bit and bytes on the net... Senate gets involved.

Spam in your real mail box which even at a quick glace effects:

- waste management resources

- recycling resources

- extra work for USPS (sorting, shipping, delivery)

- extra weight == more gasoline required

- environmental issues (litter, printing chemicals, trees = cut down)

And that is probably just the tip of the ice-berg on actual impact... nope, not an issue, this is how we make money.

I've had a problem with this for years, but there is no way to fix it besides charging the producers of such "mail" an arm and a leg.

Maybe we should push for the death of "Mailbox Neutrality"... or wait, should we support it so they'll kill it off?...

/rant

The USPS employs 522,144 [1] voting humans who depend on junk mail for paychecks and pensions; email considerably fewer.

Edit: source [1] http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/#H1

"email considerably fewer."

How so? I'd say that number is actually much higher.

You think that the email spam industry collectively employs more than 500,000 full-time voting adults, rather than a relative handful of humans and tons of bots? It's fine if you do, my hunch is just different.

No, but email in general does. And...

LOADS of what people classify as "spam" is simply stuff they signed up for and forgot about. Just last night a client had someone write in saying "I'm not getting your emails!". After some back and forth they had - 2 days prior - marked it as "spam" because they didn't recognize the name of the list, and so weren't getting any more mails (or, they were getting junked).

You may be able to make an internal distinction between "the spam industry" and "email" but many people can't or don't. Or perhaps more to the point, many people classify spam as "anything I don't like or didn't ask for" (even if, by dint of entering in to a transaction, they do in fact grant permission to get necessary emails now and then).

If only they could hire another 2^11+2^6+2^3 (2144) employees and make it an even 2^19.

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