Aaron

Not the person you’re responding to but I did the same thing for in part the same reasons.

We had significant fiscal privilege in that we were old enough and willing to go into debt enough early in our lives to purchase a house before things got stupid, and each time we moved we sold the house for a profit. We are renting again in our new country (New Zealand) until we build back up and get at least permanent residency (can’t buy a house here unless you’re a PR). Buying a home was the most stressful and most impactful thing financially, but that’s not feasible now for most people.

We got lucky enough, and purposefully saved for escape for 10 years by living with things that weren’t comfortable (concrete floors for years rather than replace water damage, going above and beyond to keep electricity and gas prices low even at the cost of comfort, working too much to put money into savings and neglecting family, no eating out and limiting grocery budget for last two years, pulling out ALL investments like 401k to make the final push and starting from scratch in our new home, etc.).

I can tell you it was all worth it. Live below your means (while increasing your means incrementally), beans and rice rather than packaged foods (balanced with how much your time is worth), make every sacrifice with a clear goal in mind. Like I said, it takes years, and you’re operating at a disadvantage just because we did this starting 12-13 years ago when prices were significantly different, and average wages haven’t compensated. We have kids, so the other benefits were things like the child tax credit increase in 2021, which gave us unexpected increases.

I’ve seen people do all this just to have to go back to the US because they didn’t scope out their landing enough: make sure you know how much you need to survive in your new country, know the cost of visas, limits on what you can earn in your job, know what jobs you can even fill based on visa and qualification restrictions… and then plan for having 5-10% more in total liquidity than you think you need. Things change, accidents happen… in our case our kid had to have emergency surgery the week before our flight, that same day our car died so we couldn’t sell it for as much as we wanted, and a year after arriving they increased the cost of visa renewal by over 100%. Luckily we had planned for things going haywire so we were still able to escape.

It’s not easy. I wish you all the luck in the world. Sorry for the novel and basically saying “be born earlier and get lucky” 👀

Exactly my thoughts. 80+ is already a horrific number, it’s not going to make people more likely to act to artificially balloon the number 3x. There could be 1000 school shootings in one year and I doubt the US people or Govt would do a thing. They actively choose this every day.

Longer explanation: the supposed paradox of tolerance is when people whine about not being protected by tolerant society when they do something intolerant. They claim society isn’t so tolerant if it doesn’t tolerate their intolerance.

In reality, society is built upon social contracts. One of those contracts is tolerance. If someone is intolerant, they’ve broken the social contract and therefore are no longer protected by that contract. In fact, it is society’s responsibility to reject the intolerant actors to protect the rest of society.

There’s no such thing as a paradox of tolerance. People who think there is such a thing just don’t understand social contracts.

I dont speak other language. Also they spelled favor wrong!

I’d settle for inventory sorting

A game that captures the feeling of when Arthur Dent crash lands on that primitive planet in “The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy” and makes a sandwich. I want The Sandwich Maker.

You crash into this procedurally generated world. All the plants and animals are new every playthrough, and you slowly learn about them through experimentation and from the native population who has never heard of a sandwich and really doesn’t do much except eat raw ingredients. When you cook the meat from an animal instead of eating it raw, they all lose their minds with wonder and you become the town’s chef.

You harvest wild crops and cultivate better ones. You find ways to use the animal fat and meat and “milk”, you find plants that work as food, maybe their seeds are great crushed up with a little water into a paste, maybe you need to dry them out, maybe you need to de-seed them and mix them with another plant to make it taste better… on and on.

You need to work with the people there to make tools, and together you iterate out exactly what you need.

Eventually you have to find something that matches your randomised flavour pallette for the perfect sandwich. You assemble all the ingredients you’ve collected, cultivated, or created, with the tools and techniques you and the townspeople have developed, and you take a bite. It’s perfect. You win.

I like his automotive channel as well