I agree. But it's good to have that structure when you first start out. It's also good to know when to break out of it, and I wish I had done so far earlier than I did. If you are a technology worker you should understand that some days you can work longer, some shorter. Sometimes you feel like you can't work on the major tasks so you do support for a few hours. And I often shift the time around. For some reason I feel way more productive between 11pm and 1am than 11am and 1pm.

My wife often comments that I am not very easy to distract when working. And the day is still delineated with events: children wake us up, time for breakfast then work. Lunch time, walk out for coffee. Dinner time, 5:30, time to stop working. Sure if you had no family then that might break down.

I've seen plenty of people working long hours at the office.

Yes I overplayed it a little there. The best workers work wherever is best for them, be it the office or at home. But the thing I find distracting at the office is the people. I love talking to people and helping them out and so forth (which obviously happens remotely too, but not as much) but for getting some programming or spec work done my own calm space is best. I can work a little long from home without really thinking about it because there's no hassle of "getting ready" or the commute. Although there is often the "shit, video conference in 5 minutes, no trousers" moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This is rather anecdotal. I refuse to believe that I'm in a 5% percentage of people more effective working from home than in the office. The office is full of distractions, noise, people to waste time with, toys like pool tables and so forth. I go in every so often because some of those distractions are important.

But home is nice and quiet. Can move between desk, sofa, bed, outside with laptop. I suspect that those who find distractions working at home will find distractions working in the office.

I've noticed that the best workers in my company are the ones who have gone remote. I'm not saying that they are best because they're remote. But they're probably the ones who don't feel they need to be seen in the office to prove their worth.

I've lived in NZ and California.

The USA could really do with more mass transit. There's plenty of concentrated population. I've not spoken to a single American here who disagrees, so it must be down to politics. When you say concentrated... the Wellington region has less than 400k people. And yet you can get around reasonably easily via train and bus. I lived in Waikanae, an hours drive north of Wellington, and getting the train + bus took an 1hr 20 mins.

In the USA I live near Santa Rosa, and it takes 1hr 15mins to drive to where I need to be in SF when there is no traffic (ha). Public transport would take more than 3hours! And North Bay alone has a greater population than the entire Wellington region.

Really? I did not know that. I found it way easier and less bureaucratic to get into NZ.

The idea of no God or afterlife doesn't really give me any feelings at all because I don't think of them. They are unrelated and uninvolved in the grief I've felt when a family member died.

As you state, you've always had faith, so how can you conceivably tell someone who does not how they feel about it (smug), and link that to the death of your loved ones in any way?

That the world was flat was not a seriously held belief, and CC did not set out to prove that it was spherical.

Whereas we know the energy requirements of settling outside of the Earth are beyond us at the moment. That's not to say that will always be the case. But putting hope into that without a viable path there is pointless fantasy. Figuring how to cope where we are with what we have is reality.

We have at least two of those, a common language and shared history. The language is English, because as much as the French hate it, it is the lingua franca in the EU. The history is one of fighting one another tooth and nail, but it is a long history and most of those wars were about a small handful of elite too.

Yes, absolutely. No different to what happens now with NATO.

My argument against a federal EU is from another direction. The USA is too big, and it's politics have become paralyzed by it's size. It might be better off devolving a lot of power to the states.

Sort of but not really. These countries have chosen to retain their links with Britain, but all three (you missed New Zealand) would be able to remove those links by democratic process. And some of them have had referendums on the subject. As has been happening slowly over time, example NZ recently introduced it's own high court and so abolished the law that allowed cases to be taken to the high court in the UK.

And the UK, is a free country, therefore it's "subject" countries are also free. Again example, this year Scotland will vote on independence, and although the UK government is being underhand in its dealing with the subject in a PR sense, if the result was for independence I doubt they won't get it.

Hang on though, what are "real goods"? A teacher doesn't provide any real physical goods, nor does a care giver. Do you count an airline pilot only if the work of creating a good meant that someone had to travel, not to visit their mum and dad?

What's wrong with the L1 system, out of interest? I'm on an L1 visa. The foreign company I worked for was bought out. It seems like a reasonable proposition to bring over the technical team, knowledge transfer into the US and so forth.

I find this somewhat puzzling. I'm in the bay area, on an L1 visa. There seems to be a shortage of engineers, not jobs. I've only got anecdotal evidence of course, but the company I work for has struggled to hire good engineers. We might offer a crap wage or something (although I've come to the opinion we don't get many applicants, especially Americans, because we're not "hip"). But I was talking to another dad at my son's school today who mentioned his company is hiring, has the same problems, was I thinking of moving etc.

I'm intending to leave the area anyway. It's ok, but not as great as people gush about it. If you like rain, it's not really the place for you (I like rain). I can work remotely, so it's a chance to check out some other parts of the USA.

Another complexity to administrate.

No, it will hit the poor harder. It doesn't matter the amount of money, it matters the proportion. If a less well off person spends 100% of their earnings on rent, food, water, etc. then they'll be taxed the full amount, and for the basics they have no choice. A very well off person won't be spending 100% of their income even if they buy that luxury yacht, and they don't even need that yacht so they could choose not to make the purchase and invest instead.

The problem with sales tax (VAT) is that it taxes the poor more than the rich because the poor tend to spend a greater proportion of their income. It is also quite a burden to administer for companies and government. It is also an inefficient tax for states with welfare - government gives you money and then you give a large portion of it back again.

I don't have a solution though, even though it is something I think about often. But it seems to me that what we really need is for some way to experiment with widely different tax regimes. But what country is going to be willing to suffer negative consequences of doing so?