they will be handed a $5000 check (their deposit). That will buy enough Uber rides for them to keep their job for now until they sort this out.

… which they will no longer have to use a deposit once this gets sorted out. Isn’t this “let them eat cake” advice? Like saying, “they can just live on credit cards until they get a job”?

I think you misunderstand me and the part at the end where I said “keep their job for now until they sort this out”. What I meant by that was: the person will have the resources of $5000 (which is a significant sum of money) to maintain their job in the short term. Were they do to nothing else, they could probably just wait the weeks for their birth certificate to arrive and follow the path they have now. Now, at the end of that they will not have $5000, but they will still have some money, and still have a job. The car they buy will have to be not as nice as their $5000 deposit car. I’m not saying this is the best outcome, I’m saying with the tools, resources, and knowledge the person has, they can solve this will little else.

However, this is a situation of “Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

True enough. I would hope, however, that we’re building a society of compassionate support systems, and not a libertarian hellscape where you have to insert a quarter to call emergency services. I mean, we’re already mostly in that hellscape, where a single ambulance ride can literally bankrupt families.

I think we aren’t disagreeing on the fundamentals: the subject made a series of poor decisions. Where we differ is that I believe that the system is letting them down, creating conditions that we’re are watching create a SovCit. However, I didn’t dig in a deeply as you did to see it the person is missing some easy fixes.

I think that is a laudable desire. I don’t think it is very likely to become reality, but it a great ideal. What you’re describing is unimaginably expensive or is a society with far fewer choices for its populace. The systems the person is trying to navigate are:

• Colorado DMV
• Colorado Bureau of Vital Records
• Georgia DMV
• An automotive financing company
• An automotive dealer

One of the largest complications is the person is working within two different state’s systems. We don’t to Drivers Licenses at a federal level. Thats just not the country we are.

Each of these work under their own rules, and to imagine a system where all of these not only speak to one another, but do so with knowledge and integration of each other’s processes in a unified way if a huge huge endeavor. Additionally staff that work at each of these places would have to have upstream and downstream knowledge of each other’s processes. This would be monumentally expensive system to design, implement, and maintain. That money has to come from somewhere, and that means taxes. The result would deliver the exact same result, but just be easier for users to navigate. What other projects would go unfunded to make this a reality?

It’s entirely possible that this person just isn’t very smart. Or maybe they aren’t very experienced at being an adult - they could be 19 and lack experience;

This is my assumption too, and I spoke to that. None of what this person has done is sinful or anything. Its just inexperience we all have when entering the adult world.

I believe we’re living in a time that favors people with certain skills, and also disadvantages people who lack those skills.

While the set of skills changes between periods, that is true at any point in history.

What you call basic “adulting” is a bias in favor of people who can navigate bureaucracies;

I don’t think this is an issue of navigating bureaucracy so much a lack of problem solving, and jumping into something without gaining enough understanding of what the person is doing. How many questions did they ask before they went down this path or did they just jump in with both feet and hoped it all worked out? There just has to be a minimum level of personal responsibility. There can’t be an expectation that someone else is going to do everything for you. We live in a society with far too many choices to do that. The cost of that is having to do things for yourself to a certain basic level or abstain from using those more complicated choices, like moving to a different state.

this tends to be a much more urban skill set, and it’s one of the things causing so much division between urban and rural America.

Is this urban skill? I have some family that are very much rural and they have to deal with many more bureaucracies than I do as an urban dweller.

Here’s just one example:

I have city sewers, I’ve never seen the sewer pipe after it leaves my basement and the only interaction I have is when I pay my bill or vote for a tax to improve our sewage treatment plant.

My rural family member needed a new septic tank (no city sewer available). They had to contact the county to have an agent come out to take soil samples and then sign off on new engineer drawings my relative had to produce. There were issues with scheduling the agent to come out, then my relative had to follow up to get the results and pay fees to two different entities to gain the permit just to replace the existing unit. At this point not a single shovel of dirt had moved. There were many more steps and costs to finish the project.

This says nothing about the labyrinth of processes they have to navigate as part of their farming (corn and soy beans). I have none of that in my urban live.

For me, it comes down to this: we, as a country, should be creating a society where people who aren’t and don’t want to have a higher education, and skill and experience with information systems, can still accomplish what they need to do.

We have that. None of the person’s issues were college level problems and for their situation, there isn’t any uncommon IT skills required. In fact, if we’re taking the High School analogy, this person waited until 2 days to start working on the assignment for a massive multi-month project (renewing their drivers license). This should have been a lesson they learned in high school.

You should be able to navigate a relocation within the country with no more than a basic high-school education.

People absolutely can with even less than a high-school education. People do it all the time.

A lot of what this person seems to be struggling with is being overwhelmed by paperwork

Their main issue is they are working within several complicated systems all at once. If they had done them one at at time it would have been not difficult to navigate and resolve. This is a compounded problem because they let the problems stack up. Its not possible to design a system that can handle an infinite amount of problems.

and a lack of skill in researching information,

I complete agree with this. I’m honestly surprised that someone graduating high school can’t find basic information, and apply critical thinking to move forward.

and IMHO, this is as much a failure of the bureaucracy as it is the individual’s ability to efficiently concurrently navigate multiple regulatory systems.

I’ve spoken to this first point above. I just don’t think its realistic to create a single uniform bureaucracy that serves all the needs you’re proposing in an efficient and cost effective manor. I understand you hold a different position.

As an aside, I appreciate your approach to this debate. We disagree about some points, but I think you’ve argued well, and politely, so thank you. It’s conversations like this that remind me of how different from Reddit the Lemmy vibe (usually) is - with the exception of a few Lemmy instances which seem to be magnets for trolls and caustic bad-faith actors.

I agree and thank you too! We have different ideas, but neither one of us is objectively “right”. We’re not discussing matters of fact, but opinion. Yours is just as valid as mine.