Re: Scale? More like Hide...
C'est la vie?
886 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2021
Both Maryland and Virginia gave land for the District of Columbia, but Virginia reneged. So the nation's capitol is sort of a weird shape. It has a lot of nice museums in it, and like you said, chaos.
I lived in the city of Seattle for 20 years, which is in Washington State, at the opposite end of the country. Although it didn't exist when George Washington was alive, it still has places named named after places he lived (think "Mount Vernon") everywhere. I have no idea why.
I was in a waiting area of a hospital in Thailand, and a robotic floor waxing robot came to a screeching stop a few centimeters from where I was standing. The robot apologized to me both in Thai and English, did a 180 and whirred away. I thought this was hilarious. The Thai patient next to me didn't. Well, to quote Jay May, "humor doesn't translate".
And then, if that's not enough, Newark airport in New Jersey operated for a time with one (1) air traffic controller when there was supposed to be 13 air traffic controllers on duty. Maybe America can just "borrow" a few cyber security experts and air traffic controllers for just a few years from you guys?
My aging 25" CRT color TV had a dim picture, so I dragged the monster to the local TV shop to have the picture tube "rejuvenated". The guy there explained that they overheated the CRT filament which would "broil electrons off of the anode, giving the picture tube extra life". Damn, it really did greatly improve the picture brightness for a few years.
I hope this has at least a vague similarity to the subject of this story.
SONY tried that crap with gamers about a year ago. Games players that bought games that were suddenly pulled. I think a class action lawsuit threat forced SONY to refund those affected.
I'm an old engineer now, but man I miss the days when all my software ran locally. And I OWNED my music on records.
Actually, the social security web site has long had "office hours" before DOGE. But the switch from username and password to login.gov is only for users in the United States. Expats are required to use something called "ID.ME", something I found out by many hours of research and analyzing a slew of incomprehensible error messages. But wait, there's more! My country will not allow any requests to ID.ME - the page is blocked by Cloudfllare. I can access the ID.ME help page, but it only uses bots. I asked the bot for an agent, and the bot said ID.ME has no human support whatsoever.
Waiting on the phone for hours for Social Security support in the USA is near impossible when calling from SE Asia. Dang, what was so terrible about a simple user name and password in the first place?