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I renewed my UK passport from 6000 miles away in sunny CA. Took a week for it to arrive. Just been to the post office to renew the kids US passport which requir
by spacedcowboy 4y ago
I renewed my UK passport from 6000 miles away in sunny CA. Took a week for it to arrive. Just been to the post office to renew the kids US passport which requires both parents to be there or notarized documents to say why not. Estimated delivery is 14 weeks.
My (US) wife continues to be in awe of the UK services compared to the US. I just wish the bus would come on time when I'm over there...
- pfranz 4y agoI do think it's worth noting for kids in the US there is no "renewal." Each time it's considered a new application.
- refurb 4y agoMy friend renewed US passport overseas at a consulate last month. Had new passport in hand one week later. Regular service. They can be fast if they want to.
- Dobbs 4y agoIsn't the both parents required to be there to stop kidnapping and other issues?
- notch656a 4y agoYeah but it's a retarded rule. The other parent can sail the kid into international waters and back without a passport, this prevents nothing. If someone's willing to kidnap a child this does absolutely nothing to stop them, except make sure any international border crossing is done in the most dangerous ways possible.
- Dobbs 4y agoAdditional barriers might not stop all issues, but heavily reduce them.
- notch656a 4y agoDo you have evidence this heavily reduces kidnappings? The biggest change I see here is kidnapping that cross borders are now guaranteed to go through uncontrolled crossing rather than ports of entry, endangering these children more than had they been kidnapped with a passport.
- diebeforei485 4y agoI think passports are seen as a normal thing to have in other countries. In the US, the government seems to consider it a thing you only apply for if you have specific plans to travel soon. Other countries might require presence or a signed affidavit from both parents when the child is actually flying out of the country.
- throwayyy479087 4y agoYes, and parental kidnapping is a real issue that happens fairly frequently. This is a reasonable policy - it might not be in a smaller country but if you're in Missouri and getting a passport for a kid, you are going a long distance no matter what.
- treeman79 4y agoThings have changed a lot. My half sister got kidnapped constantly by parents. My mom had custody but her bio dad and his wife kept kidnapping her and taking her across state lines. At one point the dad was at the airport with a shotgun waiting for them. Police had to sneak my parents onto a plane. Eventually my mom just walked with for several years at school never letting her out of her sight. That stopped at least one attempt, maybe more.
- throwaway894345 4y agoYou can also renew your US passport online provided it hasn’t expired. Not sure what the delivery window is.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jaywalk 4y agoNo, you can't. This article is literally about how they're going to roll out online renewals for US passports in a few months.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwaway894345 4y agoMaybe I was mistaken. I just looked into this a month ago and I thought you could submit everything electronically except for the old passport itself.
- jaywalk 4y agoYou can fill out the PDF on your PC and print it out, but it still needs to be mailed in.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mrwh 4y agoMe too - the estimate was 11 weeks, but start to finish the whole process took three, and I was able to take my own passport photo at home. A pleasant surprise!
- Thaxll 4y agoHow can it takes only one week in a different country? Sounds weird, or maybe they're being printed in the US?
- bpye 4y agoThey’re not printed in the US, but it’s totally possible to courier something from Europe to the US in 24 hours, maybe 48.
- AnssiH 4y agoYep, even from here in Finland regular UPS/DHL express services are normally 1 or 2 days to US (e.g. UPS Express Saver is 1 day to ~NY and 2 days elsewhere). Though even postal items can arrive in a week as well, with luck.
- snovv_crash 4y agoSame day printing and DHL express would makes 1 week easily achievable.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoWhat about the time needed to validate documents like birth certificates, etc?
- brewdad 4y agoIf it's a renewal, presumably those documents have already been validated. One would need to validate the old passport being sent in but that should be it.
- quag 4y agoMine was printed in another country and shipped 7200 miles to me in under a week for a $18 delivery fee.
- atyppo 4y agoMany countries have passport blanks in every embassy. They're some of the most tightly controlled documents in the world given they could be used to print new, seemingly valid passports for anyone (if that country doesn't info share with the other, that is). No clue if they're being printed within the US in UK's situation, however.
- quag 4y agoFrom the USA it was faster (1 week), cheaper, and easier (all online, all digital, no mailing anything in) to renew my New Zealand passport, than it was to renew the US passport for the little one. We were left with the impression that the USA just doesn’t care about improving these things. So it’s nice to see that the improvements are coming, they just took a while.
- diogenescynic 4y ago>We were left with the impression that the USA just doesn’t care about improving these things. I don't think our politicians actually care. They prefer to fight culture wars and pay lip service to real issues.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- pjc50 4y ago> We were left with the impression that the USA just doesn’t care about improving these things. The anti-statism in the US turns readily into "if you interact with the state, it should be a miserable underfunded experience" rather than "since it has to happen, we're going to make it easy and convenient so as not to consume too much time, money and energy from our citizens" (unless a libertarian wants to argue that the US should simply not issue passports at all and .. leave it up to private enterprise somehow?)
- humanwhosits 4y ago"Subscribe to MegaCorp Brand Passport today! Featuring access to 52 tourist destination and monthly bonus locations!"
- word_virus 4y agoUgh. That sounds so horrible it could actually happen.
- leephillips 4y agoHave you encountered US busses that come on time?
- spacedcowboy 4y agoThere are busses in the US ? Been here almost 20 years and car, car, car as far as the eye can see…
- brewdad 4y agoOnly in cities with dedicated bus lanes. Otherwise the buses are stuck in the same traffic as the cars.
- corobo 4y agoAll the bus services I know of at least have GPS in their respective apps now. Doesn't solve the issue but you can see how long it'll take and impress old people by knowing where the bus is :)
- babypuncher 4y agoA not insignificant portion of our population buys into the myth that government is fundamentally incapable of providing timely and cost-effective services like this. As a result, there is little motivation to fix or improve these processes and instead we end up squabbling over whether to eliminate or privatize them. This turns the myth into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- bobthepanda 4y agoAlso, some of these improvements would take an initial investment that would pay off over time (and possibly lower running costs over time) but that doesn't mesh well with the "lower my taxes/starve the beast" crowd.
- treeman79 4y agoThe problem is rarely lack of funding but rather a complete lack of work ethic. I’ve known people that have worked at the DMV on a temporary basis and they would get in trouble every time they got work done because they made regular people look bad. The idea is is that if you can not fire a person, department, agency or whatever but you’re forced to use them than the end result will often be bad. Basically the exact same reasons that most people hate HOAs.
- syzar 4y agoI’ve worked in government for over 20 years and have never encountered anyone getting mad because someone worked too hard. I’ve heard people say what you are saying but have never had it backed up with stronger evidence than you have provided. It’s simply not believable and comes across as an urban legend to me.
- egypturnash 4y agoDeliberately starving public services so that they get shitty enough to consider eliminating or privatizing them has been going on since at least the Reagan years. Probably longer, but that’s when one of his advisors said the infamous line about wanting a government “small enough to drown in a bathtub”.
- CodeWriter23 4y agoIt’s amazing how much easier things are when you’re at 20% the scale of a larger operation.
- chrisseaton 4y agoDon't things normally get more efficient with scale?
- drstewart 4y agoDo you consider large organizations more or less efficient than smaller ones?
- chrisseaton 4y agoWith something complex like passports? That's the kind of thing that scales up. A small country that doesn't produce many passports, and doesn't have many complicated cases, doesn't need to be able to manage them very well. Something with more people going through the system is more robust and better tested and has the corner cases worked out. For example if you do 1 passport a day you can't have a dedicated person handling for example issues caused by dual nationalities. If you do 1000 a day you can have someone who just handles that and knows exactly how to do it. A tech example would be that Google knows exactly how to get a worker a visa as they do it all the time and they're very efficient at it. A little startup might have no idea what they're doing and would be very inefficient at it.
- sailfast 4y agoSure, but imagine if Google was really good at something that was inefficient, like 8-11 week passport generation using old techniques and then try to change it? The larger the org the harder it is to change in big ways (at least in my experience)
- rocket_surgeron 4y agoMost of the time, large organizations are much, much, MUCH more efficient. Even with organizational overhead. Which is more efficient: Distributing thousands of books by pallet in large, predictable quantities of pallets, to a limited number of Amazon warehouses or sending a single box of 20 books to thousands of bookstores?
- dhosek 4y agoMy wife is a Mexican citizen. Last time she needed to renew her passport, she went to the consulate and came home with a new passport the same day. It seemed like some sort of black magic to me.
- throwayyy479087 4y agoI pray that Mexico gets the situation around corruption and cartels under control. It's such a beautiful culture, nation, and Mexicans are lovely people.
- 8note 4y agoI doubt they can manage that while they border the US. The US has interests in maintaining the status quo to keep the cheap labour flowing, gun exports, and drugs to maintain the social hierarchy. If mexico managed to get rid a of a cartel member, the CIA would start working on making a new one
- notch656a 4y agoWon't happen until US ends prohibition.
- nerdface 4y agoYeah same here when I renewed my kids' UK passports from CA. It took a week, all online/mail.
- tomrod 4y agoThings are improving in the US. Energy.gov just released the IT Scaling playbook for Govt digital services