FCC Fines Two Texas Telemarketers Record $225 Million For Making 1 Billion Robocalls (engadget.com) 155
The FCC has slapped two Texas-based telemarketers for $225 million after making approximately 1 billion robocalls to people across the U.S. It marks the largest fine in its history. Engadget reports: They ran at least two businesses that illegally spoofed other companies to try and sell people on short-term insurance plans, claiming they were from well-known providers like Cigna. One of the people involved in the scheme admitted to making "millions" of robocalls per day, even going so far as to go out of his way to call numbers on the Do Not Call list because he believed it would be more profitable to do so. According to the FCC, "a large portion" of the more than 23.6 million health insurance robocalls that crossed US wireless networks in 2018 came from Rising Eagle, one of the companies the two telemarketers ran.
Is a fine enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, at this point I want all telemarketers to be sent to some North Korean uranium mine where we then broadcast them working every day on YouTube live streams to send a message to other telemarketers...
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Just thought of a great method to get Americans to embrace the metric system: allow every person who has received a robocall from that individual to designate the exactly where that square centimeter is to be flayed from!
Re: Is a fine enough? (Score:2)
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The fines are too low.
At least one dollar per call would be the price. That should apply to every telemarketer too - one dollar per call. Then one dollar per minute for every answered call.
Re: Is a fine enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fines are too low.
These two assholes are not ever going to have $225M to pay the fine. Increasing those fines to eleventy bazaillion dollars is not going to be a meaningful change.
Fines that will never be collected are not meaningful deterrence. What's needed is to follow the money and go after the people who actually make money on the scam. They're all conspiring to commit fraud. RICO could actually be used in a manner intended by its authors. THAT would be a deterrent.
But "bigger fines?" No.
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That is why it shouldn't be a fine, you called me you wasted my time, I can charge you immediately on your phone bill. Why is it that companies can charge for support calls, but I cannot. I should be able to set up a voice message to any telemarketer that calls to say something like "My time is valuable, if you are a telemarketer you will be charged $x per minute or part there of, would you like to continue?", if there number is not registered as a telemarketer and they go through without the message, I can
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square centimeters? Shouldn't we be talking cubic centimeters?
Re:Is a fine enough? NOOOOOOOO! (Score:2)
Mod parent funny? Not that funny, but the funniest I could find and no Funny comments so-moderated on this story? I'm so disappointed at Slashdot. Talk about missing the low-hanging fruit.
Having said that, I got no solution approach to offer. The topic deserves some humorous seasoning but I can't make the joke. I greatly dislike receiving such phone calls and I can't conceive of the mental state of a person who would cause them to be received. Perhaps like an honest person trying to assess what makes a liar
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I'd rather they were made to walk through the streets naked and then put on the sex offender's register.
About Time (Score:5, Insightful)
Now go after the phone companies that are enablers.
Re: About Time (Score:3)
But the profit from the telcos comes from robocallers.
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Um, that's the point. They shouldn't be allowed to profit from it.
Re: About Time (Score:4, Interesting)
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But it does NOT give you the right to push through any old call that you want, especially calls that A) I don't want and B) are attempting to steal money, identities, and private information from me.
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But their side has their own slogans to respond to that, like "I don't agree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it."
I'll be waiting for those people, like phantomfive, to declare they'll fight to the death for robocallers to have their right to free speech (and a free platform).
Re: About Time (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, say whatever you want - in the town square where people can easily ignore you. When you interrupt my dinner to say it in my living room - that becomes a problem. I have a legal right to the quiet enjoyment of my home - anyone who makes a habit of intruding on that right of others is guilty of criminal nuisance.
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This is exactly why I think SCOTUS got it wrong with Westboro Baptist Church. Sure, they have the right to protest, but not when it interferes with the rights of others.
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It's certainly rude - but I'm pretty sure the protests were happening on public property, so it's legal so long as they weren't violating any noise ordinances, etc. You don't have any legal right not to be offended in public.
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So, there's no legal right to have a peaceful funeral then. This isn't freedom of speech, this is downright harassment, and certainly should be illegal.
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Nope, there is no right to have a peaceful *anything* in public. That's what's public means - anyone can participate.
If you want to exclude asshole members of the public, you have to hold your event somewhere private.
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This is the kind of thing that allows jackasses like Scientology to basically stalk former members, following them around with cameras, etc. I'm all in favor of protecting everyone's free speech (even hate speech), but imposing it on others shouldn't be included in that. When someone attempts to move away from your free speech attempting to avoid you, you shouldn't be allowed to follow them...that's when it becomes harassment. If you want a good example on this, you should see some of the tactics Sciento
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Free speech someplace out of the way where people don't have to listen to you isn't free speech - it's just a variation on the same "whisper it quietly in your own home" that occurs under even the most authoritarian dictatorships.
Freedom of speech and assembly are explicitly political protections. They exists specifically so that people can raise a big public stink about injustices or better ways things could be done, even when the people in power would rather they were silenced. And it's *incredibly* dif
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I'm totally fine with being offended. I have thick skin. In fact, I often disagree with the politically correct crowd...there's no right to not be offended. But, you don't get to follow me around, public or not, constantly. That's not free speech, and it's not that difficult to differentiate between. Prohibiting following people around (essentially stalking) has no effect on free speech, and it's not even a close comparison to forcing a whisper in your own home. That's an extreme that isn't even worth
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Sure you can have a peaceful funeral - in private. Westboro Baptist loonies weren't allowed in the funeral homes or churches, but once you're in public that's it. You're in public and as long as they weren't breaking the law they have the right to be in public as well. Sucks, but that's life.
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You're free to get a restraining order if that's the case - and if the judge agrees.
Following you around isn't a crime - they're just as free as you to go anywhere they want on public land. And if that happens to constantly be two steps behind you... well then maybe you've got grounds to ask a judge to intervene.
Consider the alternative - every corrupt public official in the country could get journalists arrested for documenting their crimes. Or at least, being in the right place to be able to do so.
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I know it's a weird concept, but some people actually have a phone in part so that friends, family, and legitimate business associates can get in touch with them.
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you have the right to say something once. Not forty seven times at 3 AM.
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Re:merica! (Score:5, Funny)
Then how did you read my post ?
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where do we start? (Score:2, Interesting)
death sentence as an option where calls are particularly annoying/message is political,
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The Telco execs should get one call for every 100 robocalls sent.
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I've always seen this as a very easy problem to solve. I get a spam call, I press a button sequence on my phone, and the caller is fined $1000, $500 to me, $500 to the telco.
OK give me a call and I'll press that same button sequence and now you owe me $500?
Sure, there might be some people who abuse it, but we could let the courts sort it out, and very quickly people who abuse it would find their phone would stop ringing entirely.
Or we could just do things like the TFA and cut out the middle man.
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I would love to see the validation of that statement.
besides renting a line, where else could the telco's make money from?
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Now go after the phone companies that are enablers.
Wrong.
Go after the people who are paying these guys to make a billion calls. They aren't doing this for free, they are getting paid. Follow the money. Someone is paying them and **THAT** is who we need to go after.
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But why not both?
Re:About Time (Score:5, Informative)
Now go after the phone companies that are enablers.
Wrong.
Go after the people who are paying these guys to make a billion calls. They aren't doing this for free, they are getting paid. Follow the money. Someone is paying them and **THAT** is who we need to go after.
This^^^
Several states in conjunction with the FTC are filing criminal actions against the principals: Health Advisors of America, Duff Insurance Brokerage, America’s Best Insurance Group and Michael T. Smith Insurance
https://www.westplainsdailyqui... [westplainsdailyquill.net]
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Duff Insurance Brokerage
Is their slogan "Hold my beer...?"
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Now go after the phone companies that are enablers.
Would that be the phone company that helpfully labels these calls as "spam risk" so I don't bother to answer?
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That's probably the best approach, but there's huge resistance against it. Every time they get called on the rug to explain why this is possible they cry poverty and explain how it's impossible for them to stop due to how the system is set up. I'd wager they've had dozens of brilliant engineers over the years submit proposals for how to add robocall-detection systems to their network only to get shot down because of how much money it would cost them in lo
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Demonstrate they can do it by having lots of calls supporting Trump. Twitter will be in an uproar and they will figure out how to cancel those calls within a week.
Maybe spend that money securing the phone system (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe spend that fine money securing the US phone system!!
It's so laughably insecure.
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The US phone system is deliberately insecure to allow government monitoring. Why would the companies that manage the backbones of the Internet encourage or even permit secure communications?
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Jesus are you really that daft or so post-modern that you have to see a conspiracy behind every technology you do not understand?
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It's not that I'm ignorant of telecom technologies: it's that I'm aware of the technology and its history. No, I'm aware of aspects of the system like the infamous "Room 641A", the room with access to the fiber optic taps used by the NSA to monitor AT&T's fiber optic trunks for years, and the ongoing "Carnivore" monitoring. Carnivore was renamed and upgraded, not discarded.
Edward Snowden published reams of documents about the NSA's widespread and casual monitoring of US citizens. Whether you believe it
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Edward Snowden published reams of documents about the NSA's widespread and casual monitoring of US citizens.
He published reams of documents. A very small portion of those documents were monitoring of US citizens. Those programs were legal, thanks to a 1979 SOCUTS decision that makes phone records everyday business records, which can be seized by the government without a warrant.
It would be nice if someone would sue over that topic again, so that we could get an updated decision now that phone records are far more expansive than they were in 1979. Plus that decision was a pile of crap designed to bail out polic
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I think his point was that the phone system doesn't need to be secure in order to support the government's monitoring aims--when you're already baked into the switch and can "SET MONITOR=8005551212,TRUE" or whatever, you don't need holes in the network to support your surveillance. In fact, a more secure network, where ANI/CLID spoofing were not possible would actually SUPPORT the government's monitoring, as it would verify the endpoints were who they claimed.
There won't be any money. (Score:5, Interesting)
A year ago, arstechnica reported that of the 208.4 million dollars worth of fines issues to since 2015 robocallers, FCC collected $6,790. Under Ajit Pal's leadership, they issues 202 million of that, and collected nothing.
They don't have the authority to collect the fines, they have to call on the Justice department.
FTC does better, collecting 121 million of the 1.5 billion of penalties issued. When it comes time to collect, they usually settle for much smaller amounts.
People doing robocalling know that FCC/FTC fines are a thing that could happen, so they are careful to ensure that their assets aren't at risk, so they can cry poor and get out of it with a penalty amounting to a small fraction of their profits.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/fcc-fined-robocallers-208-million-since-2015-but-collected-only-6790/
Name names (Score:2)
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I'm not sure encouraging vigilante justice is the right call (pardon the pun) for that.
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The names are in the linked articles found in the summary.
John C. Spiller and Jakob A. Mears, who used business names including Rising Eagle and JSquared Telecom
Google/search for FCC Forfeiture Order (FCC 21-35) and you'll find several detailed documents on this.
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Scam calling might be worth that kind of money but if thats the case then where are the fraud charges?
So my take is these guys were pushing legal services, so I just dont see how a middle man can made anything like the hundreds of millions of dollars this fine implies
sigh (Score:2)
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Until this fine is something more appropriate, like $10 PER CALL, this bullshit will continue.
What difference does it make? These scammers made a billion calls. Their fine is $225M. There is no way that they were earning 22 cents per call, so they can't even pay the current fine. Increasing it, even to infinity, would make no difference.
Once the fine is more than you can pay, it no longer matters.
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Until this fine is something more appropriate, like $10 PER CALL, this bullshit will continue.
The fine was $1,000 per call.
Although the FCC had reason to believe that a billion spam calls were made, they only had documented verification of 225,000 of the calls as coming from these spammers.
What I can't figure out from the FCC documents (such as https://docs.fcc.gov/public/at... [fcc.gov]) is the company being fined or the individuals that ran the companies? The companies can simply declare bankruptcy and forfeit all their assets which in this case is nearly nothing.
Individuals can't bankrupt their way out of
Nothing to see here (Score:5, Interesting)
>"FCC Fines Two Texas Telemarketers Record $225 Million"
And nothing will change. From the article:
"between 2015 and 2019, the FCC had ordered violators[] to pay $208.4 million in penalties. By the end of that period, the agency had only collected $6,790."
Until there are actual penalties (like COLLECTED monies, and people going to jail) and technological actions taken (like banning their calls), it is still too profitable for them to annoy the s*** out of all of us every day with billions of calls with even 0.001% of people stupid enough to give them money. And it isn't just these companies, it is "legit" businesses with their marketing crap and political organizations, too. Spam is spam.
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> Ah yes, the inevitable productivity losses due to *checks notes* police officers not murdering black people.
Stop handing your enemies winning arguments. Cops murder about 1200 black men a year. The riots are over $1.3B in insurance payouts to date and that's just what insurance has covered so far and not denied - the total is estimated to be at least 20x that. Even lifetime earnings of the murder victims doesn't come close, and the riot murders must be netted out.
Don't forget to include the purchase
Fines only affect the poor (Score:5, Insightful)
Prison is necessary for corporate crimes.
Lock them up. Punishment without suffering is no punishment at all.
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when far left start calling for greater incarceration and punishment
What are you even talking about?
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How's this hard to understand?
Because you're bringing the far left into this when there's no indication anyone is far left in this thread.
The moderate left has been about decriminalizing marijuana because it is not a problem like the other drugs. Some on the left calls for imprisonment for corporate criminals because they cause real harm to more people than some black guy with a joint. Some on the left are even calling for the de-privatization of prisons. Private prisons are something the Republicans are still pushing.
The issue is
Should be charged with fraud (Score:5, Informative)
This shouldn't be a fine. It should be criminal charges that carry jail time. It is in every sense, fraud. These fines won't even dent the pocket books of these swindlers. To them, it's just the cost of doing business. Start putting them in jail, and it might start getting their attention!
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> To them, it's just the cost of doing business.
Not even that - the fines will bankrupt one shell corporation and the assets will be moved to another.
The whole thing may even be software plus a medium-sized order of headsets in a rented cube farm. Not much to restart it.
I thought STIR/SHAKEN was going online by 9/30/2020. This /ought/ to be over by now. Maybe the FCC should spend its time enforcing rules on the telcos? Oh, right, regulatory capture.
How long before we all just give up phone numbers?
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I thought STIR/SHAKEN was going online by 9/30/2020. This /ought/ to be over by now.
Something odd has happened in the past few months. Now most of my junk phone calls are showing up with name "INVALID NUMBER" and the number starting with "11" before the area code. (technically it's the international dialing prefix for the US) The INVALID NUMBER thing is not new; I think the phone company probably writes over the original name when they detect a malformed or otherwise impossible number, but now I'm wondering if this "11" thing is a phase in implementing blocking of bogus calls, because othe
Wonder how much profit they turned (Score:2)
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Of course they turned a profit for the owners. Companies like this pay out their profit as dividends as soon as possible. That way when the fine hits, the company has no assets, declares bankruptcy and goes out of business.
Then the owners found a new company. If they're particularly clever, they engineer it so that the new company buys what little assets the old company had during the bankruptcy.
Not convicted of spam (Score:4, Informative)
They were convicted of insurance fraud. Spam, itself, remains unprosecuted and consequence free. A "robocall response team" is a place to file the complaints and do nothing, as the FBI has done for decades and the Secret Service has done for wire fraud online. They simply do not bother to prosecute, or even share details with local prosecutors, unless they find a "big fish" that interests them.
22.5c per call (Score:2)
That's pathetic.
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And $1000 per verifiable call.
They estimate 1 billion calls, they have 225k verified.
And on top of that, give them this (Score:2)
the US being a 3rd World country (Score:5, Insightful)
It's always amazing for us in civilized countries to see how the US - which we admire for many things - is actually so far behind on so many basics. It seems that everything that falls into the "society has figured out how to live with each other" category is on a 3rd World level over there. It's a real puzzle for us, and hard to understand how that can be.
I mean, robo-calls have been an issue for you guys for what, twenty years? And you still haven't figured out how to stop them? Going to the Moon took you less time. How can that be?
Re:the US being a 3rd World country (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam, telemarketing and to some degree fraudulent behavior are widely tolerated in the US partly because of the US's cultural promotion of personal wealth and entrepreneurship, most of which is dominated by the fields of sales and marketing.
Most attempt to reign in these problem areas of commerce have run into resistance from the business community. The telemarketer even gets support -- we're running *a legal business* and we are *job creators*. Then there's more ostensibly legal businesses that also rely on relentless levels of sales and marketing who resist limitations on sales and marketing practices.
Seldom, if ever, is there much said about the outright fraud and manipulation in sales and marketing practices. All corporate offers come with incomprehensible fine print, prices which are "temporary" and come with a host of unknown fees that misalign them with the advertised costs, arbitrary rules, and if you really push things, enforced arbitration and no access to civil courts.
When it is the *norm* for "legitimate" businesses to mandate and enforce the use of arbitration and deny their customers redress through the civil courts, does anyone think that America is a place that cares about enforcing laws about telemarketing call, even ones which are outright frauds?
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USA had good law enforcement and low crime that had created a high-trust society. Back when I was a recent immigrant I was astounded by some of the business practices. Some hourly wage employee with the title of "manager" runs a fast food shop completely unsupervised. Will never happen in India. The place will be robbed blind, friends of the "manager" will eat for free and run the place to ground. For example
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We know technically how to stop robocalls.
What we don't know is how to stop corporations from controlling our government, and preventing them from preventing us from implementing those solutions.
But this is a problem everywhere that has a lot of huge corporations, only to differing degrees.
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We could put a flag on the moon, so patriotism all the way around from the 2 major political parties. Can't put a flag in lost revenue sources for companies, which drives down GDP and makes the guys in charge look bad in polls, so... yea. At least we have the flags?
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There are quite a number of drug dealers, and drug addicts. Yes, bogans are stereotyped with the behavior. They're far from the only ones. Australia also has an issue with past and current treatment of Aboriginals. Yes, the Australian government isn't stealing children and throwing them into re-education camps anymore (usually), pleasantly named the Stolen Generations
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I never said Australia is perfect, i only said its better significantly better.
What is wrong with you that you have to take things to absolute extremes ?
> I could nitpick on Australia's environmental, immigration, agriculture, etc policies as well. But to sum it up, EVERY country has flaws.
Do you really think me or anyone thinks their country is perfect
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Are you really that dumb you think a movie is realistic , i guess you think everyone german is. nazi as well.
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I didn't take it as sneering or looking down on us, just stating the obvious and demonstrable fact that we're good at some things and not so good at others.
Take away the emotional baggage from the word "civilized" for a moment. Among wealthy countries America is by far the most individualistic. It's not that we aren't able to be more "civilized" than similarly wealth countries that constrain individual misbehavior for the common good more than we do, it's that we don't collectively *want to*.
Re: the US being a 3rd World country (Score:2)
In my honest opinion, that is the most thwarted way to interpret the responses amongst other peoples to what goes on in the United States. Perhaps since post fact reality, there might be some truth to this in a very very limited way, but up to a decade or so ago, the USA was certainly seen as the major Western power if not the guiding light of civilisation.
Re: the US being a 3rd World country (Score:2)
Re: the US being a 3rd World country (Score:2)
Re: the US being a 3rd World country (Score:2)
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We don't *want* to be the guiding light of civilization. We want to live our own lives, free of interference. Nobody looks up to us and they never did.
There was a point in what the poster you replied to said.
Among my friends, up until about a decade ago, there were always some who dreamed about the US. One guy I know participated in the Green Card lottery many times. Another went to teach at a university in NYC (he's a scientist).
Then, slowly, talk of such things stopped. The professor came back a few years ago. Even YouTube stars who made it don't move to the US anymore (Dubai is the most popular place right now, or so I heard).
Despite race riots, wars,
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Say, has anyone ever built a raft out of trash and risked their lives to get to your country?
Yes, and thousands more have died trying. Your point is?
You are proud to be non-American but not proud enough to state your country? Let us know which one it is so we can follow such an optimal democratic example with no corruption.
This is not a point about my country, but about yours. It doesn't matter much if I write this from Canada, Australia, the UK, from France, Germany or Japan. The points I made would be the same.
re: equal outcomes (Score:2)
Equalized outcome is a terrible goal in any society where people are expected to do some sort of labor to earn a living. Attempts to do this truly are evil, and I'm not sure why the "Left" seems to have such a tough time grasping this? Perhaps this is the inevitable knee-jerk reaction to a problem of insufficient *opportunity*?
I can absolutely sympathize with the plight of those who remain underemployed or unemployed because there just aren't enough (or better) jobs to be had where they live. (Relocating
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Equalized outcome is a terrible goal in any society where people are expected to do some sort of labor to earn a living.
Perfectly equal, sure. But more equalized? Why?
I earn almost ten times as much as the person who cleans the office. Do I contribute ten times as much to society? I seriously doubt it.
Many high-paying jobs are essentially bullshit jobs. They create very little value, even if they create lots of corporate revenue. Most CEOs are not as important as everyone thinks. Most minimum wage workers are more important than everyone thinks. Jobs such as healthcare and education are vastly underpaid compared to what they
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If you earn 10x what the person earns who cleans your office, that doesn't mean you "contribute ten times as much to society". It means you made the effort to learn a set of skills that are in more demand. (Realistically, almost any able-bodied human being can do the job of cleaning an office. Even people with mental disabilities can often do this sort of work to have some kind of gainful employment.)
The fact you're attempting to put values on various types of labor tells me you have some very subjective
How about internet advertising ? (Score:2)
About $0.25 per call. (Score:2)
Who gets the money? (Score:3)
Seriously, government fines are stupid. They just keep the money to continue doing their own flavors of evil things.
Require spam insurance for phone calls. (Score:2)
Force the phone company to hold an escrow account for calls, say $1 per call made.
If the caller is caught violating FCC rules, then the escrow is taken by the FCC.
If no violations for three months, then the money is returned to the customer.
If there's an investigation underway, then put a hold on the funds.
Insignificant. (Score:2)
I'd want the fine per call to at least match the estimated average cost of each call made (to either caller or consumer) plus the average profit per call plus a statutary fine per illegal call. There is no point in a fine that leaves the perp feeling that the cost of doing illegal business even when caught is insignificant compared to the profit of that illegal business.
Waste their time, that really costs them (Score:2)
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If you don't mind using a Google service, what you can do is forward all calls to Google Voice. Pretty good spam blocking options at no cost if you do that.
The one thing you should never do, as discussed here, is trust the worthless Do Not Call registry. Which is the Do Call registry for scammers and """"non-profit"""" agencies. But I repeat myself.