[extropy-chat] Depressing Thought. from Laurence of Berkeley

[Spike]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org 
> [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of 
> Harvey Newstrom
> Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 5:06 PM
> To: 'ExI chat list'
> Subject: RE: [extropy-chat] Depressing Thought. from Laurence 
> of Berkeley
> 
> 
> Spike wrote,
> > Most of my spam has been coming from individual
> > huge corporations in Nigeria, asking me to help
> > them loot the country...
> 
> Surely you must know that none of these really come from the 
> government of Nigeria.  They are all frauds...

Ja I was aware of that, but there is an interesting
impact of all that Nigerian spam: people are having 
constantly reinforced the notion that one can *never* 
invest *any* capital in any African nation.  There are
too many people eager to steal any pile of money
in sight.  

But other than that, Nigeria isn't much like the U.S.  {8^D

The spammers are doing unimaginable damage to any 
possible future development in Africa and pretty 
much every other currently underdeveloped nation.  
As far as I know, there are no huge corporations 
in Nigeria.  Now there may never be any.

As for government action to stop spam, the government
is perfectly helpless to stop spam.  The fed must
work within the framework of the constitution, and
it will quickly get tangled up in free speech issues 
if it does much.  Lawrence from Berkeley made a
curious contention, being as how he is in Taxifornia
and must have noticed the debacle this state has
just been thru.  The government cannot help us.
This state's government cannot get any more money,
yet it's expenses are going up.  Consequently, the
Taxifornia state government cannot even maintain
the services that it has been providing for so
many years, never mind take up any new tasks,
such as inforcing spam restrictions.

Note carefully my claim: the state *may raise
taxes* but it *cannot* take in any more money.
We must look elsewhere for solutions to spam.

spike