FWIW I have had several times this week where the site becomes unreachable. … although this has happened off & on since I joined. Most common symptom is endless wait for a page that never renders, but it can also produce 502 errors when liking a post or trying to save a reply. Doesn’t matter if my VPN is up or not.
The Cloudfare error page that sometimes appears says it’s a server problem, not the network. It has the general feel of a site running on a server that’s overwhelmed for whatever reason. If it’s a shared plan, there may be too many other clients on the same box. Otherwise, could be any number of things (other than too many users, lol)
There may not be. They do have a gofundme page which may provide a bit more opacity. Other than that, you could snail mail anonymous funds to them at 401 Broadway Ste 100 PMB 91507, Tacoma, WA 98402.
Withdrawing USD at ATMs here can largely only be done at places like airports. Alternatively, you can go to an exchange office. Either way, you’ll get fleeced.
It’s not a good idea to mail cash intercontinentally.
Ah yes. You’re still doing cheques over there. Forgot about that. The last cheque(*) I saw over here was, I think, in the 1980s. If you were born after ca 1985, chances are you’ve never seen one, or even heard about them. Today we are mostly paying by debit card or instantaneous electronic transfers on our phones, while bills are paid through online banking, so I tend to forget about those archaic payment methods
(*) Except traveller’s cheques. They died sometime in the 1990s.
It’s mostly the very elderly holding up lines at the grocer while they laboriously write out a check (or laboriously count out cash down to the penny).
In fairness I still write a check about once a month on average. For example the quarterly water & sewer bill I could pay electronically but there’s a comically high service charge that disincentivizes me from doing so (they use a 3rd party clearing house I guess); a postage stamp and envelope are cheaper. And I just paid an arborist by check who snail-mailed me an invoice for cutting down a tree in my back yard and gave me no other option for payment. So – every few years I order another hundred checks to accommodate all those edge cases.
In contrast, we’ve had a unified banking system here since 1996, and all the banks use the same PKI authentication mechanism for their customers. Paying bills or transfers between accounts in different banks works seamlessly; the money would normally arrive within 12 hours (except weekends), and is done online with a very few exceptions (like old people who are not “digital”). This is the preferred and encouraged method of paying bills, and it would normally not incur any extra costs. If you really need to, you can also initiate an immediate transfer of money betwen banks. You can also transfer funds in seconds between private persons through a mobile payment app (at no extra cost), and this method can also be used to pay for stuff.
I can’t think of any bills we have that we don’t pay on line and most are set up on automatic direct payments. Even shopping I use either a card or a third party payment system (think PayPal or Venmo).
I do donate to several organizations the current administration here probably wouldn’t like but I don’t care if they know who I am so I’ve no compulsion for anonymity.
I’m glad it is not quite as hopeless as with the impression one gets from reading about hopeless cases on the interwebs (“I read it myself, so therefore it must be true!” )
As for me, if/when the situation deteriorates even more, I feel compelled to protect my anonymity in case I am ever to travel to the USA again. I would hate to be rejected at the border just because immigration authorities find out I have donated funds to an organisation with “anti-christian bias”.
Yeah I have 5g and when I sometimes attempt to access the site it just doesn’t load at all and stays on the Google search page. I’ve noticed it happens at certain times of the day like at 3:00pm-5:00pm It just doesn’t work.
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