The Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes a clause against cruel and unusual punishment (ie torture). This has been pointed out to me in response to my methods for dealing with phone spammers (aka telemarketers). The obvious implication is that I am torturing these poor phone operators and denying them the basic human rights they deserve.
I'll admit that targeting the operators doesn't really get to the heart of the problem. The core problem we are fighting here is human greed, and the mechanism by which it is enacted is by the casino model - if you have enough customers and the probability of a sale times the profit from one sale is more than the cost of interacting with one potential customer, then you have profit.
We are all victims here. Everyone gets spam on the phone and by email. Unfortunately, by the time email spam gets to you, about the best you can do is delete it and get on with your life. With the telephone and the systems in place there, you can tip the scales of the economic interaction just a little bit. You reduce the number of customers (since you tie up one operator for a while) and you increase the average cost of contacting each person very slightly (because the time per customer goes up). Yes, you inconvenience the one poor marketer on the other end of the phone, but the important part is that the spammer overlord starts to feel the pinch. That only happens if everyone fights back, though.
I consider it cruel and unusual for me to receive semi-automated phone calls from overseas to sell me things I don't want, didn't request and will not buy, and then to receive them again and again, over and over until the end of time. Is my only option to roll over and accept this as the usual state of affairs? No. Do I have to hang up immediately, thereby allowing the spammer to pursue better leads elsewhere? Hardly.
Okay, I can't defend the active teasing games, but I think the best thing you can do with a telemarketer is hold them on the line rather than hang up immediately.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - The global spam machine can only be stopped by everyone working together.
PPS - And I mean every last person.
4 comments:
Okay okay! You win.
i found that if you dont have a home phone you can preeeetttty easily avoid telemarketers. :) they dont call your mobile, so its all good :) hehehe
They simply do not call mobiles yet! Just wait they will spoil that too.
Mobile phone charges would have to drop pretty drastically to make it economically worthwhile. I'm guessing that's several years away yet.
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