Conservationists who don't conserve.

One of the aspects of our current society is the people who espouse conservation but then do not conserve resources themselves.   The immediate catalyst for this rant is receiving an email send to an email list with about 60 members advertising a forthcoming talk.  Attached to the email was a poster comprising an A4 sized, cute, photograph of the topic of the talk overlaid with 93 words describing the topic of the talk. and giving a brief bio of the presenter  This was in the resource-hog .pdf format.

According to my browser this poster was about 640Kb in size.  I was able to copy the text from the poster and insert it into a word document.  Even allowing for all the overheads imposed by MS Office this topped out at 11Kb.  Had it been in plan text format (or HTML) it would have been less than 1Kb.

From my view the objective of the email should have been to inform folk about the time and place of the meeting, the topic of the talk and the quality of the presenter.  Thus the poster had a noise to signal ratio of at least 60 :1 and more likely 600:1. 

While there will be some things that do require a heap of bandwidth (teleconferencing etc) I suspect that most of the heavy use of internet resources is either:

1. silly things such as computer games;
2. unnecessary updates by computer companies who can't get their work right the first time; or
3. stuff sent round by people whio just don't think about what they are doing.  A classic example of the free-rider problem covered in most decent first year economics courses.

Note that this is labelled brickbats and bouquets.  It ain't a bouquet - unless someone has started making bouquets of stinging nettles and poison ivy!