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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 12th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • Interestingly… Yes. Those words appear nowhere in the article I am looking at. Currently connected to a US VPN (from outside the USA)

    What Led to the War:

    The commercial restrictions that Britain’s war with France imposed on the U.S. exacerbated the U.S.’s relations with both powers. Although neither Britain nor France initially accepted the U.S.’s neutral rights to trade with the other—and punished U.S. ships for trying to do so—France had begun to temper its intransigence on the issue by 1810. That, paired with the ascendance of certain pro-French politicians in the U.S. and the conviction held by some Americans that the British were stirring up unrest among Native Americans on the frontier, set the stage for a U.S.-British war. The U.S. Congress declared war in 1812.

    How it ended:

    Peace talks between Britain and the U.S. began in 1814. Britain stalled negotiations as it waited for word of a victory in America, having recently committed extra troops to its western campaign. But news of their losses at places like Plattsburgh, New York, and Baltimore, Maryland, paired with the duke of Wellington’s counsel against continuing the war, convinced the British to pursue peace more genuinely, and both sides signed the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814. The final battle of the war occurred after this, when a British general unaware of the peace treaty led an assault on New Orleans that was roundly crushed.

    Edited to add: I was not even aware that this was happening now. I find this even scarier. Revisionist history for Americans by IP address!


  • You cannot stop the collection. It ALWAYS collects. It may not transmit, even if connected. For example the black box in many cars is really an assortment of ECUs that contain fine grained historical data. It does eventually roll over and get replaced but the data is there.

    For example there are public cases you can find where the police, not even needing a warrant, were allowed to dump this data off of a rental vehicle that a suspect, not convicted just suspected, was thought to have been in. Of course the copaganda story showed that they the used this data which was mostly location by gps and speed by the wheel sensors and gps to get a track of everywhere that vehicle had been in the last 6 months. Every person who rented it and drove it somewhere had their privacy violated. But I guess that’s normal now.

    The infotainment systems are the biggest jerks for data storage as they’re just mini generic computers today with lots of storage.

    To stop wireless transmission you can remove the sim card from the modem. Many vehicles won’t work or even start if the modem is disconnected (unplugged or unfused). A Nissan for example will drain its 12v battery overnight trying to find the modem if it is unplugged. But if the sim is bad or disabled, it will try and fail to communicate, then retry later which won’t kill the battery.

    You lose a lot of convenience and the data is still there. So the answer is basically you can’t drive a new vehicle without it violating your privacy with collection. You can only make the wireless transmission more private or disabled. I suppose you could buy a scanner yourself and before you leave the vehicle, factory wipe all ECUs. But even then you’ll need to enable them for emissions testing and such if that’s in your area.



  • 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.



  • 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.




  • 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.