Christianity: Wow, I thought we were against idol worship? Oh well.

Buddhism: Oh man, those newfangled LED lights at the pagoda are so cool.

Ancient Norse: This is exactly as I pictured it. I feel completely validated.

Ancient Egyptian: You made paint out of what!?

Ancient Mayan: You do realize we just ran out of space on that calendar stone, right? Your desk calendar only goes to like 2025, should I assume you think the world is going to end then? I mean no, because of course not.

Romans: Oh neat, our gods have their own planets now.

Greek: Wait what? We only get the one planet? And the name sounds like what part of the anatomy? I mean come on, the Romans basically copied our religion!

Ancestor worship: Yo, we need to have a serious talk. You need to stop burning paper offerings of gold bars and currency at the altars. You think inflation in the USA is bad now? Wait until you see the afterlife.

Taoist: You got more or less everything wrong, but that’s expected. The Path only exists in contrast to that which is not the Path. Some people may pervert the Path for their own profit; without them, there is no Path. Seriously though – you paid how much for a ghostbusting service?

What does ‘residing abroad’ mean? In sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, how can you reside in a country you’re not in, right? Perhaps you legally reside in a country you’re not physically in? Or you moved such that you established residency in a new country? Or do you have no legal residency?

In the first case, I would guess you’re not permitted to move accounts, because your country of residence hasn’t changed. It depends on the terms of service though.

In the second case, surely – you reside in a country that has lower fees, like any other resident there.

In the last case, I really don’t know! I’ve been there for a few months while waiting for paperwork. I left my accounts as-is to avoid problems.

e.g. I immigrated to Vietnam and moved my Steam account. I kept all purchases and all history. I provided my new address, and get the regional lower fees. Same with Netflix.

I’ve been in a surprising number of hostile situations professionally that defied any explanation that did not include both malice and stupidity :D

We have bidets pretty universally in Vietnam, we were quite puzzled about the whole toilet paper thing during Covid in North America!

Ah yeah, great advice! I’ve also seen it expressed as “It’s possible to have an unexpressed thought”. I remind myself of that often!

Haha did you get woken up in the middle of the night to fix things too?

I had the opposite solution though. I just threw money from my summer job at computing infrastructure until they had things that wouldn’t often break. Maybe a bit silly, but it did eventually work!

The trick is knowing what’s dangerous. I feel that a lot of people I’ve met have a poor handle on this :D

In no particular order:

Advice is usually worth (at most) what you pay for it.

The harshest lessons are about trusting the wrong person.

No one will have more words for you, than a lazy person who wants you to do something for them.

Judge weak people by their natures, and strong ones by their goals.

If possible, don’t be poor. If you are though, be wary of following advice on this topic from people who have never been poor for an extended period.

I see what you mean – but in our case we generally have this whole set of completely normal (and generally reasonable!) laws – however the enforcement budget is not high (limited resources!), and compliance is this huge educational problem where a lot of people moved from rural areas to the big city this generation. It feels likely that the USA had a point in it’s history like this!

It’s getting (a lot) better with time, but this is a common story in the developing world: No enforcement, so few people obey laws. Few people obey laws, so people lose faith in public institutions because of the mess. This leads to low tax compliance, so there’s no budget to enforce laws.

I’m an immigrant though, so the compliance expected of me is quite high by comparison and I’m under more scrutiny. Which has worked out to my benefit, because now I know how to effectively use government services!

On a positive note, a lot of people still ride bicycles here! Since most traffic is two-wheeled, it’s somewhat more bike friendly than most places I’ve been in north america. Rush hour sucks though, because you’re constantly accelerating + stopping. In moderate traffic, you’re going about as fast as everyone else though. Da Nang is an absolutely lovely city to bicycle in.

I’m from Vietnam. We have the highest per-capita motorbike ownership in the world (last I checked), and have the 4th largest market for motorbikes! This creates some… interesting situations.

Our motorcycles are typically for commuting so have lower engine capacity than most American ones. My Honda Air Blade 2022 is 125cc and cost a bit under USD 2000 brand new. A Honda Wave 50cc (technically 49.9cc) can be had around USD 700 new. A lot of students drive those, because anything under 50cc generally does not require a license here.

Then we’ve got used bikes. An OK used Wave is probably 300$. Most people don’t update the registration on sale though and this creates a mess for the police.

Then… we have “ghost bikes” made from a mess of parts, these are the ones around 100-200$. These are technically illegal, as the motor serial generally won’t match the chassis serial – which means stolen parts. They are the least safe vehicles I’ve ever seen, and typically driven as a ‘disposable vehicle’ by people who won’t or can’t obey the law. So, you’ll see them outright driving the wrong way down highways, while text messaging, and carrying steel bars like they’re jousting. (No helmet of course). The police know that they can’t auction the bike for much, and they have no money on them to pay fines, so it’s a net loss for the department to deal with it.

A growing problem is tourists on the roads. No license, no insurance, driving like it’s a video game. If they hit you, they run home to avoid consequences. Hope you have money for medical bills!

My daily commute looks like something out of a Mad Max film. I see maybe a few people die per year. This is pretty much why our speed limits are generally 50km/hr (31 miles), even on highways. During peak hours, I’ll probably average about 10km/hr.

On the bright side, it’s very affordable and convenient! My petrol costs are like 3-4$ a week, and parking is way easier than if everyone had cars.

Anyway, that’s a slice of life here! Hope you found it interesting!

Haha, we’re talking about very different things, my friend! Let me give you a little slice of life here:

In my country, the situation is very different. 100% of cheap motorcycle helmets do not provide any real protection and are just there to help you avoid tickets from the police. Many are just baseball caps designed to look like a helmet at a distance. They are like 5 USD, and are universally bad.

A decent (good visor, OK head protection, no chin guard) helmet might start around 20 USD. Full face helmets would be a special order until fairly recently. You can forget about things like “safety standards”. I would suspect it to be a sticker applied to the helmet without the standard even being followed.

Even now, a full-face helmet with chin guard costs at least a comparable amount to a used motorbike (~135$). The number of people that would spend 150$ on a helmet rounds down to zero, despite road accidents being frequent and severe.

There are many great things about my country, but compliance with safety standards is a… work in progress. One good thing at least is that the speed limit is 50km/hr on all roads, and is mostly followed. This plus traffic leads to fewer high-velocity collisions at least.

Much like Reddit teaches me patience, hanging around with bankers and executives has taught me a lot about ethics! Not all were awful, but the ones that were have given me a superfluity of examples of what not to do.

Learning from what people don’t know (or don’t do) is such a neat trick! I wish I had clued in on it earlier.

Actually, that’s super exciting! I would have a fun time taking it apart, analyzing it, and publishing it. Would be great publicity, and would probably make me more money than the laptop/phone/whatever cost me.

That being said, the USA has the most established history of compromising cryptography and security. It’s not so much that I trust China or don’t trust the USA, it’s that I don’t trust any superpower, am fairly wary of nations in general, and in fact don’t have much trust for organizations of anything over a handful of people.

I go to Reddit to learn to be patient with impatient people, while ignoring trolls. These habits have improved my professional habits, helped me acquire new business, and generally improved my performance as an executive.

So I’m quite happy for Reddit to continue existing in it’s current form. Usually I log in and answer questions about electronic design for 30 minutes, then log off. Conversations on Lemmy are much more pleasant, but I don’t log on to Reddif to meet pleasant people!

In other words, if it’s useful to you, then why not use it?

I buy good brands from China for my professional tools, phones, laptops, and gadgets. The key is knowing which brands in China are good. Nothing else can compete in terms of value for money.

Motorbikes (for commuting). My midrange motorbike cost under 2k USD brand new, and it gets me to work at the same speed as an expensive one (Asian traffic, haha).

Motorcycle helmets, and lawyers.

Most other things, I cheap out on – for example for my professional tools, I buy a lot of good midrange Chinese brands. Usually quality is high and price is affordable. Same goes for phones, laptops, gadgets, and so on. I live near China though.

An interesting realization was that “saving money” and “reducing waste” are often competing optimums. I live in the developing world where there people waste a lifetime sitting at home doing nothing to save money. I am one of two or three people in my neighborhood with a job – the rest “save tons more money than I do” but don’t have jobs so their real income after inflation is negative.

Anyway, I figure out what my time is worth (based on what I estimate I could earn by grabbing extra contract work). Then I don’t spend my time saving money unless it saves something at least comparable to my hourly rate, or it’s in a context where working would be impossible, or there’s a nontangible element (e.g. repairing a thing I like a lot).

I prioritize not wasting my time first (it’s the only resource I can’t buy more of), and spend most of my spare effort finding ways to make more money (I regularly cram-study 2-3 hours per day for this purpose, usually tech). Then with the extra money I make, I can save 80% of my income on a good month.

When I started this habit, I made about 135 USD per month and had zero savings. Even if I saved 100% of my earnings, it still amounts to essentially nothing – so it became obvious that the best way to save more money, was to earn more money. When I had a little money, I didn’t put it in the bank – I invested it in myself by buying tools to learn more things and provide more services to accelerate my gains.

Anyway it’s not the right advice for everyone, I’m just another fool like the rest of us, but I hope it’s maybe useful to someone out there.

Not sure! However, it’s possible the coin cell that keeps the BIOS settings was removed or dead. This forces the BIOS into default configuration on boot, which may have caused a boot failure if you needed some specific hardware configuration set in BIOS.

Maybe they used it as a way to control computer access, but it seems more likely that they just didn’t get around to replacing the coin cell :D