Personnally, I started never answering to any unknown number (masked caller id or even just numbers not in my contacts). When it’s legit, caller leave a message on voicemail. Scammer, direct marketing,… never leave messages. Ok I still get the call and have to ignore or reject it (but it’s better than answering and having a commercial starting his speech).

Somehow related, I have also questions as an European (Belgian) who then observe what is happening right now in the USA with curiosity (and fear to be honest). Please don’t take any offense in this question, the purpose is, for me, to understand, not criticize Americans at all. I work with plenty of them who don’t look stupid at all (but I’ll never dare to speak politics with colleagues, a bit of a “touchy” topic with people you don’t know well).

In my country, we have got a new government almost at the same time Trump was inaugurated. They plan to do some changes to the way some aspects of our society is, changes that are a bit difficult for some categories of the population but really nothing like in the USA. Anyway, since January, there have been strikes, protests, people going in the streets,…

Why are we not seeing such things in the USA? I would have thought that there will be millions of people in the streets protesting against the F-gesture done to democracy, LGBT rights, women rights, nonsense with economy (tarriff, that at the end the “middle class workers” will have to pay) and foreign politics but, as far as we are aware here in Europe, I seen no such protests. The only action I seen is some boycott of Tesla.

• Is it a cultural difference with Europe (and other parts of the world) to not go in the streets?
• Are those occurring but the medias do not inform us on it?
• Are people scared to protest?
• Or, people just don’t care or are even, in majority, happy with what happens now?

Same in Belgium, no scale involved, just a handled scanner you bring in the shop. At checkout you give (or put back depending on the supermarket) the scanner, then an algorithm tell you if you’re elected to a partial control (in which case a cashier scan some of the articles, again there are some rules depending on the brand of supermarket - some ask rescan 5 random products, some 10, some explicitly list most valuable items, some require the cashier to count items,…). I say an algorithm because experience show it’s not just random (for example in the supermarket brand I most often go, if you cancel an item on the scanner, you’re 100% sure to have a control).