For better or worse, that aspect is never going away. Places with less funds, like rural counties and cities, rely on their police to do everything that gets called in to 911 and isn't fire/ems/construction (which, thankfully, they have dedicated teams/people for).
PickTheStick
It's funny you say that. On all the possibly scammy websites that I sign up for, I used Marc xxx as my name, and somehow I did get some texts using that name. I still wonder how they connected my cell# to throwaway emails and a made up name.
It probably falls under the 'not illegal' category. They got the number somehow, and I would bet it's from some stupid agreement that lets a company sell his number and whoever buys it is allowed to send messages to it.
It's also hard to get harassment charges for these, since realistically it is hard to contact the assholes and tell them to stop sending messages, which is required for most cases. There's also the issue that harassment needs to be a repeated thing (and usually after being told to stop) from the same source/conspiracy. If you could prove all of these different messages were from the exact same organization, or that each entity sending the messages had collaborated, you could possibly get a judge to agree that harassment took place. Then, of course, your issue becomes the question of who did the harassment. If the judge/jury believes that it was a particular individual at the corporation, maybe that person could be prosecuted, but if they only will say that it was the entity, like a PAC or LLC or inc. or whatever, you're boned. No one holds business/political entities accountable.
All that to say... those of us who get these messages are boned, with little legal recourse. I just block the numbers and delete. It seems like it works, because I haven't gotten any messages like OP did for the last year or so. They must reuse numbers to send texts.
Yes, so much this. Every time I have to do something in the engine bay, I get a friend. A six-pack, a dinner, or whatever other small favor they need in return returns gold for pennies in the investment. If only the damn engineers would have the incentive to make working in the engine as easy as changing the oil (though Subaru even fucked that one up), life would be a breeze.
Because it matters to the person in the category. If you're a young lad or lass in love, and you are considering marriage, knowing that only a quarter of the marriages similar to yours end in divorce is a hugely different take than half of them.
Also, the 50% statistic is from all marriages, not first-time marriages. The figure goes way up due to people being divorced, married, divorced again, ad nauseam. I remember the first-time marriage divorce rate being somewhere in the range of 27-33%.
One day, I'll play all the different white wolf games, FATE, and whatever else is in there. One day soon...
Credit unions aren't always perfect either. I switched unions because one started adding fees.
Don't forget that there used to be literal assassins that would kill you if you tried to sell (as a retailer, obviously the resale by individuals was so small-time they didn't care and hard to track) under the price you were told to sell it.
That's a culture-thing. I'm a member of two forums that are still pretty active. One views dead thread revivals as amusing, the other almost literally has a celebration in-thread when it happens as all the members with older posts in it come piling in. Heck, the second forum has a thread so active that people literally ask for, and get, recaps for the last X amount of time for it.