I have one of the worst passports in the world. It was already difficult to travel to many places, and now more and more countries are soft-banning everyone from here.

The reason being that whenever a country makes their tourism visas more accessible, people from here known as "labor exporters" or "visa brokers" apply for visas for hundreds of other people, often poor and uneducated.

When those "tourists" arrive at their destinations, they have their passports confiscated by the broker's foreign counterparts, and they start working odd jobs while on tourism visas in places like Dubai, Thailand etc.

The brokers tell them that they owe a large amount of money for the privilege, often amounting to many months of their salary, and those brokers are the only way for the workers to send money back home.

They overstay their visas and when they get caught they can't even speak in English to explain their situation, and even if they could they wouldn't expose their handlers.

All of this has made it pretty embarrassing for the rest of us from the same country who just go for actual travel and tourism, and we can't even really complain about the racism we face because we know it's our country's fault...

My first program was in BASIC on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K. I used to sit for hours typing "listings" from gaming magazines and save them on cassette tapes, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuVBX5Iu18I

I love coding manually, and I love AI! This is the first time I've felt the same excitement about computing since the 1980s, when there were new computers and new platforms and new operating systems and new programming languages coming out almost every month.

I use AI where it makes sense, where a quick output matters more than the fact that I manually coded it, like map editors and other internal tools, or quick proof-of-concepts.

I used Codex to convert some of my old Visual Basic 6 apps and games and it was a joy to see them running again after so many decades. There was no way I was going to convert them manually since Microsoft abandoned VB.

Why not use trains for heavy transport?

I lived in a country where the roads between major cities were constantly swarming with hundred trucks coming and going. Even as a kid I thought that can't be efficient! It's certainly not comfortable for everyone else. Sometimes they'd be tipped over on their side. Sometimes there would be a tiny car crushed under them.

The barons certainly don't care about pollution, but don't they see the increased cost of each individual vehicle, the additional delays, having to pay multiple drivers and risk of accidents per vehicle?

Even if they want to keep a fleet of vehicles, shuttle trains aka "rolling highways" where trucks could roll on to the train via ramps, shut off their engines, let the trains take them to wherever, then continue into the destination cities, would be better than running the fleets on the roads. That would be good even for private cars.

The government added more lanes and diverted routes just for trucks, anything but build rail...

We lived in the backwater town of a backwater country, going through a turbulent era. There was nothing to buy there, except local food and produce and clothes. The only foreign stuff available to buy were the absolute basics like soaps and shampoo, and pirated movies and music on cassette tapes (even there people knew and adored Michael Jackson!)

The nearest city with international imports was 10-12 hours away on bus. Sometimes my uncle would go there for work, and the thing I looked forward to the most were the MAGAZINES he would bring back.

At first it was Sinclair User, Your Sinclair, then ZZAP!64. I would pore over them again and again, and fantasize about the games in them… it would be months before my uncle went again. So I made wishlists, drew comics about the stuff in those magazines, and picked up British humor from them, that still colors mine to this day. :)

I learned English and about the rest of the world from them. I learned about the USSR through Raid Over Moscow, the Vietnam War through Rambo and Platoon, the Falklands through some wargames, and other things that I would not be able to make sense of until decades later.

Every magazine and every reviewer, even the imaginary ones like Chuck Vomit the troll who reviewed text adventure games, had an intensely unique personality that affected how people, specially kids like me, perceived the games they were reviewing.

The 1980s and early 1990s magazine subculture is the most sorely missed aspect of gaming and computing that was lost when the internet took over.

Even if you didn't grow up on them, do flip through some random pages of the aforementioned magazines, just to see how some things never changed: There were PC vs Mac wars and console wars even back in 1985! There were people worrying about how increasingly powerful computers would make everyone dumber even back then!

Most people were dicks even back then

including me :)

You gave up way before that

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditSafety/comments/1j4cd53/warni...

"We know that the culture of a community is not just what gets posted, but what is engaged with. Voting comes with responsibility."

You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.

Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything, and it's not some third world backhole that was suffering already anyway, but you yourself that are the worst victims of all their laws and wars.

I have enough in savings and enough passive income to be able to live comfortably almost anywhere, but whenever I talk to travel agents, or people who can help set up companies etc in the countries I want to go to, first they're like "Sure, we can do it, when do you want it" etc and then they ask where I'm from, and when I tell them, they either stop replying or say sorry, they can't help me.

sigh...Racism is a funny thing. They haven't even seen me, or seen my history of travel, or anything, they just stop cooperating when they see that one word, the name of my country.

And I can't blame them either, I know many people from here go and overstay there visas and generally make problems in other countries.

I just wish I could put down a deposit of a few thousand dollars as a guarantee that I'll behave and get a visa.

But I can't get it removed from my passport as there are laws against apostasy and "blasphemy" here :(

It'd be a nice change from the desert climates I've been stuck in all my life though haha

> You can get work as an English teacher in Korea or Japan since you're so good at it

Let's be real here, they won't feel much confidence in learning English from a brown person :') I grew up on English media and then raised on the internet so my accent actually used to be good, but living in places like Dubai has actually messed up my English a bit because of the creole/pidgin they use there.

As for racism, I've been to East/SE Asian countries and frankly the racism that white/Western people tend to perceive is often pretty harmless and benign. Just cultural differences in "appropriateness". I've certainly seen worse in my own country. The worst I've personally experienced was in Dubai from Arabs/Emiratis against the many "brown" expats who live and work there, even those following the same religion. (P.S. I'm not religious at all)

I don't really need a job per se to support myself. I just want a way to 1: Be able to stay in a country long-term (longer than the usual tourist visas) while working from home, and 2: Eventually own property there and become a permanent resident if not a naturalized citizen.

There are some "gray" options like paying someone to "hire" you as their employee, basically getting an employment visa but doing your own thing. Or paying someone to marry you :') Both options are legal but rely on trust and make you dependent on a person you don't know: They can take your money then give you the boot any time if they want.

I learned of New Caledonia a while ago (France) and man, that place looks like paradise. Would be so perfect if I could settle there!

I'm more inclined towards East Asia, and read that Thailand may have options for "digital nomads". My passive income alone may be enough to live in relative comfort there.

If I ever go to the western hemisphere I'd rather consider places like Chile, or even visa-free places like Svalbard, Norway as a last resort.. :)

How about just disappearing in a Polynesian island like Samoa, is that a thing? lol

I tried living in some of the “better” Middle Eastern places like Dubai, Qatar, and frankly, behind the artificial veneer that they spend massive efforts to advertise, they are just as shitty.

I just want to be able to code and create from home in peace, and have a beautiful environment outdoors to safely take a break in. I also want my money to go towards supporting a good country with functional democracy, that offers a path to eventual citizenship.

I’m around 40 and a high-school dropout. I have passive income that hovers around $1000-$2000 every month. If I’m successful with the stuff I’m working on then it will be more. I can dip into savings for larger one-off expenses like initial moving costs or setting up a company, and I can break the piggy bank for around $30K-$35K. I can speak English as good as a native.

What are my options?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41692777

Points: 14

# Comments: 26

Even humans have created systems that sort of create other shit on their own.

Like the patterns that form when viewing prime numbers in certain ways, the fundamental laws of the universe could be some emergent properties arising from mathematical truths, and require no "god"

This is the reason :)

——

I just bought a new external disk and tried to transfer everything from an older disk to the new one:

• I MOVE'd folders instead of COPYing them to easily keep track of what was already copied (and to avoid Finder annoyances when trying to merge folders instead of overwriting)

• In a moment of stress, instead of deleting the volumes on the older disk (to free space on it for something else) I accidentally deleted the freshly-copied volume on the new disk! :(

So the situation is:

• APFS volume on NewDisk accidentally deleted via Disk Utility.

• APFS folders on OldDisk implicitly deleted via a Move operation in Finder (bypassing the Trash)

• Both disks are from LaCie, use a USB-C connection on both ends, formatted as APFS, and they are not SSDs.

• Neither disks have Time Machine protection.

• I have done [almost?] no write operations since the deletion as far as I am aware.

I want to recover either the NewDisk volume or the original OldDisk files.

Trying to find APFS recovery solutions seems to be a search term that many unscrupulous companies like to prey upon. So far, "Stellar Data Recovery" seems the most promising but I'm not sure if I should spend the $80 on it unless there's nothing better.

Does anybody have some experience that could help? Thanks in advance!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25812738

Points: 1

# Comments: 0