Category Archives: Discourse.net

No, this is isn’t a commercial for We Robot 2014 — that comes in a week or two when we issue the Call for Papers.

I was just looking at my Akismet Stats. Although blog readership is down (but Twitter followership — of a feed that is pretty much all auto-tweets from this blog — are way up), there is one category where numbers are booming: spam. The year isn’t over yet, and I’ve had twice as many as last year — more than 348,000 spam messages through the end of August.

Of those messages, just eleven got through my two-stage filters: Askimet plus the WordPress Hashcash Extended plugin.

Meanwhile there were an average of about a hundred real comments per month; I think a grand total of maybe one or two got wrongly held for one reason or another.

People sometimes ask me why I didn’t write about something. This happens more often than I would expect, be it in comments, in person, or by email. But not being a professional pundit, and indeed having long given up promoting the blog, I feel no obligation to weigh in on everything.

So here are the top ten reasons I didn’t write about that thing you asked about, more or less in order of frequency:

1. I had nothing original to say that wasn’t being said on lots of other blogs.
2. You’ve got the [law/economics] backwards in your comment, but it’s clear that no amount of facts or explaining will get through to you.
3. Even I can tell that I don’t know enough about it, and I don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to find out what I’d need to know to write about it sensibly.
4. Drafted something, but didn’t like the way it sounded.
5. I don’t agree with [law schools’/U.Miami’s] critics, but anything I write is too likely to be dismissed as partisan pleading for my [profession/employer].
6. I had deadlines for real work.
7. I’m writing about that topic for a law review, and it’s too hard to compress an article into a blog post; I’ll link to the article when it’s done.
8. It would make UM look bad without sufficient justification (most often applicable when I have nothing original to say).
9. I was out of town while it happened.
10. Beats me.

–via the awesome Pulp-o-mizer.