J.P. Morgan is eliminating voicemail for most of its employees because it pays $10/month for the service. (Which is a ridiculous amount of money to pay considering that the marginal cost of adding an an extra voicemailbox is a few pennies worth of hard drive space, at the most.)
I personally hate voicemail anyway, and I wish people would leave me emails which take a lot less time to read than having to parse through a very slow voicemail system.
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Lion of the Blogosphere 
OT, bobo vacations are dangerous! better to go on a cruise and eat and get fat.
“She started a campaign on GoFundMe.com in an attempt to raise $1,300 for a group dedicated to the conservation of animals in South Africa. ‘I will be assisting rangers in tracking and monitoring animals, setting up camera traps, participating in poaching prevention techniques, providing support and assistance to veternarians [sic], and be involved in game capture and relocation,’ Chappell wrote in the description of her fundraiser.”
nypost.com/2015/06/03/family-and-friends-grieve-ny-native-mauled-by-lion/
rivelino
June 3, 2015 at 12:22 PM
Her voicemail would not have been of any significance!
Furthermore, you can’t indict a Lion for murder!
Her death is symptomatic of the malaise called American exceptionalism, an utter disregard for rules, coming from our egomaniacs and narcissists!
JS
June 3, 2015 at 2:13 PM
It appears she has a stretch of tattoo in her upper right arm, prole drift or not, Mericans are proles regardless.
JS
June 3, 2015 at 2:18 PM
The Germany company I work for never had voicemail implemented. All of your team colleagues can see if somebody’s trying to call you and pick up if you’re not able. Otherwise, you’d see a callback number pop-up on your phone. and can return the call when more convenient. Worst case people would write you an email after attempting to call you.
Enterprise products are always more expensive than retail products, thus I’m not surprised to see that voicemail costs $10/phone/mo.
DdR
June 3, 2015 at 1:46 PM
The $10 per month thing sounds like BS. These companies have off the shelf voip systems installed and owned outright, not leased. Enabling/disabling voicemail is an option setting. Personally, I like voicemail as email attachment.
sammysamsam
June 3, 2015 at 4:45 PM
Let’s not miss the point here. The point is that JP Morgan needs to SAVE MONEY because Jamie Dimon needs to make more. After all, the poor SOB only has a $27.5 million salary and a net worth of a billion! That’s not enough to roll with the hedge fund guys and the Russian oligarchs, so he’s got to squeeze where appropriate. Indeed, JP Morgan only just announced that they are cutting 5,000 jobs, because Jamie needs one of those $100M penthouse apartments on the 110th floor of those new oligarch buildings, and how can he possibly afford that on his crummy salary? Indeed, JP Morgan is down almost 20,000 employees since it’s peak. And rightly so! TOOS gotta TOOS, so screw you, little people, and screw your voicemail too.
peterike
June 3, 2015 at 2:19 PM
Bankster filth like Dimon should be handled in the manner used by the Chinese for big time white collar criminals, which is to be put to death. Fining these parasites millions or even billions is but pocket change, but start throwing them in the general prison population, and executing the worst of them, and justice will be served.
The founder of Silk Road just got life in prison for crimes which cannot hold a candle to those perpetrated by Wall Street parasites who do far more damage while facing no punishment.
Sanjuro
June 3, 2015 at 3:29 PM
Man, these are words of common sense. I can’t agree more. Death us what the bastard deserves.
Yakov
June 3, 2015 at 11:28 PM
OT: Lion, what are your thoughts on this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/education/john-paulson-gives-400-million-to-harvard-for-engineering-school.html?_r=0
According to Wikipedia, this guy started out studying philosophy, creative writing, and film production, at NYU!
IBC
June 3, 2015 at 2:44 PM
Sam Flynn: [Alan has come to visit Sam in his storage container/apartment, which has “Dumont Shipping” on the outside and overlooks the harbor] Why are you here, Alan?
Alan Bradley: [holds up his pager] I was paged last night.
Sam Flynn: Oh, man, still rocking the pager? Good for you.
Alan Bradley: [looks down at the pager and smiles, then back to Sam] Yeah, your Dad once told me I had to sleep with it, and I still do. Page came from your Dad’s office at the arcade.
Sam Flynn
June 3, 2015 at 2:56 PM
Who talks on the phone these days? I have not felt the need to quickly check my voice mail and answer someone back in years. There are easier way to communicate with people these days without leaving a voice mail that does not create a long term record, does not mess with electronic messaging, and probably does not work well with customer relations management software.
superdestroyer
June 3, 2015 at 3:08 PM
My Japanese company doesn’t have viocemail either. Instead, whoever is in the office is expected to pick up the phone of the person who is away from their desk.
Now imagine you’re there at odd hours, in a vast open-plan bullpen with dozens of cafeteria-style seats, and one phone in that open sea starts ringing.
By the time you’ve tracked it down, the caller has given up and is thinking that your company is ignoring him.
Kyo
June 3, 2015 at 3:54 PM
I can’t find the link, but I just read about some bank that used voicemail a lot because employees are unlikely to save it. So it’s likely to be deleted before being subpoenaed.
Anonymous
June 3, 2015 at 3:58 PM
JPM is only ending voicemails for their retail bank. Not for CIB. Who thought Voicemail would become another status marker in ‘fennance’.
uatu
June 3, 2015 at 4:49 PM
Lion, not going to write about the GS and Moelis young banker deaths? Any job that grinds the life out of you is prole. There is nothing self actualizing in putting in 80-100 hour weeks shifting cells around in excel.
IB = Prole.
uatu
June 3, 2015 at 4:59 PM
A JP Morgan employee should never leave her desk and, therefore, has no need for voicemail.
R.I.P. Voicemail
“her” tee hee
I was once familiar w/ a black female that got hired out of an HBCU for an IT job at JP Morgan in NYC in 1995 at $85K. She lasted one year.
E. Rekshun
June 3, 2015 at 5:24 PM
Good! Let ’em get rid of voicemail. You ever hear your own voice on one of those things? Mine was way less macho than I had originally assumed. When I first heard my voicemail, I thought the lines had been crossed. I was sitting there thinking, who is this pansy?
Dave
June 3, 2015 at 6:21 PM
When I was enmeshed in the straight commission life insurance pyramid scam, voice mail was the most evil thing in the world. When you called people trying to sell them life insurance they didn’t want or need, 99% of the time you’d get voice mail. Which in turn meant a 0% chance of ever making a sale. Meanwhile the brain dead sales manager would be ridiculing you for lacking a winner’s attitude. After all, if you WANTED to succeed, those people would be answering their phones!
Peter
ironrailsironweights
June 3, 2015 at 8:06 PM
If voicemail is replaced by email, I’m all for it.
If voicemail is replaced by people having to take messages for other people, I’m all against it.
BehindTheLines
June 4, 2015 at 12:40 AM
OT: The 421-a tax-rebate program that LotB often chides is likely going to change:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-developers-are-wary-over-fate-of-421-a-tax-break-1433380234
The article’s behind a paywall, but I’ll sum it up here:
– The 421-a tax program was started in 1971 to encourage developers to construct housing in Manhattan. At that time there wasn’t much construction going on.
– The tax exemption works as follows: the housing developer has to set aside a certain amount of “affordable” multifamily units (generally 20% of total units) when building his new apartment building. When the building is complete, the assessable value has obviously increased since the developer built a new building on either vacant/underutilized land plot. The old assessed value based on the vacant land is however frozen for a minimum of 10 years. Thus, the developer pays much lower property taxes than he normally would on a newly built multifamily.
– According to the WSJ many developers have found a loophole whereby they can take advantage of the 421-a program without having to set aside 20% of the built units for affordable housing. This does not surprise me.
– Currently the city forgoes about $1.11 billion in real-estate-tax revenue per annum on account of the 421-a program. These tax breaks line developers pockets while not really increasing the affordability of housing in New York. Moreover, the U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is investigating a potential relationship between the tax break and campaign contributions from specific real-estate firms.
– The 421-a program is set to expire on June 15th. Mayor de Blasio is proposing extending the 421-a tax exemption but toughing its affordable-housing requirements. Namely, developers would get tax breaks for 35 years if they set aside 30% of the units for affordable housing. Mayor de Blasio would increase the City’s Mansion Tax (tax on homes over $1 million) to offset the increased cost of the 421-a program. De Blasio is against a straight renewal of the program.
– Albany, which needs to sign off on the extension, is wary of touching the program given the scrutiny by U.S. Attorney Preety Bharara. Additionally, Governor Cuomo wants a guarantee for higher wages for construction workers. All developers are fighting this proposal.
– It appears that the program will be extended as is on June 15th, but Cuomo and de Blasio will both duke it out during 2015 to modify the program some how.
My take: do developers really need incentives to construct housing when Manhattan’s vacancy rate currently sits at 1%? Forgoing a billion dollars a year in tax revenue that could be put to better use than lining developers pockets is wasted money.
DdR
June 4, 2015 at 10:07 AM
“Mansion tax” is funny, because there are studio apartments in Manhattan that cost more than a million dollars.
Lion of the Blogosphere
June 4, 2015 at 10:19 AM
America, and NYC, especially, suffer from bouts of obsolescence. There are many things that are outdated, and should be replaced or discarded, both in the tangible and intangible realm.
JS
June 4, 2015 at 12:55 PM