In Japan, the identity verification is quite strict to subscribe to a voice/text capable phone line. Still yet to get robocalls or spam texts. I'm sure they exist, but despite handing out my phone number to city hall and countless private businesses, I have yet to receive one.
On the other hand, enabling my Verizon eSIM is a surefire way to receive hourly "Potential Spam" calls, despite giving nobody outside of direct family my US phone number. Thankfully, I've convinced enough of my family to use Signal and we call/text through there instead.
Nowadays, I only turn on the Verizon line if I have to receive an SMS one-time code or call my broker.
Don't think the U.S. will ever solve this problem; people will just say something about privacy, the country's "too big" to combat spam at scale, etc. It's also too easy to get a phone number anonymously. A frequent phenomenon I've witnessed is that when someone blocks a phone number, the same caller contacts them again from a different number with the same area code.
Sadly does not apply to political organizations, which is probably the largest source of spam “mail” (to mention nothing of text/sms spam). The amount of crap stuffed into my mailbox every election season is insane.
The Facebook of 20 years ago is very different from the Facebook of today. 20 years ago, one’s Facebook timeline was filled with whatever your friends were posting. These days—and I think this started about a year ago when AI made it really easy for “influencers” to post AI Slop—one’s Facebook feed is filled by random AI Slop accounts posting nonsense like, as just one of many examples, 80% of the women sleeping with 20% of the men. [1]
I am now using a project called Facebook Clean My Feeds [2] which cleans out all of this AI Slop, so that my timeline is like the timeline I had, say, five years ago, with only posts from friends, accounts I follow, and ads. The only problem I see with this plugin is that it is a Greasemonkey script, so I have to trust it to not do anything nefarious.
> Financing available to qualified customers, subject to credit approval and credit limit, and requires you to select Citizens One Apple iPhone Payments or Apple Card Monthly Installments (ACMI) as your payment type at checkout at Apple. In order to buy an iPhone with ACMI, you must select one of the following carriers (but you cannot use a prepaid carrier plan): AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon. An iPhone purchased with ACMI is always unlocked, so you can switch carriers at any time, subject to your carrier’s terms.
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