COVID research made generic sequencing for viruses and bacteria incredibly cheap. You can run a PCR test for most things now for $10 (USD) or less. This opens a whole world of highly specific diagnostics and cheap, hyper-personalized treatments.

Also, MRNA vaccines are being tested for several other diseases and it seems very promising.

I’m hedging my bets against the 2nd American civil war and getting the 2nd passport, but I also live in a country with a king and that’s pretty silly in 2024.

Denmark also has a land value tax for anyone who’s interested in Georgism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism?wprov=sfla1

Barcelona is kinda famous for their pedestrian transformation over the last decade or two and the hiking and trains were excellent.

https://learn.sharedusemobilitycenter.org/overview/barcelona-superblock-initiative-barcelona-2016/

I just think an American would find the salaries for the kinds of jobs that get you visas (healthcare, tech, finance) to be pretty underwhelming, especially if OP has student loans or other debt in dollars.

Glassdoor says €66k/year for a doctor in Barcelona vs $154k/year in NYC. I assure you that anyone who can get a work visa to Spain would come out financially ahead in the US by a long shot. It also becomes pretty hard to travel to the US, even if it’s comfortable to live on the salary in situ. That’s not to say it isn’t totally doable. I do it.

Are public health are and vacation time nice? Yeah, but anyone with a visa-worthy job with an American passport isn’t worried about the cost of employer based healthcare and pay substantially less taxes in the US. It’s great to be rich in the US, but really sucks to to be poor. I just think the unique position of people who can get work visas raises serious questions about whether or not it’s “worth” it.

If a doctor can pocket an extra $50k/year (after college, healthcare, taxes) from the higher paying American job at the expense of paying for some human rights out of pocket, it’s hard to say that doctor shouldn’t hustle in the US for a few years first before finding a way to retire in Spain in 10 years vs working in Spain for the next 30. Visas for owning property or starting a small business are far more flexible and less scary than something attached to a particular employer, city, etc (work visa).

source: I am expatriate American in Europe struggling with this question daily

I specifically didn’t mention it because it’s the singular country in Europe that doesn’t really have work permits for non EEA nationals. As you’ve said, wages are high and the government is great, so it’s naturally a desirable place to live. I’ve got a PhD in AI from a respected European university and I straight up do not qualify for a Swiss work visa, but OP might have better luck if they work in healthcare or attend school there.

Yeah. Super impressive considering the track changes with Denmark, France, Switzerland, and Poland (what about Austria? I don’t remember changing tracks). I’ve had delays of 45 mins on 30 minute NYC subway commutes and Sweden’s trains stop running in the winter because they didn’t bother to get the kind that work in snow.

You can keep arguing, but you’re not gonna convince me DB is bad which is where this discussion started.

what?

yes. The book, “The red badge of Courage” was printed in 1895 and the color’s association with the far left dates back to the french revolution of the 1780s.

Also, iirc Blair Mountain was backed by the IWW which is anarcho-syndicalist and not Communist.

I dunno why the downvotes but I googled it for you:

iww Blair mountain flyer:

https://omekas.lib.wvu.edu/home/s/minersorganization/media/1109

who are the iww? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World?wprov=sfla1

history of red for left wing politics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_(politics)

when the black flag diverged front he red flag. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbolism

red AND black symbolism associated with the IWW https://www.iww.org/how-we-organize/

red and black flag https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anarchist_flag.svg

Previously I had mistakenly said that the red flag dated back to the 1880s and the Paris commune. No, that’s the black flag as this article states. That split is actually kinda a big deal. The IWW and red/black symbolism is about grass roots power and not some revolutionary vanguard or dictatorship by the proletariats and I think that distinction is actually kinda important.

You can see the same symbolism and terminology (redneck) used in the US today: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redneck_Revolt

which has far more in common with black Panthers style neighborhood defense than it does with Stalin or Lenin or Trotsky.

it’s more in line with thinkers like:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman

which is about building resilient communities that exist apart or in spite of capitalism. It’s not really an economic policy or ideology concerned about the existence of the state or a dictatorship of the proletariat or really even collective ownership of the means of production. You can join the IWW and work for Amazon and not be committed to a 1917 Russian style revolution. They wanted better working conditions, not a bloody coup. While I agree that that’s associated with the Marxist ideal communist ideal future post-capitalist Star Trek furture is great, I think the IWW is notably and distinctly different than what Americans in the 1920s would have associated with the word “communist”.

And where does that put the US for sending 50k Tons of munitions. I agree that the immediate moral culpability is with the person firing the missiles, but how many more bombed hospitals and dead kids before the US says, “no more”.

Downvote away, but the district that is represented in that clip sure as fuck isn’t going to come out to vote for the Democrats. It’s not like Michigan has a huge Palestinian community and is a critical swing state with a history being ignored by the Democratic party, right? Right?

Sorry for the down votes. It’s quite obvious that if the US arms industry didn’t send 50,000 TONS of weapons to feed people. I’m having a hard time believing that many people are that stupid, but I’ve been wrong before.

How is that a correction? I predicted that a German would respond to this by shitting on DB.

Also, those rail lines are only decades old total.

Take an Amtrak from Chicago to NYC or a 15 hour ride across Sweden in SJ. You have no idea how good DB is. As much as y’all complain, a quick Google says they are within a 6 minute window 90% of the time. The publicly funded American rail company doesn’t even own the rail it uses.

https://www.bts.gov/content/amtrak-time-performance-trends-and-hours-delay-cause

Sweden is basically Europe’s version of the American Midwest. For example, it’s a 10 minute walk across nothing but parking lots to get from the high density housing to the grocery store. Stockholm has around 6 story buildings and a housing crisis, which obviously follows from the lack of high density housing. Instead, all of Southern Sweden is one giant blob of suburban sprawl and SJ (Swedish national rail) is as useful and cost effective as Amtrak.

Denmark is Copenhagen+ lots of suburban sprawl. Transit… existed.

Germany is very much about cars, even if their transit network is robust. You’ll never hear a German say anything good about the trains though.

France has 300km/hr high speed rail that takes you most places you’d want to go, but you have to switch to local regional trains for smaller destinations. No complaints. €2 tickets one weekend a month too.

Belgium is up there with the Netherlands re: trains, but their bike infrastructure isn’t nearly as safe. It’s also like a day to walk across the whole country, so that’s not super impressive. All of BENELUX (Belgium Netherlands, Luxemburg) is half the population of the DC-NYC --Boston corridor, which also has a billion transit options (bus, train, boat, car, plane).

Honestly? You generally can’t go wrong with the Krushevkas of Poland and the Baltics. High density housing with jobs, shopping, schools, and services close by and access to transit anywhere. The soviets really loved their street cars that are still hanging in there and provide service every 10 or 15 minutes , often using nuclear power (Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania Slovenia).

Western Europe is alright but Ljubljana just turned their entire old city into a pedestrian only zone, leaving the main road for busses only. You’d never see Paris do that to the Champs-d’Elysée.

Belgrade built a whole new city across the Danube with high density housing after ww2. Unfortunately, they forgot to place the housing near any jobs which causes transit problems to this day. They also tried this thing out, which failed for the opposite reasons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_City_Gate

Overall, Western Europe has the same affordability crisis as the US, but with lower wages and higher taxes. Granted, rents are generally lower too, but there’s a lack of high density urban housing everywhere that’s not already been gutted and turned into an empty city filled with nothing but tourists and airbnbs (Zagreb and Prague come to mind).

By Northern European standards, both Portugal and Spain are poor, so they’re great to visit, but not really ideal for escaping the US. They’ve both been building out high speed trains like crazy in preparation for some EU rules that will finally tax the pollution from airplanes in a couple years. And Lisbon inherited lots of the EU financial services sector from London during Brexit, but going that route means you’ll be gentrifying a 500 year old city to work for British hedge funds.

In general, though, the trains are pretty good, but that has a lot more to do with the logistics of trench warfare than being a thing targeted at helping working class people. That is, you can often find cheap flights that will get you to your destination faster and cheaper than the train. It’s not like there were daily passenger rail trips between France and Germany in 1904. Being able to move civilians in addition to artillery shells was just a happy byproduct.

Maybe if they ran on popular policies like ending interventionist foreign policy, reforming the migration system to allow more legal pathways, ending the police terror of communities of color, and codifying female bodily autonomy into law, it wouldn’t be a coin flip every 4 years. But they don’t.

Instead, they chase after the mythical center that moves further right every year. If it makes you feel productive to vote for that, then by all means.

I’m just surprised that this community thinks the woman who just dropped her progressive positions on weed, immigration, criminal justice reform, and fracking is going to do anything meaningfully progressive in the face of escalating wars and a few years before irreversible ecological collapse.

Or was the foot in the door Joe Biden, the guy who was against integrated bussing in the 80s?

Or was it Obama, the man who was against gay marriage in 2008 and then bombed and deported more people than Bush?

How many more times should I “fall in line” before I’m allowed to be upset that widely popular issues like maternity leave, abortion rights, vacation guarantees, a higher minimum wage, etc are ignored?

Can we not have a discussion about how fucked US foreign policy without devolving into “orange man bad?” Things simply are not that binary.

Personally, I would find it hard to vote for anyone who supports the US military industrial complex because all I’ll be able to remember is my buddy who lost eleven cousins in a single night in Raffa.

“Why would america let this happen?” is all he could say in his broken English and I’ll never forget his wailing. Or the children fleeing the war in Syria whom I met in refugee camps in Greece-- a war that was the inevitable result of these decades of neoliberal, reactionary foreign policy.

Sorry about the down votes. I’m old enough to remember when war was considered a bad idea by progressives. I refuse to believe that bombing the middle east is the best solution we can come up with. It’s been decades and nothing is better.

lol. downvotes for being against pointless consumerism. classic. bring em on.

https://youtu.be/V0CPjHO_3Yo?si=Gnzc1ZDAaEBHZDIh

You can build one out of an Arduino.

what’s denigrating about calling the game a number? Is the hobby collecting devices from China? Why not figure out how an N64 works and dump it yourself if that’s your hobby?

I’m not against the idea, homey. I just wouldn’t plug this device into my computer. Grab an Arduino or JTAG cable.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V0CPjHO_3Yo

The binary blob is essentially just a number stored in a fancy configuration of electrons, OP. In the best case scenario, this device is just e-waste.

A sketchy USB device from Alibaba with 0 documentation is significantly less safe than grabbing a ROM, which are widely available and have known file hashes. The security risk alone from a no name USB device is probably not worth it unless there’s a save file you reeeeeeeeally care about, as another user mentioned.