While I know most Americans feel that way it isn’t true.

Migrants, refugees, immigrants… These words apply to white Americans as much as they do to brown central Americans or darker Africans. When you’re wealthy you become an expat.

A expat can pack up their stuff, fly somewhere else, get residency and citizenship based on investment, and that’s it. Very easy in the 2010’s.

If you don’t have the money for it, you can still go but you’re going to be limited where you can go fully legally. You may have to illegally work to get to a “desirable” location.

But most people who are in the USA came because of relatives that left everything behind except 1 trunk/suitcase and went for it. It is not easy. But it is possible.

To say you just can’t because it’s expensive is the lazy way out. You can’t do it comfortably and easily if you’re poor. But you can walk across the Mexican border, 2000 miles walk, just like others do in reverse. You just choose not to.

For Americans and Canadians on a budget, southeast Asia is a great place. Easy cheap visas and lots of countries to do border runs if you need. You can cheaply buy residency in many of them.

You escape BEFORE the regime change. You do not wait to escape.

It was evident that this was the path the US chose in 2008 election vitriol and then 2012 with the tea party. Then in 2016 Trump, it was as blatant as can be. You’ve had 8 years to plan and leave. You now have 6 months.

Make sure you have a passport. You should have been trying to obtain secondary citizenship. Even with all the money and education, you are only allowed to stay in a foreign country on a residency visa. Americans call theirs a green card for example. It is tied to your passport. When your passport expires, OR IS CANCELLED, then all the visas tied to it are also affected. In some places you can stay as you transfer your visa to your new passport. Some places you cannot, you must exit and re-enter. If your passport is invalid, you can only exit back to the USA if you are only American. The cancelled part is the scary part because the USA already does this. If you don’t pay your taxes, or child support or if you have a warrant or even probable cause against you the US will cancel your passport. It’s the easiest way to force Americans back home for prosecution.

Your #1 goal should be starting to obtain citizenship elsewhere. If you have grandparents from Europe, see if you can get it. You have relatives in Canada, mayve you can get it. If you can’t, then start looking to buy citizenship or residency with a path to citizenship. This is 6 figures and can be instant like Vanuatu or take years like most of Europe. But again, better to start now.

As the Chinese routinely say, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time, is now.

The US is vast and it’s unlikely to devolve into anarchy. It may get very violent and bloody or it may become more like a governmental issue where you just get locked up if you’re bad. In that case storing some of your stuff in a storage area isn’t too risky. If it goes into anarchy, then it’ll be lost. Otherwise just keep paying and avoid.

I believe we’re looking right at 1930’s Germany. The parallels are uncanny. Those who survived, left. Those that waited until they were being rounded up to leave, mostly did not make it. And they lost everything they had and their families ever had.

I completed my move out 4 years ago now. I can now eat popcorn and watch the US implode from the other side of the world. I will lose some money, some possessions, and unimportant things. But my keepsakes and most of my assets are now free of the US.

I am not affiliated with them at all:

http://www.dzozo.net/

I purchased from a sales rep for the company over WhatsApp and using Alipay because it was easy. They sell their products on Alibaba as well which would give you the sales protection and all that. I’ve bought about a dozen of them so far for 3 different houses. Wonderful.

What I didn’t understand from their catalog until I got one, is that they are very modular. Basically they have a couple bowl designs, lots of lid module designs, and then a few tank designs. Mix and match them to get all the SKUs.

I got the extra large tanks in-wall with wall hung bowls and then the super awesome everything lids. So the final product installed is just a floating toilet, with some buttons on the wall above it. You walk up to it, the lid opens. You either sit and the seat is heated or you wave your foot and the lid opens for guy mode. When you’re done in guy mode just walk away and it will flush and close and clean. In sit mode press the little knob on the side and it starts the water and then heat dry. You can also rotate the dial to get articulating wash and dry action. It comes with a remote control (why?) and an lcd on top. The soap dispenser inside creates a foam that shoots down when the lid opens. I’ve never been so impressed by a porcelain throne.

I am not affiliated with them at all:

http://www.dzozo.net/

I purchased from a sales rep for the company over WhatsApp and using Alipay because it was easy. They sell their products on Alibaba as well which would give you the sales protection and all that. I’ve bought about a dozen of them so far for 3 different houses. Wonderful.

What I didn’t understand from their catalog until I got one, is that they are very modular. Basically they have a couple bowl designs, lots of lid module designs, and then a few tank designs. Mix and match them to get all the SKUs.

I got the extra large tanks in-wall with wall hung bowls and then the super awesome everything lids. So the final product installed is just a floating toilet, with some buttons on the wall above it. You walk up to it, the lid opens. You either sit and the seat is heated or you wave your foot and the lid opens for guy mode. When you’re done in guy mode just walk away and it will flush and close and clean. In sit mode press the little knob on the side and it starts the water and then heat dry. You can also rotate the dial to get articulating wash and dry action. It comes with a remote control (why?) and an lcd on top. The soap dispenser inside creates a foam that shoots down when the lid opens. I’ve never been so impressed by a porcelain throne.

Yes exactly! A bidet attachment plus a cheap bowl is like half of that. So it seemed like a no brainer.

Upgrade to one with power. Never look back. Automatic flush, automatic seat raise and lower with a foot sensor, uv lights inside, foam/soap dispense into the bowl before and after, all the bidet features with constant and pulsing, articulating arm, heated seat, heated blow dry air, etc. It’s absolutely amazing.

Assuming you’re in the US just because the question only seems to come up there, and for our house there we imported them from Asia for less than $1k to the doorstep. Adding a power outlet is usually easy as most washrooms in the US have an outlet somewhere.

Bidet is like going to level 100 from 5. Super automatic Asian bidet is like a level 5000.

Keep your hot bean soup, I will drink my boiled landscape baggings.

Many telecom operators have a special code that is used for recording. When you’re making a call, you or the other party may press the record button. This will save both the input via microphone and the output via the speakers as one audio file for future use. When you press this button a special code is sent back to the telecom.

Until recently most places in the USA did not do anything with this code. But now it’s catching up to the rest of the world. Once this is pressed, a voice will tell both parties that they are being recorded in the recording. This is so that you can’t later say “I didn’t know they were recording me!” and if you have every-party consent laws, then that recording is illegal so it cannot be used as evidence and the person recording could actually be charged with a crime.

You can start the recording with an accidental face press, pocket press, keypad entry, or a malicious app. If either of you accidentally started it, then there’s your answer. If neither of you did, then most likely one of you is infected or one of you were connected to a relay tower decrypting your calls and then passing them through to a real tower. Whoever was operating this relay station was a n00b idiot though. Both are concerning.

Wow I thought I was the only idiot that bought it. Once they started charging for the smart features, it got unbatteried and became just a fancy box.

Always UPS everything. But also always have a simple backdoor. I generally have 1 little desktop like a NUC running some basic Win10 OS and an install of remote software like TeamViewer. It is connected to my hardware router right after the ISP router and a backup connection. Used to be LTE everywhere, now I’m half and half on Starlink. It is then also connected to the router ports needed for management but inactive.

If I have to, remote into the NUC over Starlink. I can then reboot my main ISP box. I can eventually get into my router and enable those ports which are pre-plugged in. From there I can then access all the stack management and all the IPMI ports like iLo. It’s a virtual interface through a virtual interface. It is slow, and painful. But it works.

And it works 99.99% of the time. But even then, I’ve had to do a call of shame and walk one of my friends through which button to press as I’m on the other side of the world. In my case it was also power related but the UPS I had decided to overheat. In reality over the summer, the temps were high. But also it is a super awesome double conversion UPS. The line voltage into the UPS was dropped to below standards from the utility because their grid was overworked with everyone’s AC’s. So the UPS saw this as a line failure, kicked in the double conversion and ran happily. But it did not count as a power failure, so none of my services scaled back. Essentially it was delivering 3KW of juice from the wall through a double conversion making the whole thing super hot. Eventually it shut down for safety automatically, just pulled the plug. My NUC is on a separate little backup along with the modems and an auto transfer switch which did its thing. But there was no way to press the reset button on the UPS for a critical safety shutdown like that. It had to be in person.

Road trip? Usually week or night of.

Airline travel within 4 hours, domestic or international is usually 2 days before hand.

Airline travel across the world is usually planned as a time block a month or two ahead of time. The actual destination and activities being planned as the dates get closer.

Exceptions are scheduled events. If I have an event to attend in a location, I’ll make a hotel reservation and book tickets for the thing. Then checkup options for travel there. Sometimes it’s part of a multileg journey.

Often I don’t know where in the world I will even be the week leading up to the thing. So I tend to either not purchase travel tickets, or buy a few different ones from hubs globally that are cheap and easy to get to.

I’d make that deal with the Sharks. Sea bass today, sea urchins tommorow.

The GPU on my laptop is also upgradeable. And when I want to upgrade it, it’ll be time for a new CPU too.

As it is now, very few GPUs in a laptop that can pull almost 200W and have 16GB of RAM. Mine is slower than the newest generations for speed but its quicker for long processing and large memory. When a 24GB GPU based on the 5x architecture comes out, I’ll be ready with a new CPU too.

When you get to baggage claim, if you then stand directly at the carousel blocking everyone’s view for more than 10 seconds, trap door opens and a system of pneumatic tubes forcibly jettisons you to the furthest point away in the airport for you to walk back.

Stand back, wait for your luggage to appear, then approach and get your bag and step back to the perimeter.

To get my VC funding in 2024, id also pitch that it “has AI” which is just facial recognition and if you get jettisoned twice in the same year, the third time goes into a shark pit or scorpion pit.

For real though, the only sports competitions I’ve been to live in the past decade have been robot sports.

Why would I pay money to see a human take a ball from another human, when I can pay less to watch a robot shoot flames and saw open another robot gladiator style?!

Yes I know. My point is that’s the ONLY benefit over a big brand that is socketed and upgradeable already. And having bought hardware capable of that for 20 years+, I’ve NEVER done it. Anytime I’m ready to upgrade the CPU or GPU, I generally upgrade both and the motherboard minimally. And for a laptop that is everything. The drives are standardized and socketed. The only thing you keep is the enclosure, screen, and battery. Battery dies with age. Screens die with age. All 3 are cheap and I don’t think worth keeping at the expense of just buying a new one when the upgrade comes.

And I love upgrading my desktops and laptops. Just in the real world of doing it, usually components are replaced generationally at the same time.

I love the idea of Framework and I buy laptops that do what they do. But from MegaVendors™

For example my Dell has socketed RAM, now with 128GB in it. It has a socketed CPU and GPU “card” with a mobile Xeon and Quadro rtx 5000. 5 M2 drives inside and a 2.5in area. Battery is pluggable and changeable. The trackpad and keyboard are held in place by a few screws and ribbon cables like everything else. With a small Phillips screwdriver I can replace anything. WiFi card is socketed. Antennas are SMA connectors. I’ve replaced the shell even after a security inspection dropped and damaged the metal enclosure…

I buy it because I can upgrade it within limits as long as the upgraded parts play nice with the main board. A framework promises to do the same except allow a mainboard upgrade. But at that point you’re probably buying everything. How many times, going back to desktop days, have you upgraded the entire system’s motherboard and not the CPU, GPU, RAM, etc…

And at that point you’re really only reusing the shell and screen and battery. The stuff you interact with everyday that will deteriorate or get dirty. And battery has a finite lifespan. Makes sense to upgrade the package when those need upgrading.

I view the framework as a great solution for a picky system user. It’s not for upgrading. It’s for customizing while you have that system. Allowing the maker of 2 or 3 SKUs to sell 1000 different laptops. Versus a Dell that sells 1000 different SKUs doing that internally and some of them allow you to do it externally like mine.

I wish them the best and I may buy one next time I need a beefy laptop. But their current specs don’t come close to matching what I can do. And their parts don’t work for my use like physical 3 button trackpad for example. When they do, awesome. But then, why not just go with the Dell? Who will send a guy to me anywhere in the world for free to fix or swap hardware… ANYWHERE. And no it’s not a corporate purchase, I own it personally and the warranty is standard.

I may buy one to support them once their margins go up and the demand cools. But until then, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to solve an actual consumer problem. It solves a corporate SKU problem that fixes itself as you become a big company.

Poison the data as often as possible. I’m getting kicked off more and more services because my data doesn’t match their fingerprinting. I don’t verify any identity. Even the private databases with addresses, cars, employers, etc are all filled with random junk data making them useless. I can’t “pass verification” because the source is stupid. I take that as a small win.

Biggest part was getting tf out of that shithole country. Life is much better now.

There is even a case where the US used a drone to murder a US citizen abroad, extrajudicially. Apparently those “guaranteed rights” mean nothing when they don’t want them to.

But good luck convincing almost any Americans of this as the propaganda is strong and the populace idiotic.

American.