Off-topic, but since you mention it, I've always been confused about what Americans always seem to be doing at the DMV. It seems to be a staple of pop culture that people are always there and the queue is always very long, but I've never known what anyone is actually trying to achieve.
The DVLA in the UK doesn't have a high-street presence. I took my driving test once, then received my driving licence in the post. When it needs renewing, I can do it online. I tax my car online. MOTs (annual vehicle safety tests) happen at any local garage. I've never needed a new numberplate, but I think you can buy those online too.
So what is it you all have to go to the DMV for? Because it sounds horrible.
Because of the importance of driving in the US (right or wrong), drivers licenses are used as the primary identification document. It looks like there’s a similar use of the DL in the UK for buying tobacco.
In the US, you need to prove both residency and identity. To prove your identity in the US, many people don’t have passports, so they bring a tranche of documents to the DMV office. To prove residency, we typically bring utility bills, leases, etc. Usually people prefer to go in person so they don’t lose these documents and get feedback if they don’t have the right stuff.
It looks like in the UK, since driving licenses are administered nationally, you don’t have the same patchwork of 50 different organizations with different requirements and rules, and the process is much simpler.
I haven’t been to a DMV for 10 years. I can renew vehicle registration, renew my license, and so on online. When I bought a new car, the dealer handled all DMV stuff like getting plates.
I’m supposed to be due to get a new “enhanced” license that is good for air travel within the US, but I have a number of other documents (passport, global entry) that serve the same purpose so I avoid the DMV as much as possible.
In my state the DMV is probably worse than a checkup at the dentist, but not as bad as a weekend with the in-laws.
You hit uppon an important difference between the US and most of Europe/the UK.
An system for tracking who your citizens are. In the Netherlands, where I live, the municipalities cooperate to keep track of all citizens, and their address (or lack thereof). This means that you never need to convince any beaurocrat that your identity exists. You might need to authenticate that you are indeed who you claim to be, but that is normally trivial (Show government photo id).
The UK should not be included in here. There is no official national system for keeping track of citizens and municipalities barely cooperate. This means you have to keep proving your address for things like an opening a bank account.
If a person does not (and does not want to) drive, how do they identify themselves? Where I live, everyone gets a government issue ID card, and the ID number is the citizen's primary key. Our government is still largely paper-driven, but there's little you can't get done if you show up in person with your national ID.
Every state in the US has some form of non-driver ID. They call them different things - but they're still usually administered by the state's DMV, since that's the office that is equipped to deal with identification procedures anyways.
In the US we don't have a standard form of national ID.
Driving licences are also the primary form of ID in the UK (alongside passports, which are more expensive). People who can't (or don't) drive can still get a provisional licence, which only allows driving under the supervision of an appropriate adult but works exactly the same for ID purposes.
In my experience, the DMV (or whatever its called) likes to see you in person for license renewals every so often. Get a new photo, make sure you can see the eye chart.
I've always gone into the DMV when I purchased a vehicle from a private party. In California, it has taken me a couple visits; the first visit with the title and sale documentation, the second with the emissions test documentation that the seller was legally suppossed to provide at the time of the sale but practically, the buyer must provide to register the vehicle. Maybe you can do this by mail, but if you do it in person, you walk out with documents so you can legally drive the car. If you buy a car from a dealer, they take care of this paperwork for you, which used to mean having someone stand in line at the DMV and process a bunch of transactions, but now they can typically do it electronically.
If you move to another state, you need to get a new license and retitle and reregister your car; this usually happens in person, and most states have a requirement to do it in under a month. If your car has a loan, expect multiple trips to get it registered... the first trip will let you know what you need from the finance company; the second will bring that back and get registration; then when you eventually pay off the loan and get the title, you'll need to bring that in so you can get the title issued in your current state.
In the US we don’t have a single DMV, but rather 50 separate DMV’s with varying degrees of efficiency and online capabilities. But in my state most routine things no longer require a physical visit. Licensing is pretty tightly controlled because in the US the card serves as a primary source of identification in the absence of a national ID card.
Remember US has no National ID card. America has 50 states, each state has its own ID and DMV.
Plenty of Americans move states, remember some of our states are reasonably small enough that you might commute to the same NYC job from any of 4 different states. I have a friend who sequentially moved NY->NJ->CT->NY in something like 6 years.
Also I forget why but when I moved WITHIN a state 10 years ago, it required a DMV trip. edit: apparently within NY moving COUNTIES at the time required DMV trip (insane)
Oh and the recent push for "Real ID" enhanced IDs requires a trip to DMV. I've avoided this and just been prepared to fly domestically with my passport.
Real ID requirements started 20 years ago, which I suppose is “recent” in government terms, but not really. In some states everyone has already had a Real ID compliant license for years. In others, notably California, they’ve been kicking the can down the road the entire time.
I mean, they say they're going to start enforcing RealID 'requirements' this month, but given how often it's been delayed, and the current executive, I think it's fair to wait and see.
We have kiosks at grocery stores etc where we can get renew documents and print new license tabs etc, you can also do most things online and receive your new documents in the mail.
You really only need to go there for driving tests (for teenagers or immigrants), completing private vehicle sales, and other odds and ends
What I always found interesting is going there and people arguing with the workers about not having proof of insurance or a clear title etc.
It's different in every state, but mostly it's an outdated stereotype that still sticks around even though it's not really indicative of reality. Most states let you do almost everything online, and when you do have to go in you can usually schedule an appointment and not wait in line at all.
Lol. I went the NY DMV a month ago to exchange my out of state license. Even with an appointment, a preapproved application completed online, and all the correct paperwork I had to wait 2 hours.
My experiences with the CA DMV were similar. Only in IL have I had quick, easy visits to the DMV
Usually dependent on the area and their population density. I know people who would drive out to more rural areas just to get a quicker DMV experience.
The whole taking appointments but still making you wait kills me a little inside though. There's a world where these processes could be so seamless.
I had an ok time with the NY DMV. I think it just depends on when you go. If less people would go when it was busy, I guess the reputation would be better, haha!
> MOTs (annual vehicle safety tests) happen at any local garage.
Oh, I think we should have that in Croatia, since I'm doing yearly car service at my dealership and than still need to take my car to our national inspection station to get the car certificate renewed. Not sure why can't they organize a system were certified car garages can also inspect the vehicle and notify the Center for Vehicles. Maybe that would allow for more cheating but it's not like inspection stations employees are currently immune to taking a small bribe to overlook minor issues during the inspection.
The incentives are very different - private garages would be very incentivized to find nothing wrong with your car and business would gravitate to those with the least checks. The government stations would not have that incentive (actually maybe incentivized the other way - to make up problems that can be waved away with money, depending on how corrupt things are there)
I'd have thought the private garages would also be incentivised to find problems - that they can then offer to fix for an additional fee.
As it is, I think most garages that offer MOTs in the UK are fair and honest, as the test is relatively strictly regulated, but I'm sure people do get ripped off.
The Netherlands has private garages do the yearly recertification inspection (APK here).
There was a recent rise in 'remote inspections' where the garages had figured out tricks to avoid spot checks. This involved tricks like 'file the inspection very close before 17:00' or 'file the inspection result right before an actual true inspection' because apparently spot checks look at the last inspection.
They noticed the tricks as patterns, and are handling it. My point is, there is an incentive for private garages to do fraud here.
As a fellow Brit I’ve always been puzzled by this too.
The DVLA website and online processes are very good. Which is rare to say about a government IT system. I don’t think I’ve ever had any problems for a decade (or two?) dealing with everything driving-related fully online.
I expect since we just have one single system, and a smaller number of possible workflows/situations to cover, it’s easier to create a central online system. In the US, with 50 different variations perhaps it’s a harder problem to solve.
> I've always been confused about what Americans always seem to be doing at the DMV
Getting your car registered in your state of residence, renewing your driver's license, stuff like that. The exact details of the process can vary wildly from state to state, but no matter where you live, it's gonna be a waiting room in a drab government office.
Here in Wisconsin, I got a title for my car, and plates and tags all online. Never stepped foot in the DMV. This is incredibly high tech stuff by state government standards.
You usually don’t. Licenses can be renewed online until you reach a certain age in some states where you have to go in to take an eye test. Car dealers will handle registration. If you buy from a private party you have to go in.
In metropolitan areas that have make you get car inspections like Atlanta, you go to a third party where the price is regulated and they send the results in. You still can do everything on line
Similarly, Americans expect people to be aware that California is not "the South", despite being on the southern border, and that the Midwest is actually in the eastern half of the country.
Basically the names of geographical regions don't always make sense.
Quora's ChatGPT answers are, as far as I can tell, more often confidently wrong than they are right. For example, for the question "Which monarch in history had the highest regnal number?" it generates
> The monarch with the highest regnal number in history is Sobhuza II of Swaziland, who reigned for 82 years and 254 days
which is clearly incorrect (2 is not a very big number), and yet gets its own nice answer highlight at the top of Google (where the AI generated nature of the answer is not noted at all).
Possibly a better way to achieve a similar level of prettiness would be (ab)use of vim's conceal feature. Through its judicious use, the author can have "forall" appear to them as ∀, "alpha" as α, etc., without imposing these symbols on their colleagues.
Agree, there is definitely a trade-off, I certainly don't know how to input those characters quickly even if the author states it is faster in Vim and I am not a Vim newbie. Also, if you get a stacktrace in a log file, do they still print nicely? Do they still print nicely if I'm viewing that stacktrace on a build server's web interface? There are probably some number of utilities that this code is "viewed" by that don't correctly handle non-ascii unicode and the usability would suffer at the expense of the beauty/terseness. They do look pretty though.
Honestly, I would have had this concern ~10 years ago, but it's 2023. Unicode is ubiquitous, to the point that you'd need to pretty aggressively go out of your way to find things breaking due to it.
I agree, in Kitty I'd have to hit C-S-u and then type fora... to get ∀. Good thing I can just type forall and the formatter replaces the keyword with the symbol for me :) Same for transforming othey symbols, like :: and =>, <=, ->, <- into single characters.
Well the article mentions Ctrl-k+FA to put in the ∀ symbol, but it should be fairly easy to make it output "forall" instead and then use the concealing feature to turn it into ∀. That would get you the best of both worlds, no?
> I don't understand what the numbers in the lower corner mean
If you tap on the numbers in the lower corner, you can cycle through various options including % read. My personal preference is for time left in chapter.
Some Amazon Kindle books DO have "real" page numbers. It's an additional feature that must be supported. The problem of page numbers on reflowable text is much more difficult than it may appear.
Not totally trivial, sure, but I have a hard time believing that it's difficult. Maybe for complex documents, but just plain text? Not really. I use Moonreader on Android, it shows page numbers with no trouble.
Ok, well it has been available for zero books I've read on Kindle, and 100% of books I've read on moon reader. Whatever the challenge might be, other people have figured it out and Amazon hasn't. It's embarrassing.
23andMe DNA tests claim to tell you what proportion Neanderthal you are. I, for example, have just under 2% Neanderthal DNA (allegedly), which they say is in the 47th percentile.
From what I understand they test for some fraction, like 1/4 to 3/8 ish of total number of known Neanderthal SNPs. Dunno quite how representative that is of the total but I imagine probably a decent correlation.
However, around 2013-14 they either changed the number of SNPs they considered Neanderthal origin or their algorithm changed, and I was PISSED because I went from 95th percentile to 47th-ish myself.
In the (UK) context of this study/article, blue tits and great tits (and indeed most garden birds) are generally non-migratory in the UK, so I think that's an orthogonal issue.
To be fair bird movements are quite complicated: e.g. a Robin in the UK between September to March might be a member of a migratory or a non-migratory population. And Blackcaps are an example of a mostly migratory species in the UK but where less migratory individuals come to feeding stations in winter months.
The DVLA in the UK doesn't have a high-street presence. I took my driving test once, then received my driving licence in the post. When it needs renewing, I can do it online. I tax my car online. MOTs (annual vehicle safety tests) happen at any local garage. I've never needed a new numberplate, but I think you can buy those online too.
So what is it you all have to go to the DMV for? Because it sounds horrible.