I think it's more than incompetence or accountability sinks; The DMV (and similar offices; Service {Canada, Ontario}, etc) are also the points at which the bureaucratic system of government interfaces with actual people as well. Boundary-layer components in any system are complicated because they have to distill complex input into abstractions understood by the system.
I recently emigrated to Canada from the States and exchanged my US state driver's license for one in my now-home province, but there were a ton of hoops to jump through to add my US driving history to my provincial record. The process seemed to be somewhat exceptional as the supervisor for the DMV-equivalent had to guide the reps I spoke to on how to append the multiple-states-of-history that I had to offer.
That's just a microcosm of what it wakes to distill the complexity of a person's life into pieces of verified information that a government can ingest. That's a lossy, complicated process that relies on both the 'customer' and the agent having a matching mutual understanding of what points of information can be agreed upon or, indeed, offered.
In some cases it's not clear, either; my wife was told initially that she would have to hand over her license from two states ago to update her history, because the province's documentation showed it was still active (despite the fact that our immediately-previous state merrily punched a big VOID hole in it, and that it was expired), but when she returned after digging up her voided license they said they didn't even need to see it. That last bit was possibly 'incompetence'; possibly on the part of the Canadian agency, for not being consistent on if they needed to see the license or not, or the US states, for not being up to date on their record keeping, but again: these are complex systems tryng to maintain consistency. It's reasonable to expect noise.
Starting in four days, you will need, to board a commercial flight in the US or enter a federal government facility, either a passport, an 'enhanced' or 'real ID' driver's license, or one of a small class of alternatives. This has increased the burden on state DMVs, and any resulting deepening of the accountability sink is at least partly due to not doing anything to mitigate a predictable situation.
The DMV is frequently just a case of under resourcing. For the most part, once you get to the counter your business can be handled in a few minutes. It’s the fact that it takes a while to get to the counter that’s the issue.
We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to help accelerate our AI backend. We'd like someone who can jump in and accelerate/own large components of the development.
For someone London based, this could very likely turn into a FT role.
Must have highly relevant experience and strong references.
> It's not a shadowy cabal; it's really just the fear of going out of business.
Thanks for the insight, I was wondering about this point.
I generally tend to try and attribute what _feels_ like coordinated cabal behaviour to general incompetence or lack of control. This feels like one of those situations.
I've worked around banks and this erratic behaviour is pretty common, and mostly due to short term personal motivations, and lack of coordination rather than an excess of coordination (i.e. collusion - which is not to say that banks aren't guilty on this point, but I think mostly not the case)
Wondering around a new city today I had a similar thought.
Prior to an iPhone I’d have the general lay of a city memorised within 10min of landing, using a paper tourist map, and probably never feel disoriented, let alone lost.
This morning I walked 2 blocks further than needed (of a 1 block walk) because I wasn’t at all oriented while following Google maps.
I won’t spell out the AI comparison, other than I think more “apps” will be created, and predictable “followed the GPS off a bridge” revelations.
Do you think the US flip made a meaningful difference (presuming you did it for US customer/investor access)? Lucanet is EU, so maybe it complicated it in the end
We started as a US company in 2019 to make fundraising easier, and I think this did have a material impact. It's operationally quite annoying, but chances are that we would have had to do it eventually, to efficiently employ US people without paying Deel extortionate fees
If you want to do it properly you need to setup an inter-company loan agreement, transfer pricing, you need accountants and tax specialists for both UK and US, ... so the costs will definitely be significant. I don't think there are any shortcuts. Ideally, you find an accountant that is familiar with this setup.
It did make the acquisition process a bit more difficult + US lawyers are more expensive than UK/German lawyers.
It's still worth it IMO given how much easier fundraising gets.
I couldn’t make much of atmo given the SF constraint, but I use the UK2 model for UK forecasts and it seems to be a similar level of detail and does very well taking topographical and micro weather nuance into account. Depending on your location you might find an equivalent short range model
I think it is looks to be very good, and probably the best I’ve seen having given it a cursory search recently to see what was possible.
In terms of what I’d like to see, open ocean waves generally have more rhythm, I’d be very interested to see a simulation of 15 knots of wind blowing over 1km for a few hours and see if that matches what I observe, which would be relatively organised wave trains (sets) that build and disperse.
DMV sounds more like incompetence than design. Compare with airline where the system is “better” when you have no recourse.