It actually makes sense to have a paid service that makes this abomination less painful. Though they work with VFS Global for collecting the applications and relevant documents, the VFS Global itself is an abomination and doesn't help with the handling of the form filling anyway.
Recently EU streamlined the Schengen visa application process for Turkish citizens as those "visa agencies" that are the official agencies and the only way to apply for a visa for many countries don't actually help with anything and are scamming people by selling the "good hours" for the visa appointment on the black market. An agency was dropped for this and the scams by agencies were listed among the reasons to streamline the application process.
Both with US and EU people are losing scholarships etc. due to outrageous wait times that are sometimes are years ahead or there's an issue with the systems handling the applications.
I guess there must be an opportunity there to fix all this together with smaller stuff like handling transliteration and character encodings, I wonder if some of those scam site are not scams and actually help with it. An AI agent can be useful here.
The rejection rates are also not bad and EU has a "return agreement" with Turkey, which is designed to keep the middle eastern refugees in Turkey(essentially, if you come from Turkey EU can send you back to Turkey right away ).
Crime rates for Turks show up among the lowest ones, unlike others from the region. So I don't think that EU is trying to reduce visas for Turks.
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/visa-applications-rea...
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Maybe in the EU it’s all good, but expect a lot of turbulence in the US.
Early in my career, I was warned that if I took a job with the state of California, I’d be stuck there for my whole career. I’d be unhirable in the private sector.
Not so much after DOGE fired entire departments for dubious reasons.
I don't know why anyone would work for the federal government now - pay still sucks, and job security has been demonstrated to no longer be guaranteed.
I'm not sure I see the upside of moving to a nation knowing that its citizens actively despise my existence.
It's bad enough that in some cases I believe the designers should be threatened with legal penalties.
Really the only reason you need TreasuryDirect is for buying Series I bonds (and maybe a few other niche Treasury products), which are not available through brokerages.
Back then I thought Treasury Direct was great.
I discovered this when it was late at night and I was procrastinating going to bed and I was curious what my estimated Social Security benefit would be at retirement so I tried to log into mySSA and it said the website is closed from like 11 PM to 5 AM or something like that.
I couldn't believe it. I could understand a weekly several-hour maintenance/batch processing window, but DAILY?
Two years in a row we’ve been able to fill out a 1040 and the NY state equivalent and make a paper submission in less time than it takes to reach an operator on hold.
These identity verification services look like a scam to me. LinkedIn incessantly hassles me to verify with CLEAR and it always fails without a clear error message, either “it just doesn’t work” or my hair has grown too much since I got my driver’s license or it is making me take my glasses off and comparing to a driver’s license photo where I am wearing glasses.
Even if their intent is to run an 'honest' business, the method of bouncing a user around to god knows how many domains during the process becomes effectively indistinguishable from a compromised service, and the alternative of having each site host their own id verification system screams, HACK US. I can see users becoming increasingly accustomed to getting out their cards several times during a sign-up and not having the foggiest idea of where their information went to.
Obama had the Digital Service (that Trump shut down) which paid higher salaries. Those folks were sharp and everything they touched was actually decent.
As I noted this is not unique to government. Large corporate projects at the Fortune 500 are often the same sort of consultant-driven crap.
If you visit their website, you will notice that except for historical documents, there is no full name branding at all; mostly only the logo and the occasional "USDS", when prior to the reorg (as can be seen on the Wayback machine) the original full name was prominent.
These aren't unsolvable problems. The UK, for example, had invested a lot of time and effort into making their websites user-friendly. In most countries filing taxes online is something you can do during your lunch break - without paying the Turbotax maffia. Driver's license? You can order that online, and make an appointment for a 15-minute window to pick it up.
If interacting with the government is painful, it is almost always because someone benefits from it being painful.
That's probably because of the fact that the appointments are near impossible to get, they only allow booking a few months out and it's always completely booked. So everyone was refreshing (or if clever botting) to get an appointment slot.
The "waterfall model" is a toxic way of thinking that pervades corporate management. Simplistic minds can't fathom any states other than "done" or "not done". Corporations are determined to crush the human soul. That is why it's not a progressive series of forms, saving your progress all along.
These random logouts happens more frequently during certain times of the day and seems to follow a semi-predictable pattern. It is almost certainly tied to system load in some way.
Also, the site's HTML and JavaScript are bloated beyond hope for what should be a fairly simple set of web forms. And itnhas been thisnway since at least 2018 with exactly zero improvements.
I worked with people on parole that were given free phones to use for job applications, finding their way around etc, and they would only get 3GB data a month. Some of the sites they visited were dropping 250MB of payload on the home page. You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city.
Sure, I'll do my best to try it. I'll approximate the throttle by limiting chrome to 128kbps, 500ms delay, and 5% packet loss for fun.
With a fresh incognito session, google responds to "here to 4th street" in 10 seconds, and when I click to open maps it needs just under two minutes to load. Then I can click on the transit option and it needs another 10 seconds to update.
Not too bad for a cold cache. If I do it again with a hot cache it only takes 20 seconds to go through the whole process. And I expect the app to be similar to the hot cache situation. Even with 64kbps I'd expect reasonable results. Do any cell providers throttle worse than that?
I agree with your argument about bloat in general, but google in particular has a lot of good engineering resources and tries to work well on bad connections.
Also I would be in favor of some spectrum licensing rules that say you can't throttle below 1Mbps...
There are probably a host of other telemetry things going on in your standard $20 Android handset in the background too, eating up all that bandwidth and causing all sorts of bottlenecks.
Agree it would be really nice to have some sane minimum speed.
> Because it is slow to render people start trying to swipe around the map to make it do something
At a certain point it's the user's fault. And once it gets to the point where you can swipe around, the tile loading should be pretty visible.
And to add more emphasis to the app being usable, I can get driving directions fully offline, then click bus and now it needs one tiny server request to tell me.
And I put on a significant delay and significant packet loss. Was that not enough? Do I need something else too?
Even if the US has a horrible visa system – as I can attest, despite only having to do it every 5 years – the EU countries could benefit from attracting talent by being more welcoming. So that is part of my mission as an MP and tech-entrepreneur. Any help and pointers is welcome.
https://www.bbc.com/turkce/articles/cz5r2l43kn2o
https://medyascope.tv/2024/01/22/vize-sorunu-kontrolden-cikt...
On the social media the anecdotes differ but some say they were able to get the visa appointments bots, others say it was agency personel selling it to them under the table. Maybe its really the agency personel, or maybe it's people running bots to snap appointments and sell those pretending to be from the agency - can't know for sure but there are multiple services where people purchase appointments unofficially.
In general the news situation in Turkey isn't very good as with the law enforcement but as you can see even BBC took notice.
Generally speaking, these visa agencies are very unfriendly and unreachable. They seem to just collect the money, provide no personalized help at all. My GF had some questions about her US visa application, we were not able to reach VFS Global. The phone numbers provided don't work, it's not even like taking long to speak with a human, the phone just gives you calling error.
She previously used the same company for her Schengen visa for a company event in Paris, of course unreachable again and no appointments available. Because she works at a French corporation, she was able to ask a high ranking French person in the company who has a contact with the French embassy and they arranged the appointment shortly.
No clue if this specific instance if scam but such scams have indeed been done before
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr56vl410go
> According to Ablakwa, a locally recruited staff member and "collaborators" were allegedly involved in a "fraudulent" scheme whereby they extracted money from visa and passport applicants.
> It is alleged that the scheme consisted of creating an unauthorised link on the embassy's website to redirect visa and passport applicants to a private firm where they were "charged extra for multiple services" without the knowledge of the foreign ministry.
> Ablakwa added that the staff member "kept the entire proceeds" in their private account, and that the scheme had been going on for five years.
> Applicants seeking visas were charged unapproved fees ranging from almost $30 (£22) to $60 by the private firm.
It would be good if the Indian government could block the scammers but I guess it’s a lower priority for the moment.
I know that Indian scam stereotype is racist and bad but how much it is "that bad"
So obviously the only way they could to this is with government contacts meaning the government themselves could already do it, but a lot of immigration stuff everywhere is full of people taking kickbacks.
it's one hundred per cent clueless privacy invasion. they are probably also opening ports via other means and using that for side channel ID like Facebook does.
just like any other documentation scam, the only weak point is on the "last mile" that's why you will always have a human interviewer.
the visa process is abusive and unpractical because people will work around any hurdle and their kpi will never be affected no matter how crappy they manage to make to whole process. or how many doge kids implement useless privacy invasion tech just because.