How many died in the battle that preceded it? Do you kampf to remember what Hitler was, if not a douchelander?

And there's your answer. Very precisely so. If you're really, truly better off in the other place, then presumably you're in a better economic situation as well. As Hans Rosling pointed out a while back, even the poor can travel abroad fairly often now, which would mean visiting them should be considerably easier, especially given you've likely got free room and board on the visit, and if you're doing that, then you're not abandoning anybody. I'm sure you're already aware of this. Moving in and of itself has nothing in the way of insurmountable barriers. It never does. No matter how poor or how destitute you think you are, moving somewhere else is always a possibility, and it always carries a cost, but the cost is never one that you simply can't afford. I say that because people with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs, if they even have that, have been doing it since time immemorial over massive distances, even when the process of traveling itself brings a high risk of death.

What's really going on, whether you want to admit it or not, is that you're actually quite comfortable where you already are. Too comfortable to desire to leave, anyway. For every person who moves, there's a risk calculus involved that few people are willing to chance: After I move, will my new life really leave me happier (i.e. better off)? And what happens if it doesn't? And that calculus is always changing from instant to instant. Right now, Russians who even love Putler and their fatherland are moving out simply because they fear being sent to Ukraine more than they fear giving up what they currently have, while still praising their tsar and saying the boyars are the ones to blame. They don't want to leave their tsar out of some political motive, but they feel they have no choice. Same thing we do when measuring any risk. Did the people at the top of the Yamasaki towers think they would survive a fall if they jumped after the towers were hit? Almost certainly not, but something very convincingly told them that it was worth the astronomically low odds of survival.

In other words, right now you're in a situation where the internet has convinced you that there's a better life for you somewhere else, and then you further convinced yourself of that. But there's sufficient lingering doubt in your mind: Will what you told yourself will be on the other side waiting for you actually be there? And is your life so miserable right now that it's worth the cost to get what you want on that other side? Will you get the dopamine hit you think you will? Remember, you CAN afford the cost, but as you said, you don't know if it's worth it, and as of right this moment, your amygdala has already given you an answer that you've already accepted.

If you think that, then you know next to nothing about either. Fascism was itself born from a socialist turd, and shares a massive overlap with socialism on the Venn diagram. See for yourself:

https://www.econlib.org/simila...

Here's a tl;dr of fascism "Socialism is awesome! Especially the part where the government exercises heavy handed control over morality and the economy, but command economies are far too bureaucratic and unresponsive to demand signals to ever have any hope of working, so let's continue denouncing liberalism and especially capitalism but still allow a tiny degree of free enterprise." That's really it. The whole racial purity thing isn't fascism, it's nazism. Conversely, nazism without racial purity is fascism. The fascists aren't entirely wrong in that they did demonstrate a much higher rate economic growth than socialism (socialism can rapidly start from nothing, but after a certain point, socialism basically moves so slowly that it, in every single case, GDP eventually grows so slowly that, compared to everybody not living in that system, even appears to move downwards, never stopping until the institution enforcing it falters.) Liberalism, which includes capitalism, ultimately always ended up with a consistently faster growth rate than both, and economic growth carries compounding interest, hence, simply put, given enough time drastically out-scales the others. That is neither opinion nor ideology on my part, it's just a historical fact.

In fact, the common left/right political scale people use puts fascism more in the center. This is exactly why I eschew it completely and deliberately avoid using left or right in relation to politics -- it just doesn't make any sense, the precise meaning literally changes by the decade, and nobody can even agree whether any particular form of authoritarianism is right or left, which to me is a distinction without a difference. In other words, it's pointless if not counterproductive.

The rest of your post is tangential and I'm not particularly motivated to add any comment.

That's not it. Expensive moves are for people with a lot of shit that they don't want to sell, simply dispose of, or move themselves. For everyone else, moving is anywhere between free and cheap. I think the most I've ever spent on a move was $900, and that was hiring actual movers because I was confined in a hospital at the time because they were concerned that my graft was undergoing acute rejection. So I literally couldn't be there to move my own stuff.

Such as? The same $150 Zinus bed frame I bought on Amazon literally 8 years ago is still good, and it shows no signs of needing to be replaced any time soon. At all. In fact, the fabric upholstery still looks pristine. The two Ikea dressers I bought 15 years ago cost $80 each, and other than a few scuffs that you'll get on any furniture with normal wear and tear, it's just fine. In fact, patching those up just takes a sharpie. The stand thing that my TV and a number of other things sat on was bought at the same time, and has the same story as the dressers. I gave all of that to my mom, and she's still using it. The furniture I got rid of was literally just stuff I had no room to take with me, and nobody else wanted it, but functionally it was just fine, so I think I just dropped it all off at goodwill or something. If you want it, they'll probably sell it to you for less than I paid for it.

No, those are just the ones you want to move to. Many people find it remarkably easy to move to Luxembourg, which is a pretty wealthy country. That includes Russians, which basically nobody wants right now. While you're there, you can apply to move to southern Italy or Portugal if you can convince them that you have any marketable skills.

And what, exactly, is stopping you?

I personally don't like living in LA county for a crapload of reasons. I stay here because it is more to my advantage to stay for now than it is to leave. As soon as that changes, I'm out. I'm not related to anybody around here for at least 400 miles, and I came here knowing exactly nobody. The cost too move here was basically everything that couldn't fit in my car.

That's an interesting non-sequitor followed by a self-contradictory comment. Why do I say that? Because nobody actually has a billion dollars. You know what they have? Assets that they acquired at a much lower value than their present value. Now how do you suppose those assets typically appreciate in value?

Well Hitler did other amazing things in the morning, like mandating a sudden change driving from left side of the road to right side of the road overnight. Douchelanders were ecstatic to wake up to signs facing the wrong way and roads with turn pockets on the wrong side. It felt very Douche, and gave them much pride.

Depends. Are they there because they think it's a fast way to a high paying job, or are they there because they like doing the work? Think back to an old slashdot article where some construction worker took a two-week coding bootcamp expecting to get a high paying job afterwards, then blamed AI when nobody would hire him. The rsilvergun-alikes lapped it up, AI this, AI that, it took his jerb, even though at no point in history would a two-week coding bootcamp suddenly make you a software developer when you had no prior experience. But even then, getting an actual CS degree doesn't either, nor does not having a CS degree mean you can't.

Nobody wants a shitty developer just because they have a CS degree, and nobody ever did. Shit, look at angle of sphere, who talks about how a CS degree is mandatory, insists on building shit with linkedlists, then wonders why somebody like me, without a CS degree, tells him how stupid that is when the application was obviously asking for a deque, which was years ago and to this day he still doesn't understand why because he's completely disinterested in how the underlying hardware works.

The answer is: It depends on how they're using it. AI makes a fantastic learning tool. But ONLY if you're using it for that. The other day I wanted to implement a CLDAP ping for a georedundant AD client, which there were no libraries for. The documentation on that is annoyingly sparse, but an AI tool talked me through it, answered all clarifying questions I had, the answers to which were scattered all over the MSDN docs that would take forever to find, and the implementation worked perfectly.

Poor choice...that was an unmitigated disaster.

Taxes are always on consumers. Full stop. You pay for it one way or another.

I don't know how France operates in this regard, but if it's anything like the US, they don't have to add below-the-line fees like this. They can just bake it into the price, rate, etc. Either way, the consumer always ends up paying.

That's interesting -- so basically the ISP just blames somebody, and whoever they blame is who gets taxed. That's going to prove very difficult as TLS improves and ends up added to more places, unless they literally tax every kind of content. CDNs already commonly carry Netflix traffic, and as time goes on you're only going to be able to take an educated guess what kind of traffic it is by its burst pattern. As for where it originates from, France would have to give ISPs permission to violate all kinds of its own privacy laws. Unless they're taxing backbone providers, which would include transit traffic. And if they did that...ohhhhh boy...

VPNs don't have to operate anywhere in Europe for this to work. At all. If they send it to say Proton or PIA, the recipient can wipe their ass with the invoice and mail it back completely brown, and there's nothing France can do about it as they're outside of France's jurisdiction. France has already tried to regulate content beyond their borders by requiring google to censor searches for anything they ask for anywhere in the world and under any ass crack or snail shell that a French Fry might be found in. That didn't go over well. They've done other weird shit like kidnap Pavel Durov for not sufficiently censoring telegram to their standards, even if it didn't happen in France. If they tried to tax outside of their jurisdiction, that's going to go over just as well. Just don't go to France if you care about free speech or privacy -- problem solved on your end.

It sounds like you very badly want to impose your will on other people. You don't have to watch it if you don't want to. I personally maybe get 5 or so hours in a week at best. Lately I've been doing a lot more diving. But diving doesn't necessarily do what you're asking for either.

We live in a free society. That means freedom to decide for yourself what you want to do at any given moment, good or bad, and deal with the consequences on your own, good or bad. I think you'd prefer a more authoritarian system, like say socialism or fascism, which generally ban anything that the leadership decides for you that isn't in your best interest, which always varies, often without any rhyme or reason, typically because of what they think will happen, even if there's no evidence to support that belief. Though usually it's guided by a fear that people will grow to reject their system, which historically has always been the case.

I personally don't believe in telling people what to think, I just tell them when there's objective evidence that they're wrong, or in your case, that what you're asking for historically doesn't provide the outcome that you think it will.

It sounds like you're asking for socialism, which only still exists in Cuba and North Korea. Everybody else found that it wasn't worth it, the benefits of it claimed by its supporters never materialized, and most of them weren't doing it by choice. Cuba and North Korea could use the labor though -- every instance of socialism to ever exist had a chronic labor shortage, which is the main reason they don't allow anybody to leave. But they'll still be happy to have you there to help till the soil and harvest the grain, and they encourage exactly what you're asking for here.

Or, if you want to move to Europe, then go for it. I tell everybody this -- if you don't like where you live, then why would you stay there? There's no rhyme or reason for that. If you don't want to leave (there's no law that says you can't -- we're not socialist) then the only reasonable conclusion is that you're happy enough to be there that the hassle of moving isn't worth it to you. And it's really easy to leave, just take a boat, a jet, etc. You don't have to bring everything with you either, you can literally just pick up whatever you can carry and walk away from all of it. And people do exactly that all the time, often to Mexico or somewhere in the Caribbean, but overseas too. I sort of did it once, though it was everything I could fit in the car I had at the time, and I eventually gave away everything else. Starting over can be nice.

Though it seems like the French don't think the grass is greener in Europe right now. Maybe they do, it just...doesn't seem like it. It's also worth mentioning that France does the most social welfare spending as a percentage of GDP than anybody else in the world by far. Raising taxes and spending more isn't a panacea, and if you do it too much, it can make things much, much worse.

One day I may move to New Zealand. Nothing political, nor am I expecting to be given free stuff (pretty much the opposite) rather I just like the landscape, the warmer climate, and so much outdoors stuff to do there.

Doesn't much look like it. I've been on medicaid, and medicare is basically the same with subtle differences in terms of coverage, and you pay. It also sucks because most of the better providers out there don't accept it, and my private insurance has always provided better dollar figure coverage. If you want predictable, medicare isn't for you. If you want predictable, then why even bother with deductible? The real number for you in that case is the out of pocket maximum, and you just plan around that.

HDHP is an IRS rule for whether you're eligible for an HSA card. That's it. I've been on one of those, and in that case the employer just frontloaded money into the HSA card, which was only something like $550 short of the deductible in my case. I kept that money whether I used it or not. In my case, the out of pocket maximum on that plan was something like $4,000. IRS allowed a maximum of something like $3,500 HSA contribution (I don't recall exactly) which I was already maxing out anyway. I had ESRD during this period, and often did hit the out of pocket maximum. Literally everything was free after that. My kidney transplant was covered 100%, and all related medical expenses were also covered 100%.

No, in fact I'm talking about the exact statistic you claimed to be giving, only you weren't. You said average, and with no other qualifiers, which means everybody. Averages are often misleading as well, but regardless, that's what you picked.

HDHP starts at $1,500

Either way, even if this goes into effect, I really doubt the revenue will deliver what they think it will. Things like this often manage to reduce tax revenue in some way.

The streaming companies are more likely do any number of things:
- Reduce the bit rate to mud, then charge a higher fee for what everybody outside of France gets (though mud often has snails in it)
- Switch to a pay-per-view model
- Switch to a time-based model
- To avoid any of the above, French users just VPN to another country where this tax doesn't exist. (And then perhaps France bans VPNs? May as well at this rate, because they could break chatcontrol too.)

Luxury taxes rarely work and often have exactly the kind of effects that you really don't want. Any time you guys say "tax the corporations" it's just their customers and the broader economy who pays for it. Ask Russia how well it's working out for them.