Google Maps is driving me nuts in Pittsburgh

I managed to get through the driver’s license process in Pennsylvania. They even accepted the evidence I had available—I’m still establishing residency, with a move-in date of tomorrow—for REAL ID.

Vehicle registration, the piece that’s supposed to happen within twenty days of establishing residency, is proving more difficult. Because I drive for Uber and Lyft, AAA can’t insure me in Pennsylvania (they did in California).

Tomorrow will be a busy day. I’m supposed to get the keys and I expect to receive the first of two furniture deliveries. I’m going to try to unload the car—I’ve actually been hauling around the stuff from California that I could squeeze into my car all this time. I will also endeavor to straighten out the auto insurance.

Hopefully, I can return to the vehicle registration tomorrow or the next day. When this is complete, I will go deal with Uber and Lyft. They will need to run background checks, so I won’t be driving right away regardless.

I can’t say I’m happy about the prospect of doing the Uber/Lyft sort of driving in Pittsburgh. I’m not happy about working for these outfits anyway, but Pittsburgh navigation is seriously challenging. Not only are there the unclear turns, but then there are the intersections you can’t actually see until you already need to be in the correct lane to move correctly through them. And Google Maps simply fails here: It’s way of presenting navigation information has always given me trouble anyway; it completely fails to provide the information I need to navigate these turns properly in Pittsburgh.

I mean, it’s astonishing how horrible Google Maps is here. It really doesn’t work.

Palestine

It would seem that Jared Kushner thinks the solution to the Palestinian issue is to double down on Binyamin Netanyahu’s strategy of making Palestinians suffer more.^[1] It hasn’t worked so far and I think the Palestinians will hasten to assure you it won’t work at all.

Marwan Bishara, “The logic behind US humiliation of the Palestinians,” Al Jazeera, April 24, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/logic-humiliation-palestinians-190423123902553.html

Fast Food

Danielle Wiener-Bronner, “Burger King plans to roll out Impossible Whopper across the United States,” CNN, April 29, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/29/business/burger-king-impossible-rollout/index.html

1. ^[1]Marwan Bishara, “The logic behind US humiliation of the Palestinians,” Al Jazeera, April 24, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/logic-humiliation-palestinians-190423123902553.html↩