National Do-Not-Call List Open for Registration

[SteveC]

The national do-not-call list, which goes into effect on October 1, is open for registration. To sign up, go here, and it last for five years. It won't stop all calls, however, and the list of exemptions is here, which unfortunately covers many of the companies that use telemarketers. It's still better than nothing.

 

[blakerwry]

The national do-not-call list, which goes into effect on October 1, is open for registration. To sign up, go here, and it last for five years. It won't stop all calls, however, and the list of exemptions is here, which unfortunately covers many of the companies that use telemarketers. It's still better than nothing.

Since I got on the Kansas do not freakin call me list phone solicitation has dried up... if I placed myself on the Federal one, is it possible that the exempt organizations could use it as a calling list? (Ever since i joined the Kansas list I get called every once in a while by the local sheriffs asking for donations)

 

[honold]

i wouldn't sweat it if you're not getting calls right now...

 

[Prof.Wizard]

Thank God I live in Europe...

 

[honold]

i think it must not be happening in europe because the numbers are too long

 

[SteveC]

Since I got on the Kansas do not freakin call me list phone solicitation has dried up... if I placed myself on the Federal one, is it possible that the exempt organizations could use it as a calling list? (Ever since i joined the Kansas list I get called every once in a while by the local sheriffs asking for donations)

The national list will replace the Kansas list. From here:

Kansas will adopt the National Do Not Call Registry in place of its existing state do not call list and share the numbers on its state list with the national registry. Kansas consumers who already signed up for the state list do not need to re-register to have the protections of both federal and state law.

The complete list of what all states will be doing, and whether or not you have to re-register, if they already have a do-no-call list, is here.

 

[jtr1962]

The only thing that bothers me about this list are the exceptions for political calls, charities, surveys, and places you've done business with in the last 18 months. Do not call should mean exactly that, and there shouldn't be an five year expiration once you register either. Just to show how despised this form of marketing is, over 370,000 people have already registered in only 12 hours.

 

[blakerwry]

I think this is a good example of government helping people

>8- )

 

[Mercutio]

I think it's a shameless example of the current regime shamelessly pandering to the masses.

17 months from now, when voters go to the polls, they won't remember Enron or Bechtel or the Patriot Act. They'll remember that George W. "Asshat" Bush stopped the phone calls that they used to have to get up during dinner to answer.

 

[P5-133XL]

I will remember!

 

[jtr1962]

Me as well! :wink: Since I couldn't in all good conscience vote for a Democrat either based on what the party has come to stand for I may very well end up either not voting next election or voting for a third party.

BTW, this legislation appears to be a bipartisan effort. I don't call getting rid of what constitutes a major annoyance pandering to the masses. Hopefully next will be a national do not spam list. I would also like something to be done about TV commercials. Perhaps limit the number of breaks per hour in addition to the total time. Commercials every 6 or 7 minutes are a major annoyance. Besides that, nobody watches them anymore.

 

[Mercutio]

Television as it presently exists would cease without commercials. Besides, on the rare occasions I see regular TV, the commercials are usually more entertaining than the crap that comes on between them.

Since the support for this was so widespread, why didn't the legislation just out-and-out ban telephone solicitation except in those cases already mentioned.

3rd party voting is what got the US into its present mess. Nader undoubtedly stole enough votes from Gore in Florida to cause our present situation. I'm not saying "don't vote 3rd party", but I am saying that my primary concern as a voter is to see that conservative-types are as far from elected office as possible. I don't always agree with democrats, but they're far more tolerant and tolerable than the elephant-men on the other side of the aisle.

 

[jtr1962]

I guess you're not too familiar with the kinds of Democrats who usually seem to get elected to office here in NYC and NYS. They are even more dogmatic than right-to-life conservatives if that's at all possible. They seem to revel in passing all kinds of silly laws designed to protect idiots from themselves and from other idiots. No jaywalking, no beer drinking in the park, no cycling on the sidewalk, no carrying any form of personal protection including stun guns or small knives, no unlocked cans of spray paint in stores, etc. Problem is these laws restrict the rights of the majority who in many cases do the restricted actions safely day in and day out. They also seem to think it is the government's responsibility to provide cradle to grave care for everybody, even illegal aliens, along with the attendent control of the populace and high taxes which that implies. Maybe the local Democrats by you are different but I don't want the New York style ones anywhere near an elected office any more than I want ultra conservative types. A common theme with both extremes are the silly restrictive legislation they will impose to satisfy their own rigid dogma. The local Democrats also add catering to the lowest common denominator to their agenda.

 

[Mercutio]

New York sent Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the Senate. Hardly something to complain about.

I can get behind high taxes (as long as they aren't regressive taxes like sales tax) for social services. People deserve better than homelessness. There's nothing worse than seeing someone wither and die because of untreated medical conditions (e.g. diabetes). I can get behind public health and safety (not biking on sidewalks might be a little extreme, but then, I've been knocked on my ass by a bike messanger, so I can understand that one, too). I can't get behind huge tax cuts or special legislative treatment (e.g. relaxed environmental regulations) for big businesses. I can't get behind prayer in school or government support for "faith based charity". I can't get behind pro-life.

BTW, the person Howell quotes in his current .sig ran for president of the US in the 1940s (meaning that he was at least 35) with the slogan "Segregation Forever". He retired from the US senate LAST YEAR.

 

[Mercutio]

While I'm at it, I'm aware that Democrats are nearly as guilty as republicans in the corporate welfare department, and I'd also like to say that Joseph Lieberman (hawkish democrat and orthodox jew who supports widespread media censorship) scares me more than a little bit.

 

[jtr1962]

Moynihan was a true statesman well liked by both parties. He's hardly the type of Democrat I was referring too. I was all too happy to vote for him. Rather, I was thinking of most of the local and state legislators, including one idiot City Councilman whose name I forgot who said white people need a good smacking.

The sad truth today is neither party truly represents the people. While I like the idea of low taxes I don't like budget deficits. Simply put, if the American people really want low taxes they need to be prepared to give up many government benefits, including the so-called safety net. I'm with you on most of what you wrote, especially the environmental regulations, although I don't think the government should treat health conditions bought about by poor lifestyle choices. If you get AIDS by indiscriminate sex or diabetes because you're 500 pounds and eat at McDonalds each day tough. Ditto if you're an alcoholic, smoker, or drug addict. I'm all in favor of treating those too poor to afford it for conditions they didn't create but the government can't keep picking up the pieces if you make bad choices. And I'm 100% against laws restricting people's actions because a few cause problems. You're right about bike messengers. I even wrote to my City Councilman and the Mayor that the solution was to ban bike messengering, not to ban bicycles from sidewalks. The problem with lawmakers today are the throw out the baby with the bathwater solutions to every problem. It's also funny how if you lobby hard enough you get favorable treatment from both parties. While I hate the Republican's stance on the environment the Democrats are no better. Eight years of Clinton-Gore gave us SUVs and more airline flights than ever. The mostly Democratic NYC Council recently banned smoking in most business establishments because of concern for air quality while they really should have banned everything except zero-emission vehicles from city limits since that's the larger problem. Wonder why people are voting for third parties? It's because they're disgusted with the two main ones. I wish there were such a party as environmental libertarian. I'd vote for them in a heart beat.

As for the last election it was more than a little difficult to decide. Neither candidate was inspiring. Although in the end I went for Bush I could just as easily have gone for Gore. Perhaps if there had been more environmental legislation during the Clinton administration I might have been swayed. I liked Gore's environmental stance, I liked Bush's tax cuts. Too bad I couldn't merge candidates.

 

[Fushigi]

I'm with you on most of what you wrote, especially the environmental regulations, although I don't think the government should treat health conditions bought about by poor lifestyle choices. If you get AIDS by indiscriminate sex or diabetes because you're 500 pounds and eat at McDonalds each day tough. Ditto if you're an alcoholic, smoker, or drug addict.

I have a fundamental agreement with this but it would be too difficult to legislate & enforce. Long-term smokers were raised on the belief that smoking was a health benefit so it's hard to tell people of that generation that their lung cancer isn't covered because smoking was bad for them .. they were told otherwise.

Now, for someone who started smoking int he past 20 years or so, I would tend to agree. But you will always find extenuating circumstances. And for legislating it, where do you cross the line? Any cigs ever and your not covered, anything more than a pack a day? 2 packs? Do people need to keep receipts? How do you prove it one way or the other?

I've no problem with 'sin taxes' as long as the funds could be used to treat the victims and promite the eventual demise of the unhealthy sin. Every year, cig taxes should go up a buck a pack. Use the funds to treat the patients. Maybe 25 cents a year for liquor -- or more for the types that tend to produces alcoholics and less for the types that don't. The reason for the graduating increase vs. a flat $10 a pack or something is to wean people off. Find their breaking point. Encourage them to reduce, then eliminate.

The harsh side of my personality says let the drug addicts kill themselves off; it's a long-term benefit to society. But that's not a very compassionate view. Maybe help them but at the price of rendering them infertile so they don't reproduce? That'd never fly, but what would? Legalize and tax it to death?

Another one is pregnancies while on public aid. Personally, I believe that reversable infertility (via Norplant or the new one they just released for men) should be a condition for granting public aid. The gov should help those in need as long as they aren't making the problem worse.

And we should damn well be providing job training and any other reasonable assistance to reduce reliance on the system. Welfare will always be needed, but it should only be for those in transition between jobs and not as a way of life. Those states that said 5 years of aid and that's all have the wrong idea as their programs, as far as I've heard, don't help people get what they need so they can get a job.

And I'm 100% against laws restricting people's actions because a few cause problems. You're right about bike messengers. I even wrote to my City Councilman and the Mayor that the solution was to ban bike messengering, not to ban bicycles from sidewalks. The problem with lawmakers today are the throw out the baby with the bathwater solutions to every problem.

Agreed. Although banning the messengers is a little drastic and would arguably put some people out of a job. Mandating a bike lane (shared if not exclusive) would probably do wonders to reduce the problems. Do they have those? Downtown Chicago doesn't to my knowledge.

The bathwater laws, so to speak, are all just pandering for attention. None of them ever mean anything and have little effect on reality. Ban cel phone use while driving? That's already covered by laws against distracted driving, reckless driving, unsafe driving habits (only 1 hand on the wheel), etc. Indiana had (dunno if it still has) a law banning wearing headphones while driving as people wouldn't be able to hear emergency vehicles. It came about when walkmen became popular, I think. But that too would have been covered by existing laws.

While I hate the Republican's stance on the environment the Democrats are no better. Eight years of Clinton-Gore gave us SUVs and more airline flights than ever.

So, what did the Clinton-Gore era do to aid the sales / development of SUVs? It seems to me this is a big business and societal move and not a political one. The automakers made and marketed SUVs to the environmentally-ignorant public. SUVs have been around since before then, BTW. My first father-in-law had a Trooper back in 85 or 86 (no logical reason for him to have it, BTW, just like most other truck-based SUVs).

I personally have little problem with the latest car-based 'crossovers'. Mileage is nearly the same as the car they're based on. Crossovers are the station wagons of this decade.

The mostly Democratic NYC Council recently banned smoking in most business establishments because of concern for air quality while they really should have banned everything except zero-emission vehicles from city limits since that's the larger problem.

It'll never happen.

Wonder why people are voting for third parties? It's because they're disgusted with the two main ones. I wish there were such a party as environmental libertarian. I'd vote for them in a heart beat.

The problem with that is you have to look at the full picture. Nader never wins because, while he's a strong consumer advocate, he has no knowledge/experience with economics (that I know of) and foreign policy. Currently, foreign policy is going to be needed bigtime by US leaders as they try to slowly repair the damage done to the US image by Bush.

As for the last election it was more than a little difficult to decide. Neither candidate was inspiring. Although in the end I went for Bush I could just as easily have gone for Gore. Perhaps if there had been more environmental legislation during the Clinton administration I might have been swayed. I liked Gore's environmental stance, I liked Bush's tax cuts. Too bad I couldn't merge candidates.

I abstained. But I couldn't have voted for Bush as I knew he'd do what he has so far done to f*** up the future of the country. Yes, the recession was going to happen regardless of who was in charge -- that's Wall Street's fault and not the politicos. Wall street never should have overvalued the companies the way they did on the late 90s. When a little dose of reality hit, the numbers came crashing down.

The tax cuts won't help anyone that matters (trickle down failed in the 80s and will fail again because it just doesn't work) and companies are still sending more and more jobs out of the US. The environment is worse off and so is the average citizen. Republicans talking about family values make me want to vomit. I can't think of one event, in my lifetime, that I've seen the Republican party do that I agree with with regard to bettering the lives of the average person. 3Rs in education? That's just lowering the LCD (and Riting and Rithmetic DON'T begin with R!) of the education system. Legislating morality makes me want to renounce my citizenship.

Enough of that! That was a fun little rant.

- Fushigi

 

[Mercutio]

Are you sure you live in DuPage county?

 

[Fushigi]

Are you sure you live in DuPage county?

Will county. :lol: There's a tiny little corner of Aurora in Will county; I'm there.

I forgot to mention I refuse to declare a party when registering to vote. I was raised in a liberal household (my mother was chairperson of the Indiana NOW chapter) but find I do have a few conservative views. Plus it's none of their business ...

- Fushigi

 

[jtr1962]

I've no problem with 'sin taxes' as long as the funds could be used to treat the victims and promite the eventual demise of the unhealthy sin. Every year, cig taxes should go up a buck a pack. Use the funds to treat the patients. Maybe 25 cents a year for liquor -- or more for the types that tend to produces alcoholics and less for the types that don't. The reason for the graduating increase vs. a flat $10 a pack or something is to wean people off. Find their breaking point. Encourage them to reduce, then eliminate.

This is a good way to deal with the problems I alluded to as well which I neglected to mention. As long as people who lead unhealthy lifestyles are somehow made to pay the cost of their care through "sin taxes" it's fine with me if society treats them. As for hard drugs, I'm all for legalizing and taxing them as well. My best guess is drug use will immediately drop by half since for many of the casual users it is the illegality of it that appeals to them. The hard core users may or may not be affected right away, but at least the government will get some money from them towards their treatment, and the number will eventually drop since some casual users become full-blown addicts. And most importantly, the inner city turf wars will be a thing of the past, and the people in those areas will no longer have the allure of dealing drugs so they will have to find more conventional means of earning money.

Another one is pregnancies while on public aid. Personally, I believe that reversable infertility (via Norplant or the new one they just released for men) should be a condition for granting public aid. The gov should help those in need as long as they aren't making the problem worse.

Agreed, and that's one of the sore spots of liberalism for me. Not only are they not helping anyone but in many cases they're actually making the problem worse by encouraging dependency. The so-called job training to date has been a sick joke. One of my cousins was in a program where the training consisted of putting plastic spoons in bags day in and day out.

Mandating a bike lane (shared if not exclusive) would probably do wonders to reduce the problems. Do they have those? Downtown Chicago doesn't to my knowledge.

We have them in some places. Problem is that they're not physically separated from auto traffic by a barrier and cars use them as a passing lane. We simply don't have enough street space to put bike lanes everywhere unless we banned curbside parking and used that space for bike lanes(separated of course by a fence from auto traffic). You may not be familiar with biking in NYC. Sometimes even an experienced cyclist like myself takes to the sidewalk to avoid wild packs of SUVs. It is a simple matter of survival and shouldn't be illegal. Of the 55,000 miles I've ridden may 5% has been on sidewalks and I haven't had any incidents. Other than bike messengers nobody really causes a problem doing this, and bike messengers avoid the consequences of tickets by either carrying false IDs or having the tickets paid by thier employer. For similar reasons people jaywalk to avoid turning cars when they cross. Long-term the solution is to put roads underground(this will also give use more real estate for housing) but this may never be done.

So, what did the Clinton-Gore era do to aid the sales / development of SUVs?

It's what they didn't do. There exists a loophole in the current CAFE laws big enough to drive an SUV through. SUVs should be subject to the exact same fuel economy standards as cars, and those standards should have continued to be raised up until they hit a figure that would be technologically impossible to exceed(say 100 mpg). By now we might have CAFE standards of, say 50 mpg, with 100 mpg by the end of the decade. Furthermore, foreign cars not meeting the standards would be banned, not just subject to a gas-guzzler tax, so foreign auto makers would have to meet the same standards. The fact that Toyota made a hybrid SUV getting 40 mpg city shows it can be done. Detroit refuses to acknowledge this, and the American public is too ignorant to see the effects of their SUVs on both the environment and the general health of the populace. And zero emission vehicles should be mandated to be 100% of the fleet within a decade or at most two, with the percentage being increased each year. While this may or may not stem global warming since the power needs to be generated somewhere, it will at least relieve cities of their pollution problem(and their Medicaid bill for pollution-related illnesses), and make underground roads in cities cheaper since you don't need to worry about venting exhaust.

 

[jtr1962]

To continue this article basically seems to sum up the current administration's attitude towards fuel economy although we wouldn't be in this position if Gore the environmentalist had pushed for CAFE standards such as I described.

 

[Fushigi]

Again, I think a more graduated system of CAFE increase would be more effective from a public policy standpoint. I know the end you want -- I want it too -- but I think you're a bit too agressive to be realistic in achieving it. Up CAFE standards by 1 MPG for trucks and 2 for cars each year for the next 10 years. Move all SUVs to the car schedule over the next 5 years. Then up each by 1MPG/year going forward. This would have the desired effect. Hybrids would become popular and almost everything would offer an electric assist. This increases economy and tells the automakers in no uncertain terms that mileage is a design imperative.

Coincide it with slowly increasing gas taxes. Maybe 25 cents a year increase for 3 years. Use the proceeds from the tax to improve the roadway infrastructure as it certainly is in a shambles right now.

 

[jtr1962]

I'll buy into your approach Fushigi since it's better than what we have today, which are standards from maybe about 1990. Had that been done from about the time CAFE standards stabilized in 1990 or thereabouts we would be up to around 50 mpg for autos and maybe 35 mpg for SUVs. Ultimately, it makes no sense for everything not to be hybrid first and eventually fuel cell. Besides the fuel economy advantages, you get bursts of power without a large engine and they are far easier to control than anything with a mechanical transmission. They also have a certain coolness factor that boring conventional cars just don't have. For example, you might finally get cruise control that really works rather than the current implementations which can't hold set speed(unless you consider +-5 mph holding speed), especially on downgrades. Eventually I would also like all cars to be automated(see my other thread). I know this is already being worked on and can hopefully be implemented within 10 years. The only infrastructure improvement needed outside of the cars themselves would be magnets embedded in the roads. 50,000 dead annually is too many, and some sort of automated control will render any arguments about weight moot since accidents(and accident insurance) will be pretty much a thing of the past. I know those who like to drive will complain, but based on my observations 90% of the populace is incapable of properly driving a vehicle anyway even if they think otherwise so in the end everyone will benefit.