Aaron

Oh lol it’s a stereotype that lesbian relationships move fast… and move in fast 😆 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-Haul_lesbian

Not doing wonders for the stereotypes 😆

This was the primary reason for me leaving the church, but I had begun my whole “deconstruction” journey years earlier. Between losing my belief and losing my religion, I was there to be a good influence on the true believers. I eventually realised it was useless to do so, that these people who I once considered friends were actually just horrible people. I’m embarrassed how long I really ignored some toxic beliefs and actions just because the people committing them were doing so “for sincerely held beliefs”. Trump and Covid were the real catalysts just because the way and the speed of their “mask off” transition made it obvious even to a socially inept person like me that they were just bad people.

I’m not a financial advisor, so nobody copy this, but we removed all our money from the US over the last few years in preparation. We dont have stocks any more, and our last bit of US money is due to be transferred when our tax return is paid out. I’m cautiously optimistic things will hold until then 🤞

We’ve put most of our money short term into New Zealand banks, specifically term deposits at a few locations, as the financial system here is well insulated at least compared to most countries. Long term we will vary our investment more but we don’t have many options until we are permanent residents (another couple years). It’s a moderate low risk growth, and we are okay with the downsides of it being inaccessible since we have several staggered.

Here term deposits are likely to be frozen short term in the event of a crash by the Open Banking Resolution system, but our everyday funds will be more accessible. Now for a huge market crash, most bets are off, but being in this little island nation, I feel a lot more secure in the fact that society will pull together rather than eat each other. That’s the true benefit of being here: the culture.

I was pretty sure I knew what a general strike was… wouldn’t any strike be more expensive than 2-4 hours of protest, and wouldn’t a general strike involve much more planning than a normal strike due to the scale and breadth?

Also I was worried that generalstrikeus.com was too soon. The UAW general strike is planned for 2028 to get time to plan, because a general strike isn’t something you can just do successfully at the drop of a hat.

Beautiful! Congrats on your escape :-)

Welcome! North or South island?

You’ve done right by your daughter. Good luck on the job search!

Looks fun, I’ll give the demo a try with my kids 😆

Not the person you’re responding to but I did the same thing for in part the same reasons.

We had significant fiscal privilege in that we were old enough and willing to go into debt enough early in our lives to purchase a house before things got stupid, and each time we moved we sold the house for a profit. We are renting again in our new country (New Zealand) until we build back up and get at least permanent residency (can’t buy a house here unless you’re a PR). Buying a home was the most stressful and most impactful thing financially, but that’s not feasible now for most people.

We got lucky enough, and purposefully saved for escape for 10 years by living with things that weren’t comfortable (concrete floors for years rather than replace water damage, going above and beyond to keep electricity and gas prices low even at the cost of comfort, working too much to put money into savings and neglecting family, no eating out and limiting grocery budget for last two years, pulling out ALL investments like 401k to make the final push and starting from scratch in our new home, etc.).

I can tell you it was all worth it. Live below your means (while increasing your means incrementally), beans and rice rather than packaged foods (balanced with how much your time is worth), make every sacrifice with a clear goal in mind. Like I said, it takes years, and you’re operating at a disadvantage just because we did this starting 12-13 years ago when prices were significantly different, and average wages haven’t compensated. We have kids, so the other benefits were things like the child tax credit increase in 2021, which gave us unexpected increases.

I’ve seen people do all this just to have to go back to the US because they didn’t scope out their landing enough: make sure you know how much you need to survive in your new country, know the cost of visas, limits on what you can earn in your job, know what jobs you can even fill based on visa and qualification restrictions… and then plan for having 5-10% more in total liquidity than you think you need. Things change, accidents happen… in our case our kid had to have emergency surgery the week before our flight, that same day our car died so we couldn’t sell it for as much as we wanted, and a year after arriving they increased the cost of visa renewal by over 100%. Luckily we had planned for things going haywire so we were still able to escape.

It’s not easy. I wish you all the luck in the world. Sorry for the novel and basically saying “be born earlier and get lucky” 👀

Exactly my thoughts. 80+ is already a horrific number, it’s not going to make people more likely to act to artificially balloon the number 3x. There could be 1000 school shootings in one year and I doubt the US people or Govt would do a thing. They actively choose this every day.

But wouldn’t you want the ones who would uproot their lives because Trump was elected? It’s the ones who voted for him that you wouldn’t want. If anything, Canada could use all the non-maga you can get.

You could make a case that based on his other comments and stochastic terrorist language that what he said was dangerous, but those claiming that this specific instance was a threat either didn’t listen closely to what he said (you don’t give someone facing a firing squad a rifle of their own), or just listen to those media reports who are purposefully spreading disinformation.

He has made plenty of statements that are prosecutable, people don’t need to grasp at straws.

To answer the question, yeah if you said the same thing Trump did about Cheney, you’d be fine. It wasn’t a threat. He said give her a rifle and put her on the front lines if she’s so eager to have a war, see how she feels then.

That’s said, Vote. Vote for Harris. While Trump didn’t advocate for putting Cheney in front of a firing squad here, he has asked his military personnel to kill citizens and next time he won’t have someone that will stop him.

I dont speak other language. Also they spelled favor wrong!

We already did, to New Zealand. Education visa to get a PhD my partner had been eager to get, followed by work visa and/or resident visa. Few more years and then permanent resident then citizenship.

We’d been saving up/planning for a decade because we wanted to leave anyway, the environment that gave us Trump only encouraged us to leave. Years later and I’m still 100% convinced we made the right choice for us.

I suggest finding a culture that fits yours, making a very detailed budget, exploring all the options for visas and plan for future visa extensions/applications, and making some sacrifices to get where you want to be.

Lots of EU countries have generous options if you have lineage, I’d start with that as getting into one of them gets you into all of them eventually.

I dunno, Thomas is still there, and I’m sure he wouldn’t be with their iron clad ethics guidelines, right?

I’d settle for inventory sorting

A game that captures the feeling of when Arthur Dent crash lands on that primitive planet in “The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy” and makes a sandwich. I want The Sandwich Maker.

You crash into this procedurally generated world. All the plants and animals are new every playthrough, and you slowly learn about them through experimentation and from the native population who has never heard of a sandwich and really doesn’t do much except eat raw ingredients. When you cook the meat from an animal instead of eating it raw, they all lose their minds with wonder and you become the town’s chef.

You harvest wild crops and cultivate better ones. You find ways to use the animal fat and meat and “milk”, you find plants that work as food, maybe their seeds are great crushed up with a little water into a paste, maybe you need to dry them out, maybe you need to de-seed them and mix them with another plant to make it taste better… on and on.

You need to work with the people there to make tools, and together you iterate out exactly what you need.

Eventually you have to find something that matches your randomised flavour pallette for the perfect sandwich. You assemble all the ingredients you’ve collected, cultivated, or created, with the tools and techniques you and the townspeople have developed, and you take a bite. It’s perfect. You win.

Thanks! Inaturalist looks way better and doesn’t require a subscription. Got a plant right away, and I like how it gets more and more precise as you move around the plant.

I like his automotive channel as well