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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2090 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 26, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I see Americans complaining online about how many spam telephone calls they are getting, to the point they don't even pick up the phone when the caller is unknown.

This is pretty alien to me; I live in Sweden and have literally never gotten a spam call in my life. (Maybe the reason for this is that the scammers naturally won't bother learning Swedish?)

So, potential silly lifehack: why not get a foreign telephone number from e.g. Denmark or something, and then never get spammed again? Presumably your calls will be more expensive as you'd be paying the international rate constantly, but this can be ameliorated by getting a plan where that's cheaper.

You can do this, through various SIP or other voice services. But a lot of normal people can't or won't be able to call you, including a lot of services that you may specifically be after a phone number to support: a large portion of Americans don't even know how country codes work and may literally have never used one other than 1, a VOIP solution I've deployed defaults to not recognizing any of them at the dial plan level, and a lot of businesses that require phone numbers to talk to you won't recognize anything but 10 digits (or may find that their shitty phone TFA doesn't work).

So there are tradeoffs.

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