#Retirement abroad

[retireyoungtravelsmart]

What are the Best Places to Retire Abroad?

The recent discussion in our Facebook Group highlighted the challenges that many global retirees face when dreaming of living abroad. The current exchange rates and rising costs can make it seem daunting to stretch a pension in many parts of the world. However, there are still several destinations where a pension can offer a comfortable and fulfilling retirement. Retiring abroad has become an…

[darrenwalleyconsultancy]

Expat Living

Photo by Helena Lopes Last week I commented that I believe Western expats are a dying breed and that the modern generation is not equipped for Expat living. Expat living can give you an incredible outlook on life. It can show you the world’s wonders, and if you are lucky like me, you can finally find your life partner. What is an Expat life? An expatriate lives in a foreign country away from…

[ushas42]

I'm not sure I agree with Martellus's assessment here. Yes, I think he's right that this is an attempted attack on Mechanicsburg, but I don't think the Queen of the Dawn is behind it. I think it's much more likely that Patel is acting on standing orders from Klaus himself, regarding what to do if it looks like the timestop is about to be lifted. It being the Queen of the Dawn requires that Patel be either a revenant or loyal to Lu/Zola, neither of which I think are likely. It being Klaus only requires that Patel be more loyal to Klaus than he is to Gil.

Because we haven't really been dwelling on all the conflicting loyalties that are about to pop up once there are two Baron Wulfenbachs running around. I can't imagine that Gil hasn't given it a lot of thought, but what's the plan? How are they going to prevent Vole's predicted "messy, terrible, civil var"? I know Gil doesn't *want* the empire, but as things are he can't safely hand it back over to Klaus. They'd better have a way to yeet his ass back to Skifander or some such or this is only going to get worse.

[poppy5991]

Me, post election, hyping myself up to stay in the US and public health:

Me, only one week after inauguration, ordering documents for a Canadian PR application for skilled workers in case public health doesn’t exist in a few years in the US:

[slightlytoastedbagel]

thinks about Kohane Azusawa and photography (explodes)

[melodiousoblivionao3]

By my math I think we’re looking at ≈33 FA’s who were on a team at the end of last season who haven’t announced next steps…

[retirementtravelguide]

Thinking about retirement? Cyprus might just be your dream destination! This Mediterranean gem offers low taxes (only 5% for foreign retirees), a friendly healthcare system, and a lifestyle that blends safety with sunshine—300 days a year, to be exact. With English widely spoken, settling in feels easy. Sure, tourism drives the economy, and the island’s size can limit cultural diversity, but the benefits far outweigh the cons. Plus, there are various visa options to make your move smoother. If you crave a relaxed, budget-friendly lifestyle with vibrant healthcare and stunning weather, Cyprus could be calling your name!

[podcastprincess]

Luxury Homes For $100,000! - BRITS REACT!

[wealthmanagement123]

Retiring Abroad From Ireland | Imperius Wealth

Transition into retirement abroad from Ireland smoothly. Expert guidance for a seamless move. Start your international retirement adventure today!

[retireyoungtravelsmart]

Affordable Slow Travel Retirement: Is Your Dream Within Reach?

Affordable Slow Travel Retirement is a dream for many, but with rising costs, it can feel out of reach. Recently, in our Facebook group, https://www.facebook.com/groups/budgetslowtravelinretirement, Michelle Patricia Huntington asked a question that resonated with many: “Where can we live with $50,000 savings and very small pensions?” This sparked a vibrant discussion, revealing a wealth of…

[maptoimmigrate]

Retiring Abroad: The Ultimate Guide | Immigration Guide

Are you considering retiring abroad? Join us in this comprehensive guide as we cover everything you need to know about moving overseas for retirement in 2024. From visa requirements to finding the perfect destination, this video is your ultimate resource for retiring abroad. Don't miss out on this essential immigration guide to make your dream of retiring overseas a reality!

[canbritport]

Embracing the Digital Nomad Life in Retirement

Image: Freepik Entering retirement opens up a world of possibilities, and for some, the digital nomad lifestyle is an appealing choice. This journey offers freedom, adventure, and a chance to redefine your golden years. However, transitioning into a digital nomad requires careful planning and preparation, including financial assessments, goal setting, and research. Here’s how you can make the…

[ok-sims]

most of the time I'm pretty content about where I live, but seeing quite some people on the timeline talking about seeing DT and MS on stage has me jealous

[retirementtravelguide]

Officia quia ut aut.

Officia quia ut aut. Quis iusto dicta eveniet unde quasi sunt. Architecto ex est saepe magni doloremque. Possimus odio et reiciendis hic iste eos inventore exercitationem. Saepe ut assumenda sed eveniet. Qui consectetur dolorum sit sapiente et earum. Error nobis facere non voluptatem qui. Consequatur ut odit repudiandae molestias.Voluptatibus impedit perspiciatis perspiciatis sint. Tempore eos suscipit aut aut. Quia doloremque iste dolorem sint provident quasi. Odit inventore tempora nemo et nostrum. Voluptatum pariatur reprehenderit ea cupiditate magnam. Facilis atque ducimus reiciendis quibusdam explicabo. Nulla commodi dolorem minima quasi quia. Nostrum ea et vel est accusantium. Consequatur est quaerat libero et at exercitationem quisquam. Ullam magni culpa quia enim. Autem neque deleniti quam nobis eius. Dolor fugit dolor ipsa nihil. Omnis rerum id quia eum reiciendis. Nostrum autem nulla nihil corporis atque nemo commodi. Ea eos autem quam consequatur totam quas. Autem porro quo rerum dolorem est aliquam qui. The post Officia quia ut aut. appeared first on Retirement Travel Guide. DIGITAL NOMAD WORK, autem https://ift.tt/Aaibn5O October 06, 2024 at 08:51AM

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ideas Lying Around

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in DC TOMORROW (Mar 4), and in RICHMOND on WEDNESDAY (Mar 5). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

I get a special pleasure from citing Milton Friedman. I like to imagine that as I do, he groans around the red-hot spit protruding from his jaws, prompting howls of laughter from the demons who pelt him with molten faeces for all eternity.

If you're lucky enough not to know about Friedman, here's the short version. Friedman was a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet, and other assorted authoritarian, hard-right leaders who set us on the path to the hellscape we inhabit today. But before Friedman rose to prominence and influence, he was a crank. Specifically, he was a crank who dedicated his life to rolling back all the progress of the New Deal and re-establishing the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

In his crank days, people were justifiably skeptical of this project. "Milton," they'd say, "people like New Deal programs. They like the minimum wage, the 40-hour work-week, and the assurance that they won't be maimed, poisoned, burned alive, or otherwise killed on the job. They relish a dignified retirement, quality education for their children, and the assurance that no one is starving to death in their country's borders. People like national parks! They like Medicare! They like libraries, museums, and reliable weather forecasts! How, Milton, do you propose to convince the vast majority of people that they should settle for being forelock-tugging plebs, groveling before their social betters for the chance to scrub their toilets?"

Friedman had an answer: "In times of crisis, ideas can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink. Our job is to keep good ideas lying around, in anticipation of that crisis."

When the oil crisis hit, when prices spiked in the USA and abroad, Friedman seized his opportunity. The years following the oil crisis saw a violent political revolution in which organized labor, social justice movements, and the political opposition to oligarchy were crushed under police batons and the guns of Pinochet's thugs. The world was transformed. Left parties like UK Labour were remade as austerity-pilled neoliberals (not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher call Tony Blair "her greatest accomplishment," and it took Bill Clinton to pass a welfare "reform" bill that was too extreme even for Reagan to get through Congress).

Friedman was a monster.

But.

He had a hell of a theory of change.

When prices spiral, when people can't pay their bills anymore, when their retirement savings are wiped out, anything is possible. The oil crisis wasn't Jimmy Carter's fault, but the voters still delivered a Ba'ath Party-style Republican majority in 1980. The covid shocks weren't the fault of the world governments that presided over pandemic inflation, but they were creamed in the ensuing elections.

Let's talk about Trump's tariffs here. Trump's goal is to force a re-shoring of the American industrial capacity that was shipped to low-wage, low-regulation corporate havens around the world after the Reagan revolution. The pandemic provided a vivid lesson about the problems with long, brittle supply chains where all the slack has been extracted and converted to dividends and stock buybacks. That kind of system may work well – at least to the extent that it keeps Walmart's shelves full of cheap goods – but holy shit did it ever fail badly. Re-shoring is a good idea, as are other forms of pro-resiliency industrial policy.

But re-shoring doesn't happen overnight. As we saw during China's covid lockdowns, when one supplier ceases to ship goods, other suppliers can't spring up overnight to take up the slack. China itself became a manufacturing powerhouse thanks to extensive state support and planning, and it took decades. That kind of patient, long-run, planned process is the best-case scenario (and it still caused wrenching dislocations to Chinese society). Simply throwing up tariff walls and demanding that industry figure it out – amid the resulting economic chaos and the political instability it brings – isn't a plan, it's a disaster.

Redistributing the means of production around the world is a necessary and urgent project, but it won't be advanced through Trump's rapid, unscheduled mid-air disassembly of the global system of trade. Tariffs will cause breakdowns in neoliberalism's fragile supply chains, and the ensuing chaos – mass unemployment, shortages, political rage – will make it even harder for countries (including the USA) to rebuild the productive capacity vaporized by 40 years of neoliberalism.

This is our oil crisis, in other worlds: a moment in which a belligerent superpower's ill-considered monkeying with the underpinnings of global production will cause chaos, the crisis in which "ideas can move from the periphery to the center" in an eyeblink. If Steve Bannon can call himself a Leninist, then leftists can call themselves Friedmanites. This is our opportunity.

Or rather, it's our opportunity to seize – or lose. Governments are defaulting to retaliatory tariffs as the best response to Trump's tariffs. This is political poison: making everything your country imports from the USA more expensive is a very weird way to punish America for its trade war. Remember the glaring lesson of pandemic inflation: a government that presides over rising prices will be destroyed by the electorate.

There's a much better alternative, one that strikes at the very roots of American oligarchy, whose extreme wealth and corrosive political influence comes from its holdings in rent-extracting monopolies, especially Big Tech monopolies.

Tech giants are the major factor in US economic health. Take Big Tech stocks out of the S&P 500 and you've got a stagnant market punctuated by periods of decline. Superficially, US tech companies have different sources of extraordinary profit, but a closer look reveals that they all share the same foundation: Big Tech makes the bulk of its money in the form of monopoly rents, backstopped by global IP treaties.

Apple and Google take a 30% cut of every dollar spent in an app, and it's a felony to jailbreak a phone to make a new app store with the industry standard 1-3% transaction fees. Google and Meta take 51% out of every ad dollar, and publishers and advertisers are locked into their ecosystems by abusive contracts and technological countermeasures. HP charges $10,000/gallon for the colored water you put in your printer, and third-party ink and refills violate the anti-circumvention laws the US has crammed down the throats of every country's legislature. Tesla makes its fattest margins by renting you features that are installed in your car at the factory, from autopilot to the ability to use your battery's whole charge, raking in monthly fees from you and anyone you sell your car to – and the reason your mechanic can't just permanently unlock all that DLC for $50 is the IP laws that your country agreed to enforce in order to trade with the USA. Mechanics pay $10k/year per manufacturer for the tools to interpret the error codes generated by your car, and the only reason no one is selling a $50/month universal diagnostic service is – once again – US-originated IP laws that came in a parcel with trade agreements that gave your country's exporters access to US markets. Farmers pay John Deere $200 every time they fix their own tractors, because the repairs won't work until a technician comes out and types an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard – and bypassing that unlock code is a crime under the laws passed to comply with international treaties.

These aren't profits – they're rents. It's money Big Tech gets from owning a factor of production, not money it gets from actually making something. The app maker takes all the risks, but Apple and Google cream off 30% of their gross income. Big Tech's profits are almost an afterthought when compared to its rents, the junk-fee platform fees and farcically expensive consumables. For tech firms, capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism…and technofeudalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

America's robust GDP figures are a mirage, artificially buoyed up by the monopoly rents extracted by US Big Tech, who prey on Americans and foreigners:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/#reaganomics-revenge

But foreigners don't have to tolerate this nonsense. Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores – for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets – to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America's trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech.

The first country or bloc (hi there, EU!) to do this will have a giant first-mover advantage, and could become a global export powerhouse, dominating the lucrative markets for tools that strike at the highest-margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in the history of the human race. Like Jeff Bezos told the publishers: "your margin is my opportunity":

https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/the-cost-of-your-margin-is-my-opportunity

In times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the center in an eyeblink. Many of us have spent decades organizing and mobilizing against these extractive, dangerous, destabilizing abuses of technology, where the computer-powered devices we rely on for everything are designed to serve their manufacturers' shareholders, at our expense. And yet, these technologies have only proliferated, infecting everything from insulin pumps and ventilators to coffee makers and "smart" TVs.

It's time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech's margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it'll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn't have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.

Taking the margins for Big Tech's most profitable enterprises to zero, globally, will strike at the very heart of American oligarchy, and the hundreds of millions tech giants flushed into the political system to put Trump into office again. A race to the top for technological liberation benefits everyone – including Americans.

Truly, it would be a rising tide that lifted all boats (except for oligarchs' superyachts - those, it will swamp and sink).

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh

[bzjs35172]

Shutting down the Education Department, Trump really did it

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order at the White House on Monday, directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take all necessary steps to close the Department of Education and return the administration of education to the states.

Under the U.S. Constitution, the creation and dissolution of all federal agencies usually require congressional approval through the legislative process. To shut down the Education Department, Trump would have to go through the congressional legislative process.

"Take all legal means to shut down the Ministry of Education"

In a speech at the White House on the same day, Trump said that except for core essential functions, the administration will "take all legal means to shut down the Department of Education" and will "close it as quickly as possible." Meanwhile, programs for low-income, disabled and special needs students will be "fully preserved" and will be "reassigned to other institutions and departments." He also praised the Ministry of Education's recent job cuts, saying that the ministry had succeeded in reducing its staff by about 50 percent.

After Trump signed the executive order, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Chair Meng Zhao-wen and Education Task Force Chair Mark Takano issued a joint statement saying it was an "illegal decision" and that Congress "must not relinquish power" in the face of the order.

Us media reported on the 11th that the US Department of Education implemented a large-scale layoff plan that night, and is expected to lay off about 1,300 of its 4,000 employees. Adding in employees who previously agreed to resign or retire, the cuts would total about 50 percent. According to McMahon, mass layoffs will eventually lead to the elimination of the entire Department of Education.

Twenty-one Democratic state attorneys general have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the Education Department's layoffs. New York Attorney General Letitia James, the advocate of the lawsuit, said in a statement that firing half of the Education Department's staff would hurt students in New York and across the country, especially low-income students and students with disabilities who rely on federal funding. She called it "outrageous," "reckless and illegal."

Many universities have imposed hiring freezes

Harvard University, Stanford University and North Carolina State University are also suspending hiring as the federal government seeks to reduce federal contracts and cut research funding.

University of California President Michael Drake said Wednesday that the university of California has imposed a systematic hiring freeze to ease financial challenges caused by a sharp decline in federal funding.

Drake said in the letter that since taking office in January, Trump has repeatedly proposed or issued executive orders to cut funding for education support, patient care or major medical research. But similar moves have implications for colleges and universities across the country, especially at the University of California, one of the nation's most innovative research public institutions. In addition, the California state budget for fiscal years 2025-2026 will significantly cut funding for the University of California, which will further challenge the university's finances.

Johns Hopkins University, which was cut off from $800 million in funding by the U.S. Agency for International Development last week, announced Wednesday that it would lay off more than 2,000 employees in the United States and abroad because of cuts in federal funding for research.

Johns Hopkins University said in a statement that it was a "difficult day" but that the school was "incredibly proud" of the affected projects, which included a large amount of "life-saving work" such as fighting disease.

Scientists leave Europe to pick up the slack

According to the US Science magazine and other European and American media reports, in the face of the uncertain policy environment of the Trump administration, an increasing number of scientific researchers are considering leaving the US. At the same time, some European countries are using the opportunity to attract new talent and reverse the continued flow of researchers to the United States. Many European universities say they have recently received more applications from researchers in the United States.

France is one of the fastest "people snatching" countries. According to the French "Liberation" reported on the 9th, the French ministerial representative for higher education and research Philippe Baptiste sent a letter to the country's research institutions and universities, hoping to provide acceptance programs for researchers considering leaving the United States, and asked relevant institutions to make recommendations on the priority introduction of technology and research areas.

Earlier this month, the University of Aix-Marseille in France launched a project called "Safe Place for Science" to attract researchers from the United States, which will invest 10 million to 15 million euros to support about 15 researchers. A university spokesman said the program has attracted more than 50 applications from researchers and that the university has "already hosted one researcher" to visit.

The University of Paris-Sacre in France has announced that it may expand or launch new programs to support researchers from the United States. Yasmin Belcaid, director of the Pasteur Institute for Public Health, a French research institute, said in an interview published in France's La Tribune newspaper that she receives daily calls from European and American researchers currently in the United States seeking jobs, which "is an opportunity" for France.