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The USA too has regulations and levies fines, however, the robcallers and scammers are almost always overseas criminal operations. I suspect the US is much mor

• fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
  My bet is simply that you go where the money is[0]. [0]https://www.justfacts.com/news_poorest_americans_richer_than_europe.asp https://www.justfacts.com/news_poorest_americans_richer_than...
  • apexalpha 7y ago
    That's a big difference. It says the bottom 20% of Americans consume as much as the average person in my country. Although this is in 2010, during the crisis, it would suggest a big difference in what I thought the outcome of such a study would be. This doesn't include savings, it seems. Which are mandatory here.
  • bildung 7y ago
    Note I don't disagree, but that source was on hn a few days ago and is a pretty poor propaganda site. The article: * redefines poverty multiple times and then comes to the surprising conclusion that the results differ from the NY Times article * uses consumption in USD as a measure, which is highly problematic, because a) different countries have different purchasing power, which is is the reason almost noone in poverty research compares international poverty using gross consumption b) consumption heavily reflects economic inefficency (e.g. health care costs: If a say Danish poor gets her broken arm fixed for free, she would consume 0$ according to this figure, while achieving the same quality of life out of it) The usual threshold for poverty (for good reasons) is 50 or 60% of the median income in a country. Which the NY Times article used.
    • fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
      >The usual threshold for poverty (for good reasons) is 50 or 60% of the median income in a country. If you think half to 40% of people in the Congo are not in poverty you are delusional
      • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        That's cherry-picking. Of course everybody in the poorest country in the world, is in poverty. But the usual measure of relative local wealth, works pretty good.
        • fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
          That measure won't work on the vast majority of the planet. The global per-capita median income is less that three thousand dollars a year. People making 4 grand a year aren't out of poverty.
      • bildung 7y ago
        60% of the median is the definition of relative poverty. This is what the NY Times article was about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#Relative_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#Relative_poverty You are free to find that delusional, but if you want to partake in the scientific discourse about poverty, it would be advantageous if you don't redefine the core concept.
        • fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
          Yes, and my point is it's an entirely useless definition. If 40% of the population were billionaires and the remaining 60% were millionaires. The millionaires aren't in poverty. "delusion: an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder." It is quite delusional to create new metrics on poverty because ones based on income or consumption don't get you to the result you like.
          • 7y ago
  • hypervis0r 7y ago
    This is wrong on so many levels it's not even funny. Original HN submission WRT that link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799705
• mcherm 7y ago
  I think it is because the phone companies (in the US) refuse to identify and block such calls.
  • FDSGSG 7y ago
    Do you have any evidence of phone companies elsewhere doing this?
  • sbarre 7y ago
    I used to think this, then I worked at a telco for a while.. The problem is a lot more complicated.. Due to how ILECs and CLECs (incumbent/parent phone companies who own the infrastructure and then wholesalers/resellers who operate on top of them due to competition laws) integrate, how they share and allocate phone number prefixes and lists (this whole process alone is mind-blowingly arcane), and how all phone companies cooperate internationally, it's extremely hard - almost impossible - for them to identify and block these kinds of nuisance calls in real-time. And don't get me wrong, they could do it.. But the amount of coordination and cooperation that would be required is a non-starter because most phone companies don't talk to each other enough to get this kind of initiative off the ground, even if the money and motivation was there. Edit: Remember that most (Western) phone companies are 100-year-old institutions, and many still have 50+ year-old infrastructure that runs the underlying systems, and that they can't just throw that away and start over, due to how deeply integrated they are in the public/private communication infrastructure of society, and many of their modern systems are really just shims built on top of that older tech. Unintended consequences are rampant.
    • mcny 7y ago
      > Unintended consequences are rampant. Breaking up AT&T into regional bell operating companies[1] (the ILEC thing) was a very stupid decision in hindsight. I don't know what actually happened. Did AT&T simply have smarter people than the US Government did? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System