I got to tell you, email is broken and my family just proved it (again!)
I get, um, alot of email..
The other day someone in my family decided it would be fun to send one email to literally everyone that they classify as family.
I have a large family. They have spouses, cousins, aunt's, uncles, parents and children. This is a long list.
So I responded to all, not realizing that all was so big.
My favorite response came from my brother Dan. It was one word: Unsubscribe.
So I've another reason to make use of my favorite GMail feature. The mute button. I do admire my brother Dan's response though. Thanks to my co-worker Josh Gomez for pointing this out to me.
So I'm glad I responded to the email but Dan's response was simple. I don't have time to join this discussion, and I don't want to be included in it anymore.
The mute button is easier and less prone to offending but really it's a little unfair. I don't like getting email I don't want to receive and letting people know that I don't want it prevents me, my mail program, and my mail server from having to filter it out. This is why email is basically broken. We'd rather just delete it or easily filter it out than ask someone to stop sending it.
Notwithstanding this was about, of all things, why the Climate Crisis is not real to whatever degree, and how there's no reason that we can't do more to solve the problem. Full disclosure, part of my job is managing the website Earth 911 I believe the science on the impact of global climate change is pretty clear and I find the "meta discussion" of whether or not it's correct enough, or practical distracting and unproductive. We need to get past it and get to the things we can and should do. I was particularly troubled by the media frenzy over Al Gore's Nobel Peace prize, which seemed to be the topic of the email thread, but it was hard to tell as I was CC'd halfway through the discussion.
It quickly turned into a little family soapboxing on the topic. It wasn't that "noisy", and I got some great links, but really I don't have a lot of time to talk to my family online and I live far away so arguing with people for amusement is not near the top of my lists of things I'd like to do online. I'd much rather do it face to face.
