bitofarambler

Ha, it’s an interesting language, and the Duolingo course is actually pretty good, although I’m more interested in the writing system myself.

I lived in China for years and I’m gonna go visit some friends in a couple weeks.

If you’re willing to teach English, living in China is a great way to save money very quickly while enjoying the affordability and convenience mentioned above.

The value of Chinese yuan is directly dictated by the Chinese government, in contrast to the other currencies you mentioned.

A stated raise in value would erode their national manufacturing competitiveness, which is a large percent of Chinese GDP, and hit most people in the country hard, instantly erasing a proportional amount of their savings value, which would threaten Chinese political stability.

1 usd to 6 yuan from 1 usd to 7 yuan means tge 1.5 billion chinese people holding rmb lose almost 10 percent of their purchasing power instantly and directly because of government action.

one of the upsides for the Chinese government is that Chinese people are very dependent on living in China, lending political stability and citizen retention.

This encouraged dependency is effective because it really is incredibly cheap aid convenient to live in china. USD equivalent of $1 meals, $100/month apartments, new 2026 EVs with the highest safety ratings in the world for only $8000, everything delivered to your door the same or the next day for free or nominal shipping costs, cashless society, national affordable healthcare, and many more.

Any declared raise in value of the yuan destabilizes the entire system and citizen dependency that the centralized government appears to be working very hard to establish and maintain.

It isn’t dumb to feel overwhelmed, though many people regret the things they didn’t do.

The “overwhelming” part of travel is usually of our own making, while the valuable part of traveling is simply living in a new world.

Don’t plan any activities, don’t rent a car. Watch movies, sleep all day in your comfortable apartment and then visit the markets or cafes when you’re hungry.

Just by being somewhere new, you’ll be learning and living; I tell everybody who asks me about traveling that travel should be slow and easy and as comfortable as you want, especially in the beginning.

Vietnam is a solid pick: the people are incredibly kind and you get to eat pho every day.

If you’re already thinking about the excitement of a new country, China or Taiwan is the way to go. If you go to Japan again, you’ll be wondering about the new country you didn’t choose half the time.

China’s mountains are amazing , their cities are fun, the food is still my favorite after 30 countries, the transportation across the entire country is very convenient and cheap, you can buy the newest electronics at rock-bottom prices, the celebrations and community activities are fun, my Chinese friends are the only people I’ve met traveling who I still stay in regular contact with, the street food the foooood.

I have four episodes dedicated to my favorite chinese foods, you should go to China and get the food.

It’s going to feel a lot different(and louder) than Japan since there’s still basically zero non-Chinese people living in China, so everyone will be confused about your presence and there won’t be much English, but if you plan your stays ahead and check the transportation(I can help you with that if you like, I lived in China for over 6 years), you’ll be good to go.

you’ll have to use alternative apps, Didi is their rideshare app, for example, but it has an English version that’s easy to sign up for and works just as easy as uber/grab/whatever you’re familiar with and of course it’s china so everything including taxis will be dirt cheap.

I also love Taiwan, and if you want a more relaxed new adventure, that’s a great place, it’s a much quieter and more organized version of China and they still use the traditional characters, which is cool to see. Taiwan is definitely worth visiting as well, but it will feel a lot like Japan and you probably won’t be surprised and confused every twenty minutes like you will be in China.

Oh, and the island sea-goddess pilgrimage in Taiwan will begin mid April, looks like the 17th this year, so there will be a lot of fairs and things going on leading up to and during that time. They walk around the island visiting different temples to honor Mazu, the resident sea goddess.

Ooh, and Taiwan has amaaaazing vegetarian buddhist food, that should be mentioned.

Okay! Reach out if you like, have fun!

Thanks, I’m flattered! Feel free to do so at the next opportunity, I’ll be there ready to not shut up about travel, haha.

heyo, I’ve been traveling for ~15 years now, been to ~30 countries so far and it continues to be extremely rewarding and fuuuun.

I’ve had travel partners now and then, though I prefer solo traveling for the absolute wide-open “guess I’ll go walk toward that mountain in the distance for 4 hours” and “guess I’ll try 8 gelato flavors today” type of freedom that is very difficult to attain traveling with others.

I’m traveling solo in Matsuyama, Japan right now. Today I decided on a whim to take a train to Imabari, hung out at a temple, found my favorite yuzu ponzu sauce at a grocery store, spent a couple hours at a public bath, practiced some Japanese, stopped at a random yakitori restaurant on the way back, talked in terrible Japanese with the staff who were very kind and gave me a free shirt I’m wearing now! Pictures of the amazing food here.

I love solo traveling so much I keep doing it and talking about it, nothing else really compares for me. it’s certainly worth looking into and If you have any specific questions or concerns, I and the travel community are here as resources for anyone interested, so feel free to reach out. Apartments, healthcare, jobs, transportation, budgeting, whatever, I’m happy to talk.

Ha, beep boop, acknowledged. Thanks

Not sure how much longer people are going to think I’m crazy for living abroad.

I like to talk and travel

Few things going on there. Disappearing a couple generals is pretty par for the course for Xi and it wouldn’t be ruffling any feathers if the economy wasn’t stumbling, unemployment wasn’t crazy high and his covid policy wasn’t an unmitigated paying-it-forward disaster.

He’s probably asserting authority because he knows he’s run out of a lot of runway, and I’ve read things and listened to people saying that Xi is really at the end of his rope, but being in China myself recently, so educated guess having talked to Chinese people, unless there’s a military coup, which seems imprudent and not to the advantage of the military, I don’t see Xi being ousted from leadership.

He’s changed the constitution so that he can be president for life, released indoctrination pamphlets, but way more importantly on the ground, has dominated trump publicly and repeatedly, which Chinese people love to see, and the technological infrastructure and development of China is so rapidly outpacing the rest of the world due to Xi’s directives(400% medical tourism increase in the last 5 years, more than double solar energy installation than the other 199 countries combined every year, 25% of global battery energy grid storage added annually in China alone, BYD destroying Tesla, driverless taxis being commonplace in China, delivery drones, wind farms/turbines) that China already looks progressive, almost futuristic, and has no reason to stop pushing forward.

It’s impossible to know, but i think this move will further strengthen his authority that is resting on his political victories on the public stage and that head party and military members won’t want to risk removing Xi from power now for fear of losing this opportunity to completely outpace the US in practically every field while trump is fumbling everything scientific, social, and technological while simultaneously destroying almost a century of international goodwill and trust.

Chinese people care a lot about face, and while they aren’t domestically happy about covid/economy/unemployment, a lot of them are very happy to be prevailing over the US and for the rest of the world to be witnessing repeated Chinese victories over the US.

2028? Depends on how Xi does. For now, I can’t see the advantage to any faction in China removing Xi in the near future and throwing away this golden opportunity trump has handed to them.

Taxes: everybody’s hoop.

Which latest consolidation of power? I lived in China for 7 something years.

I use 1440 for news in general, and if I want to confirm or get more context on something, I use a few different sources to piece together the consistent facts.

Moved out of the US, legally stopped paying earned income taxes using the FEIE via physical presence test, an IRS procedure that allows you not to pay taxes if you live outside of the US for 330 or more days out of 365 consecutive days including the day you pay taxes.

Yea. The path i was on was pretty depressing, so i took a big step off it straight into the forest.

Started traveling didn’t stop.

I’ve known plenty of older travelers and I’m happy to talk to you about traveling if you’re interested.

Golgoppa, minced veg salad you can eat with potato chips.

Cabbage base, carrots, onions, other crunchy vegetables, dice/minced everything, mix in some cream sauces so it sticks together, you don’t need much, cute down on tastiness.

Super cheap, super easy to make, super tasty and healthy.

From a post with more detail and recipes back in the old travel com. New travel com here.

I travel full-time and I definitely feel more free and protected abroad then i ever did in the US. It’s healthy for you to want a better life or to distance yourself from an abusive government.

Let me know if you have any questions,I’ve been traveling for 15 years and can explain exactly how to live abroad easily and comfortably.

tldr: you can opt out, but it doesn’t matter.

At this point in history, opting out of a single face scan at the airport is sort of like walking on the beach for a mile and making a point of walking back to two specific footprints and wiping them away.

Between the ubiquitous phones pinging your phone every few feet or capturing your image, airplane cameras, the hundreds of cameras throughout the airport, thousands throughout the city on lampposts, in the buses you took, your taxis or rideshares, supermarkets, gas stations, bodegas and everywhere else, in the vast majority of countries your identity is being captured and tracked constantly.

That’s just where technology is at in the vast majority of countries at this point in history. I live outside of city centers, I use cash and don’t use rideshare apps, but I book plane tickets, I pass through city centers, I use ATMs to withdraw that cash, and 10 years ago in Vietnamese mountain villages I bikepacked to days away from the nearest town, where every building was a hand-built bamboo shack, every villager(about 30 people) had at least one smartphone.

A Viet family from that village who invited me to spend the night in their shack had a couple smartphones per person, bluetooth karaoke microphones(that was super fun), two smart TVs and an Xbox with a kinect(or whatever the new iteration was). Full internet access and electricity, and they lived in otherwise full undeveloped jungle a kilometer away from the 30-people village along a single road that experienced a mudslide a month previous that had no timeline for being cleared. We all recorded our dinner and karaoke together, they posted and streamed it on facebook or wherever real-time and afterwards.

Living in parts of entirely disconnected rural Afghanistan or other yet-recovered war-ravaged countries is still an option for “privacy-focused” individuals, but in about 15 years I doubt even the rural towns in those countries will be entirely excepted from blanket identity tracking.

Cameras and ID software are already affordable and become moreso literally each passing day, and the advantages to law enforcement and data brokers are already beneficial and become moreso literally each passing day.

This ironically does not eliminate privacy altogether, I believe in the “there’s so much going on and being recorded nohody is going to care if I’m smoking a joint in an alley with a camera” future. Before cameras, we were tracked by our immediate communities. In the middle camera age a decade ago(before ubiquitous digitization), it felt invasive, and now we’re past that and living in nascent transmetropolitan where everything and everyone is recorded and analyzed all the time to the point that soon nobody is going to look at you unless you are literally consecutively Jack the Ripping in plain view.

I don’t like being tracked, but it isn’t exactly a battle I have any say in and there are historical privacy policies being developed now that will shape how the future looks. If citizen rights are robust, tracking doesn’t functionally matter much more than your elderly neighbor eyeing you from the porch.

Now in the US, identity tracking is already everywhere and citizen rights have been nearly entirely eroded, so I prefer to live abroad where I at least have much more robust functional rights as a traveler.

It’s everywhere.

Digital immigration went from the interesting exception to the somewhat chilling norm over the last ten years I’ve been traveling.

I’ve been face scanned and digital fingerprinted entering every country in recent memory.

really good article with a couple surprises in there.

"some people speculated that, because of the political pressure against it, its release must have been an act of resistance by someone within the IRS. But the open sourcing of the program was always part of the plan, and was required by a law called the SHARE IT Act. It happened “fully above board, which is honestly more of a feat!,” Given told 404 Media. “This has been in the works since last year.”

Vinton told 404 Media in a phone call that the open sourcing of Direct File “is just good government.”

“All code paid for by taxpayer dollars should be open source, available for comment, for feedback, for people to build on and for people in other agencies to replicate. It saves everyone money and it is our [taxpayers’] IP,” she said. “This is just good government and should absolutely be the standard that government technologists are held to.”"

i haven’t myself, but i became friends with a chilean couple who traveled around the world according to berry season, Australia, Italy, Germany and so on picking berries, living in free housing while saving for a house back home.

they seemed pretty into the lifestyle, or at least willing to trade a few years for traveling and a house.