131–140 of 140 posts
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That's great, is there an app that will do this, like put it down next to your landline phone and let it answer for you?
If you look at the reddit sidebar there's a phone number you can forward to or conference in
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This kinda rocked my view on spammers. It's easy to group them together and have a lot of prejudice, but clearly they come in all kinds of forms.
I would say that this sort of service spam is generally on a different tier from your classic 419 garbage or whatever. Usually those outfits will have their most competent person dealing with email to rope in new customers. Amusing aside: I once hired one of these Indian web dev outsourcing firms to create a super simple form for one of our sites. (Not from a spam email, which I certainly wouldn't want to reward, but…
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> I also have a solid guess you've never experienced this environment. Maybe there are worse environments that I have never experienced and where outright rudeness is the only answer, but as described I have experienced it and never had to resort to anything more than: - keep moving at a firm pace - avoid eye contact - hold a hand up, palm outward, preemptively, as you move (I'm not a tourist, I work here) - as a las…
>- keep moving at a firm pace >- hold a hand up, palm outward, preemptively, as you move (I'm not a tourist, I work here) What, push people out of the way? And now that you've touched someone, they'll touch back...
> Imagine if this type of thing happened in real-life. You walk out the door in the morning and you’re immediately attacked by Parul, Kevin, and Amelie. I laughed out loud at this, because it's exactly what I'm experiencing now in West Africa. Street vendors are aggressive about selling whatever they have, and they seem to assume I want it - almost like I owe it to them to buy it - I'm not sure if it's because I'm Wh…
I had a similar experience in Thessaloniki, Greece. In this city, there is a famous tourist attraction called The White Tower (which has grey color, by the way). One day, I had to wait in Thessaloniki for a couple of hours, and I decided that it would be a great idea to sit down near the tower. Well, it turned out to be a bad idea. A few hundred meters from the tower, I was greeted by someone who self-identified as a…
> Imagine if this type of thing happened in real-life. You walk out the door in the morning and you’re immediately attacked by Parul, Kevin, and Amelie. I laughed out loud at this, because it's exactly what I'm experiencing now in West Africa. Street vendors are aggressive about selling whatever they have, and they seem to assume I want it - almost like I owe it to them to buy it - I'm not sure if it's because I'm Wh…
It would be great if someone could implement this as a free public service, using neural algorithms to generate responses.
I agree. But I have to say I had a chuckle that the second half of your sentence looks like hipster mode to me.
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Just remember to tear-off anything that looks personally identifiable ( address, reference numbers etc ). There used to be a trick in the UK of attaching reply envelopes to bricks and putting them back into the postal system, hoping that the spammer would be charged by weight, but Royal Mail put an end to that.
Slightly OT but that's because one of the biggest customers of postal services are direct marketers. By sending a brick you're abusing the system and harassing the real customers.
Sure, great idea, funny and clever and all that. But I disagree with the idea that inboxes are sacred, and disagree with the attitude of "how dare people send marketing to me!" Fraudulent spam is one thing. Plain old marketing or sales cold calls, though... you know people are going to do it. It is their job. And I'd much rather get emails than I can quickly delete and ignore vs. phone calls. And once in a while, som…
You are welcome to disagree with the notion for your inbox. If you want spam, godspeed. But other people get to decide for their inboxes. And as to this: "You know people are going to do it. It is their job." This always puzzles me. So what? Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job. That people have found a way to make a l…
And we did, by implementing Bayesian spam filters, not be making spam illegal. It's a bit rich to think we can legislate a global Internet.
> Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job.
These are differences of kind, not degree.
> That people have found a way to make a living from being an asshole does not mean I have to support them in any way.
Feel free to spend your money how you please, but do we really have to write it into the law?
Why is junk mail legal but spam is not? It's because Congress could understand the mechanics of junk mail, not because junk mail has any sort of moral or societal value lacking in spam.
> In the end, the purpose of most advertising and sales activity is to manipulate people into buying something regardless of the purchaser's utility or need. This is a fundamentally disrespectful activity; the people they attempt to manipulate owe them no respect in return.
This is a pretty cynical view of marketing. Do you work somewhere with a marketing department? Is that what they do?
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You are welcome to disagree with the notion for your inbox. If you want spam, godspeed. But other people get to decide for their inboxes. And as to this: "You know people are going to do it. It is their job." This always puzzles me. So what? Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job. That people have found a way to make a l…
> You are welcome to disagree with the notion for your inbox. And we did, by implementing Bayesian spam filters, not be making spam illegal. It's a bit rich to think we can legislate a global Internet. > Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job. These are differences of kind, not degree. > That people have found a way to m…
Yeah, if something is hard we should just give up right away and save time.
> These are differences of kind, not degree.
All of them have in common that they make their living in ways that are mostly negative-sum interactions, ones that they make profitable. All of them are also partly or totally illegal in many jurisdictions because society recognizes that negative-sum issue.
> Why is junk mail legal but spam is not?
Junk mail has a much higher ratio of production/delivery cost to recipient cost. It's societally much less of a problem.
> This is a pretty cynical view of marketing.
I said "most sales and advertising" for a reason. There are other ways to market things. And it's not impossible to do advertising or sales usefully. It's just not the bulk of what goes on.
But if you'd like to check, see what gets salespeople paid. Is it when the value is delivered or when the sale is made? You could also see how much ad agencies do to test the value of products before they hype them. Or whether they go back and make sure that they aren't giving purchasers the wrong expectations.
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> You are welcome to disagree with the notion for your inbox. And we did, by implementing Bayesian spam filters, not be making spam illegal. It's a bit rich to think we can legislate a global Internet. > Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job. These are differences of kind, not degree. > That people have found a way to m…
> It's a bit rich to think we can legislate a global Internet. Yeah, if something is hard we should just give up right away and save time. > These are differences of kind, not degree. All of them have in common that they make their living in ways that are mostly negative-sum interactions, ones that they make profitable. All of them are also partly or totally illegal in many jurisdictions because society recognizes th…
You misunderstood me, and it is true that I did not speak plainly. The Internet is a global resource which we cannot legislate because it isn't something we have authority over. A counterargument might go, "so is the radio spectrum, and we regulate that," and that is so, but I don't think you'd like an Internet where it's illegal to send someone an email if there country hasn't signed a treaty with your country (as it can be, simplistically, with ham radio).
> All of them have in common that they make their living in ways that are mostly negative-sum interactions, ones that they make profitable.
Pickpockets and hitmen are a drain on society in every conceivable way, but to say you're being unfair to telemarketers is a bit of an understatement. When they call trying to get me to fill up empty spaces on cruises so they don't feel like ghost ships, they are offering me something that (if you squint and pinch your nose) has value, and Carnival certainly sees value in what they're doing. Who is getting fleeced here?
Are they in a line of work that I wouldn't be comfortable with? Yes they are, but that doesn't make them the same as thieves and murderers. I can understand not being interested in entertaining moral relativism, but a nuisance is just not the same thing as a threat, and treating them as similar leads to poor decisions.
> Junk mail has a much higher ratio of production/delivery cost to recipient cost. It's societally much less of a problem.
Which of these is an existential threat, receiving unsolicited sales pitches, or running out of fossil fuels?
> I said "most sales and advertising" for a reason.
I said you were being very general, presumably I had a reason too.
> ...see what gets salespeople paid. Is it when the value is delivered or when the sale is made?
Don't salespeople deliver value to their employer when they make a sale? Isn't it their job to make sales and engineer's (or whatever specialty's) job to create whatever valuable thing will be delivered to the customer? Do you get paid for things you don't do?
> You could also see how much ad agencies do to test the value of products before they hype them.
Is it the ad agency's job to make sure my Anker cable won't overvolt my battery? Or is that the role of Anker and relevant regulators?
> Or whether they go back and make sure that they aren't giving purchasers the wrong expectations.
We can agree this is definitely their responsibility, and to forgo it would be dishonest.