Just an update for those who know me. This past week has been a little crazy. We just bought our first car (my wife needs it for her new job). Having lived close to 10 years in Manhattan and then downtown Boston, we never really needed a car and probably saved quite a bit by never owning one. But I guess it was inevitable.
So what did we buy?
At first we checked out Craig's List. You can find superb deals there, however the condition and state of the car + reliability of the seller is always in doubt. A friend of mine went through the car listings on Craig's List, only to find out that many listings were by used car salesmen posing as folks who are trying to sell their own car.
Next step - used car dealers and certified used cars. We were looking for a used Civic or Corolla and quickly found out that these two models do not depreciate much over the first 2-3 years. 15000$ for a two year old car? In the end we bought a 2007 Yaris. Same price as the used cars that we were looking at, and the MPG (Miles per gallon) was excellent ... 34/40. We were actually considering getting a Prius ... when you take into account the tax rebate and the money saved on gas (based on the amount of driving that my wife will need to do for her job), it was quite affordable (about the same as a new Corolla), but in the end it was hard to top the deal we got with our Yaris.
Another side note: although I've been in the US for close to 10 years I never exchanged my Quebec driving licence for a NY/Mass driving licence. Thus this week was hell on earth. I don't want to go through the details but all I will say is that I had to deal with bureaucracy in both Canada and the US (or should I say Quebec and Massachusetts). The difference between the two is striking. And this is not the first time that I've had to deal with government agencies in both Countries. In Canada, the service was quick efficient and in fact civil servants went out of their way to be helpful - when I had to deal with my health care and passport issues I found the same thing. On the other hand in the US ... words cannot describe it. I don't believe that it's the actual workers. US officials have been in general pretty nice, however the system is full of obstacles and pointless rules ... rules designed to make everything more difficult. I don't get it. I just don't get it. It's not that government is inherently bad, if it was then how do you explain the Canadian government. It's not size. Yes, Canada has 30 million people or about 1/10th of the US population, but Montreal is just a tad smaller than Boston. If you can efficiently run Montreal, you can surely run Boston, or 10 Bostons. In fact you can argue than Canada is inherently HARDER to govern. It is less dense, smaller GDP but still full of big cities. Montreal although smaller, is much more dense than Boston. Toronto has a higher % of immigrants than any other city in North America. AND the Canadian government provides far more services than the US Government. So why? It's not Canadian superiority that I'm advocating. I live in the US and married to an American. I came to the US because the science is (was?) better here ... although that may be (is) changing. I just wish life here could be simpler.
But I'll leave my rant at that.
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Come back to Canada! Car insurance here is a fraction of what it is in Boston.
I agree with U, go back to canada!
Seriously, the biggest problem in this country is that all our money is being sunk into a military with no real return on that investment. This includes all of the companies that continue to get rich by bilking the government (us) every way that they can.
My other point is that in my experience in the UK and eastern Europe the beauracracy is equally painful and ridiculous.
Your rant is spot on. I don't even speak the language of the Quebecois beauracracy and I have found them to be helpful, polite and expeditious, which was almost never the case back home in Texas. Moreover, beauracrats here seem to have a keen understanding that people's lives do not fit into neat little checkboxes and when problems arise they need to be taken care of and not allowed to fester into a tailspin through the maze of redtape that these offices almost always become behind the front desk.
If I might just offer an example, which will be somewhat lengthy, but perhaps will prove a point. I am American, my wife is Mexican. We were married 4 years ago in Texas and my wife became a conditional permanent resident of the US one year following our marriage, hence a conditional resident for the 2 years following that date. The next year, I applied for, and recieved an NIH NRSA Fellowship for postdoctoral work at McGill University where we are now (Montreal, Canada, for those who don't know). This created a problem for my wife since we would be living outside the US, however, we were assured by a Congressperson and Immigration (USCIS) officials that it was okay because I was a Fellow of the NIH. We eventually applied to have the conditional status of her residency removed and we were placed on over-seas hold, as is customary for anyone living outside the US as a permanent resident of conditional status. The catch is, if you are on official government business, you do your interview and have the conditional residency change to permanent at the end of your service, if you are not on official government business you must return within one year of the end of the conditional residence.
We assumed that everything was okay as we had sent all of my NIH documents to USCIS and been told, by a congressional liason that our paperwork was in order. However, as the deadline approached for the conditional residence extension to end, we recieved a letter from USCIS that my wife's permanent residency has been terminated unless we can prove we were living in the US prior to July 2006. Since my NRSA runs from March 2005 to March 2008 and we are living in Montreal, we obviously cannot do that. Hence, I am a Fellow of the NIH doing work on an NIH grant at a foriegn institution (mind you it wasn't easy to pull that one off in the first place) and the government does not consider me to be on official government business and has in effect kicked my wife out of the country. We have tried to go through as many channels as we know and no one seems to have even the slightest idea what to do for us or even who to contact at USCIS. Ironically, we applied for a reentry permit (temporary passport) for my wife because she is tired of getting harrassed by border officials (it really is tough being Mexican in the face of an immigration officer) and even though they have stripped her residency, we were asked by that office (USCIS but in a different state) for additional documents so they could go ahead and approve the reentry permit. Does that make any sense?!? We had intended to return to the US following my postdoctoral work but now we are seriously reconsidering that proposition.
Yesterday after writing this, I left home turned on my portable CD player (my wife has the iPod), and what song starts to play? Idiots Rule by Jane's Addiction.
I had an idea that you should put NSA in front of your titles for non-science entry then give it a normal title. Non-science entry isn't satisfying.
NSA or NSE?
NSE I guess. Not sure where NSA came from.
Sorry TP,
Your comment was rated as spam??? (I just went through my "junk" comments). Maybe someone didn't like your assessment ;) But seriously I hope that everything works out ... dealing with US immigration has been a nightmare and it got worse after 9/11.