Thanks for taking the time to reply. I apologize if I was a bit harsh or antagonistic. I expect you were a little antagonized when you wrote your original pos

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I apologize if I was a bit harsh or antagonistic. I expect you were a little antagonized when you wrote your original post and then I may have amplified that in my response. I think we may have a fundamentally different outlook on employment/economics that leads to the divergence in intent and interpretation here. Rather than beat a dead horse I wanted to reply to a couple things quickly. > "...by a simple reply to my cover letter or understanding that there are also poor employers out there and that even the time of the college kid that wrote you an e-mail is important." This is a point you had that I agree with whole-heartedly but is more the rule than the exception. It is extremely disheartening to put a great deal of effort into an email/cover letter and then hear nothing, unfortunately the mentality that spawned the phrase "don't call us, we'll call you" existed long before I was born and is still going strong in a lot of sectors. While acknowledgement is the decent thing to do (and a polite rejection is always appreciated more than silence), I've found it is not a cultural obligation in the US. > "As for the account, it was made specifically for this post. Some employers could have identified themselves in what I wrote, which was not my intention at all." Completely understandable. > "The only thing I advocated for was an equitable exchange of time." This is an understandable desire, and I empathize with it, but I think it distills a difference in outlook on economics. Rather than framing it as an equitable exchange of time, I look at it in terms of an equitable exchange of opportunity cost. Your time is substantially less valuable than the time of those you email (no offense but probably true), so the amount of time you spend writing the email may not have as much economic value as the time it would take to reply to them, even though the time required to reply is drastically lower. Galling and impolite as it is, economics rules humanity and this behavior stems from economics.