Month: January 2016

In America, a great deal in business and life is built on trust.

An interesting system, where bending the rules is very easy, but you are only given the right to do so once in a lifetime.

Once caught, you end up on the list of unreliable people, and you simply can’t approach the issue of trust a second time – for example, you won’t be hired for a decent job, the bank won’t give you a loan, the insurance company won’t offer fair terms, and you won’t be able to rent a decent apartment at a reasonable price, etc. You will need to live by the rules for a long while and slowly in order to rebuild trust, gradually bringing your karma back to a normal level. Or you could move to the right neighborhood with others like you 🙂

I find it a very beautiful system. However, it requires a certain organization of information systems and processes, which the government needs to mature to support. In Russia, for example, even the civil registry database isn’t centralized, nor are the databases of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Checking if someone has any misdemeanors turns into hundreds of requests across regions into different databases, then often requires manual aggregation of all this together. The process is so “expensive” in terms of resources and relatively slow that only insiders or quasi-insiders use it.

On document turnover in the USA. Look how interesting it is signing a contract with a real estate agency (just 10 minutes away by car) – photo. Yesterday, I sent them a signed check from the bank, photographed with my cellphone, which they forwarded to the realtors representing the apartment owner (the check for the application fee).

And yesterday, I physically signed a contract to purchase a car that is a meter long. I’ll make a separate post about it someday)

I got a new little phone! +15713428492. It’s funny that although it’s T-Mobile and not AT&T like before, the only difference with the previous one is three digits in the middle.

America for Pedestrians

Tiny Nissan Note? – eight suitcases of 23kg each and a total of four people. Ah! Picked up the family from the airplane

In our parts, snow is a useful thing to have around. It goes somewhere

Never seen anything like this here before. Bank services and ATMs on the go. On the right, a pneumatic tube goes up into the ceiling

Coming back to life

In the English language, signs and labels can speak and read. The sign says “No smoking”, and intriguingly, “the label read ‘don’t wash’, but he did”.

A guy walks into a bar and sees a sign that reads.

“Hey,” says the man to the sign, “If you can read, what does my shirt say?”

“I don’t know,” says the sign. “I can only read sign language.”

Yes, quite the fun. Today’s flight to Washington for the family was canceled. Rescheduled for tomorrow – and they just canceled tomorrow’s flight too, after we had already checked in a slew of suitcases and received boarding passes. Spent 10 minutes trying to get through to an operator. Now I have to go back to Domodedovo to rescue a heap of luggage and check in for the next flight, which isn’t until Monday, handing them back again.

I feel so sorry for my family. With this bad weather, it’s one trouble after another