Scapeghost

> and they then chain migrate other people over by putting in referrals for random people.

I have one of the worst passports in the world. It was already difficult to travel to many places, and now more and more countries are soft-banning everyone from here.

The reason being that whenever a country makes their tourism visas more accessible, people from here known as "labor exporters" or "visa brokers" apply for visas for hundreds of other people, often poor and uneducated.

When those "tourists" arrive at their destinations, they have their passports confiscated by the broker's foreign counterparts, and they start working odd jobs while on tourism visas in places like Dubai, Thailand etc.

The brokers tell them that they owe a large amount of money for the privilege, often amounting to many months of their salary, and those brokers are the only way for the workers to send money back home.

They overstay their visas and when they get caught they can't even speak in English to explain their situation, and even if they could they wouldn't expose their handlers.

All of this has made it pretty embarrassing for the rest of us from the same country who just go for actual travel and tourism, and we can't even really complain about the racism we face because we know it's our country's fault...

> Road damage is proportional to the 4th power. Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable.

Why not use trains for heavy transport?

I lived in a country where the roads between major cities were constantly swarming with hundred trucks coming and going. Even as a kid I thought that can't be efficient! It's certainly not comfortable for everyone else. Sometimes they'd be tipped over on their side. Sometimes there would be a tiny car crushed under them.

The barons certainly don't care about pollution, but don't they see the increased cost of each individual vehicle, the additional delays, having to pay multiple drivers and risk of accidents per vehicle?

Even if they want to keep a fleet of vehicles, shuttle trains aka "rolling highways" where trucks could roll on to the train via ramps, shut off their engines, let the trains take them to wherever, then continue into the destination cities, would be better than running the fleets on the roads. That would be good even for private cars.

The government added more lanes and diverted routes just for trucks, anything but build rail...

ChatGPT refuses to colorize private family photos if there's any Mickey Mouse comics in view.

Gaming magazines were THE best part of my life growing up. More than the games themselves, more than cartoons, more than family, friends (I had none..the reviewers were my friends :)

We lived in the backwater town of a backwater country, going through a turbulent era. There was nothing to buy there, except local food and produce and clothes. The only foreign stuff available to buy were the absolute basics like soaps and shampoo, and pirated movies and music on cassette tapes (even there people knew and adored Michael Jackson!)

The nearest city with international imports was 10-12 hours away on bus. Sometimes my uncle would go there for work, and the thing I looked forward to the most were the MAGAZINES he would bring back.

At first it was Sinclair User, Your Sinclair, then ZZAP!64. I would pore over them again and again, and fantasize about the games in them… it would be months before my uncle went again. So I made wishlists, drew comics about the stuff in those magazines, and picked up British humor from them, that still colors mine to this day. :)

I learned English and about the rest of the world from them. I learned about the USSR through Raid Over Moscow, the Vietnam War through Rambo and Platoon, the Falklands through some wargames, and other things that I would not be able to make sense of until decades later.

Every magazine and every reviewer, even the imaginary ones like Chuck Vomit the troll who reviewed text adventure games, had an intensely unique personality that affected how people, specially kids like me, perceived the games they were reviewing.

The 1980s and early 1990s magazine subculture is the most sorely missed aspect of gaming and computing that was lost when the internet took over.

Even if you didn't grow up on them, do flip through some random pages of the aforementioned magazines, just to see how some things never changed: There were PC vs Mac wars and console wars even back in 1985! There were people worrying about how increasingly powerful computers would make everyone dumber even back then!

I have IRC logs from 1998

Most people were dicks even back then

including me :)

In Russia, China, the people are under threat of literal torture and murder.

You gave up way before that

Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world?

You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.

Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything, and it's not some third world backhole that was suffering already anyway, but you yourself that are the worst victims of all their laws and wars.

Right now the biggest problem in life is the country of my passport.

I have enough in savings and enough passive income to be able to live comfortably almost anywhere, but whenever I talk to travel agents, or people who can help set up companies etc in the countries I want to go to, first they're like "Sure, we can do it, when do you want it" etc and then they ask where I'm from, and when I tell them, they either stop replying or say sorry, they can't help me.

sigh...Racism is a funny thing. They haven't even seen me, or seen my history of travel, or anything, they just stop cooperating when they see that one word, the name of my country.

And I can't blame them either, I know many people from here go and overstay there visas and generally make problems in other countries.

I just wish I could put down a deposit of a few thousand dollars as a guarantee that I'll behave and get a visa.

Without giving away too much PII, some of it is interest from various savings accounts and subscriptions/donations from Patreon etc. and some from sporadic sales.

"as well as a native" sounds ambiguous in my head, like implying "and I am a native" so I went with the counterpart to "as good as new"

P.S. Since I mentioned being from the Middle East I think I should add that I'm not religious at all lol

But I can't get it removed from my passport as there are laws against apostasy and "blasphemy" here :(