This reminds me, I need to extend the warranty on my 10 year old paid off car.
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Yes, the card is a MasterChoad and the number is [Reads number from test credit card generator]
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Cheap bastards.What commons is being plundered here? All of unwanted junk mail can and should be recycled, along with the rest of paper waste in the US that dwarfs junk mail volume.The failure of Americans and their institutions to properly handle recyclable waste is tragic, but you can hardly lay all of that at the feet of advertisers. The very nature of advertising is that the vast percentage of it is wasted on the uninterested. Most timber producing land is in private hands. The post office runs as a business, not a public service. Advertisers find good rates to distribute their junk, and it allows the post office to earn money and not have to take it out of small users. Silver linings, man.
Couple of thoughts. Both would have to be ballot initiatives inwesr coast states, because politicians are way too corrupt to do anything about it.
1: Require phone companies to give users the option to block all spoofed calls. They have the ANI, so they can figure out which are spoofed.
2: Make robocalling people on the federal do not call list a felony. State AGs actively investigate and extradite offenders.
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I appreciate the thought that it doesn’t seem repercussions for violating the Do Not Call list have enough teeth, but the US already over-incarcerates. Perhaps bigger fines and other sanctions could be considered instead? Many of the call centers are overseas, automatic economic sanctions could be imposed to pressure governments to do more to crack down on these operations.
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Corporations can be charged with crimes.
But of course, most of these robocallers are overseas entities. Any new regulations will be just as toothless.
I wonder if an overhaul of the telecom systems is needed? And if perhaps as a society we are ready to just get rid of phone numbers? Effectively, what’s the difference anymore between an email address and a phone number? The identifier contains information which enables routing to the right location, and we have measures in place against spoofing email addresses.
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So the challenge here is to make it less profitable for your country’s postal service to deliver junk mail.
Dropping that junk mail back into the nearest post box may help. The postal carrier then incurs the cost of carrying it back to their mail centre and throwing it into their sorting machine, which will spit it out into the reject pile of things it could not process. Then a human has to look at it, realise it’s junk and throw it into the pile for disposal, and someone else has to do the actual disposal. If enough people did this, it might add up to a significant extra cost, making junk mail delivery unprofitable.
When my junk mail includes llose leaflets from local shops, I like to save them up for a couple of weeks and then drop them in the shop’s mailbox, along with a huge pile of other junk mail. The impression I’m trying to give them is that while they may have paid top dollar to have their leaflet distributed promptly and individually, the service they were actually getting was that their leaflet was distributed late as part of a large pile. If the leaflet includes a discount coupon, I redeliver it after it has expired.
OK. It sounds petty, but it gives me something to do on an otherwise tedious evening run.
I tried that once, but then felt bad about abusing the system – sympathy for the letter carrier, perhaps – so I stopped.
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