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I used to be somewhat mean to telemarketers, until I learned that some of them are prison laborers - getting paid pennies per hour to work in a prison call cent

I used to be somewhat mean to telemarketers, until I learned that some of them are prison laborers - getting paid pennies per hour to work in a prison call center. That already feels morally un-great, and messing with them further no longer felt like something I could justify.

pocketarc 2y ago
I agree, and I feel like that goes for everything in general. It's like people who get mad at customer service people - the customer service person has absolutely nothing to do with the product that's giving you grief. Even the telemarketer, as you point out, doesn't want to be there (or even if they do, they may just be there because they have no better options and need to put food on the table). In life, there are very few situations where being unkind is ever worth it. And even here on HN, I sometimes get the impulse to argue with someone for whatever they said. What I do is I type out my little comment, then close the tab without actually posting it. Some things are better left unsaid, regardless of how satisfying they'd be to say.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  I should have been clearer that I meant the more-obviously illegal telemarketers, which frankly are the only ones left. Having said that, I have no moral problem with keeping them on the line and dragging out a conversation without being rude - every minute they're speaking with me is a minute they're not trying to convince my elderly grandmother to switch her power bill to some fly-by-night shitfarm.
- psadauskas 2y ago
  One thing that really stuck with me from the show The Good Place. The premise is that getting into heaven is a points-based system. You get points for doing good things, loose them for doing bad things, and when you die, if you have enough points, you go to heaven. Spoilers for season 3 ahead Used to be, for hundreds of years, you'd go visit your mom for her birthday. You'd be walking down the lane and see some wildflowers, so you pick them and bring them to her. +10 points. In modern society, to do the same you'd drive to the florist and buy some flowers, then drive to your mom's. +10 points. But the PE firm that bought the florist laid of 100s of workers, and -10 points for supporting them. And the flowers were picked by underpaid exploited immigrants, -10 points. And you dumped a bunch of CO2 in the air from your drive and gave a newborn asthma, -10 points. The show was saying that because of the choices that modern society and late-stage capitalism force upon us, nobody has gone to heaven for decades.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    I guess that show has been over for nearly 5 years, but it might still be a good idea to spoiler this reveal for folks who haven't gotten around to it so you don't lose 3 points.
    - psadauskas 2y ago
      Good idea. HN doesn't have a spoiler tag, but I added a warning.
    - AStonesThrow 2y ago
      Freezes; looks around Hackernews... Wait a minute... THIS is The Bad Place!!! Seriously though, I was super-embarrassed a year or two ago, when I received a phone call and quickly became convinced that some scammer had a hold of me. I began questioning the poor lady on the phone and she gamely answered all my questions: location, company, including spelling her name and pronouncing it entirely differently. Many answers were quite vague and not satisfying to me at the time. But cold callers will absolutely hang up on that type of treatment! My ultimate question was asking if she was safe or being trafficked or captive or something, because I noticed there was a dog barking in the background. And she must've been WFH. Only after I wrote up a detailed play by play of the call and frantically reported it to several of my colleagues, It turned out to be a totally legitimate call and somebody had authorized the marketing campaign. She just had so little information, she was unable to answer me adequately. I was so embarrassed I can't even tell you.
      - pavel_lishin 2y ago
        I wouldn't be embarrassed. I'd be embarrassed on their behalf, maybe, for half-assing it so badly. I don't owe anybody who calls me out of the blue my time, especially when their shit isn't together. My mom answers the phone and actually talks to these people, and politely says "no thank you", whereas I don't even pick up the phone for certain area codes, and certainly don't engage in conversation if it's clear it's some bullshit I do not care about.
- SkyBelow 2y ago
  >It's like people who get mad at customer service people Except the customer service people willingly accept a job to act as an in-between so that any appropriate anger at a company is directed at an employee. To what extent do companies purposefully make use of this to prevent outrage directed at them? Back to the original topic, how much do the people leading these scams like pushing the story of the scammers being forced into it, because it increases the empathy that people feel towards the scammers and better allows the scams to continue? At what point does being kind shift into a sort of pacifist mindset, that while great if everyone used it, creates fertile ground for far worse approaches to human relationships to flourish and spread, leading to the quality of the average approach to human relationships declining?
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    > Back to the original topic, how much do the people leading these scams like pushing the story of the scammers being forced into it, because it increases the empathy that people feel towards the scammers and better allows the scams to continue? My feelings of pity towards the people being literally enslaved don't mean I don't want the scams to stop, or for the people to be liberated. It just means I don't scream profanities at someone who had their passport stolen.
- rawgabbit 2y ago
  "It's like people who get mad at customer service people - the customer service person has absolutely nothing to do with the product that's giving you grief." I used to believe this. But I have since changed my mind. Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for. A couple years ago, I was on the return flight from France to the US with wife and kid in tow. At the airport, I learned that the flight was a code-share. The airline I had booked with was meaningless. Meaning, the seats that I had paid extra for so we could sit together was no longer the seats that I picked. Even though I spent extra money to get what I asked for, I wasn't getting it because the real airline said <random paragraphs of verbiage>. Meaning myself, wife, and kid would no longer be sitting together on an 8 hour flight despite me paying extra for it, five months in advance. So I performed what I called my "angry frustrated customer routine". I became loud and agitated several times at the airport. Until I got my way and got what I had paid for.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    > Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for. And how much choice do those reps have? Their choice is "follow the playbook" or "go out and find a new job". It sounds like you yelled at someone who was not responsible for your original issue. You weren't performing. You were being.
    - rawgabbit 2y ago
      Eventually I got someone’s attention although I had to through five different people. Somebody did the right thing after I became loud. I termed it performing as I was deliberately trying to draw attention to myself from the other passengers.
xp84 2y ago
It's odd to me that people feel worse about unpleasant things happening specifically to convicted felons than to the general public. If you were being mean to a random jerk, and then he pointed out "By the way, I roughed up my wife last night" would you feel more bad about being mean? But you'd feel worse if it turned out he was doing time for that same crime? Note: I know that there could be people truly wrongfully convicted included in the set of all prisoners, but I certainly don't think that's common enough that they should be treated better than the average person. Second note: I also am not saying being a felon means one should be punished forever or anything. Just that, yeah, prison isn't meant to be fun, and being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment. It's what most people do outside of prison. Anyone who doesn't accept those terms, I fully support them clicking "Decline" by not commiting crimes.
- gambiting 2y ago
  >> prison isn't meant to be fun, and being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment. The problem I have with this is that last time I checked, nearly all sentences for people going to prison are incarceration, not incarceration+forced labour. It's the same as people cheering up prison rape because "they deserve it" or "if they don't like it, they should just stop committing crimes". Again, no one is ever sentenced to prison+prison rape, and failing to protect prisoners from each other is a massive failure of the state. And of course we have to acknowledge that having prison population working for close to nothing creates really perverse incentives, both on the side of the state as well as enterprises employing prisoners. In fact I'd argue that even if you feel that it's entirely fair and deserved you should still be against it to stop incentivising all the nasty shit happening around it. Prisoners should be sitting in prison, they shouldn't be working, or if they are it should be on public works not on anything that the state charges money for.
  - xp84 2y ago
    > It's the same as people cheering up prison rape Respectfully, no it's not. Our society does in theory, and should, recognize a universal right to not be raped. It doesn't recognize, for anyone, a right to not have to work and still be taken care of, with the possible exception of the Royal Family. Though I understand most of their income comes from their historical ownership of vast lands, which is slightly different. > Prisoners should be sitting in prison, they shouldn't be working, Why should they only be sitting? Where's the free room and board for those who haven't committed felonies? If we aren't offering a UBI to random non-criminal lazy people, I don't think it's justified to recognize that as a right of prisoners specifically.
lurk2 2y ago
> I used to be somewhat mean to telemarketers, until I learned that some of them are prison laborers - getting paid pennies per hour to work in a prison call center. Are you talking about people who have been convicted of a crime and are calling you at dinner to sell you something or conduct a survey, or about people in Southeast Asia who have been kidnapped and are being forced to run scams? I've heard of this happening in Southeast Asia, but not with actual convicts, only kidnapping victims.

pocketarc 2y ago

I agree, and I feel like that goes for everything in general. It's like people who get mad at customer service people - the customer service person has absolutely nothing to do with the product that's giving you grief. Even the telemarketer, as you point out, doesn't want to be there (or even if they do, they may just be there because they have no better options and need to put food on the table). In life, there are very few situations where being unkind is ever worth it. And even here on HN, I sometimes get the impulse to argue with someone for whatever they said. What I do is I type out my little comment, then close the tab without actually posting it. Some things are better left unsaid, regardless of how satisfying they'd be to say.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
I should have been clearer that I meant the more-obviously illegal telemarketers, which frankly are the only ones left. Having said that, I have no moral problem with keeping them on the line and dragging out a conversation without being rude - every minute they're speaking with me is a minute they're not trying to convince my elderly grandmother to switch her power bill to some fly-by-night shitfarm.
psadauskas 2y ago
One thing that really stuck with me from the show The Good Place. The premise is that getting into heaven is a points-based system. You get points for doing good things, loose them for doing bad things, and when you die, if you have enough points, you go to heaven. Spoilers for season 3 ahead Used to be, for hundreds of years, you'd go visit your mom for her birthday. You'd be walking down the lane and see some wildflowers, so you pick them and bring them to her. +10 points. In modern society, to do the same you'd drive to the florist and buy some flowers, then drive to your mom's. +10 points. But the PE firm that bought the florist laid of 100s of workers, and -10 points for supporting them. And the flowers were picked by underpaid exploited immigrants, -10 points. And you dumped a bunch of CO2 in the air from your drive and gave a newborn asthma, -10 points. The show was saying that because of the choices that modern society and late-stage capitalism force upon us, nobody has gone to heaven for decades.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  I guess that show has been over for nearly 5 years, but it might still be a good idea to spoiler this reveal for folks who haven't gotten around to it so you don't lose 3 points.
  - psadauskas 2y ago
    Good idea. HN doesn't have a spoiler tag, but I added a warning.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    Freezes; looks around Hackernews... Wait a minute... THIS is The Bad Place!!! Seriously though, I was super-embarrassed a year or two ago, when I received a phone call and quickly became convinced that some scammer had a hold of me. I began questioning the poor lady on the phone and she gamely answered all my questions: location, company, including spelling her name and pronouncing it entirely differently. Many answers were quite vague and not satisfying to me at the time. But cold callers will absolutely hang up on that type of treatment! My ultimate question was asking if she was safe or being trafficked or captive or something, because I noticed there was a dog barking in the background. And she must've been WFH. Only after I wrote up a detailed play by play of the call and frantically reported it to several of my colleagues, It turned out to be a totally legitimate call and somebody had authorized the marketing campaign. She just had so little information, she was unable to answer me adequately. I was so embarrassed I can't even tell you.
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      I wouldn't be embarrassed. I'd be embarrassed on their behalf, maybe, for half-assing it so badly. I don't owe anybody who calls me out of the blue my time, especially when their shit isn't together. My mom answers the phone and actually talks to these people, and politely says "no thank you", whereas I don't even pick up the phone for certain area codes, and certainly don't engage in conversation if it's clear it's some bullshit I do not care about.
SkyBelow 2y ago
>It's like people who get mad at customer service people Except the customer service people willingly accept a job to act as an in-between so that any appropriate anger at a company is directed at an employee. To what extent do companies purposefully make use of this to prevent outrage directed at them? Back to the original topic, how much do the people leading these scams like pushing the story of the scammers being forced into it, because it increases the empathy that people feel towards the scammers and better allows the scams to continue? At what point does being kind shift into a sort of pacifist mindset, that while great if everyone used it, creates fertile ground for far worse approaches to human relationships to flourish and spread, leading to the quality of the average approach to human relationships declining?
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  > Back to the original topic, how much do the people leading these scams like pushing the story of the scammers being forced into it, because it increases the empathy that people feel towards the scammers and better allows the scams to continue? My feelings of pity towards the people being literally enslaved don't mean I don't want the scams to stop, or for the people to be liberated. It just means I don't scream profanities at someone who had their passport stolen.
rawgabbit 2y ago
"It's like people who get mad at customer service people - the customer service person has absolutely nothing to do with the product that's giving you grief." I used to believe this. But I have since changed my mind. Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for. A couple years ago, I was on the return flight from France to the US with wife and kid in tow. At the airport, I learned that the flight was a code-share. The airline I had booked with was meaningless. Meaning, the seats that I had paid extra for so we could sit together was no longer the seats that I picked. Even though I spent extra money to get what I asked for, I wasn't getting it because the real airline said <random paragraphs of verbiage>. Meaning myself, wife, and kid would no longer be sitting together on an 8 hour flight despite me paying extra for it, five months in advance. So I performed what I called my "angry frustrated customer routine". I became loud and agitated several times at the airport. Until I got my way and got what I had paid for.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  > Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for. And how much choice do those reps have? Their choice is "follow the playbook" or "go out and find a new job". It sounds like you yelled at someone who was not responsible for your original issue. You weren't performing. You were being.
  - rawgabbit 2y ago
    Eventually I got someone’s attention although I had to through five different people. Somebody did the right thing after I became loud. I termed it performing as I was deliberately trying to draw attention to myself from the other passengers.

xp84 2y ago

It's odd to me that people feel worse about unpleasant things happening specifically to convicted felons than to the general public. If you were being mean to a random jerk, and then he pointed out "By the way, I roughed up my wife last night" would you feel more bad about being mean? But you'd feel worse if it turned out he was doing time for that same crime? Note: I know that there could be people truly wrongfully convicted included in the set of all prisoners, but I certainly don't think that's common enough that they should be treated better than the average person. Second note: I also am not saying being a felon means one should be punished forever or anything. Just that, yeah, prison isn't meant to be fun, and being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment. It's what most people do outside of prison. Anyone who doesn't accept those terms, I fully support them clicking "Decline" by not commiting crimes.

gambiting 2y ago
>> prison isn't meant to be fun, and being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment. The problem I have with this is that last time I checked, nearly all sentences for people going to prison are incarceration, not incarceration+forced labour. It's the same as people cheering up prison rape because "they deserve it" or "if they don't like it, they should just stop committing crimes". Again, no one is ever sentenced to prison+prison rape, and failing to protect prisoners from each other is a massive failure of the state. And of course we have to acknowledge that having prison population working for close to nothing creates really perverse incentives, both on the side of the state as well as enterprises employing prisoners. In fact I'd argue that even if you feel that it's entirely fair and deserved you should still be against it to stop incentivising all the nasty shit happening around it. Prisoners should be sitting in prison, they shouldn't be working, or if they are it should be on public works not on anything that the state charges money for.
- xp84 2y ago
  > It's the same as people cheering up prison rape Respectfully, no it's not. Our society does in theory, and should, recognize a universal right to not be raped. It doesn't recognize, for anyone, a right to not have to work and still be taken care of, with the possible exception of the Royal Family. Though I understand most of their income comes from their historical ownership of vast lands, which is slightly different. > Prisoners should be sitting in prison, they shouldn't be working, Why should they only be sitting? Where's the free room and board for those who haven't committed felonies? If we aren't offering a UBI to random non-criminal lazy people, I don't think it's justified to recognize that as a right of prisoners specifically.

lurk2 2y ago

> I used to be somewhat mean to telemarketers, until I learned that some of them are prison laborers - getting paid pennies per hour to work in a prison call center. Are you talking about people who have been convicted of a crime and are calling you at dinner to sell you something or conduct a survey, or about people in Southeast Asia who have been kidnapped and are being forced to run scams? I've heard of this happening in Southeast Asia, but not with actual convicts, only kidnapping victims.