The notion of consumer choice is deeply flawed. As consumers, and as workers, we have no control over production or over what is produced. What we also lack is much in the way of consumer protection. Not only is the amount of spam coming through my email account increasing, it is becoming increasingly unpleasant and no matter how good the spam filters I still have to look at a fair number of messages a day to check that they might be bona fide or not.

Unlike the British government, the Dutch government has apparantley taken this much more seriously and consequently the amount of spam in the Netherlands is falling.

I’m now wondering how to get call barring on my mobile phone - it would be good to only receive calls from trusted sources. But the phone won’t allow calls from individual numbers to be barred. Why not? Surely this would be very easy to set up in a mobile and would help to immediately reduce all sorts of nonsense. This must be such an easy thing to set up - why isn’t then?