Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Joey in Charge So someone who wants peace is now a terrorist. Exercising freedom of speech makes you a terrorist. Want to rethink any of that? Water cannons will help clean up inconvenient opinions. People like you give solid reinforcement to the notion that government can't be trusted; the fact that people like you are in charge right now is what scares a lot of people in this country, and a lot of people around the world. You seem to be pretty gung-ho about "right thinking" Americans, as long as you get to define what's right. By the way, I think the war makes sense. I am just disgusted by your snide and derisive attitude towards other opinions. You are the problem. 10:29:27 PM

Taxing Spam So you want a way to control spam, and you want it to have minimal impact. Ideally, the people who receive spam or have to process it wouldn't have any impact on what they do. I think that maybe the tax code can be helpful here. Spammers do what they do because there's a very minimal cost to them. Upstream people pay the cost, of course. When a business sends out direct mail, it doesn't just splatter that mail all over the known universe. It targets the mailing as precisely as it can, to reduce the costs of it. The company may choose to do a wide-ranging campaign, from time to time, but these are carefully managed so that the benefits (new business) outweigh the costs (of printing, mailing and so forth). Let's say we put a flat-rate "send tax" on unsolicited business email of $0.05. That is, for each unsolicited commercial email, the sender must pay a tax of a nickel. You can see how that will add up. If a list is truly opt-in, then the cost will be worth it. There are significant advantages to making this part of the tax code. The first thing you'll suppose is, well, the spammer isn't gonna count his spams! That will probably be true...but whoever is receiving them can find out where they came from, and a sending ISP can be forced to reveal the source of email pretty easily. At that point there are only a few variables: Who sent the spam, and how many there are. Those are the only questions. Tax is due and payable, and there's no way out of it. I suppose you could permit a write off like any other expense. The thing is, if a spammer doesn't report the spam, he's subject to an IRS ruling later on in his life, and that's something he probably doesn't want to do. It's one thing to be spending spam and pissing people off right and left. It's another thing entirely to be a tax cheat. Far fewer people are going to be willing to take the step of deceiving uncle sam. Some of the tax dollars gained could be used to form a spam team, which collects spam and uses statistical methods to estimate the numbers produced by a given spammer. Example spams can also be compared against a spammer's list to see if they are exceeding what they said they'd send. There are a lot of ways to trip up the spammer with this approach. The deterrent factor of the tax code is the real win -- there's plenty of law out there on that already! So I say tax spam, at $0.05 per unit, and let the government do its thing! 10:22:59 PM

Fibonacci and Recidivism Bad guys out there often commit crimes again, after they're released from Prison. There's a Supreme Court case that is trying to (or maybe already has) decided what to do when faced with something like California's Three Strikes Law. California has decided that when someone is convicted of a third crime, they are automatically given a very long (life) sentence. Someone can steal a set of golf clubs worth, say $1200, and because that is a felony (over $1000) they can be sentenced to life. On one hand, you can say that this is unfair. On the other hand, you can say that they're clearly a repeat criminal and they should have thought about it. The constitution tells us that a punishment should fit the crime, which makes a life sentence seem unfair. But it also says that a state has the right to figure out how it wants to do punishment, and California has clearly decided that it has a low tolerance for felonies. There's another solution...I think the problem is not the fundamental nature of the three strikes law, but that the formula it proposes is a little too simple. If we decide that there are more categories of crime than felony and non-felony, we can begin to make a better, fairer formula. We can give the state what it needs to put recidivists away for longer, but keep fairness in the system. Divide crimes into violent/non-violent, and create tiers for financial damages. Every time someone commits a crime in a given category, they are subject to the appropriate sentence for that crime PLUS any time previous served for the previous two offenses in that category. If he steals and gets a year sentence, the next time he steals he can get a year plus the previous year. The time after that things get more serious...it will be three years plus the new sentence. That's just the Fibonacci series applied to justice, and it seems fair to me. Every time you screw up the same way, you just pile more on yourself for the next time. But we avoid the notion that a life sentence is mandatory, and we give judges the latitude to make the right things happen. Sentencing should be left up to judge, and not dictated by the harshness of a too-general law. 10:21:12 PM