Why so much Spam? Because People Respond to it.

I was amazed when the percentage of email that’s received by the organization where I work exceeded 50% a few years back. Today the number is over 90%. What a waste!

I have always wondered “why?”, and obviously the conclusion was that it generates more revenue for the spammers than it costs. But I guessed that less than 1% of the email users who get spammed responded to it. I was wrong. According to this article,  12% of those who read spam respond to it. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but even if they’re off by an order of magnitude and 1.2% respond then I have been way overestimating my fellow email users.

Why, in a rational world, does spam continue to exist? Because someone you know—or maybe it’s you—has actually tried to buy something from it, a new study finds. Find that person and beat him (or yourself) with a stapler.

It says that 12% have responded to spam because they were “interested in product/service.”

Ponzi Financial Relationship Between US and China

While doing laundry and surfing the web today (I don’t normally work on Fridays) I came across an article that likens the US – China financial relationship to the Ponzi scheme perpetrated by fraudster Bernie Madoff, who was recently sentenced to 150 years in prison.

What’s so Ponzi about the Chinese-U.S. relationship? Basically everything. Look at it this way:After a currency debacle in 1998 left its economy in tatters, Beijing decided to radically restructure its financial relationship with the West. Policymakers pegged the value of China’s currency to the dollar, which had the effect of keeping it artificially low.

Over the past decade, Americans were able to outspend their incomes by easily rolling their debts forward through serial home refinancing. The situation was never ideal, but it worked as long as the value of their collateral — their homes — kept rising.