Stupid Is As Stupid Does

By Evan — — Culture

I’m back! For the record, I had planned to come back with a cute little piece about my recent computer woes. But rather than focus on my personal stupidity, this entry is going to focus on stupidity in general.

Via Mark Pilgrim‘s “b-links”, I ran across this lovely little piece titled, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity“, by economics professor Carlo M. Cipolla. I must say that this article is a remarkable example of its genre. The author hits us right away with his First Law of Human Stupidity:

“Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.”

Always and inevitably! At the same time! Wow. What the heck is wrong with all of us? It sure is hard to understand how everyone could continue to underestimate the number of stupid individuals, what with the sheer numbers of Smart Persons taking time out to warn about this pressing problem and all. From UC-Berkeley Economics Professors to angst-ridden teens, there’s really no shortage. In fact, there are enough people churning out such warnings that we really ought to give them their own designation. Call them, “Meta-Stupid”.

Basic Law of Meta-Stupidity #1: Meta-Stupid people believe that almost everyone else is stupid.

We might naively (stupidly?) expect that this amounts to a not-so-subtle dig at the reader. If most people are stupid, doesn’t that mean the reader is probably stupid? No, no, don’t worry — if you’re smart enough to travel in the same intellectual circles as the Meta-Stupid person, to read his or her oeuvre, there’s an excellent chance you’re not stupid after all. Think no more of it.

Now, what does “most people are stupid” mean? It means that rather than drawing the Line of Stupidity at, say, the 5% mark, or even the 30% mark, the Meta-Stupid person is pulling the line far, far to the right. “The people at the 50th, 70th, even the 95th percentile are all profoundly stupid,” says the Meta-Stupid person. “Only a select few peers and I make the cut.” In other words, whatever stupidity is, the criteria for not having it are rather stringent.

And if that’s true, if the vast majority of people really are so stupid, that’s actually pretty disturbing, isn’t it? After all, I had always thought that a complex modern society had to be composed of hundreds of millions of complex people. People who work, pay rent, create, raise children, pay taxes, vote, live, love, hate, die, and even tie their shoelaces all by themselves. But no no, that’s all wrong. Our society consists of nothing but hundreds of millions of stupid drones. Everything would fall apart if not for a tiny minority of super-men, heroically banging away at their keyboards, focusing their super-brains on… whatever super-brains focus on. Let’s hope they keep doing such a diligent job. Or failing that, let’s hope that “stupidity” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Basic Law of Meta-Stupidity #2: Meta-Stupid people mean different things by “Stupid”.

When a Meta-Stupid person uses the word “stupid”, he or she could mean any of the following:

  • “People who disagree with me politically or philosophically”
  • “People who are novices in an area in which I am an expert”
  • “People who dislike me,” or the closely related, “People who don’t understaaaand me”

Finally there’s the tautological,

  • “People who do stupid things”

Definition of stupidity to be left as an exercise for the reader. Our UC-Berkeley professor friend defines it thus:

[The Third Basic Law of Human Stupidity]: “A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.”

And here is where I confess: I am a stupid person. I have caused losses to other people, deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. In fact, definitely incurring losses. Worse, I’ve even done more than one stupid thing in my life. And in the next half-century, there’s a good chance I’ll do something else that’s stupid. Who knows, maybe even two or three things. Heavy doth the mantle of stupidity weigh.

Needless to say, our Meta-Stupid professor’s definition needs a little work.

First, the definition doesn’t explicitly account for expectation values (a rather surprising omission for an Economics professor). For example: speeding and tailgating is stupid, because it increases your chance of death for very little benefit. Nevertheless, even if you’re a terrible driver, there’s a good chance that you’ll make it through your entire driving career without dying in a heap of flaming wreckage. So if you’re one of the people that makes it to age eighty, does that make you smart?

Second, some stupid actions actually do benefit others. Consider someone who runs up a massive credit card debt buying stuff they can’t afford, and ends up having to pay off tens of thousands of dollars at exorbitant rates. Pretty stupid, right? And yet lots of other parties benefit. The merchants that sold the stuff to the stupid person. The people who manufacture the stuff. The credit card company that accepts the payments. The bank that takes over the loan when the person consolidates their debt at a lower rate. Lots of benefit all around — and so by the above definition our credit card person is, well, not stupid.

Third, the way the definition is written, it’s one-strike-you’re-out. I don’t know who these non-stupid people are, but I want to find them. And follow them, and gather at least one or two of the golden bricks they shit.

Basic Law of Meta-Stupidity #3: Meta-Stupid people tend to say profoundly stupid and self-refuting things.

Nothing brings out the stupidity quite like calling most of your fellow human beings stupid. It’s kind of like being a grammar fascist: as soon as you harp on someone, someone else will point out three errors in your own post. It’s the Pot-Kettle effect. Incidentally, that’s why I haven’t been ripping on Professor Cipolla for his piss-poor prose. (Whoops!)

[The Fourth Basic Law of Human Stupidity]: “Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.”

Huh.

  1. If I were a non-stupid person, wouldn’t I never “underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals?” After all, if I failed to do this, I would be causing losses to myself and others. And therefore by definition, I would be stupid.

  2. If most people in the world are indeed stupid, then what, pray tell, is protecting me from “deal[ing] and/or associat[ing]” with them, at least some of the time? Must be those mile-high walls of adamantium surrounding Stupid Country, keeping us all safe from Stupidity Rays.

Moving on…

[The Fifth Law of Human Stupidity]: “A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. The corollary of the Law is that: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.”

Oh really? The most dangerous? Let’s see. If I encounter a “bandit”, he is always going to beat me up and take my stuff. If I encounter a “stupid person”, at best he is only sometimes going to cause losses. Again, our economics professor blithely ignores expectation values. Weird. My friend Eric’s older brother Bob studied math and computer science at UC-Berkeley, and Bob just loves probability and expectation values. Maybe it’s a departmental thing.

“Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination.”

Gosh, that’s a relief. But a few lines later, we get:

[The Second Basic Law of Human Stupidity]: “The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.”

Wild. So on the one hand, stupidity is genetic. But wait — stupidity is independent of any other characteristic of that person. Except their parents, I guess.

Well, anyway. You get the idea. I think Mark sums it up best in the title of his link to the Stupidity page: “The only power stupid people have over you is when you let them waste your time.” Truer words were never spoken. I’m going to bed.

Helpful Fascism

By Evan — — Web

Quite a storm of activity going on over at Dave Hyatt‘s developer weblog.

Dave is clearly annoyed with the difficulty of parsing broken HTML. It’s an extremely hard problem to solve, and not very well-defined. It must be even more frustrating to have to be judged against the quirky behavior of the dominant browser. And Dave is exactly right about Safari’s XML parser: it must be “Draconian“. Otherwise, by definition it’s not an XML parser. (The more interesting question is whether one should actually use an XML parser to parse XHTML.)

All of this kerfluffle has generated various proposals for solving the problem of broken XHTML. Presumably the web would be a better place if all XHTML files were well-formed and therefore parseable with a standard XML parser. But the reality is that about 75% of XHTML home pages are invalid, and over 90% of XHTML sites have at least one invalid page.[1] So how do we improve the situation?

One commenter on Dave’s weblog said that he dreamed about a “fascist” browser, one that would refuse to display any page with any errors. Unfortunately, a recent weblogs.mozillazine.org server error swallowed that comment forever. It seems that the Great Spirits of the Internet have spoken. Fascist browser: bad idea. Let us never speak of it again.

A friendlier variation on this proposal is to design a browser that still displays a malformed XHTML page, but provides some sort of obtrusive error message. The basic idea is that the users will then know about the errors, the website will receive a flood of complaints, the designers will fix the page, and XHTML quality will improve. As Dave puts it:

“Many people suggested that there be a built-in validator in the browser that could show the errors to the developer. The validators basically break down into two types: obtrusive validators and unobtrusive validators.

If the validator is unobtrusive, then I would argue that it won’t receive sufficient usage to make a difference. If the browser doesn’t impose a penalty of some kind, then there will be no incentive for the author to correct mistakes.”

Never before has the gulf between developer and end user been more stark.

I’m hoping this is simply the result of sheer frustration on Dave’s part. That at some level, he realizes how quickly this “feature” will destroy Safari. In a sense, it’s kind of reassuring. Proves he’s human.[2]

Unfortunately, I don’t think any browser could survive pulling such a stunt. Maybe Internet Explorer could… after all, IE users have been trained for years to ignore annoying technical messages, and most of them don’t know how to change their browser anyway. It would be a close one, at least. Actually, here’s a clever evil plan. If we could somehow convince the IE development team that the “helpful fascist” browser was a good idea, we’d be in a win-win situation. Because either:

  • XHTML quality would magically improve all over the web, OR
  • Firebird and Opera would capture 50% of the Windows browser market.

Oops, did I say that last part out loud? Damn. Being an evil mastermind is harder than I thought.

1. Note that the XHTML 100 does not distinguish between well-formedness errors and validity errors. However, I can assure you that very few sites were invalid but well-formed. Most of the failed sites generated a torrent of errors of all kinds.

2. Although we really ought to run Dave through the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test, just to be sure.

Happy, Happy Machines

By Evan — — Web

Mark Pilgrim: “Thought Experiment“. It’s not a thought experiment, actually. It’s Jacques Distler‘s reality.

Here’s a short story for you all. My company makes a large suite of J2EE software, mostly for banks and insurance companies. Our software uses XML all over the freaking place. We use XML for our configuration files, XML to communicate from our machines to our customer’s machines, and so on. Machines happily consuming XML from other machines. It works just fine, thanks.

One example of where we are using XML is in our workflow engine. A workflow contains tasks, chained together in a kind of graph. If you change the shape of the graph or the nature of the tasks, you change the work that the end users (the customer service representatives) have to do. Tasks and workflows can be in various states, they can connect to each other in certain ways, they can branch due to logical conditions, they can contain timing information, they can be routed to specific users or groups… and on and on it goes. As you might expect, the XML that represents a workflow is rather baroque.

Fortunately, we provide a nice GUI interface that allows you to quickly create tasks and assemble them into a workflow. Like the workflow engine, the GUI interface can read our proprietary workflow XML format. But instead of running the workflow, the GUI merely displays it in graphical form. Anything you can do by editing XML files, you can do by using the GUI interface. Huzzah!

Unfortunately, one of my newly-adopted manuals both A) lists every element and attribute of our workflow XML format and B) describes how to use the XML in detail, with many code examples. By placing this information in our public documentation, we have accidentally encouraged our customer engineers to muck with the workflow XML format by hand. This has caused exactly the sort of problems you would expect. And this is why I spent a good chunk of last week stripping out all of this information from our public documentation. The information will partly move into the schema, partly be reserved for internal documentation. If our customers need this information, they can get it. But we won’t be broadcasting the message, “Look! It’s XML! Open it in vi and have at it!” quite so loudly.

The more I have to deal with XML, the more convinced I grow that XML is for machine-to-machine communication only.

Horse of a Different Colour

By Evan — — Tech

Intrepid J2EE nerd Charles Miller is annoyed with Apple’s USA-centrism, at least when it comes to spelling.[1] For the record, I’ve worked for three USA companies that had writers in the UK… and I have to say that I have always taken great pleasure in pointing out to my colleagues across the pond that in this company we’re standardized on U.S. English, and by the way, that’s “standardized“, not “standardised”…

Well, of course I’m kidding. I’m actually very nice when I’m editing.

No, I’m not.

On a related matter, I’ve always wondered about the Anglo-centrism of computer languages. Consider the case of a non-English-speaking developer who’s starting to learn Java. The reserved words (“if”, “else”, “for”, “this”, …) are in English, which almost certainly results in annoying overhead. To make matters worse for our developer, all of the standard packages (and most 3rd-party packages) are in English too. If you speak English, you can often guess what a Java method call does — for example, HashMap.clear() probably, err, clears a hashmap. But if your sole language was French or Korean, you wouldn’t know what “clear” or “hashmap” were unless you had run across those words before (perhaps earlier in your career). In any case, your learning curve for Java or any other high-level language[2] would be steeper than than a native English speaker’s. And it would be even worse if you didn’t know the character set. Imagine as an English speaker, having to learn to code using Arabic or Japanese Kanji. What a pain that would be.

Of course, there’s no reason that you couldn’t have a development environment that allows you to code in your native language, and then automagically transforms the source into the associated English source code. That should be pretty straightforward for the basic language keywords and any standard libraries, anyway. I wonder if such a feature exists? Hmmm.

1. Having recently reinstalled my PowerBook’s operating system, I can also state for the record that Apple clearly favors Swedes over Norwegians. The Swedish localization files install before the Norwegian files, in blatant disregard for alphabetical order.

2. Except for UNIX shell scripting, which is gibberish in any language.

Switching

By Evan — — Culture

According to the New York Times, the Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church
are busily swapping members:

“It breaks my heart,” said Shari de Silva, a neurologist in Fort Wayne, Ind., who converted from Episcopalian to Catholic this year. “I think the Episcopal Church is headed down the path to secular humanism.”

Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing religious Switcher commercials. “… It was a really good Church! But then I found out that they had, like, consecrated a gay bishop. It was kind of… a bummer.”

Hey, in case anyone was wondering: Reform Judaism has been ordaining gay rabbis for over ten years, and many rabbis are happily performing commitment ceremonies. (See here for summaries of the CCAR‘s and UAHC‘s official statements on homosexuality.) Of course, there are a few disadvantages to becoming Jewish. Gefilte fish, for instance: definitely an acquired taste. Chanukah gelt: almost invariably made from the crappiest grade of chocolate available. And then there’s the small matter of pretty much everyone in the world trying to kill us. But aside from that, being Jewish is a hoot! Our literature over the last century or two pretty much speaks for itself on that regard.

Linkdump: Cable Conspiracies, Crooning Killers, and Cranky Cossacks

By Evan — — Miscellany

Just a little flotsam and jetsam from my /tmp bookmarks folder. Some of this stuff has been sitting around for months. Phew.

  • While you were sitting around eating nachos and scouring the web for Return of the King spoilers,[1] Jacques Distler has been busy exporting his 21st-century, MathML-enabled, bulletproof XHTML weblog to his academic colleagues. My goodness, I think someone’s going to find a real honest-to-God use for this XHTML stuff one of these days.

  • The fabulous brunching.com is dead, but at least the Self-Made Critic lives on. It’s not every movie critic who has to deal with flame emails on web standards… fortunately, he’s hired a cranky Russian named Boris to handle his Inbox.

    [Reader Jonathan]: So, Boris, tell me: is the horrible scroll bar an evil Communist plot to annoy the hell out of SMC readers or what? Are our capitalist browser scroll bars not good enough for you people over at selfmadecritic.com, to make you implement your own mouse-over-driven scroll bar? For God’s sake, at least make it trigger on mouse click instead of mouse over so we don’t have to do a little cursor dance over the button.

    BORIS: Quiet, Dog! Or I unleash BLINK tag!

    Ah, Boris. A man after my own heart.

  • I’ve managed to bully Dave Shea into providing a (temporary?) RSS feed for “The Dailies”, http://www.mezzoblue.com/rss/2.0/dailies/. Sweet. Between Siliconvalley.com, Dave’s “The Dailies” and Mark’s b-links, I’ve got all the tech/geek info a growing boy needs.

  • Having problems with your cable service? Fuzzy TV signal? Cable modem losing sync? Well, don’t just stand there cursing your own rotten luck… you might actually be the victim of a conspiracy. A crude, bumbling, beer-soaked conspiracy, but a conspiracy nonetheless:

    Take that, nitwit neighbor fratboys. The lesson, I think, is that you’re less likely to be caught hijacking cable service using high-quality parts.

  • Let’s not forget Silence of the Lambs, The Musical! If you can’t empathize with poor, lonely Buffalo Bill as he sings about how hard it is to find that special someone (“I want a girl who will fit me to a T / a woman who’ll look good on meee…”), then I say you’ve got a heart of stone.

  • Finally, because it’s there: The Runcible Spoon Society.

1. Gollum bites off Frodo’s finger, falls into lake of fire with the ring, The End. Oh, and Dernhelm is a chick!

Shameless Self-Promotion

By Evan — — Writing

Recently I’ve been remiss in my postings, but never mind that. I return triumphant!

  1. This year for Thanksgiving I made the turkey, the stuffing, Grandma Goer’s gravy, and a pumpkin pie. All from scratch. All delicious.[1] With all due modesty, I rule.

  2. The Why I Hate Aliens anthology is finally out![2] The WIHA anthology includes my short story “Watercooler“, plus fourteen other crackling good SF tales. Here’s what our editor Marissa Lingen had to say in the introduction:

    You would think it would be depressing to read well over a hundred stories about hating anything, aliens or not. Actually, it was heartening, because I learned something very important.

    Science fiction writers aren’t very good at just hating people.

    Which works out just fine with me — I never intended for this to be a bitter anthology, and I hope you don’t find it to be one. Instead, there’s a lot of frustration, a lot of self-discovery, and a few chuckles. There are even a few evil, exploitative aliens lurking around corners, shooting humans with Nerf guns or worse. You’ll find out about someone very much like Rush Limbaugh, and someone inspired by David Bowie, and someone frustrated by Jerry Garcia. There will be pheromones and experimental subjects and interspecies politics and really, really, really bad dates.

    But we, we as science fiction writers and fans, seem to have moved away from the view of aliens as beings with whom communication is impossible, leaving only mutual annihilation. We may get really mad at our aliens, but we have the chance to yell at them, to negotiate, to learn from them, and even to
    become like them.

    Enjoy yourself. I know I did.

    So there you have it, folks. For a mere $3.00, this beautiful 60,000 word PDF can be yours — just in time for the holidays. Go forth and read it. You’ll be glad you did.[3]

Update 10-Dec-2003: Alert reader Luke Reeves has informed me that that our PDF distributor is using an SSL certificate signed by “SuperWebHost.com“… which is, shall we say, not a standard trusted authority. So if you try to buy the PDF, your browser will probably pop up a warning about this. Speaking personally, I’m not keen on purchasing from sites with certificates signed by unknown authorities. My editor has contacted our distributor, and we’ll see what they have to say about this. In the meantime, Luke has informed me that you can still purchase the eBook through PayPal. If you have a PayPal account already, I think that’s a fine way to go. Either way, my apologies for the confusion — and stay tuned for more information.

1. With the exception of the beta version of the pumpkin pie, which I managed to burn to a crisp. Fortunately, my lovely girlfriend managed to talk me down from this horrible experience over the phone. So I’m all better now, really.

2. Note that the “Aliens” in Why I Hate Aliens refers to creatures-from-outer-space, not immigrating-fellow-humans. If you’re looking for the latter stuff, you’ve come to the wrong place.

3. “But I’ve already read ‘Watercooler’,” I hear you cry. Sorry, that’s no excuse. Go read the Karina Summer-Smith’s “Marks of Ownership”, or “Sally and the Dead-Heads” by Timons Esaias. Right this minute. Go on, off you go!

This Conversation Never Happened

By Evan — — Tech

‘Tis the day before Thanksgiving, and I expect the office will be deserted. One thing I know for sure is that all my fellow tech writers have decided to take a vacation day. My boss’s parting words were, “Hold down the fort.” She left off the “comma, kid” at the end, thank goodness.

Of course holding down the fort won’t be too difficult; even a lone tech writer can be awfully intimidating. Case in point: a few weeks ago, I ran into one of our senior engineers in the hallway. “Hey, did you send me a review copy of your new guide?” he asked.

“Oops,” I said. “You were supposed to be on the list, but I completely forgot. Sorry about that. I’ll email you a copy.”

His face fell. “No no,” he said, backing away slowly, “No need for that…” And with that, he turned and fled. “This conversation never happened!”

Linkdump: Ethics and Other Obsolete Things

By Evan — — Miscellany

Today’s linkdump is brought to you by Simon Willison. Simon, now my list of links links to your list of lists of links.

  • Wilcox High School sacrifices its football season on principle. “He said, flat out, a rule was broken and even though it’s not our fault we’d have to pay the consequences,” senior captain Anthony Reyes said of [Coach] Freitas’ address to the team. “It broke my heart. I’ve been waiting for this for four years. We were on top of everything, and it all got swept away.”

    I agree, it truly is heartbreaking. But at the end of the day, this is a time to be more proud of our alma mater than ever.

  • History of FrameMaker. I had no idea that Sun Microsystems had such a significant role in FrameMaker’s early history. Incidentally, reliable sources report that Sun has dropped internal support for FrameMaker on Solaris and is forcing its tech writers to move to StarOffice. Speaking for all my fellow tech writers, I think this is a fabulous idea. Now Sun will need twice the number of writers to accomplish the same amount of work. Ladies and gentlemen, send in those resumes!

  • The Wingnut Debate Dictionary. Cute, but I like the Devil’s Dictionary 2.0 a bit better.

  • The RCA SelectaVision VideoDisc Web Site. My family rarely makes good technology choices. Case in point: the RCA VideoDisc player. Back in the day, you had two choices for watching movies at home: videotapes, and videodiscs (not to be confused with another dead technology, laser discs). Videodiscs had a number of disadvantages. They were far bulkier than tapes. You couldn’t record on them. They held less than an hour of material per side, which meant that halfway through the movie, you’d have to get up and flip the disk.[1](This was back before the days of the remote control, so we didn’t mind so much.) The VideoDisc player’s main advantage was that it cost about a third of what a video tape player did. Unfortunately that cost advantage evaporated in a few short years, and with it, the VideoDisk player market. I should note that my family did clean up when all the video stores started dumping their discs for $1-2 a piece. My folks still have the player, and for all I know it still works. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad investment after all.

  • Analysis of the Voyager Record (hat tip: my second cousin Andrew). How do you convince an alien race that they’re holding an artifact produced by another intelligent species? That Carl Sagan was one smart cookie. Plus he looked sharp in a turtleneck.

1. I remember that when I watched the Count of Monte Cristo, I accidentally started the movie on side 2 of disc 1. I spent most of the movie wondering, “Who is this mysterious Count of Monte Cristo? And why is he so pissed off?” I had completely skipped the whole Chateau D’If / Edmund Dantes part. Come to think of it, this might be the preferred way to see the Count of Monte Cristo.

But They’re Doing It In Shelbyville!

By Evan — — Tech

Huh. Well, that was… something. Is it too late to come up with a Return of the King stylesheet?[1]

A few months ago, I decided to experiment with opening up comments. The experiment has turned out to be a lot of fun, a great success… and yet it has also brought its share of headaches, in the form of comment spam. Fortunately I don’t get a lot of comment spam, but it sure is annoying to clean up these little nastygrams.

It just so happens that earlier this week, on the very day I was grumbling and going through my ritual cleansing-of-the-comments, GMSV pointed to a somewhat relevant Business Week article by e-marketeer Christopher Kenton. The article argues that California’s new opt-in antispam law will hurt small businesses. Unfortunately, Mr. Kenton had difficulty switching his writing style from “marketing whitepaper” to “editorial article”. But it’s hard to blame him for this — there are some unfortunates who simply don’t have an off switch for that kind of blather, and so it falls on the rest of us to be patient and understanding. We can only hope that for the sake of his family, he at least leaves it at the office.

Anyway, if you slog though Kenton’s dismal prose, his editorial boils down to two points:

  1. The California anti-spam law will crush entrepreneurs, because it causes small startups to lose a powerful and inexpensive marketing tool.

  2. The California anti-spam law can’t be enforced anyway, because the spammers will just move out of the state.

The first argument is rather charming, in a musty sort of way. It reminds me of Late Medieval and Early Renaissance scholars, pondering the ruins of the Ancient World. “The Ancients were Giants among Men!” goes this line of thinking. “How can we hope to match their achievements? They built the Pyramids! They wrote the Illiad! They somehow managed to sell their products and services without resorting to unsolicited email!” How were such ingenious feats possible? I suppose Mr. Kenton is free to argue that the small businesses of 2003 are demonstrably more stupid and feeble than the small businesses of 1993. I guess I just have considerably more faith in the American entrepreneur than he does.

The second argument brings to mind another analogy. Imagine a large freshwater lake that is ringed by a number of small towns, each of which is dumping its wastewater into the lake. The water is becoming undrinkable, and something has to be done. Let’s say that the citizens of Springfield pass a law banning the dumping of untreated water into the lake. Now imagine you’re at a council meeting at one of the other towns, debating the merits of the brand-new Springfield law. A man stands up and says, “Why the heck should we ban the dumping of wastewater? Even if we do, they’ll still be doing it in Shelbyville!”

And so the argument goes. If you make a strict law banning unsolicited email in California, the spammers will just move out and spam us from somewhere else, like Nebraska. If Nebraska passes an equally strict law, then the spammers will run off to Europe. Except wait-a-minute — the European Union already has a strict anti-spam law. Okay then, they’ll set up shop in China and Russia…

But see, the problem with being Shelbyville (oops, I mean China and Russia) is the following: once the majority of people recognize a problem and start to agree on legislation for solving it, they tend to get annoyed with groups of people who don’t follow suit. And ve hav vays uv making you follow suit. In the world of Springfield and Shelbyville, this means honking and giving the finger to Shelbyville drivers as you pass them. In the world of international relations, it means something else, like angry communiques and threats of trade sanctions. If you want to participate fully in the world economy, the other countries have mechanisms for applying pressure until you bring yourself up to international standards. True, these mechanisms are slow and imperfect. But the issue in this case is whether such laws can spread fast enough to prevent email as a mode of communication from melting down completely. The issue certainly isn’t about whether we should waste our time dithering and whinging and making excuses for our own bad behavior.

Of course the main hole in the international-pressure strategy would be countries that have zero interest in participating in anything, like North Korea. Well, that’s North Korea for you. Seriously, if all the spammers flee to North Korea, good riddance. Plus, think about it: wouldn’t you rather North Korea based its economy on spamming than on global extortion and the manufacture of weapons-grade plutonium for sale? Seems like a good trade to me.

Then again, the United States also seems to be immune from this sort of international pressure. So okay, forget what I said above, maybe this strategy isn’t so smart after all. But let’s look at the bright side… won’t it be fun when China and Russia are lecturing us about being the world’s haven for criminal spammers? I, for one, will at least take comfort in the fact that they won’t be over here in California.

1. Probably, assuming I’m disinclined to steal background graphics from lordoftherings.net.