Spam, Pizza Hut, finances, and the like...

Well after wasting the better part of a hour sifting through thousands of spam e-mail messages, I want to congratulate congress on the lack of progress they've made in eliminating truly one of the major banes of the Internet. Yes, my ISP filters my e-mail which in fact is part of the problem. Although the filter is pretty good (currently filters out about 200 spam e-mails each day) it isn't perfect. Unfortunately it has a tendency to occasionally mark valid e-mail as spam which means I need to periodically wade through my spam folder to see what got marked incorrectly.

While there have been charges now made against Alan Ralsky and Robert Alan Soloway, two of the Internet's most persistent spammers, I personally can't say I've seen a drop off in the spam I receive. Maybe even more disappointing in this whole spam issue is the lack of cooperation by the various e-mail software vendors, ISPs, and the like. There are solutions that would make it much more difficult for spammers to get spam into our mailboxes, but no one seems to be able to agree on the "best" solution, so no solution has been widely adopted. So in the meantime with 95% of all e-mail in 2007 being spam, we get to continue to waste our time and resources dealing with the actions of these criminals.

I would like to congratulate my local Pizza Hut for subjecting me to a lot of unnecessary pain and headaches. The reason I was searching through my spam folder was to look for additional notices that some account or another was late due to having to cancel my credit card. Why did I cancel my credit card? Because the local Pizza Hut managed to lose mine! They forgot to return it to me one night when I picked up a pizza at the drive through (after finally getting it ordered on a really bad website!). They called me about an hour later and told me they had my card. So far so good. Since it was a virtual blizzard outside I asked if I could pick it up the next day. Seems pretty simple. I go the next day, and now they can no longer find my card. A couple of days go by and they STILL can't find my card, leaving me no choice but to cancel the card and get a new one. Now all the services that charge to my credit card such as my phone service, some donations we make, etc., all have to have my credit card information updated. Thank you Pizza Hut! :-(

So why are the tax payers bailing out Bear Stearns and probably others? Were the tax payers responsible for the bad decisions made by mortgage applicants, the shady practices by mortgage brokers, and the greed and deception by the capital markets? Why aren't the people responsible for this fiasco paying the price? Oh that's right, responsibility died when it was decided people weren't responsible for their own actions. Just look at the product liability cases, the labels on a ladder, or the McDonald's hot coffee case. Why would we expect those involved in the sub prime mortgage disaster to be responsible when we don't think someone is responsible enough to realize that if they pour hot coffee in their laps, IT'S THEIR PROBLEM, not the person who gave them the coffee! Did a jury of 12 really think McDonald's was responsible for some klutz putting a cup of hot coffee between her legs and burning herself when it spilled? Do I really need pages of information about what not to do with a lawn mower such as "Don't pick up the running lawn mower to use it to trim your hedges." Really? Maybe a little more cleansing of the gene pool is needed.

So what's the moral here? Be irresponsible, blame it on someone else, let the government and tax payers bail you out, just so you can do it again! Personally I think a bunch of people should be pounding rocks in a nice penitentiary somewhere.