If I had one policy wish it would be to completely eliminate corporate lobbying. Concerned citizens can lobby individually or in groups, but corporate donations, perks, etc to such people/groups would be tightly regulated with steep fines for trespassers.
We insist on secret ballots for individual voters so they can't sell their votes, but for our legislators whose individual votes are far more consequential, we've given up on it.
In exchange, we get to see how they voted and "hold them accountable." But we can't do that nearly so effectively as corporate donors. Most of us don't look at voting records at all; our information mostly comes from attack ads taking votes out of context.
No, that’s not true. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have information like this, the breakdown of votes by members on the 1964 civil rights act.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/h182
It may be that prior to 1970 or so the number of bills (or the number of bills salient to major donors, or whatever) passed by voice vote rather than recorded vote was higher, that’s a harder claim to assess. But it is certainly not the case that Congressional votes either (1) were ubiversally nonrecorded prior to sometime around 1979, or (2) cannot be by voice vote today.
Recently, the House Republicans publicly voted to back Marjorie Taylor Greene (strong Trump supporter) but also had a secret ballot to back Liz Cheney (Trump critic, voted to impeach, #3 in House Republican hierarchy).
It seemed obvious that if the second vote was public that Liz Cheney probably would have been censured and lost her position.
The US Government acts like your US mail is a sacrosanct communication channel that if they send you something it doesn't get drowned out by junk mail.
Basically, our society says: any communication channel you will have to deal with a 10% to 90% ratio of useful communication vs forced against your consent advertising and fraud, even in _the_ constitutionally mandated/provisioned official government communication channel..
It's the Golden Liberty of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, except instead of the szlachta, we have corporations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Liberty
It did not work out for the PLC's democracy, which entered a state of perpetual deadlock, and became a cautionary tale taken into account by the framers of the US Constitution.
Likewise they would redefine what spam is if there were a referendum.
But last year I got a new phone with a new number.. wow! It is completely unusable as a phone. Relentless nonstop spam calls every hour as well as continuous SMS spam. I've had to mute everything and send everything straight to spam except for a couple known numbers that I allow through. Nobody except family will ever be able to call me on the new phone because there's no way to enable unknown calls on it without having it ring nonstop.
It's the one call that makes me want to shout, "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?", but since there is no reason anyone would know who I am, I'd just feel silly, and I'm not the sort of person who shouts into telephones anyway.
I did miss a few calls when recruiters called me without scheduling it first. I made it clear they needed to email me first with a call time, or I wouldn't be reachable. Sad, but that's how terrible the spam problem is on phones these days.
Blocking rings doesn't block voice mails, right?
Because of such things like DKIM, I really don't have an email spam problem, or if I do, it is because I signed up for it myself.
Because there is a record of who is transmitting the message, hosts and ISP's that transmit spam get punished by having their emails ignored. It is thus in their best interest to make sure they behave well, and deal quickly with any complaints.
The big difference in phone spam is lack of accountability. I believe if you fix that, the problem can be solved pretty quickly
Running home and work mail servers, I would disagree. If I let my shields down, I get kajillions of spam emails from snowshoe [0] spam operators (assuming it's not all the same operation!), coming from hundreds of IP addresses in dozens of /24s, all with random word salad domain names, valid DKIM, and valid DMARC, with domain registrations that lead nowhere. Blocking whole /24s and certain egregious TLDs is the only way to stem the tide. As long as there are ISPs, colo/cloud providers, and registrars who are willing to pocket the cash and look the other way, nothing's going to improve.
And yet, I'm getting a constant barrage of spam over SMS and voicemail, there's no stopping that.
At some point I stopped checking my voicemail and it seems to have broken. I am better off for it, because now I no longer am notified about new voicemails.
Maybe it does not have to be. Someone should take a swing at that.
The message they get is "you have reached [name] phone, please use SMS or email. This message box is not monitored."
Best thing I have done.
Not everyone can. I wish it were otherwise.
I do answer most calls, and all calls when I am waiting on something critical.
Robocalls got bad this year.
Sadly, they are all recordings. I used to have great fun with the live ones!
You can see that scene in "Boiler Room" where the guy gets a call from someone pitching a local paper to get a good idea of the fun.
I used to pick a rando goal based on my first impression. These ranged from a friendly exchange, pep talk, stall or troll, up through encouraging them to quit and walk out while I keep the line hot... (That guy from Vonage who I had on the ropes? Sorry in hindsight man. I really, really did want to just cancel, and... well, you were the lucky draw that day. Nothing personal.)
My cousin in HS runs her family’s tablet SIM card in an old iPhone and runs ads to make a dollar a day. They end up using close to 100 GB a month.
The other carriers could be stricter.
Maybe something to check up on a bit. But not a big deal regardlsss hah.
I get you about the bad luck
Turns out it was easier to borrow a friend's phone and leave myself a bunch of voicemail to fill up the storage.
I'm annoyed by McDonald's France, someone who presumably lives in France made a mistake and subscribed my email to their list, and when I tried unsubscribing using their link, I get a "you're not in our geographical service area" nonsense, so I can't unsubscribe truly. Right into the trash filter they go. On my shitlist are all companies that allow subscription or signup w/o an email verification.
My phone is on answer-only-if-known. It makes me hard to find, true, but I like it that way. If someone really needs to find me, they will. Dentist, contractors, recruiters, applies to all.
My mailbox is next to the paper recycling bin. Garbage gets sorted in there immediately. It hurts me to see resources get wasted this way, and I wish the USPS would raise the price for this garbage. I've read somewhere that first class mail subsidizes junk mail, I don't know if that's true. I'm all for the USPS making tons of money off commercial mailers. Do you ever see junk delivered by UPS/FedEx? Even one bulky envelope? Never!
The USPS is the source of your snail mail spam, not the solution.
Butm regarding spam, yea, it is pretty bad. My HOA piles on by sending letter about "canning spam" with links to spam removal sites and such that I just trash because I am not trying to fight that war.
Why do we do this to ourselves?
"We" just call it differently like "growth hacking" or "marketing" or "engaging" people to legitimize it.
We tolerate them, and every year they grow a little more evil and audacious.
Your filter is constantly being spammed.
How come robocalls and junk mail are so much worse for you?
Note, this was about 6 years ago. I don't know if the current market is the same.
They are targeting older people who maybe let their spouse take everything and that spouse is dead.
I've run into that, and don't get me started about phone companies being unwilling to insure Caller ID is accurate, even when they charge you for it. I'm looking at you, AT&T. The VoIP service I ported my landline out to costs less per month than what AT&T wanted just for Caller ID.
> Everything in life has turned to spam. My physical mailbox, my email, and my phone is bombarded by spam and there’s practically nothing I can do about it.
Also add your cell phone (if you run Android) and your desktop OS (if you run Windows 10).
I host my own email, and block a number of TLDs on sight simply because they've been nothing but spam cannons.
More and more, I find myself forgoing consumer tech products in general, or looking before I leap. Consumer routers suck, consumer NASes suck [0], I sure as hell don't want my heating system connected to the network in any way, nor my car. Smart lighting? Only if it doesn't depend on someone else's computer to function (so, IKEA for me, and even there I'm considering firewalling it so it doesn't auto-update).
[0] Cross-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26800062
Definitely consider USPS form 1500 if you have any repeat offenders [0]. If it's possible to interpret the spam as trying to sell you something then courts have broadly upheld your right to personally decide what kinds of content are excessively offensive without any additional oversight. Credit card offer? Discount to buy a used car? Nah, it's sexually explicit advertising that won't make it into your mailbox again without a hefty windfall.
Also, credit offers lately have been including fine print specifying how to opt out from all of them (the culprit there is credit rating agencies selling your data). That might be CA specific? Anywho, if you jump through a few hoops you can opt out from that particular source of spam for life.
> my email
If you don't need to receive inbound connections from unknown sources (e.g., recruiters) then switch your email to whitelist mode and just allow your contacts. Otherwise, at least create a few accounts to compartmentalize that part of your life. Logins and promotions go into a bucket you never read unless you're expecting an auth code or something, and you can keep your personal email filtered to a whitelist. Depending on your skillset this can be much easier to manage and customize if you host it yourself.
> my phone
I have no practical advice here; nothing I've tried yet has an appropriate balance of usability and effectiveness. Whitelist solutions aren't as great because it's uncommon for one phone to support multiple numbers simultaneously, and voip solutions can have prohibitive drawbacks depending on your use habits.
As a partial solution, Google's dialer (disclosure, noogler, but I liked this product before starting too) is decent at detecting spam if you're using a new enough version of Android that you can install it. It still clutters up your call history till you manually mark calls as spam, but in the moment if you're expecting a new number to call you can have high confidence that if Google hasn't marked it as likely spam that it's probably the call you're expecting.
what we need are better spam filters for calls, texts and physical mail. allow people to pay to blacklist numbers that have a high probability of being spam. I'd imagine that "real" numbers get an average level of incoming calls, messages and push notifications that a spam number wouldn't
it might also make sense to allow private or government white listing. ie, prove that your phone number belongs to a "real" person potentially by paying a one time application fee. with enough adoption, that could change the spam economic equation
I get a phone number that is outside of my area code so if I get a phone call from that area code, I know 99.999% that it is spam (and probably spoofed).
I wish I could block all unknown numbers, but I'll miss the rescheduling call from the roofer who had to borrow his wife's cell because his fell out of his pocket, or I'll miss the "please confirm you're coming to your appointment tomorrow" and now I've lost a doctor's appointment I scheduled weeks in advance, etc.
Almost all spam calls now spoof the number to give it the same area code as your phone.
So I know any call coming from a local area code is probably legit. Most calls coming from the same area code as my number or from a random area code or even 800 number is usually spam.
Getting a new number is not a realistic "solution" for many people because they've had their old cellphone # for decades and it's already deeply entrenched with all their relatives, friends, doctors' emergency contact numbers, airlines notifications, bank fraud alerts vis SMS, etc, etc.
E.g. Most of my friends & family have had the same wireless phone numbers for more than 20 years which they've deliberately kept even when changing carriers.
People still want to keep their familiar number; they just want the spam robocalls to stop. Yes, buying a new area code # (which btw costs ~$40 admin charge with AT&T) ... and then expending a lot of effort to "propagate" the new number to all your contacts and website profiles is not impossible but it's a burden many don't want to tackle.
Some celebrities manage spam by always having at least 2 different cell phones. So a high-profile Hollywood actor would have:
(1) personal phone for spouse & kids & the agent that brings in the money. This number is a closely guarded secret and never shared with anyone or websites' account profiles. This phone's ringer can be set to "silence unknown callers not in the contact list".
(2) separate "burner" phone for everybody else.
The (2) business phone # is changed out monthly because it inevitably leaks out with all the people that have it. But (1) personal phone is only changed if it was leaked by a insider employee at AT&T or TMobile. But again, it's another unrealistic "solution" for most because regular people don't want to buy and carry around 2 separate phones. Yes, some phones can use dual SIMs but only the expensive models ... and it also requires paying extra for 2 numbers on the monthly bill.
Hopefully, an eventual solution that combines:
- more effective FCC crackdowns and penalties
- SHAKEN/STIR anti-spoofing,
- intelligent spam filters at the wireless carrier level,
- better call management tools in iOS/Android
... would be a more sane approach than buying new phone numbers to escape the spam.
* Only 7 were from my phone's area code
* 2 were from where I live now
* The other 18 were from all over the country
So.. you're lucky if your spam is so consistent. It's far from a guarantee.
Your roofer or doctor or whoever should have only a local area code. So out of those 27 spam calls, you only need to answer the 2 that came in from where you live now.
That's a 90%+ reduction! Not a bad strategy.
Presumably the 18 random area calls would have been ignored in any case.
So the real reduction is 7/9, which is is a 77% reduction. Not bad, but not 90%+.
Even the fairly small doctors office I use locally now texts instead of calling.
I watch the scam baiters on YouTube and on occasion you hear a victim crying while the perps laugh.
Truly bad people to be executing scams against some of the most vulnerable.
Of the 200-300 spam robocalls I receive every month, about 50-80 are blocked by my cell phone (the landline rings to my cell) and I also subscribe to nomorobo on the landline, which I assume blocks even more. Still, that’s some 200 calls that make it through even with two levels of blocking.
The scams are terrifying- serious sounding people on the line saying your social security number will be cancelled and you will be arrested unless you speak immediately to an officer; Medicare advantage scams; IRS and treasury scammers... and since my personal info is published by the phone company, many times the scammers have all my personal information as “proof”! It’s a sickening information asymmetry that can totally fool an unsuspecting older person who doesn’t entirely understand what’s going on.
If you’re curious about what these scams look like and how vigilantes actively work to combat them, I’d recommend two videos to start: Jim browning at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvjjpzyiig4 and mark rober at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VrKW58MS12g.
I’d say 95% of the calls I receive are spam. It’s so bad that I rarely even answer my phone anymore, instead letting it go to voicemail if the number is not in my contacts.
Everything in life has turned to spam. My physical mailbox, my email, and my phone is bombarded by spam and there’s practically nothing I can do about it.