Scapeghost

In Russia, China, the people are under threat of literal torture and murder.

You gave up way before that

Reddit bans users based on what they upvoted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditSafety/comments/1j4cd53/warni...

"We know that the culture of a community is not just what gets posted, but what is engaged with. Voting comes with responsibility."

Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world?

You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.

Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything, and it's not some third world backhole that was suffering already anyway, but you yourself that are the worst victims of all their laws and wars.

Right now the biggest problem in life is the country of my passport.

I have enough in savings and enough passive income to be able to live comfortably almost anywhere, but whenever I talk to travel agents, or people who can help set up companies etc in the countries I want to go to, first they're like "Sure, we can do it, when do you want it" etc and then they ask where I'm from, and when I tell them, they either stop replying or say sorry, they can't help me.

sigh...Racism is a funny thing. They haven't even seen me, or seen my history of travel, or anything, they just stop cooperating when they see that one word, the name of my country.

And I can't blame them either, I know many people from here go and overstay there visas and generally make problems in other countries.

I just wish I could put down a deposit of a few thousand dollars as a guarantee that I'll behave and get a visa.

Without giving away too much PII, some of it is interest from various savings accounts and subscriptions/donations from Patreon etc. and some from sporadic sales.

"as well as a native" sounds ambiguous in my head, like implying "and I am a native" so I went with the counterpart to "as good as new"

P.S. Since I mentioned being from the Middle East I think I should add that I'm not religious at all lol

But I can't get it removed from my passport as there are laws against apostasy and "blasphemy" here :(

If you're looking for a beautiful place to go outside, Svalbard is not it lol.

It'd be a nice change from the desert climates I've been stuck in all my life though haha

You can get work as an English teacher in Korea or Japan since you're so good at it

Let's be real here, they won't feel much confidence in learning English from a brown person :') I grew up on English media and then raised on the internet so my accent actually used to be good, but living in places like Dubai has actually messed up my English a bit because of the creole/pidgin they use there.

As for racism, I've been to East/SE Asian countries and frankly the racism that white/Western people tend to perceive is often pretty harmless and benign. Just cultural differences in "appropriateness". I've certainly seen worse in my own country. The worst I've personally experienced was in Dubai from Arabs/Emiratis against the many "brown" expats who live and work there, even those following the same religion. (P.S. I'm not religious at all)

I don't really need a job per se to support myself. I just want a way to 1: Be able to stay in a country long-term (longer than the usual tourist visas) while working from home, and 2: Eventually own property there and become a permanent resident if not a naturalized citizen.

There are some "gray" options like paying someone to "hire" you as their employee, basically getting an employment visa but doing your own thing. Or paying someone to marry you :') Both options are legal but rely on trust and make you dependent on a person you don't know: They can take your money then give you the boot any time if they want.

I learned of New Caledonia a while ago (France) and man, that place looks like paradise. Would be so perfect if I could settle there!

Thank you. Though Mexico has always seemed just as scary and with many of the same problems as the place I want to leave.

I'm more inclined towards East Asia, and read that Thailand may have options for "digital nomads". My passive income alone may be enough to live in relative comfort there.

If I ever go to the western hemisphere I'd rather consider places like Chile, or even visa-free places like Svalbard, Norway as a last resort.. :)

How about just disappearing in a Polynesian island like Samoa, is that a thing? lol

Why does it have to be one OR the other?

Even humans have created systems that sort of create other shit on their own.

Like the patterns that form when viewing prime numbers in certain ways, the fundamental laws of the universe could be some emergent properties arising from mathematical truths, and require no "god"

I've never understood

This is the reason :)

Consider turning images off to read the content.

I'm sorry, I can try to understand the well-meant intent behind this, but what, and pretend the world is all roses and rainbows?

No. Leave the images on. You first world city folk need to SEE the horror that goes on beyond your ivory towers, some of it enabled by the very work that you do.

Do you honestly think that most people in the USA believe that?

Ah yes, the mythical "Locals"

But even among them I'm sure there's plenty bread-and-butter 9-to-5ers, just in slightly posher professions.

You know what other societal paradigm shift could be really amazing but nobody seems to have brought it up yet?

Working in the evening instead of daytime.

Specially in hot ass countries/cities.

I mean really, do most modern jobs really depend on sunlight anymore?

Right now most people's daily cycle is "Rest -> Work -> Leisure -> Rest"

We should give "Rest -> Leisure -> Work -> Rest" a try.

Some other radical ideas: Let people alternate between 2 jobs every week. Like say being a waiter one week then a store clerk the other week. Most professions like cashiers etc could easily handle this. The benefit to workers would be the option to gain more experience/networking/mobility and a safety net of always having a backup job if you lose one.

Indeed. People run entire families on like $300 a month, where I've been.

taking a 20% pay cut

There has been no drop in productivity

Your employer seems to believes different.

It's appalling, but not surprising, how little of the world cares about taking even ONE day off every week, let alone two, and laughable to suggest mandating three days off.

In the UAE, for example, most people work 12+ hours every day, and barely get just Fridays off. Almost every one I know was working on Christmas, and they'll be working on New Year's. Vacations etc are unthinkable.

They don't feel it's odd or that it's "over"working or that having more free time would be rewarding; this is dominant mentality in the the Middle East and most of Asia and Africa (and I bet in other "poor" regions like parts of South America and Eastern Europe too).

Being idle in these societies is seen as a sin at best and the difference between survival and starvation in practice. Besides, even if people were forced to take 2 days off every week, they wouldn't know what to do with their time anyway (which manifests as the generally low output of creative arts from these parts), or have the disposable income to indulge in anything beyond a stroll at the mall or a meal at McDonald's (though KFC is more common round here I suppose).

Holidays are a first world luxury.

If everyone took them more often in every country, your Samsungs etc would be a lot more expensive.

Boy Microsoft's software is the most pirated in the world.

In my corner of the 3rd world and the countries around it many people have computers but almost nobody pays for software.

meh I've just about given up.

There's no worse curse than being born and stuck in a place where you can't find any compatible people let alone kindred spirits.

All I can hope for is running into someone like myself someday, but if they're really like me we will just turn each other off.

Bubbles of privilege are never a real solution to endemic societal issues. What will you do when you don't even have any electricity to run the HVAC on?

In most third-world regions with similar pollution people don't even have a reliable electric power grid.

with regards to Korea and China. Japanese resentment is still highly noticeable in countries where they colonized and raped them.

The US and UK are resented for the same reasons in many parts of the world.

For example the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnō_jōi

To be fair, wasn't Japan invaded first? A few times.

The "West" has had the longest record of invading other nations, forcibly "opening ports", or just generally intruding into and screwing up countries in other ways besides war.

The Opium Wars are one of the more appalling examples. Literally invading a country because they don't want to buy your narcotics? What the fuck.

On the flip side of what most comments are talking about, here's a very cute and wholesome example of how a Japanese person views the US:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVcU6i2k9-M

(Highly recommended if you are in need of a smile on your face)

When talking to Japanese people I sometimes surprise them by mentioning or recommending Japanese media or things about Japan I love that they didn't know about.

Likewise, when they talk about my country they sometimes mention stuff that I barely know!

This is usually good. It shows us what qualities about us are the most visible to other people, to build upon them or fix them.

Anglocentric chauvinism has always had a gross habit of looking at other cultures in a patronizing way. Though to be fair other cultures are guilty of this too when viewing those different than them.

Ever since antiquated Orientalism, it's rarely been an honest curiosity but more of a high-nosed "what's wrong with them" or seen as an exotic escape from the West's own mundanity.

The latter of course often ends in disillusionment, prompting generalized complaints about the object of fetish (if you lurk on any expat forums you may know what I'm talking about).

It can be really annoying to other people, specially when they have to either live up to some stupid assumption or defend against it.

Only if the people you are kind to appreciate that.

I grew up in a third world dog-eat-dog culture where kindness is generally equated with naivete and everyone has to keep their guard up against each other.

I'm still struggling with ping-ponging between being taken advantage of or being too mean. I don't know where to draw the line and with whom.

In the last couple months alone I've been played for a fool by a few people who, to put it simply, weren't deserving of kindness. It certainly has not been good for my health, mental or physical, and it's going to leave me too cold and cynical for someone who could actually use some kindness, until I being to feel bad about that and open myself up to being exploited and so the cycle repeats.

I immensely prefer USB-C to any of the alternatives.

I don't know why Apple hasn't positioned video podcasts as an alternative to YouTube.

They already exist, and the subscriber mechanism is already better than YouTube (view offline, choose when/what to download), just needs some work for comments, ratings, annotations etc.

I'm sure retconning (was the game even canon?) it as having happened after Crusade would have taken less work than writing an entire new story.. (though considering the quality of Skull's writing, I'm not sure)