On a popular webmaster BBS today, I posted a poll. I asked my friends and colleagues to guess how many celebrity related queries The Search Engine gets per day. Of course, that's a really tough number to arrive at. But a guess is a guess, so my guess is 40 million.
Well, that's the demand side, then. Now imagine that all that demand is inacessible to you because...
No, better yet, imagine that the US has been struck by an epidemic and...
"You are the President. You have to decide where you are going to draw the quarantine line. You have to decide who gets treated as a patient, and lives, and who gets a body-bag.
The situation with celebrity sites is exactly the same. This is a territory now filled with links to some of the most offensive domains on record, the spammers, the installers, etc. from back in the day.
So, not only is it an innately blurry territory, contentwise, but it also appears to be the in hands of proven betrayers of the public trust.
Hmmm. What would you do? Would you try to save the big circle, and carve-out just the little circle?
The Search Engine is, in this case, the President. He has no desire to give up the Southwest to the disease. But he must stop the spread. He only has so many resources available to divide between the dual efforts of containment and medical treatment. If you try to save the big circle, you may risk more of the country, because you know there will be a meaningful number of carriers who may travel outside the quarantine zone. It looks like the best solution might be to sacrifice the bigger circle and be sure to save the rest of the country. It doesn't hurt, either, to know that in just a few weeks the National Guard will be able to roll-in (with proper equipment, of course) and begin reclaiming National Assets.
Of course, it will take a little while for the infected to die. We may also expect that those within the quarantine zone will do all they can, for as long as they can, to survive. But these will be relegated to ever-smaller, very-well-contained slums in some of the bigger cities... more
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