Android prompts me to "Block and Report Spam" for spam phone calls, in both the Phone app for regular phone calls and the Voice app for calls through Google Voice. There is no way to report spam in either app without blocking the number. Spammers and scammers change their phone numbers frequently. Daily or more, in the case of sophisticated large operations. Those numbers get reassigned to innocent users, who will forever be blocked from calling me. "Dumb" phone number blocks should only last for maybe a month or a year, not forever. And we should have "smart" blocks, that sync to phone number registration databases and expire when the number changes hands. This is going to become an increasingly impactful problem if we keep using phone numbers as identifiers while most phone number users don't keep the same number for decades.

People often ask why I contribute to open source projects or otherwise work on building automated tooling. They see me spending hours to automate a task or fix a bug that take seconds to do or avoid manually, in a way that the original XKCD comic says won't pay off. The disconnect seems to be that the comic and those people only consider time it saves *me*, not time it saves the tens to thousands to millions of other people who will use the script or patch or whatever when I publish it. So, here's a version of [xkcd.com/1205](http://xkcd.com/1205) updated for making decisions that benefit a thousand people instead of just one.