5. Nobody in the system or in the political hierarchy has any interest in the deep overhaul required to actually restore these systems’ reliability, efficiency and ability to fix problems.
Who’s going to fix what’s broken? No one. When the systems we rely on–the postal service, the vehicle registration system, the tax payment system–no longer function reliably or effectively, where does that take us as a society?
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun22/who-fixes6-22.html
By Charles Hugh Smith
OfTwoMinds.com
When nobody cares that systems have broken down and there is no will or interest in fixing essential systems, there is no happy ending.
Who fixes systems when they break down? The answer appears to be: nobody. Here are three everyday examples from my own life, breakdowns which may be random and rare but which the odds suggest are systemic. Let’s assume I’m not an unlucky one in a million but just another recipient of systemic breakdown.
1. U.S. Mail forwarding six month late. Millions of Americans move every year, and the US Postal Service, like other large-scale systems serving the public, has a system that automates change of address forms online. My previous experience is that mail forwarding might be a week or two late but it’s been reliable.
In 2021–not so much. We left a car in storage in California in the Covid lockdown and family obligations made it necessary to deal with it at a later date. It’s old and not worth much, and since we’d filed a Planned Non-Operation registration with the DMV, the registration fee was $23 a year.
If I’d anticipated USPS mail forwarding to completely break down, I would have signed up online for CA-DMV email notices, but I assumed mail forwarding was functional. Alas, we received our 2021 auto registration notices sent in May 2021 in late November–long after the renewal deadline in early June. The mail wasn’t a week or two late, it was six months late. That’s a breakdown.
That’s when the breakdown of California DMV’s system revealed itself rather ingloriously.
2. Your non-operational car in storage must be insured and pass a smog certification test. I’ve noticed many local government agencies are no longer satisfied to simply charge a late fee for tardy payment–their responses are designed to punish the tardy public far beyond the “sin” of missing a deadline for payment/filing a form.
The California DMV strips away the option to register a car as non-operational once you’re 90 days late in registering the vehicle. This doesn’t mean your non-operational car magically becomes operational and can be driven to a smog certification station. It just means you have entered DMV No-Exit Purgatory: your car can’t be smog certified, therefore it can’t be registered, and so it drops completely out of the DMV online system.
Not only is the car non-operational, we weren’t there to deal with it. California has tens of millions of residents (around 39 million) and millions of registered vehicles. 675,000 people moved out of California in 2021 and some percentage probably left cars in storage, what with the 2020 Covid travel restrictions and other issues.
I find it difficult to believe I am the only individual who missed the deadline to register my non-operational vehicle as non-operational, but the DMV has no system response other than demanding a $214 late fee (heh) and that you register the vehicle as operational.
Trying to get the DMV to acknowledge a DMV change of address form is an epic in itself. Submit a paper form or an online form, neither one can be relied on.
Sending correspondence to the DMV asking for help in fixing this problem is like sending letters to the dead-letter dumpster. Some DMV staffer decided to get my case off their desk by arbitrarily declaring the car had been “registered in another state.” This led to the absurdity of the DMV demanding a document from the Hawaii DMV proving the car which I’d repeated stated was non-operational in California storage hadn’t been transported to Hawaii. In other words, it became my job to fix the absurd errors of DMV staff.
When the public has to go through endless hoops to fix problems created solely by the public agency itself, this is a Kafkaesque breakdown in “public service.”
I finally located an online DMV portal which accelerated the 7-month back-and-forth-going-nowhere to a week of endless emails and submittals of documents. (Could the DMV have pointed me to this portal in the previous 7 months? One would think so, but the answer is “apparently not.”)
After 7+ months of completely needless churn– a waste of my time and the time of DMV staffers–the DMV decided to issue us a non-operational registration for the non-operational car.
What difference does it make to the DMV if the non-operational car in storage is registered 91 days late, or 209 days late? As long as the outrageous late fee is paid, what benefit to the public interest is served by creating a no-exit Purgatory where the owner can neither register the non-operational car as non-operational or get the car running and get the smog certification? None. The DMV just wasted its own staff on a completely useless 7+-month travesty of a mockery of a sham of “public service.”
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As part of a proposed series of changes issued on Monday by a judge at the California Public Utilities Commission, residential solar customers would receive a much lower credit for excess energy sent to the grid – with credits ranging from around 30 cents per killowatt-hour, to less than 10 cents depending on time of day.
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