fourthwaveska

You’ve reminded me of that xray spex song, “I live off you”.

She just gave you an icy look of doom.

Nope. Nada. None. Zilch.

But enjoy singing some bad national anthem and crying while waving a flag or maybe killing someone who disrespects your flag, or whatever it is the patriotic kids do today.

We really have no country or stable home right now. Once we get to Spain we will love being there, but we will still hold no sense of patriotism.

I'm not willing to fight, murder, or die for a nation. Some people are wired that way, violent ideation of being a hero, dying for god and country or whatever, but it ain't me.

I’m guessing you have never volunteered at a refugee camp?

Would you like to? I ask in all seriousness. The UN has several programs which are basically refugee tourism.

Like missionary work but without forcing them to get baptized for their supper.

I did it in Turkey 6 years ago. Imagine 5 miles of tents in any direction. Most people who were there then are still there now.

Obama invaded Syria "in the name of Christ and oil profits"? That justification was a myth, even when the Trotskyites-cum-Conservatives asserted it as truth 15 years ago.

Citation needed.

Hmm. So it is OK for me to say make all of my money in San Francisco then go buy property in much poorer Detroit?

Now what if about 1/3 of that income came from my wife who is from a poorer country than Spain?

Damn. Maybe I should tell the IRS that I’m an oil company instead of an expat.

I just realized, I never mentioned Bush, you did. See, I didn't even have to mention Bush, just his legacy, and you instantly knew what I was referencing.

My life experiences have made me incapable of empathizing with this view. My fellow citizens have never had my back, and I disagree with most everything they hold dear, as they disagree with most everything about me.

I don't hate America or its people, I'm just not that into them.

Patriotic people love to tell others "If you don't love America, leave it". Well, as my patriotic act to those great patriotic Americans .. I left.

Please don't take this personnaly as I'm not targeting you specifically with my comment: but I don't know how I feel about wealthy foreigners coming to a place, buy property and extract rent from locals, who may not even be able to afford ownership in the first place.

Weird statement. Don't worry, I wouldn't take your uncertainty about your own feelings personally.

However, I do understand you, and this is something we've struggled with. My wife is a Turk, and at first when we realized "hey, if we sell my house in Mendocino, we can live like princes in Istanbul, or kings on the Aegean", and once that novelty wore off, we decided that we weren't those people.

The argument itself can apply to anywhere. In San Francisco, I spent 10 years living in illegal punk warehouses where I was not a gentrifier, but then I spent 10 years living in Oakland, where I was a gentrifier, even though I'm from California.

Where does the line get drawn? Is it OK to have the $$ to buy a nicer place anywhere in my own country? What about my home state?

We still struggle with this question a lot.

Sure by these measures I'm rich, but I don't feel that way. Our current income isn't really indicative of the whole picture. Since I was diagnosed as Bi-Polar 20 years ago, I have averaged 2 months of unemployment per year, and just spent 13 months without income due to my inability to cope with the stress of the world.

Today I'm rich. Tomorrow I could be living in a van for 6 months like I did after the 2001 bubble burst.

Summers really are lovely there. Now that I'm finally vaccinated I'm hoping to go spend 3-4 weeks hopping back and forth between Fano/Esbjerg and Copenhagen. My treat to myself after over a year of Covid-induced unemployment now that I'm vaccinated and working again.

Yes Bush isn't president, but the failures and hatreds of the entire Bush family are still incredibly relevant today. If you don't believe that, look at the 10s of thousands of Afghans currently walking through Iran and Turkey to find refuge in Europe).

When you're the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, your decisions outlast your position.

This argument also gets me icy cold stares of death.

It also reminds me of how mind-blowing it is that a country whose land-area is 1/5 of California managed to conquer almost 1/2 of South America!

Yeah that kind of pissed me off too. Luckily most countries treated everybody the same and we got out jabs with our age groups without a fuss.

Not really. I dont think I fully got over the us vs them mentality with dev organizations until ‘07 or ‘08.

Oh no. I understand that america’s military exists mosty to force christianity on the world and to maintain high oil prices, not to protect little old me.

I just expected them to, you know, pick up the phone or have a hotline with a recording of suggestions.

I left the usa a long time ago, and the only interaction I need with them is a new passport every 2 years when I run out of pages for stamps.

Patriotism? What exactly is that word to you? To me it is merey loyalty to mud.

Yes, I love it there. My two closest friends moved there to study marine archaeology and within 3 years another 7 had moved there. We were married in Fanø. I’m old, I like the quiet.

Ideally we would spend our winters somewhere warm and the rest of the time in Denmark.

The Spanish golden visa will require a €550k housing investment, then the normal amount of accrued in-country time for citizenship.

Maybe we’re sort of upper midde-class then. We gross about $200k consulting. Not rich, not poor.

We live in the developing world now so here we are definitely upper middle class/rich, and do not have millions in assets.

Re: Nato, fair point. There is still a difference between being bullied into submission to American hegemony and being part of the us empire.

I really, really detest cold weather and drunk people, both of which Russia has in abundance. Russia and China are just as offensive to my own moral compass as the USA.

Once we attain citizenship I’m going to try to convince my family to move to Esbjerg, at least for a few years.

I wish! Greece was my secone choice (I used to study Lyra in Crete, and Rembetiko Bouzouki (Rembetiko style) in Thessaloniki and Athens.

We almost bought a flat in the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens! Politically/Energetically It’s what Berkeley was like in the early/mid-90s.

The day Trump was elected we were in Barcelona, and decided never to go back to the USA, flipped a coin between Spain and Greece. I always lose coin flips!

Yes, but my wife has spent the past four years learning Spanish and every time I suggest Portugal she gets a murderous look in her eyes.

My preference is actually Denmark, but it is an order of magnitude more difficult to move there, and my wife hates the language :(

By most western standards my family teeters on the line between middle and upper middle clas.

We sold all of our US property last year; and now we are shopping for 4-6 unit buildings within 100km of Barcelona to get our Golden Visas. Our goal is to get citizenship and access to the EU then renouncing my US citizenship.

It isnt about money, I am juwt ashamed to have an American passport and know my tax dollars are being spent on war and murder in the name of christ and oil profits.

I was born an American and would prefer not to die that way.

From the bottom of my heart, fuck off. If you get blackmailed, abducted, squeezed or raided in any way, the U.S. will have the privilege of not caring.

Guess you have never lived abroad? If you think the US doesnt care about you when you’re in country, you dont even exist when you’re out of it.

Imagine being in the middle of a coup, calling up your consulate for guidance only to find out that they all left the country or are hiding in their bunkers. Been through that before.

Sysadmin is a System Administrator, which performs operations manually.

For decades before DevOps was coined, Sysadmins were automating infrastructures with tools like Kickstart, Jumpstart, CFEngine, ISconf, Rancid, netboot/pxeboot/dhcp, etc. I first provisioned infrastructure with CFEngine in 1996 or 1997.

Man, I am in full agreement with you on every single point. The pure animosity between Dev & Ops was really a negative self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating trope that did a great deal of harm, both emotionally and professionally.

One thing that really helped my teammates and friends was asking them to do code reviews of my work, and them realizing "hey, if I understand this, I can fix it, if I can fix it, I can write it!"

Another was Ruby. Sure, Ruby sucks, but it's easy, almost anything you did just worked. This was why Puppet was written in Ruby (Luke spent months trying to do it in Python, then when he tried Ruby he had a working prototype in 2 or 3 days). Ruby was a great transition language.

I've been writing software since I was about 10, and a sysadmin/systems engineer for almost 30 years now. You could be very successful with the right mindset, understanding of process and deep-knowledge of operating systems, networking, file systems and dns.

A good friend of mine suffers dyslexia and dyscalcula, and was just never able to jump past the standard unix shell scripting skillset, not for lack of trying. His understanding of Unix internals, TCP/IP, DNS and TQM-oriented process development is mind-blowing.

He just retired from a successful, 30 year career architecting and implementing secure messaging systems for several large banks. If you bank with Wells Fargo, Bank of America or Wachovia then you've probably communicated with your bank through systems he built.

It doesn’t tell me anything about what you do; and it implies that sysadmins never used to code either.

Back when Luke wrote Puppet, he himself admitted that he was a mediocre developer with a good idea. His premise was that most SysAdmins weren't developers and that they would be more effective with a DSL that wrapped a templating engine and an executor then really learning how to code to build their own tools.

This set just an ugly trend. Next came Chef, which was written by someone (Adam Jacobs) who was pissed off at Luke because he felt entitled to 100% of his time. This was an incredibly dramatic exchange, Puppet Issue #1010 (I can't seem to find any of the old tickets anymore). Adam was making bank off of Puppet consulting, Luke was barely scraping by.

So Chef came along, it was supposed to bridge the gap between Puppet and developers. It was also garbage, but after a few years you could sort of kind of do real development on it.

Then we got Ansible, meh. Salt Stack which was more for managing api driven saas infrastructure but had/has a lot of the bad architectural decisions made by Puppet.

Now we have Terraform, which is OK, but also garbage. On top of that there's the Terraform CDK, which sort of lets you code, but is really just a golang-like DSL that generates HCL or Json. We also have Pulumi, which like the TFCDK, is a golang-like DSL that .. generates HCL to be run by Puppet.

All of this garbage because Luke felt that Sysadmins couldn't code.