Honestly I find it pretty fucked up that someone would renounce their citizenship "for convenience". I can't really comprehend how their country could mean so little to someone, especially when that country is a democracy.
Regarding the taxation when living abroad, doesn't it actually make sense? Sure it sounds like an oddity because the US are the only to do it, but most emigrants I know still use the consular services of their country of origin every now and then, benefit from its diplomatic protection, and can return any time if circumstances require it (implying they should be contributing to keeping the country safe and functional in the meantime, call it an insurance policy if you will), and probably many other benefits I'm not thinking of. Some countries will even send special forces abroad to recover citizens in danger.
So yeah apparently the practicalities of it suck sometimes (and that should definitively be improved) but in principle it's not as outlandish as it sounds, imo.
It would have sounded ridiculous to me too had I not lived it. It’s the tax compliance, not the paying of taxes that is the issue. Most of us will never pay, we already pay more in the country we live in. The tax compliance enforcement costs the US far more than it makes in collecting taxes from citizens overseas, and other countries refuse to allow dual citizens to open accounts or invest. There are MASSIVE, and I’m talking tens of thousands of dollars in fines that can be assessed if you are overseas a file a form too late. And it’s difficult for a specialist accountant to work it all out, let alone a regular person. It’s the anxiety of not knowing what is coming next.
If there were a fee for living overseas and having the option of using consular assistance, sure I’d be happy to pay it.
If you live more or less any other industrialized country, and work there, you will owe the US ZERO in taxes because you pay more to the country where you are resident (and perhaps a citizen).
The complaint is not about having to pay taxes to reflect your status, it's about having to pay accountants etc. to complete forms that show you don't owe any tax to the US.
Why wouldn't a country mean little to someone, even if it is a democracy? I live in the United States, and any theoretical vote I give is completely worthless unless I would move to Maine, and even then it's still not worth much. I move out of the United States, my vote is still worthless. I get citizenship elsewhere, my vote might have a chance at value.
The United States doesn't actually do much for its citizens; it's the states that do things for citizens, and if you're not in a good state, you get no real value from the United States or any part of your country. It wasn't always this way, but it's been this way for as long as I've been alive.
Sentiment is overrated and irrational if the country's never given you anything, and the United States just doesn't give anything to a substantial volume of its citizens.
A common argument is that the United States gives the right to free speech, or to guns, or to varying abstract concepts, but it would also give this even if everyone stopped paying their taxes and the United States was unable to enforce anything.
I'm a big fan of taxation, and of most laws. The US, though, really doesn't do anything with it that has ever benefit me.
The poster really does seem like, if anything, she cares too much for the country.
I've always wondered how people in the green card immigration queue, sometimes estimated to take 20 years until their turn, feel when they read someone like you failing to value the country they live in at all.
Probably skeptic, because they lived elsewhere, got an education for relatively inexpensive or free, and all they see is the difference in the value of currency.
Or probably skeptic, because they're planning on moving to a good state.
Or most probably, they don't care. They're moving countries, they probably don't have the most nationalistic bent to them.
I don't hate the United States, I'm just not being unrealistic about how beneficial it's been for me.
>You are free to not wear a mask or party by yourself, in your house, away from society.
Or you could frame it the other way. Instead of suppressing everyone's freedom, people who are too scared to resume a normal life could watch us live a free life through their window, from the security of their home.
I'm not aware of any country that had a democratic consultation to ask the people which way they wanted it.
>I would recommend looking into decoupling your social needs from your job.
I absolutely hate that this is the standard answer that comes up everytime someone mentions not being happy with WFH.
Not only it doesn't answer the question, but it's just a slightly more polite version of "just make friends, duh" which is not helpful at all.
To many people (myself included) 2-3 hours of social activities in a day is not enough. I need to be around people, and while it's great to meet some friends in the evening it doesn't change the fact that I just spent 10 miserable hours alone in my appartment.
In addition to that, I find there are many disadvantages to remote work: I hate doing over the phone what could have been a nice in-person chat, I hate how tedious it is to show/explain things that would have been easily demonstrated in person, I hate how difficult it is to grasp non-verbal cues, etc.
I don't know a single person IRL who likes full time WFH, but judging by how popular it is here, it seems I shouldn't assume that everybody is in the same situation. Conversely, don't assume everybody can turn his miserable WFH experience in something awesome just "by doing stuff in the evening". Btw no offense but I had to laugh at your suggestion that a vido chat is a social activity.
The explosion in the number of sofware components in modern tractors and combines is inherent to what we expect from them. If your open source tractor is essentially a tractor from 20 years ago without the fancy new tech then there's no market for it.
Just lookup how much tractors from before the "e-tractor era" go for. I'll break it to you, it's not a lot.
I think people who aren't involved with farming can't really comprehend the amount of technology involved and the savings that technology enables (and ultimately makes it worth it even if the equipment is more difficult/expensive to repair).
As an aside, we always hear complaints about John Deere and never other manufacturers. I wonder if it's because anti-corporate populism works better when it's targeted at a well known american brand or if John Deere is truely that bad. We don't have any modern John Deeres in my area but a few Case IH and Claas, and I've never heard any complaints.
Btw my point isn't to justify the anti-consumer behavior of some manufacturers, but to provide context as to why "an open source tractor" is a completely naive idea.
I don't understand how "not having to file a tax return" can work. How does it account for all the information a government might not reasonably have about your wealth and economic activities? How do you apply for tax credits?
The taxation system is not particularly intricate here in Switzerland but there's absolutely no way a government that is not an orwelian surveillance state would have the required information about each person to pre-file their tax return.
In both the US and UK employers have to report earnings and banks / brokers have to report interest and investment income to the IRS/HMRC. Do the Swiss tax authorities trust citizens to correctly report their own income without any verification?
In the UK the government communicates your tax code to your employer payroll department to tell them how much tax to withhold on your earnings (taking account of tax credits etc.) Banks have to withhold the basic rate of tax (higher rate tax payers must file, but that already excludes 90% of tax payers from worrying about it.)
In the US the system seems similar except the government doesn't let your employer know how much tax to withhold so you fill in a form for your employer with the information that gets it mostly but not quite right (so long as you don't switch jobs that year!) Filing taxes as a regular employee ends up being substantially more complex than filing taxes as a self-employed person in the UK where the government provides an online system much simpler than that provided by the tax filing companies in the US (otherwise print and mail several different PDF forms and do the math yourself, fortunately if you get it wrong the IRS already knows what you owe so at that point they'll just point out the corrections and tell you what you owe...) And this beurocracy is of course all doubled because states have their own completely separate set of rules.
> A pound of steak requires 4000 to 6000 gallons of water.
People keep throwing this number around but it's at best voluntarily missleading, if not straight up a lie.
4 to 6k gallons is roughly what a meat cow (slaughtered at 18 months of age) will use in its lifetime (which btw if a lot less than the average westerner in the same time span). To stretch it to "4 to 6k gallons per pound of beef" you have to include the rain that watered its pasture, which makes absolutely no sense. Nobody ever tells that a bread loaf requires 500L of water to produce (roughly the quantity of water needed to water 1 bread loaf worth of wheat) because this water falls for free from the sky anyway.
Now you can make intricate arguments about how if there were other types of ecosystems in place of pastures more water could be retained in the soil and would eventually make its way to aquafiers or rivers -which is true- but I'm confident this isn't how people interpret this number. The goal of people who provide this number without any context is to give the impression that eating a pound of beef is equivalent to letting the faucet open for 4k+ gallons worth of water, which it absolutely isn't.
> To stretch it to "4 to 6k gallons per pound of beef" you have to include the rain that watered its pasture, which makes absolutely no sense. Nobody ever tells that a bread loaf requires 500L of water to produce (roughly the quantity of water needed to water 1 bread loaf worth of wheat) because this water falls for free from the sky anyway.
Not in the west, it doesn't. The water for the pasture (or the alfalfa for the feed lot), and the water to grow the wheat, are often pumped from an aquifer. And some of the more important aquifers are shrinking.
But the overall point is a valid one. I note that 500L of water is about 125 gallons. Per loaf of bread.
(edit: just realised that maybe you meant the west of the USA and not the western world in general, in this case you might be right I'm obviously not aware of local practices from the other side of the world)
It does, I absolutely hate using authoritative argument but my family raises cattle and I've never seen a watered pasture in my life. I wonder what's the background of people teaching me online "how things really are".
In bad years when it doesn't rain enough for grass to grow, people get rid of the animals they can't afford to feed. There's no system in place to water the pastures and "save the harvest".
If you buy cheap, low quality meat from animals that never grazed and are fed grain and silage all year round then yes these feed crops would probably have been watered at some point (but even then, not 100% of the water comes from irigation). The broad avilability of meat grown in miserable conditions is a problem as well but not the one I'm talking about.
Yes, I meant the west of the USA. West of the 100th Meridian, you're west of the western edge of the Gulf of Mexico, and therefore you get significantly less rain.
You can see this when you're driving. If you drive west on I-70, the trees stop about 20 miles west of Salina Kansas. On I-80 you're close to the Platte River so it's not quite as stark.
Also fun fact, a cow does not yield a single stake, if I recall correctly a cow yields 30-40% of it's weight. Given a stake is 250 grams and a cow weights over 300kgs that's about 400 "steaks" (a cow yields a lot of cuts not just steaks) per cow. So that's about 10 to 15 gallons of water per "steak".
> I think it's pretty widely acknowledged that speed limits are not effectively enforced on cars.
No it's not, unless you have some study to back it up because it's not my experience.
(edit: just to be clear, the spirit of this comment is not to dismiss anything that isn't backed by studies, sometimes simple observation of the world around us is enough to reach solid conclusions, but I disagree that speed limits aren't respected and enforced. Could depend on where you live as well.)
I'm personally convinced that there's no justification for banning eMTBs (or any other negative sentiments toward them really) beside gatekeeping.
There's nothing about eMTBs allowing people to venture in more difficult trails than with normal MTBs. Most terrains that are too hard on a normal MTB will be even harder on an eMTB because you loose some agility and the ability to carry the bike over unrideable sections.
I often see people complain about "how fast eMTBs go in some climbs, which is dangerous to bystanders". This is the most ridiculous argument, completely unrelated to eMTBs. Regardless of the terrain (uphill, downhill, flat, ...) I always slow down to ~walking speed when passing someone if the trail isn't wide enough to put at least ~1.5 meter between me and them. Meanwhile the same people who complain about eMTBs being dangerous bomb down the hill past hikers at 25+ km/h. Anyway, a long rant to basically say that any argument about speed is only ever relevant if brought up in the context of educating people to be more courteous riders regardless of the bike they ride.
Finally, you're orders of magnitudes more likely to be stranded because you punctured and forgot your repair kit (or whatever other damage to your bike that can't be fixed trailside) than due to overheating battery or whatever improbable scenario people come up to justify hating on eMTBs.
I generally agree with you. I don't personally find eMTBs to be bothersome, and fully expect to be riding one when I'm not physically able to ride an acoustic MTB. And I definitely agree with you re. bystanders, where regular MTBs are fast enough to be dangerous.
The only point where I disagree is:
> There's nothing about eMTBs allowing people to venture in more difficult trails than with normal MTBs
If you want to go down the hill, you need to climb up the hill. This is a skill and fitness gate, normally; you're not going to tackle a difficult or extended descent if you don't think you can climb out again.
Soquel Demo Forest, one of the very popular Bay Area spots, bans eMTBs. It might be reasonable in this case due to the elevation profile. From the car park you need to climb for 20-40 minutes. You descend. You then have another long climb back to the carpark. It's a worst-case scenario for batteries, and because the area is so popular, it tends to attract people riding beyond their limits already.
I don't personally care, and I don't want to tell people not to enjoy an activity, but I can understand the reasoning in some cases.
> It is also not really a viable large scale solution to "how do you move people around?"
Not every solution needs to be large scale to be usefull. I think biofuels should be promoted and used as much as possible (obviously within the limits where it makes sense ecologically speaking, e.g. not destroying ecosystems to plant more biofuel crops or burning coal to synthetize (m)ethanol). Both the idea that EVs are suited for every purpose and that they'll quickly take over the entire ICE car pool are ludicrous. Where EVs can not / not yet be used it makes perfect sense to use alternative fuel sources.
> many countries in the West should hire the Chinese to construct and build HSR in their countries with foreign labour under local direction
There's absolutely no reason to do it, most (if not all) western countries are perfectly capable of building highspeed railway technically speaking. The reason why it's not done is political and financial. Also in the current climate you'll have a hard time justifying hiring a chinese companies over a domestic company to build critical infrastuctures (and rightfully so imo). In fact I believe public contracts should always be awarded to domestic companies, granted domestic companies with the required skills exist (which is absolutely the case in Europe for railway).
Regarding the taxation when living abroad, doesn't it actually make sense? Sure it sounds like an oddity because the US are the only to do it, but most emigrants I know still use the consular services of their country of origin every now and then, benefit from its diplomatic protection, and can return any time if circumstances require it (implying they should be contributing to keeping the country safe and functional in the meantime, call it an insurance policy if you will), and probably many other benefits I'm not thinking of. Some countries will even send special forces abroad to recover citizens in danger.
So yeah apparently the practicalities of it suck sometimes (and that should definitively be improved) but in principle it's not as outlandish as it sounds, imo.