alt Hacker NewsPush based advertising needs to be outlawed. Period. It's one thing if I'm actually looking for something to get your sales funnel, it's completely another to normalize behavior that incents shoehorning advertising into activities completely divorced from the act of searching for businesses to transact with.
I'll call you. Stop trying to force yourself on me.
Absolutely. Its also an arms race - if one company advertised like this, maybe they'd get an advantage. But given that everyone does it, they're back to where they started, relative to each other (and also relative to the wider economy!)