noodlesUK

This is going to be a huge pain. The US has a very fragmented identity system, and "move fast and break things" approaches like this to bring information from across government systems well outside the scope of what that information was collected for will result in real problems.

I worry what this app and systems like it might mean for me. I'm a US citizen, but I used to be an LPR. I never naturalized - I got my citizenship automatically by operation of law (INA 320, the child citizenship act). At some point I stopped being noodlesUK (LPR) and magically became noodlesUK (US Citizen), but not through the normal process. Presumably this means that there are entries in USCIS's systems that are orphaned, that likely indicate that I am an LPR who has abandoned their status, or at least been very bad about renewing their green card.

I fear that people in similar situations to my own might have a camera put in their face, some old database record that has no chance of being updated will be returned, and the obvious evidence in front of an officer's eyes, such as a US passport will be ignored. There are probably millions of people in similar situations to me, and millions more with even more complex statuses.

I know people who have multiple citizenships with multiple names, similar to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45531721. Will these hastily deployed systems be able to cope with the complex realities of real people?

EDIT: LPR is lawful permanent resident, i.e., green card holder

The UK has no notion of a person number or national ID number that is tied to citizenship. Therefore it is not possible to prove British citizenship except with a British Citizen passport, naturalisation certificate or pre-1983 birth certificate.

It’s therefore a lot harder to prove citizenship for an initial passport application in certain circumstances than you might expect. You need to prove that you have an unbroken link of people born in the UK to someone born before 1983, and as time goes on that will mean even more generations. Right now you typically need to provide your birth certificate, up to 2x parents birth certificate, and up to 4x grandparents birth certificates.

In many other countries the birth certificate will have the person numbers of the parents, which will mean there’s essentially guaranteed to be a record of the citizenship of the parents that the state can check. Alternatively there’s a national ID scheme that helps bootstrap this information early in life.

A birth certificate is not proof of citizenship or legal presence in the UK for anyone born after 1983.

Anchoring proof of citizenship is going to become a very obnoxious problem going forward if there is not a population register or universal ID system introduced, as you'll have to go back however many generations it takes to reach birth before 1983.

I think the UK and Ireland are the only countries in the entire world that have non-birthright citizenship and no citizenship register, which is a less than ideal combination.

Honestly the “Gold Card” doesn’t worry me too much - the US has had investor visas for a long time.

The related “Platinum Card” on the other hand makes me absolutely livid. It means that for $5 million, there’s a status available that is arguably better than US citizenship, granting 270 days of presence in the U.S., and exemption from US taxation. I am a U.S. citizen who spends <30 days per year in the U.S., and I can’t even open an ISA in the UK where I live due to the US’s global tax rules, let alone anything more complex. To have citizenship based taxation and then grant a special status to foreign wealthy individuals is a slap in the face of decency.

270 days in the U.S. is also long enough to become tax non-resident in whatever country you’re spending the other 90 days in, making it likely that you’d be tax resident nowhere.

I think that we should impose webauthn 2fa on all npm accounts as the only acceptable auth method if you have e.g., more than 1 million total downloads.

Someone could pony up the cash to send out a few thousand yubikeys for this and we'd all be a lot safer.

I just don’t believe that people should be allowed to benefit from limited liability if they aren’t willing to share ownership information and addresses of service if the corporate veil needs to be pierced. I get that people deserve privacy of their home addresses and similar but I feel the public benefit of being able to hold people accountable for their actions is very important. You need to know who you’re entitled to sue if you have a cause of action.

I don't like the OSA and associated regulations as much as the next person -- I think we could have gotten a long way by saying you need to include a X-Age-Rating in http responses and calling it a day. The law itself is incoherently long and it's very difficult to know what duties you have.

However, I don't see what the legal basis of Wikimedia's challenge is. The OSA is primary legislation, so can't be challenged except under the HRA, which I don't really see working. The regulations are secondary regulation and are more open to challenge, but it's not clear what the basis of the challenge is. Are they saying the regulations are outside the scope of the statutory authority (doubtful)? You can't really challenge law or regulation in the UK on the basis of "I don't like it".

Interestingly in this case the tram fits far fewer people than a typical British bus. A modern London route master fits a maximum of 87 people (standing and seated). This tram only fits 50 (standing and seated). I'm nonetheless certain that it will be a much nicer way to travel, but I'm not sure that the maths work out the way you might initially expect.

Some of the other commenters here have reasonable mitigations. One word of advice - PayPal is ruthless about banning merchant accounts that it deems risky. You’d best sort this out quickly or have plans to be able to rapidly switch to another PSP. Even if your business doesn’t get banned, the multiparty vendors (or whatever the appropriate term is) might get hit.

In order for U.S. citizens to pass on their citizenship to children born abroad, they need to have resided in the U.S. for a certain period prior to the birth of the child.

The amount of time the parent has to have lived in the U.S. varies but usually it’s 5 years with at least 2 years after the age of 14.

If they don’t automatically pass it on and they want to move back to the U.S., they need to apply for green cards for their kids.

Since 2001, anyone under 18 who has a green card and lives with a U.S. citizen parent becomes a citizen automatically by process of law, under INA 320. Unfortunately documenting this is not automatic. A lot of people who came before 2001 don’t even know that they’re citizens. The application for a certificate costs a lot of money, so often parents tend to skip it if they don’t feel it’s necessary.

See below for the residency criteria.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-lega...

INA 320: https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-h-chapter...

Thanks. I guess that’s a valid point - why invite unnecessary scrutiny.

Thanks for doing the AMA!

I'm a US citizen born abroad - I got my citizenship via (I believe) INA 320 when I was a child. I have a US-born father who was not eligible to pass on his citizenship at the time of my birth. I lived in the US for most of my childhood up until ~2015 (initially as an LPR), and at some point, I obtained a US passport.

I don't have a certificate of citizenship, only a US passport. Given the way the US is going, I'm concerned that one day I'm going to apply renew my passport or otherwise have to prove my citizenship, and I'm not going to be able to sufficiently document it. Is this a real risk? Would you advise applying for a CoC in my circumstances? Am I even eligible to apply for one given that I live abroad? What other steps if any should I take to protect my status?

I completely agree with the sentiment that we don’t need SPAs and similar tech for news sites and dashboards and the myriad crud apps we use on a day to day basis but I think what you’re proposing is throwing the baby out with the bath water. How would a site like google maps, which I’m sure we can all agree is extremely useful, work in a Web 1.0 style world? It needs to dynamically load tiles and various other resources. The web being a place where we can host and instantly distribute complex cross-platform interactive software in a fairly secure sandbox is a modern marvel.

I think one of the key things here is that those prices are denominated in dollars. If the real value of dollars falls, so does the value of those equities. If the nominal price falls, and the unit of measurement is falling at the same time, the actual value of represented has fallen more (potentially a lot more) than it seems like at first glance. There’s been a lot of inflation over the past couple of years, and it’s likely that this period will contribute even further.

I also think that the uncertainty hasn’t been fully priced in yet. I think that traders are hoping that this all blows over.

Not an accountant, simply talking from my experience.

If you're moving after April 6th you're probably going to be fine on the UK side. If you have any US income in the tax year you can claim either split year (on the foreign pages) or treaty residence (using hs302) in the US up until you move (assuming you file Self Assessment, most PAYE employees don't, though you strictly should given the foreign stuff). HMRC is way nicer and easier to work with than the IRS. It's a breath of fresh air. This is pretty simple, but UK accountants are also pretty cheap.

The trouble is on the US side. If you're an American citizen you are liable to pay US taxes on all your income. If you're outside the US for most of the tax year, you can claim the FEIE and if you make less than ~$130,000, you have little else to do. If you're PAYE in the UK, you can claim the FTC on the cash basis in the US and you will probably also be fine. This is all fairly simple to do, and depending on your comfort levels you can probably do it in TaxAct or myExpatTaxes online. You also need to file FBARs and possibly 8938s every April. The trouble is if you are a sole trader or similar in the UK. This makes the FTC really hard. You will probably want a US accountant with knowledge of foreign tax if you are self-employed. Buzzacott is a firm I have seen do some good work for friends of mine with complex US and UK tax filings (though I have not personally used them). You can expect to pay thousands of dollars in tax prep fees every year if you use an accountant. This stuff seriously exceeds the knowledge of most US CPAs, so you will need someone who specifically advertises this.

Also as an American you need to avoid pretty much all of the useful tax-planning tools here in the UK. You can't really have a S&S ISA, or any other kind of tax-advantaged account other than a workplace pension without it all going totally bananas on the US side. You also can't own a UK limited company (more than ~10%) without getting whacked with crazy 5471 reporting. Same applies to UK trusts, you can't touch them without 3520 reporting (even for trivial things like life insurance trusts here in the UK, and even certain pension products). Many banks and financial services providers won't touch Americans with a 10 foot pole.

On the other hand you can potentially save a lot in taxes if you ever move back to the US if you've accumulated a lot of FTC carry forward. You can also probably pay a pretty minimal amount of US student loans if you're on IBR because the payments are based on your AGI which will be artificially low.

The US needs to abolish citizenship based taxation and chill out on the reporting requirements (which are generally the worst part) for people who generally live abroad. However, I wouldn't hold my breath. Even though the current admin has said they'll get rid of it, I just don't see that there's much political capital to spend on this issue. There aren't that many Americans living abroad, and most Americans don't give a shit about this sort of thing.

I agree, but I suspect that you’d have much better luck if you wore something that was superficially similar to the kinds of things other people wore, but was much better fitted and higher quality. For instance, if you showed up in a nice pair of chinos and a tailored buttoned shirt (of appropriate formality), that might come across as being really put together rather than ignoring subtle social cues by dressing in something that stands out by not fitting in.

> Heaven help you if you ever live in a place where the tax window is incompatible with the American ones.

The lack of matchup between the UK tax year from 6-Apr to 5-Apr against the US tax year of 1 Jan to 31 Dec is the bane of my existence.

I'm really curious what proportion of printers can be decoded with public tools. Are there any stats on which manufacturers codes have been cracked?

In the absence of a better standardised test, I don't doubt it. However, I really don't think that the SAT does a good job of testing the kind of longer-form literacy that the OP is talking about. I showed the SAT English component to a British A-level English teacher a few weeks ago, and after reading a dozen questions he was red with rage, shouting about how idiotic it was to ask such asinine questions under such a heavy time pressure.

> The last ~15 years have seen a decline every single year in reading comprehension, to the point that ordinary middle-of-the-road books from the 80s or 90s are beyond the ability of gifted students in the same grade to understand without great difficulty.

I think this is true, but I would disagree with the statement about gifted kids. I recently had the pleasure of reading some essays produced by A-level English students at a nearby school, and I was absolutely chuffed reading them. The mediocre ones were pretty mediocre, and there was definitely some ChatGPT drivel in there, but the ones from the top of the class were genuinely wonderful. The top students were writing beautiful (and insightful) prose, far better than what I could have done at their age. Don't write off the whole generation.

There are different kinds of autonomy. In every European country I am familiar with there's a fairly rigid curriculum (national or otherwise) that needs to be followed, but there's often a lot of autonomy about how individual lessons are delivered. I think in the US, you might argue that the opposite situation exists.

I doubt that the SATs were ever that effective at screening this sort of thing, at least for the past several decades. They're an aptitude test.

By the time you're graduating secondary school you should be able to demonstrate end-to-end ability in multiple subjects (in something like an AP or an A-Level), which should be a better proxy for doing well in university than something as handwavey as the SAT.

I definitely echo your comments about this point:

> The fear of God had been put into them by nightly news and the understanding that an unsupervised child could invite a call from CPS. But walking alone to school or playing outside alone is not neglect. Giving your kid an iPad and letting them rot their brains with Cocomelon is neglect.

But I don't at all agree that the logical conclusion to this is that we should encourage corporal punishment. I would estimate that fewer than a fifth of the well-adjusted people I know were beaten or had their mouths washed out or such similar things. I would say that as a proportion, many more of the badly-adjusted people I know in adulthood experienced corporal punishment or similar.

We can give children rights, agency and protections from abusive behaviour without locking them in a padded room and melting their brains with iPads.

I really think that overexposure to technology is a huge part of this. It's doing something negative developmentally, stripping away children's agency and curiosity. I often feel addicted to tech, but I grew up in a world without nearly as much of it.

Something tells me parent implied the /s.

Disclosure in the UK (as it’s called) is a bit different from discovery in the states, but serves largely the same function.

I googled a bit to find a decent guide and found one on the HSE’s website: https://www.hse.gov.uk/enforce/enforcementguide/pretrial/aft...

Unfortunately in real life disclosure is one of the many places that the criminal justice system tends to fail to meet its stated ideals. Disclosure is often served late or improperly on run-of-the-mill cases from what I’ve heard and read. There’s a great book called the Secret Barrister that goes into some detail about the UK’s (or England and Wales more specifically) criminal justice system from quite a critical lens.

You’re absolutely right, I’ve edited my comment to say vehicle tax rather than road tax. It’s actually one of my personal bugbears as well, so I can’t believe that I said that.

Yes, they can, however I don't believe this is quite as straightforward as just looking up the data for a particular vehicle on your police computer. Looking up the ANPR data on a vehicle is only marginally more complex than looking up a person's driving license details or similar. My understanding is that in order to do a reverse geofence request, or look up a specific device, it's a lot more complicated, and these days you're only going to get cell site information rather than precise GPS data (as was possible by asking Google in the past).

I would say there’s a pretty significant difference between something like phone geolocation data, which is not very practical to search, especially for Apple devices, and in any case usually requires at least a superficial level of scrutiny, and a database that any old police officer can just run a query on as and when they feel like it.

I think the crazy thing about ANPR/ALPR is just quite how simple it is to create a massive panopticon. The UK has a fairly established national ANPR system, and it generates on the order of 90M records per day [1]. All of this data is available to various law enforcement agencies. If you drive, you're probably being recorded in a way accessible to the PNC every day.

Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay vehicle tax, number plate cloning is becoming pretty common (comparatively) in the UK. This means that you can easily get swept up in a police dragnet because someone has stolen your car's identity.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-anpr-ser...

I don’t really understand what this is from the landing page. Is it a signature tool where you’re signing an arbitrary existing document? If so, I need to know whether it’s legally appropriate for my situation, and that means eIDAS for me.

Alternatively, is it a tool to manage writing contracts and other documents, and soliciting legally binding signatures? If so, I need to understand it more.