Still Learning...

Moving

What country can I move to that has the least idiots in charge? (this has nothing to do with the recently passed Health Care Reform)

When I was in Europe everywhere used chip-and-pin cards, most of the time they were able to swipe my card and take my signature but occasionally they weren’t. The NYTimes has a good article about it. I don’t know much about Smart Card technology but it’s got to be safer than some barely payed wage slave trying to determine if my signature on one piece of paper is the same as on another.

My wife is now trying to change her name which means dealing with Social Security and the DMV. The DMV requires a hand written note signed by me saying that she lives with me. Let’s think about that for a second.

• How is the person at the DMV going to know it was written by me?
• If they could verify it was written by me how would they know I was telling the truth?

We’ve already covered my opinion on the worship of signatures in the US, but oh, they also require two forms of proof.

• Deed or mortgage statement (which would prove I own the house but not that I live there)
• Voter registration card (which would prove I registered that I lived there, which could be false)
• A utility bill (which proves I pay utilities on the house, but still doesn’t mean I live there)
• Automobile payment book (because everyone has one of those, right? how many people would even know what that is?)
• Mail from a financial institution (which I can get sent pretty much wherever I want)
• Mail from federal, state, or government agencies (which at once point in time I got at three different addresses)

So they’ve set up a number of arbitrary rules that serve no purpose and even if those rules weren’t incredibly easy to get around what would they be protecting us from? Someone getting a drivers license for an address they don’t actually live at? Is that a huge problem? If that is a huge problem why hasn’t something been done to make it dramatically harder than it is?

Reminds me of dealing with the TSA. Everyone who travels regularly sees obvious ways the system could be compromised but no one can do anything to fix it and the people in charge aren’t motivated or intelligent enough to actually fix anything.

Is there a single place on Earth where I won’t have to deal with constant stupid arbitrary decisions impacting my life for the worse? Or where I can at least minimize the occurrences?

Does anyone still believe it’s possible in the US after the disaster that was the healthcare debate (no matter which way you feel about the reform itself, the discussion was a travesty of discourse)?

Infertility

From my anatomy final:

The most common cause of infertility in women:
A. Blocked fallopian tubes
B. Blocked vas deferens
C. Migraine headaches

It took every ounce of my willpower not to be a smartass and answer “C”.