OT: do you think the new "no call list" will survive?

[ddinc]

How do you sign up in CT?

[B a r r y B u r k e J r .]

[Larry Jaques]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 16:37:29 GMT, bonomi@c-ns. (Robert Bonomi) pixelated:

Perhaps he is -to the press-. Or maybe it's because he has always hated answering the phone in his mansions or in the White House and being bothered by all those telemarketers. Yeah, maybe that's it.

-- Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ---- --Unknown

[clutch]

I don't understand how this can be a freedom of speach issue. The telephone isn't free and I am the one paying for it. So, if I don't want telemarketers, I should decide. Not the courts.

Being a third shift worker, telemarketing calls tend to be harrasment in my view. I need my sleep.

Wes

[Grandpa]

[/..]

By Thu, 25 Sep 2003 14:01:53 -0500, Traves W. Coppock decided to post "OT: do you think the new "no call list" will survive?" to rec.woodworking:

Telemarketers are scum. If their product was worthwhile, they wouldn't need to try to force, con or trick you into buying it. Applying psychological pressure is a tactic advertisers have always used, but use it even more now.

Have you ever seen/heard the ford truck commercials with the announcer with the big forceful voice? He's trying to IMPALE you with the desire to buy the crappy product. (sorry, Ford lovers, my own Fords have never been excellent....) If it really was as good as they say, would you need to be forced?

Telemarketers use your desire for tranquility against you by invading your space and destroying that peacefulness. They depend on volume of attempts to solicit your business. They hope to wear down sales resistance gradually using such tactics that are intended to diminish your quality of life to allow a successful sales model through volume of attempts.

Thus they are scum. They, a stated ~2,000,000 jobs, should be put out of business. Maybe they could find gainful employment that improves the world rather than diminishes it.

/ts

[Silvan]

Hello, Mr. President. I hear the windows in your house are very old and ineffeicient, and that you don't yet have vinyl siding. We'll be sending an agent to your residence to give you an estimate on dramatically lowering your monthly energy costs.

[Henry St.Pierre]

Richard Pate.

[Gfretwell]

The current gripe is about how many telemarketers will be laid off if this goes through. By that logic we should also be worried about all the hookers and crack dealers the cops put out of business. It would actually be a raise in respectability if this phone scum became a hooker. At least they provide a service to the customer.

[George]

Must be some other kind of robot than I experience. With me, they ring three times only, to avoid answering machines, I suppose.

Three rings is just about the time it takes me to confirm the phone ringing by the second, and get to the phone as the third dies away....

[Charlie Self]

Barry Burke responds:

Me, too. I own the phone. I rent the line. They use it. Therefore, they should pay me rent. About $50 per second would work nicely.

Charlie Self

"Don't hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft." Theodore Roosevelt

[Silvan]

We need congressional assemblies in order to keep all the bookies, call girls, drug dealers and lobbyists in Washington from going out of business, silly.

[David Hall]

I don't disagree, but the illogic of the law that caused it to be ruled invalid is that it still allows the "annointed" to use your phone line to bother you. The ruling made it clear that if ALL phone spam was treated equally it would be OK. However, the law allowed politicians to call, allowed BS "chairities" to call and allowed the worst - pollsters- to call. Why are these people allowed to abuse my phone lines, but people trying to make a buck selling something aren't. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to hear from any of them, but the politians, pollsters and charities (that spend 95% of their donations on salaries and fees to raise more donations) are the first ones I want blocked. If this ruling forces the law to be revised to allow us to opt out of those calls, then it was a great ruling.

Dave Hall

[Mark & Juanita]

The telemarketing people just don't get it, FoxNews had a statement by one of the telemarketers who (paraphrasing) said, "We don't call people to sell them something, we only call so that we can make an appointment to sit down and explain the safety benefits that having a fire and smoke detection system from us can provide". Glad they're not selling anything.

Making it a free speech issue is nonsense, even if different classes are prevented or allowed to make unsolicited calls, they have no inherent right to annoy people with calls on telephones that they neither own nor pay for. By this extension, they should have the right to drive through neigborhoods with sound trucks since police and other civil servants can do so in cases of emergency.

[Mark & Juanita]

I have occasionally gotten telemarketing calls at work. My standard answer is, "my employer charges $x.xx per minute for my time. How many minutes do you want to buy? When you submit a purchase order, we can talk."

[B a r r y B u r k e J r .]

So do I, most often from long distance companies. While I work, I'll let them go through the entire spiel, sometimes putting them on hold while I answer other calls.

You should hear their reaction when they find out they've called another phone company.

Barry

[Wes]

I totally concur. I was mystified by that Colorado judge's invocation of the "free speech" doctrine to claim that the do-not call list somehow infringed upon the telemarketers' Constitutional civil liberties. The Founding Fathers were clearly stating that the First Amendment protected individuals from persecution and/or imprisonment for (primarily political) speech. The historical context, of course, was the imprisonment of political opponents in Britain, France, and elsewhere in Europe, or the arrests of individuals for criticism of an existing government's policies. It was this that the framers were opposing. The framers were *not* insisting that drunken hecklers be allowed free rein to shout at and harass a family in a home 24 hours a day. Free speech is a 2-way street, after all; the targets of the telemarketers expressed their earnest wish not to be bothered by the sales pitches at suppertime.

The telemarketers then cited some commerce clauses, claiming that the do-not-call list prevented people who might otherwise desire to hear of commercial offers by telephone, from being able to do so. Yet that's precisely what the D-N-C list does-- people who truly don't mind the telemarketing calls just don't opt to place themselves on the list. What I can't quite fathom here is that, if anything, the D-N-C list might actually *help* the business of the telemarketers, since it will focus their calls on the subset of people who would hear them out, rather than hang up after 3 words on the other line. This would seem to increase business efficiency, since the telemarketers won't waste so many calls on uninterested recipients. The list makes sense from every perspective. The judge said something about "unequal treatment" given to political and charity calls vs. commercial ones, but this seems to be a red herring; AFAIK, numerous SCOTUS decisions have asserted a distinct category for commercial speech, so the FTC and Congress were entirely within legal bounds in giving special consideration to telemarketers' calls.

Now, we need to nail the spammers. Especially with these 250 kb-attachment messages they've recently become fond of, they're even worse than the telemarketers these days. Time to fight the good fight again.

Wes Ulm