Court House in Arlington is nice.

Oh. Well, so much for that then.

The mobile carrier for the phone you have may be able to help you. There’s no harm in sending an email to their tech support or whatever. They may have some special kind of thing for this situation.

I think they can do it once they’re residing in the U.S. but they can’t do it while they are living overseas.

You would have to get a number that forwards to your existing international number probably. I wonder if a Google Voice number would work? That would be free. At the very least, if it doesn’t work, you’re not out any money.

And some middle managers LOL

A lot of this is because what was originally a slow-moving attrition crisis in the Federal Government became a fast-moving crisis under the previous administration.

Republican-dominated governments always screw over the civil service and degrade its ability to do its job including service to citizens.

I originally typed out a longer answer to this but: the work has received (valid IMO) criticism for harming Holocaust education.

EDIT: Children were not kept as prisoners in concentration camps. They were exterminated shortly after being deported there.

> Teams chats and the 30 seconds of “how’s it going” before a meeting

You assume that is the extent of my non-work social interaction with my co-workers.

??? We still have those conversations all the time on teleconferences before and after meetings and on Teams chats.

My company’s internal metrics indicate that we’re all as productive now when most of us are primarily WFH as we were when most of us were in the office pre-COVID, so I figure I am too.

Same productivity, less stressed, overall happier.

Filthy city people are hiding under your bed, waiting to get you when you fall asleep.

Where does this idea come from that people aren’t getting any face-to-face social interaction if they aren’t going to the office?

It’s almost like a lot of police departments (DC police included) are a gang with a side business as a shitty protection racket more than anything else.

Yeah right like anyone should tell a fed poster what their protest plans are on Reddit.

Cannot recommend Unauthorized Bread enough.

There’s a little bit about this in Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway too and how some communities in the budding Walkaway society use it to encourage innovation and contribution while others don’t because it’s seen as toxic (eventually they all seem to drop it).

LOL gubmint jobs have really strict social media policies in the Rules of Behavior you have to sign.

I got a wedding present from a client - yes, a client - that says - “domestic bliss is only one wine bottle away.” Some people are too uptight.

Sometimes your terms of employment include an agreement about your conduct on social media under your own name and if you violate it, that’s on you! So you should read that thing carefully and be aware of what you’re doing. It’s why all my social media accounts are anonymous and I don’t disclose my employer or talk in detail about my work.

If it’s not in writing though and you didn’t sign your name to anything, firing you for what you post is a bunch of nonsense.

> The only companies interested in doing business in China are greedy companies that don’t mind when China allows it’s technology to be ripped off and copied.

This is laughably incorrect. Most of the manufactured products in your home have components that were fabricated or assembled in China. Whatever you typed that on? Partly if not completely assembled in China. Same for the routing equipment of your ISP that put it on the internet.

> Smart companies have already left, having had too many teeth gone missing the past decade.

No, a good chunk of the world’s global manufacturing is still there.

> So we’re not tied to China. In fact if the borders closed this very second the only thing that would happen is Americans would have to figure out how to manufacture a fucking bag of screws again.

Our economy would melt down overnight before we figured that out (so would theirs). We might not even have the means to build our own domestic production capacity for a century or so if we did that. Ask anyone who works in a statewide factory or a shipping or logistics company.

Yeah okay sure

Last time we had your kind of attitude about another county we wasted 20 years, trillions of dollars, and a lot of American lives on a military misadventure that destabilized a whole region and they didn’t even have a comparable military force or nukes but I’m the one drinking Kool-Aid. Right.

Does that mean we should do it when we aren’t in active hostilities with them? I thought they weren’t a free country but we were? Did I misunderstand?

> They want to be top dog and that position inherently cannot be shared.

IMAX-level projection

Stick to sports.

> You don’t mind your personal information being compromised I guess.

Bro your entire life history and sensitive financial information is held by Experian, which is one of the credit reporting bureaus, which you cannot opt out of. Chinese state-sponsored hackers got all their stuff in 2015. Your medical records and your financial records have probably also been compromised multiple times (sometimes those hacks make the news, sometimes they don’t, freeze your credit).

Facebook can track your stuff even if you don’t have an account with them because they have scripts on all the most popular Web sites. You are actually safer from them if you have an account with them and don’t use if for anything except to max out your privacy settings - it’s the only way to opt out.

The ISP you are using to connect to this website, and most of the services you use online, collect and collate information on you, and sell it to data brokers (which the Chinese government can purchase from by the way, like anyone else).

That horse has left the barn for all of us.