ExtremeDullard

With Trump and his sycophantic appointed hacks, “If you hire clowns, you get a circus.” has never held more true.

It’s almost as if rich Republicans were terrible people…

You should write to your reps that banking apps be mandated to support multiple operating systems outside the duopoly.

Yeah… Good luck with that. This is beyond naive.

Your rep doesn’t give a shit about monopolies or duopolies (if they did, Google and Apple would have had their collective ass Sherman’ed into a million itty bitty pieces a long time ago) and they don’t care about your privacy and how you feel about it.

All your rep cares about - if you’re lucky - is more mainstream topics like taxes, employment, housing, education etc. And more likely, all they care about is lining their pockets and winning the next election to line their pockets some more.

Food pedants aren’t gullible. They know full well water isn’t worth anything like the price it’s sold when it’s bottled. But they’re pedants: it’s their job to look sophisticated. They literally make a living out of talking bullcrap about food.

That’s why I said: if they want to pay silly money for water, they’re welcome to. What I oppose if ordinary people listening to them and getting taken for a ride next time they go out for dinner.

But I think reasonable people won’t fall for that one. It’s just too stupid on its face. And people who are too dumb to know water is just water, well… a fool and his money…

That’s a blatant scam for self-appointed restaurant critics and other food pedants.

Let them be scammed. Why not… I have nothing against taking money from fools, so long as they don’t convince reasonable people to do the same.

What a terrible, terrible country…

But I thought Trump could declassify things just by thinking about it? His words, not mine.

That’s where you’ve been had. Trump doesn’t think. He says any old shit that goes through his deranged mind at any given moment, even if it makes no sense or contradicts what he said 5 minutes earlier.

Coherent thinking is done for him by other people - namely the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. Those particular sonsabitches never wanted a pedo president, nor do they want anything declassified. But Trump is the best fascist racehorse they could find in 50 years, so they put up with his shenanigans.

And that’s news?

I’m old enough to remember spotting Michael Jackson’s first album in an obscure record store in SF and wondering if this guy was any good, and I’ve always knows rich people pay less taxes than working stiffs. In fact, I’m almost certain that’s where the idiom to get stiffed comes from.

I also don’t remember a time when I haven’t thought the next time I come across a rich prick, if he’s enough of a prick, I might just slit his throat for the sheer satisfaction of doing it.

I’m tempted to try Ubuntu Touch. But I want to buy a second-hand Fairphone 4 to try it on, and other OSes possibly - because I don’t want to waste the CalyxOS install that’s running fine on mine right now - and I haven’t found a good second-hand one yet.

The way Google is actively on the war path against deGoogled ROMs and sideloading lately, I expect to have to install some sort of mobile Linux OS on my Fairphone at some point to do my regular smartphoning while preserving my privacy, while having to buy an ultra-cheap, small smartphone on the side with vanilla Google spyware just for my banking apps. In other words, carry two cellphones for nothing. Because Google.

I guess now that fascism rules the land, Google isn’t worried about being getting broken up for being a monopoly anymore. That emboldens then to finally do what they’ve always wanted to do: lock down the Android ecosystem.

Fuck Google.

Everything Trump and his henchmen do seems to have a degree of built-in cruelty. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, being one of the few real thorns in Trump’s backside, probably earned himself an extra helping or two.

I assure you that I had no special skills when I moved out of the US the first time 🙂 I was a decent but otherwise run-of-the-mill junior software engineer. The only “special” skill I had was being rather good at coding tight assembly - something that was in demand when embedded systems didn’t have gigabytes of disk and RAM and processors that would rival a Cray-I just to flush a toilet or something.

I picked up skills that are quite valuable along the way (I am certified aero QA engineer on the white collar side, and I have a degree in a rather obscure but highly-specialized metalworking sub-field that I shan’t mention because there are so few people working that field on the blue collar side). So it helped to find new jobs for sure.

But the relocating and moving countries was just me wanting to see the world before I was old by living where other people lived for real instead of being a crass tourist for a week, and it didn’t have much to do with my professional qualifications.

My outrage is exhausted

That’s exactly what authoritarian regimes like the USSR’s or Trump’s want to achieve by overwhelming everybody with outrageous shit all of the time: people get used to the dystopia and it becomes their new normal.

America becomes a fascist state, jews turn into Nazis and religious nutjobs become the voice of reason.

I must have inadvertently stepped into some really bizarre alternate reality at some point…

In many countries, your best bet is to get sponsored, or otherwise helped by your employer in the country of destination. If they won’t help you, you simply apply for a resident visa.

In Canada for example they have (or at least they used to have, I don’t know if this still applies) a system of points whereby you get x percent for having this or that skills in demand, x percent for speaking both French and English, x percent for having found an employer in Canada already… and the visa is granted automatically if your total is over 80% or something to that effect.

In Australia, I got a visa by proving that I had a bunch of money on my bank account. Again, I don’t know if it still applies today, but at least back then, all Australia was interested in is whether you could take care of yourself financially or if you were a bum coming to leech off welfare. I didn’t really have the money, I asked friends and family to lend me as much as possible to make my account fat enough to enter the country, then I gave them the money back.

As for Europe, I had dual citizenship (not anymore, I gave up my American citizenship). So I didn’t have to do anything to enter the EU country I have citizenship with. Once in the Shengen area, you can relocate anywhere you want without asking permission.

Originally Canada. Then the UK, Australia, then back to Europe where I lived in several EU countries. Currently I’m in northern Scandinavia.

Don’t sell yourself short. You never know… You might have some skills that are in demand somewhere. Or if not, but there are welcoming countries that only require one to be motivated enough.

At any rate, it doesn’t cost anything to look around for the minimum requirements for immigration into the countries that might interest you.

Well, like I said, it’s not for everyone.

Even in the best of times, the United States is a country that requires a background level of stress and paranoia to live in. You realize that when you move to another developed country where you don’t have to lock your door or wonder whether the next person you meed is armed, mentally unstable or up to no good.

Even before this whole fascist shitshow got started in 2001, I considered the US a lost cause that’s not really worth fighting for. Dubya and the USA Patriot Act was the thing that finally pushed me to leave.

I only have a finite number of hours on this dirtball and I fully intend to spend them as best I can with my family and my children, and offer them a good life. I don’t have time to fight for lost causes.

It’s a choice ultimately. Emigration isn’t for everybody. If you want to stay and try to make America better, more power to you. I just want people to know that life is sweeter elsewhere.

I fucking hate it here

I know it’s not for everyone, but emigration is an option. I left the US 25 years ago and never regretted - and that was when Dubya only barely started turning the country fascist, and it was still normal and somewhat pleasant to live in. So just imagine how much better life is outside the US today…

If you have the possibility, you should consider it.