Just make sure you alternate which side of the road you are running on somewhat evenly so you are getting the benefit on both sides.

Presumably you have to have a lot of experience skiing for this to work, but there are probably isomorphic activities (weaving around a crowd? Playing dodgeball?) that can hack your brain in a similar way.

I understand pension contributions, but what are the other "hidden" costs that could equal the net salary?

A free market is not a means to an end. Part of the reason that the USA was (until recently) doing so well was that the winner-takes-all mentality of the free-market benefits Silicon Valley, but that doesn't mean that other nation states have to submit to that philosophy.

With the current surge, everyone is (expected to act as) a senior/mentor to a swarm of workers that lack interpersonal/business context.

It’s not a huge shift if you’re already deeply invested in business lore, but it’s unfortunately a brutal speedrun of skills that were previous slowly accumulated for new/junior hires.

You'll have to reassess what a "software engineer" salary looks like, but this is unironically part of the pathway towards living in a more-equal society where perhaps we shouldn't be earning 3x as much as everyone else just because we can invert a binary tree.

It's a huge undertaking, but you _can_ vote where your tax money gets sent. You can ensure it bootstraps a more equal system instead of propping-up an unequal one.

I did this myself, and I feel good about having done it.

I don’t buy the cheapest brands, but also don’t buy anything marketed as premium/luxe.

Mostly I gravitate towards stuff with a fairtrade cotton (and good thread count, but that’s from preference of how it feels to wear)

Plus, I may be deluded but I’m of the opinion that polo shirts and jeans/neutral trousers are a multi-decade winning combination.

And “define the spec concretely“ (and how to exploit emerging behaviors) becomes the new definition of what programming is.

In my own experience you quickly run into jarring tangents or “ghosts” of unrelated ideas that start to shape the main thread of consciousness and resist steering attempts.

There is no centralized ID number, the closest is your social security number but this is basically only outbound for PAYE tax and haphazardly correlated to your pension payments in late life.

Everything operates on a “trust system” where you often present paper (!) with whatever address you claim to be living at as proof you are real (e.g. opening bank accounts).

Passport loss is rectified by seeking out “professionals” with government-approved occupations that are not related to you that can vouch you are actually the person you are trying to replace a passport for.

The entire thing is a mess and living in digital-identity-native Europe is a dream come true that you should be extremely thankful for.

Can you elaborate on this part? I would say one of the strengths of JS is that you can get it to run consistently just about anywhere.

Game theory only works when you have skin in the game. You think the other nations’ machines are just going to wreck your machines and then go home?