NYT: Diverging Estimates of the Costs of Spam. The article points out how the analyst company estimates of the cost of spam widely diverge. That’s reasonable — in fact, that’s analysts for you. Some great data in there, too.
But then we get to this glorious quote:
Peter S. Fader, a marketing professor at the Wharton School who has studied e-mail, says the research firms’ estimates vastly overstate the actual cost of spam. … He also argues that the computers and networks that are being installed to deal with spam will be a powerful resource for processing legitimate e-mail, once spam filters and economic Darwinism tame the spam epidemic.
‘Spam, although it is a bad thing per se, is fostering the growth of the e-mail infrastructure,’ he said.
Yeah — in the same way that arson ‘fosters the growth’ of the firefighting infrastructure. Wow.
Ireland: I’ve just heard about the ‘no fares’ day of protest by CIE’s unions. It seems the unions, rather than closing up shop for the day as would be traditional, decided to take a much more consumer-friendly approach; instead of shutting down the normal public transport services, they ran them for free. Genius.
RTE reported that ‘tens of thousands of people’ travelled for free, and Iarnrod Eireann said that ‘there has been a notable rise in passenger numbers on some inter-city trains to Dublin as people take advantage of free travel.’ Now that’s an effective way to strike…