[PEN-L:3149] Re: We are waiting

[Gerald Levy <glevy@xxxxxxxxx>]

I. CONGRATS PEN-L!

   *  Digest #177 was 411K!

   *  There were 87 posts in Digest #177!

II.

   * One person wrote 18 posts yesterday!!!

This is insanity. Who has time to read this quantity of posts/day?
(Answer: only those without a life).

Given this volume and free-rider effect abuse, PEN-L needs some basic
rules such as ones that exist on many other lists.

E.g. why don't we (in the presence of this overwhelming volume!) have a
limit (let's say 3) for the maximum amount of posts that can be sent per
day per subscriber?

E.g. why isn't there some kind of a restriction on cross-posting? Why
can't there be a limit (let's say 3 posts/person/week) of posts that
originate from another list but are cross-posted to PEN-L?


III.

Someone asked me to define "economist". For the sake of this discussion,
I'll define economist here as anyone who either works professionally as an
economist or someone who was trained as an economist.

The problem isn't that there are non-economists on this list. The problem
is that this list -- *which is defined as a list for economists* -- has,
in practice, been taken over by non-economists. *AND* it has had a sharp
effect on what we discuss and how. Here's an example of the increase in
quantity of posts sent by non-economists transforming the quality of
PEN-L. And not, by any means, for the better IMHO.

This is why a number of people who used to subscribe to PEN-L told me that
they unsubscribed ...

IV. on Dave R's daily labor report:

a) The damn thing even has a large section (in "MIME" format) which is
encoded. I.e. it can't be read at all by many subscribers (who don't have
the ability with their e-mail system to unencode) or requires one to spend
the time "translating" it.

b) Deleting it unread can not be the answer for everyone. E.g. if you
receive the digest version, you can't delete the DLR without deleting the
digest. And it means that you have to scroll past the DLR to read the
remaining posts in the digest. That takes too much time when it is
repeated every day.

c) To those who want the DLR on PEN-L -- you are a bunch of inconsiderate
lazy asses. You know that you can receive the DLR by e-mail in other
ways. Dave R, for example, could send it to all those who express a desire
to receive it.

Jerry