Category Archives: Technology and Society

Thunderbird Spam Filter, WTF!?

OK, I’ve been living with this for too long, and I can’t find anything about it anywhere with web searches.

Thunderbird’s spam filter is absolutely stupid. Every effing day I have to dig through the junk folder to find legitimate email from people whom I’ve repeatedly (as in dozens of times) told it are not spammers, and from subjects (e.g., mailing lists, like arocket) that I’ve repeatedly told it is legitimate email I want to read. It absolutely refuses to learn. I can handle false negatives in spam reporting, but when it continually buries legitimate emails after I’ve implicitly whitelisted them, I can no longer tolerate this.

Am I the only one with this problem?

Green Cars’ Dirty Little Secret

They’re not very green. All they do is move the emissions to a different location.

The electric car might be great in a couple of decades but as a way to tackle global warming now it does virtually nothing. The real challenge is to get green energy that is cheaper than fossil fuels. That requires heavy investment in green research and development. Spending instead on subsidizing electric cars is putting the cart before the horse, and an inconvenient and expensive cart at that.

It’s not about the economics. It’s about feelings, which are of course the highest value.

Really, Facebook?

I just got this email from them:

Steve Mims mentioned you in a comment.

Steve wrote: “The ACLU wholeheartedly supports Senator Paul’s efforts to make the Obama administration explain why it feels it has the right to kill Americans on American soil when they are not attacking America.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/03/06/Exclusive-ACLU-backs-Rand Simberg

Apparently the bot that makes these connections is confusing me with Rand Paul, to the point that it’s actually substituting my name for his.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I’ve deleted the link to the Facebook discussion, per comments.

[Update a while later]

OK, here‘s a safer link to the original FB post.

How Delaying Commercial Crew Is Deadly

Jon Goff says that it could cost thousands of lives:

Just shaving 36 hours off of the availability date of commercial crew could potentially save more lives than would be lost in the worst case Commercial Crew crash. Even if expediting the process, dropping many of the NASA Human Rating requirements, dropping some of the abort tests, and sticking with Space Act Agreements instead of FAR Contracts really meant a massive decrease in actual safety (I don’t think it would) to say a 5% chance of losing a crew on a given flight, over the course of the ISS’s life you would have saved hundreds of times more US lives by taking that course than you would potentially risk in astronaut lives.

I’ll have to incorporate this thought into the book. I made the point, but not quantitatively, just that our approach is an indicator of how unimportant ISS research is, despite NASA lip service.

This is the problem that Bastiat described. Loss of crew is very publicly visible, while the people who die are anonymous and unknown to all except those closest to them, and their deaths aren’t understood to be a result of flawed government policy. This is the same problem that the FDA has, so it ends up inhibiting innovation, destroying jobs and killing people lest it be blamed for letting people die through underregulation.