You are right about the taxes in the Baltic countries - in all three you can get ~20% effective tax (minor differences between the countries). And they are really similar otherwise.

Most people in a similar situation to yours pick Estonia. It is the most focused one on tech, supporting startups, and overall the most developed one (relatively speaking). Also seems to be the most expensive of the three.

Lithuania has the most business-oriented culture in my experience. Otherwise a nice and chill place.

Latvia is maybe not the best in the above regards (though, not too far off either), but I would say it has the most stuff going on and things to do overall.

What I love:

* Total mental clarity during the first half of the day, can focus fully on work or life responsibilities without a single thought about food.

* Freedom to not have to organize the day around food (making choices, planning logistics, "wasting" time). Pays off big time when traveling.

* Never inconvenienced or slip into grumpy mode when for whatever reason I don't get food.

* Eating a lot of high-quality home-cooked food - as I love cooking (when I have time) and I don't depend on eating out / ordering food / quick-prep meals as much.

* Bonus: great ROI of the occasional first alcoholic drink of the day (on a more or less empty stomach). Not a health advice!

Guess what happens during the cold season when you you've got your gloves on? Yep, absolutely nothing! (bonus f.u. points if you are carrying stuff and cannot easily take the gloves off)

Luckily have a fully analogue car so I'm maintaining my sanity somewhat.

I recently went from:

  * somewhat understanding the concept of transactions and combining that with a bunch of manual locking to ensure data integrity in our web-app;

  * realizing how powerful modern Postgres actually is and delegating integrity concerns to it via the right configs (e.g., applying "serializable" isolation level), and removing the manual locks.

As a long-time remote worker I also noticed (especially in early 2020) that a significant portion of people were struggling simply because they assumed they can continue doing things _exactly_ like at the office, only at home.

No, it's a considerably different setup, and you (and your team) have to adjust your processes accordingly:

• Slack is not a (chit)chat. Be precise about what you want and provide enough context to the reader. Small niceties are important, but reduce the overall fluff.

• Pay attention to how you structure your messages / exchanges. Take advantage of the formatting features. Make your messages easily digestible. Small things add up over time.

• Take notes / write documentation more than before.

• Embrace tools that you didn't need previously (for communication, brainstorming, whiteboarding).

I believe work in a remote setting is generally more productive if done well.

P.S. Not trying to dismiss the highly extroverted folk who _need_ human contact to feel normal day-to-day. I believe that's a separate topic entirely.

What we need to stop is put unreasonable emphasis on association studies (i.e., interpret the results incorrectly).

I've gone the extra mile and set my phone to be entirely in grayscale, and have never been happier.

(Doable on Android at least, look under "Developer Settings")

As someone who wanted but struggled to motivate myself to take up regular physical activities, the short duration of HIIT was what sold it to me. Sure it's "intense", but I found it way easier to just push myself for ~10min (20min door-to-door) rather than finding time for a 1-2h regular exercise - which I personally don't enjoy much more anyway.

Weight loss has never been my consideration. However, what I've found over the years (and is also supported by research afaik) is that a practice of regular short HIITs greatly contributes to endurance too. Anecdotally, by doing HIITs almost exclusively I am able to keep up pretty well with my triathlon friend during longer runs.

Those were Spotify ads promoting other podcasts, not sponsors promoted in the podcast itself.

Tangent: Now that I occasionally play music on Spotify I get ads in the form "We know you were a premium user before, how is life with the free service now?". I find that somewhat creepy and disturbing.

What is the simplest way to host this project as it is on the web? (as a static page, no additional functionality)

On the other hand how many jobs were made redundant as a side-effect of the pandemic? Catering moving a lot towards delivery, people realizing they can actually work from home, etc.