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Republicans Want To Leave You Voicemail -- Without Ever Ringing Your Cellphone (recode.net)
bricko quotes a report from Recode: The GOP's leading campaign and fundraising arm, the Republican National Committee, has quietly thrown its support behind a proposal at the Federal Communications Commission that would pave the way for marketers to auto-dial consumers' cellphones and leave them prerecorded voicemail messages -- all without ever causing their devices to ring. Under current federal law, telemarketers and others, like political groups, aren't allowed to launch robocall campaigns targeting cellphones unless they first obtain a consumer's written consent. But businesses stress that it's a different story when it comes to "ringless voicemail" -- because it technically doesn't qualify as a phone call in the first place. In their eyes, that means they shouldn't need a customer or voter's permission if they want to auto-dial mobile voicemail inboxes in bulk pre-made messages about a political candidate, product or cause. And they want the FCC to rule, once and for all, that they're in the clear. Their argument, however, has drawn immense opposition from consumer advocates.
People want to leave politicians and marketers a big turd on their front door - without ever ringing their doorbell.
#DeleteFacebook
*#61# (call) - Shows if Voice Mail (voice forwarding) is enabled and your Voice Mail number.
#004# (call) - Disable all Voice Mail forwards.
If your network is non-standard (or your network operator is a prick) those don't work, call customer support and ask them to disable Voice Mail completely and remove your Voice Mail mailbox from the HLR.
VoiceMail is useless anyways. If someone really needs to get hold of you, they will call again.
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And they send you SMS messages. The best way to describe it is *FUCKING ANNOYING*. You listen to you messages and then you hear some shit "Did you know that such and such is a dick and therefore has no business in politics: Vote Asshole - We're full of shit".
I did the best I could to familiarize myself with the VM controls so I could delete those messages immediately without listening to them. The worst this is you can't leave a message for them telling them to fuck off.
Yeah, it's *that* annoying.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The typical way companies do this is to issue two call simultaneously, and disconnect whichever call connects to the switch first (under a second). The telco will roue the remaining call to voicemail, and this usually happens before the call notification worms its way through the cellular network to the handset.
The student loan scammers are already doing this. One company was calling-not-calling my phone five times an hour? Not a distraction? It certainly is! My phone still goes vrrt-vrrt, and I still look up from what I'm doing.
It's an utter waste of the recipient's time and fails the "What if some large number of people did this?" test.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
Try http://800notes.com/
They have been collecting data for over six years.
I suppose it wouldn't do any good to point out that I said measures, now? If the Democrats tried pulling something like this - and I mean changing the FCC rules to allow someone to pull this sort of shit - I'd be pissed off at them too.
And if a Democratic candidate did it regardless of the rules? I'd expect them to get slapped and fined for it.
But let's be brutally honest, the two parties are NOT equally bad right now. That's not to give the Dems a pass, it's just that the Republicans have gone totally unhinged. Go look at what their agenda is, and tell me that they give two sh*ts about anyone but the tiny fraction of billionaire donors. They're not even pretending anymore. Go tell me that Ajit Pai really does mean to help us all by sticking a shiv in Net Neutrality and letting Comcast/Verizon/etc free to do whatever they want. Go tell me that the GOP majority really is going to act as a check on Trump's attempt at doing a speedrun of the Nixon presidency.
And I think it sucks, because we need two sane, reasonable, yet generally opposing parties to make our current system of government work. That's not the case though, at present, and I say that as someone who was once Republican.
Politicians... you're wasting your fucking time.
They're betting that enough bored idiots will listen to enough of them to make it worth while, and they're probably right.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I never use voicemail - it is one of the (mis-)features I always turn off if at all possible; and if not, I simply ignore it and let it fill up. Why? Because I have to actually call a service number to access voice mail messages and then work with an awkward interface; I may even have to pay call time to do so. There are much better alternatives now: instant messaging. My favourite (that is, the first one I tried and found reasonably useful) is WeChat; I know all the criticisms, so don't bother - the point is, there are several like it, that allow you to chat in real time, send pictures and voice messages and even make a call (optionally with video); if you don't check your messages they just hang around until you have time. And you can control who is allowed to contact you. I can't see why I would want voicemail for. The same goes for SMS, in many ways; I think I have only used SMS something like 3 times in the last year.
Reagan at least was a Democrat for quite a while. Back in the early 1970's, he said that he didn't leave the Democrat party; the Democrat party left him.
Yes Reagan claimed that exact quote but it was bullshit then as it is now. Basically his brand of politics was more conservative than the bulk of the democrats. Reagan's politics drifted right long before he ever switched parties. His claim is exactly backwards for the most part.
And if you read the party platforms and public statements of most Dems in the 1950s through the mid-70's, they sound VERY Republican.
That's because many of them were what we think of republicans to be today. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 caused a huge number of democrats (particularly in the south) to switch party affiliations over the next decade. The south used to vote solidly democrat up until 1964. It was Nixon in 1968 that appealed to scared white voters in the south and started the transition to the solidly republican south we see today.
Today's Democrats used to be called "Communists", and today's Republicans used to be solidly Democrat.
SOME of today's republicans used to be democrats. Most democrats were politically to the left of those individuals long before they switched parties, largely over what is clearly racial bias after 1964.