not a perfect process... but what is seen in the video seems reasonable

as an american living overseas for many years, i've seen american bureaucracy at its worst in our consulates, embassies and trade offices ... what is seen in this video pales in comparison

try this one on for size before complaining of invasive, unfair requirements and possible conspiracy:

my son is born overseas and i want to apply for his us citizenship / passport

i try to phone the embassy to ask what documents i will need to bring by three-hour train ride - i get a 10-minute phone tree that answers nothing and simply refers me to their website, which is rattled-off so quickly that i need to listen to the 10-minute phone tree two more times to jot the url down

the website explains that answers cannot be given over the phone, and i can only speak to a human in an emergency circumstance - the website gives me some ambiguous answers, and states that if i have questions i will need to make an appointment online - an online calendar appears showing me possible appointment dates/times - all monday to friday between 9-11am and 2-4pm... also the american citizen services section is closed for all american holidays AND those of the host country - yay for having to take unpaid time off from work!

i get a date and time to appear, and i try to collect all relevant information to only make a single visit

at the appointed time, i appear and am told to surrender my bag and phone, pass through a metal detector, and then i am frisked - upon arriving at the proper office, i am given a number and told to wait - when my number is called, i approach the proper window and speak to an 'american' through a speaker system embedded in the 1-inch bulletproof glass

i have somehow managed to have most all of the necessary documents (not to the website's credit, but to my overkill), but one requirement stops me... they don't accept that i am a us citizen... what the hell?!

i show them my original us birth certificate, my valid us passport, my valid us driver's license, my social security card, proof of my us address, my us high school and university diplomas, my voter registration card, etc...

all are unacceptable proof...

i am told that to satisfy their requirement, they will need at least five-years' worth of us school transcripts from a single us location... since i was a military brat, and changed schools often, this was an impossibility

i finally get through to a supervisor who i had phone my state senator, who is a family friend, and he rips them one and they finally relent

clear? nope... one further requirement is that my son's notarized foreign birth certificate needs to be translated into english and notarized - i have the translation but not the notary seal (this can only be done at the embassy) - i ask them to notarize it and they inform me that i will have to leave and mail it to them with a check and pre-paid, express-mail return envelope - once i receive that, i should set up a new appointment and return... with their assuring me that the process (CRBA) would be complete at that point

i do what they said, and two weeks later I receive the now-notarized translation and set up a new appointment - i return at the stipulated time with all the proper documents and go to pay the fee...

then i am told that my infant son has to be present as well... and so the process can't be completed at that time

i return home, a 6-hour roundtrip commute by train, and set up a new appointment... returning with my 6-month-old son so that they can see him through the bullet proof glass, and then i can pay the exorbitant fee

as if all of this isn't enough, the cashier will not provide change... and they want me to leave, set up a new appointment and return with exact change - i offer to leave 'a tip' of close to us$20 in order to finalize this ridiculous process without having to return... they refuse

having read all of this... can you still complain about what this woman and her son had to go through?

nonsense

>> ^Ryjkyj:

>> ^Lawdeedaw:
>> ^KnivesOut:
I can't believe this hasn't already been posted. Amazing.

I know! But it doesn't seem to be getting votes... That makes me sad... Any suggestions?

Hey, so far it's beating the votes/hour ratio of my video of the MAN WHO WAS CURED OF AIDS.
Plus, I voted for it, ya know, so there's somethin'.
PS, I up-voted for booby-petunias, but I stayed for poop-beer.


Actually, I have self confidence issues--if you can believe that. I am just glad the poop-beer was good for you.

@ Ponceleon--yeah, supposedly he does this every Monday. But his epic rap battles are almost all taken by other members though. I still can't believe they didn't get more votes though--but my humor may be different. Who knows.

But's its off to bed now or else I will fall asleep and not wake up in three hours...

Actually, before that, why do two thumbnails show up? One on the main sift page, and one when you actually play the video? I think the video one is better but; I suck at computers--even the basics and therefore know not how to change it.

Follow the radioactive cloud via the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI): link (high load)

Take a look at screencaps made over the last couple of hours, Ibaraki prefecture, south of Fukushima: 1:00, 1:20, 4:30, 4:40, 4:50. The wind turns and Ibaraki prefecture goes from ~40 nGy/h up to 5000 nGy/h -- and that's ~160km from Fukushima I NPP, so it's most likely the cloud passing by.

If you convert it 1:1 into nSv/h just to get a rough picture, it's 5 μSv/h. Average annual dose over here is 2 mSv. That's 400 hours at 5 μSv/h for your annual dose, a little less than 17 days.

Now, it only peaked around 5000 nGy/h and dropped again after the cloud moved on, so it's basically negligable in the short term. But that's 160km from the most likely source of the radiation. Some readings from up close would be interesting. They ought to be considerably higher, don't they?

Unfortunatly, all the entries for Fukushima are marked as "under servey" (sic). Last I heard was about 680 μSv/h recorded at some monitoring posts northwest of the power station: annual dose in three hours, how wonderful for the poor sobs trying to prevent the defecation from hitting the oscillation.

Happy Early New Year! Well early by three hours on my clock.

Upvote for this, because this G20 was a giant waste of money. All the "big" things they wanted to do got pushed back to Seoul. As for some Canadian law quick facts. In Canada the police can actually arrest you for twenty four hours without charging you. This has been around since I was a kid, and before, because the War Measures act circumvented this, holding people indefinitely. The Public Works Protection act (which has now turned out to be misled by police,) did the same thing in some ways, but people not charged were held to a max of twenty three hours, unless they were charged.

This is a good piece, with some great questions. Some uninformed facts, but a good piece.

There's a lot more going on there than what you see on the video. The thing people should be concerned about is what happened less than a hundred feet from that line.

The cops were looking for Anarchists with weapons and incendiary devices. They know this, because they have footage of people in black hoods and face wraps, who dropped their weapons (pick axes, hammers etc.) and their things to set more cars on fire, and then changed clothes to blend in with the crowd. That's what we know.

We also know that this tactic is used to disperse the crowd, or make a run forward and snatch someone they want, who is within reach.

Also, there were massive protests that happened all weekend, which were peaceful, and when the jack ass anarchists showed up, they separated from them. The outter perimeter fence was not breached once during the weekend, and no major injuries to the people or the cops.

Things to ask questions about are: Why was that group of a hundred folks or so held at Queen and Spadina in a thunderstorm for three hours, and then just let go? That's the biggie. People just out walking their dog or going to dinner, all of a sudden confined into a tight space and held there.

I'm a big metro supporter, and they did an amazing job this weekend. That incident needs to be investigated though. The one thing you can be sure of, it was an OPP decision, and those cops are bad. Bill Blair has to take the heat for it, because it's a United Security force. That's also speculation and conjecture from my stand point, but I'm paranoid enough to think Fantino had a hand in that somehow.

tl&dr

Metro Cops did a great job, one bad incident needs to get looked at, no one seriously hurt.

edit: I also forgot the incident which Steve Paikin saw, which was not cool at all, with a journalist from the Guardian being assaulted by cops. That needs to be investigated as well. As for the other incidents, re. The Real News journalist who got punched, they did tell him to move back. You may be a journalist that doesn't give you the right to disobey the orders given. And check out the police footage when it goes live, and you can see them pick out the anarchists in the crowd. They lady hit by the horse was told to get out of the area again and again. If you want to stand in front of a charging horse line, you have to accept your consequences. It wasn't a surprise, they were very clear in what they intended to do. The surprise came at QUeen & Spadina.

Yeah, the smugness of Apple is spot on. I own a number of Mac products myself, but I can attest to their hugely frustrating failures. They do not "just work". PCs are nothing to write home to Jobs about, but their consumer base doesn't consist of smug geeky hipsters who* claim superiority.

In fact, just this past week I bought an Airport Express. It's advertised as "plug and play" yet it took me nearly three hours to get the damn thing to work, and I'm not what you'd call technically ignorant.

*I hope I'm using that right. I cannot determine if it relates to the subject or object in that sentence. Man, I feel dumb.

^yep, i still think that was a good use of three hours.

I gave AA a shot a few years back, until I came to the conclusion that it's not conservative talk radio that I hate, but rather the talk radio format itself.

Talk radio is as dumb a media format as media formats come. Listening to some blowhard bullshit off the cuff about politics for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, 12 months a year is not something I'm interested in doing, regardless of the political views of the host. I think even your intellectual Chomsky types would be hard pressed to come up with three hours of commentary a day for weeks on end, let alone the rejects they dig up to host these AM shows.

I have to take this failure as a sign of intelligence of my ideological brethren.

If you want news, commentary, culture and politics on the radio, public radio is by far your best bet.

Weird. Didn't feel almost three hours long when I saw it. But then, I had a lot of fun, probably because it was on a HUGE IMAX 3d screen, and I wasn't overthinking it, or going in expecting too much... >_>

god dammit, every time i go "that's as low as they can go" i kick myself. then i read people saying that and go haha retard, they always steep lower (to make myself feel better of course) and then Beck and Co. do it again... why do i still get surprised, why lord, why?

PS. Could you tell Mr. Woods to go home now, my mom and him have been working on her stroke for three hours now and i can barely hear my ann coulter

Three, because you posted this three hours ago.

>> ^Payback:
Some of us are gainfully employed and realize the amount of time she spends saving $267 we earn $500.


The median household income in the United Sates is ~$43k, which is ~$20/hr assuming 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. So... if she's an average American and she's spending fewer than ten hours a week clipping coupons, she's doin' pretty good for herself. And she gets to be around the kids while clipping.

Of course, the $267 is kind of an outlier (she said it was her record), but even if only the drugstore is more representative, if that took less than three hours of clipping for that one single visit, she's doing well.

That's crazy! A normal game of Monopoly for my family took well over three hours, but a Monopoly tourny?! Must take YEARS to complete!

Department of Homeland Security. That's reason enough to not hold the Olympics in the USA. I'm a Caucasian male in his mid-twenties with no criminal record and I don't dress like a hippie or a terrorist, yet whenever I arrive at a US airport, I am treated like one.

On my first post-9/11 trip to the US, I was disgusted by the security measures at my departing airport in Düsseldorf, Germany. But compared to the arrival at JFK, it was a fucking breeze. Heavily armed guards on an airport? As if we landed in bloody Beirut.

We traveled in a group of four and one of us, a French of Tunesian heritage, was snatched and detained in a backroom for three hours while the rest of us where searched thoroughly and stripped of all electronic equipment (notebooks, mobile phones, MP3 players). They made an image of the only unencrypted HDD and kept the other three notebooks. They were mailed to our home addresses four months later. All the while we were barked at and ordered around. Now, all four of us spoke English rather well and were well dressed, so I can't even imagine what it's like for many others.

Your DHS demands more information about me in advance to any flight than my own bloody mother knows. And that's from a country that is part of the Visa Waiver Program. Fuck, crossing the intra-German border prior to '89 was more pleasant than travelling into the US as a foreigner. Biometric passport, Orwell would be proud.

Oddly enough, the Travel Promotion Act, intended to lure visitors back into the US, aims to impose a $10 fee upon entry into the US. That's some fucking logic.

Edit: "Data helps prevent crime before it happens. Smarter public safety for a smarter planet." <<-- that's an IBM info tablet on airports and again, Orwell would be proud.