bigdollopenergy

OP didn't state their exact country, but E-2 visa may be applicable. It's not just for investors/business starters. Companies that are privately owned by people from E-2 countries can transfer/hire citizens from other E-2 countries. Probably the most realistic option for a junior/mid-level developer IMO. See if your country is an E-2 country and apply to companies that qualify. E-2 is a non-immigrant visa so moving onto green card is more difficult but not impossible.

There's also the L1B Company transfer, if you work for a company with offices in the US and they would be able to transfer you after a year. Bit of a gamble to find a company that would be willing to do this though, and you gotta work for probably years to find out.

H-1B, if you're not already in the US has a 100k fee attached to it. Though AFAIK that was a proclamation that expires at some point, but probably won't. So it's really not an option for 99% of people.

I'm not a lawyer, so definitely verify what i say, but i'm pretty sure these are also valid options.

No. But also very much yes, if you're talking about the economy as a whole.

Transport is massively profitable for the economy but not for the transport companies themselves, they simply can't capture enough of the value generated to turn a profit. If they try then the level of travel disproportionately goes down to make them lose even more money. It's why most/all of a public transport needs to publicly funded in some way and saving a penny or two per ticket on WiFi will cost far more to the economy than it saves.

There is one notable exception. Japan's train system is profitable depending on how you look at it. The trains themselves are a "loss leader" in that they actually lose money per train ticket, but the company that runs the trains also owns the terminals (lots of retail space) and the commercial real estate around them, which is where the money is made. They are in effect a commercial real-estate holding company that's doing transport on the side to beef up their portfolio.

They never specified H1B.

They were probably on a treaty visa, Like E2 (which i have, it's not just for business owners/investors, employees can get this too) or T2 (The NAFTA equivalent). These visas allow you to live and work in the US for a very long time (extendable indefinitely for 2 years a pop in my case), but they have no dual-intent attached to them. They are a dead-end and if you want to stay in the US you need to start from square one with an H1B/Marriage or convince your employer to start a standalone green card sponsorship, which costs like $50k and 2+ years of processing, where the only benefit to the employer is that you can now get a different job.

It's actually kind of a problem, there's a lot of people on these visas who've lived and worked here for 20+ years with no viable route to permanent residency.

In as much as anyone has to respect the copyright coming from any jurisdiction they are not in. Which for the most of the world generally means that, yes, you do have to respect it. It being the UK and your historical reasoning isn't very relevant.

One of the main things that allows global trade to happen as freely as it does, is countries cooperating so that copyright can be legally enforced across them. The resulting court cases are likely to be less actionable if you have no presence there, but you can be sued in that country for breach of copyright and have a judgement placed upon you. It's bilateral, a Brit may wonder the same thing about the US or any other country and the answer would be the same.

I don't think so. I think Covid was unique in that it occupied a sweet-spot in it's severity. A more severe virus would play out very differently. I don't think we'd see such a huge conspiracy movement around it and much greater compliance from the population.

The danger of the covid virus was concentrated in specific demographics such that a lot of people didn't directly see how dangerous it was. This created a disconnect between what was being reported vs what people saw with their own eyes, creating the perfect environment for conspiracy theories to run rampant. For example, I don't know anyone that died or had a bad time with it, nor does anyone else in my family/close circle. But that's because I don't really know any old or medically vulnerable people, but with our aging populations in the western world this group is actually huge. We had people dropping like flies in certain sub-groups while in others nothing much happened and only where the groups intersected was it visible how bad it really was (healthcare workers, people with old grandparents not taking it seriously). It also doesn't help that older demographics almost always have something else wrong with them and Covid a lot of the time was one contributing factor that pushed them over the edge, this really fueled the conspiracy theorists narrative of falsely attributing causes of death to "inflate" numbers.

I also think the media took a wrong turn in it's messaging and told too many noble lies. It was really important that the young and healthy also thought that this might be real threat to them personally so they'd actually take it seriously and stop spreading it. But young people would lookup the statistics for their own risk and would see fatality/complication rates of sub 1%, and also note that those affected were primarily the morbidly obese and immuno-compromised. I recall seeing a lot of articles indicating that there was a surge of young people in ER and articles showing obituaries of young people in order to hammer home the message that it was a real danger to them too. The problem is the official statistics didn't back that message up to the degree that it needed to, so you had this big disconnect that was exploited heavily by conspiracy theorists. IMO this was likely a misguided effort directed towards reducing spread, because it was determined that quarantining to save other people wasn't a strong enough incentive to curb risky behavior (which is depressing), but backfired heavily and likely caused more harm than good.

If a more serious virus came around that had fatality rates in the double digits, I don't think conspiracy theories would be able to form. Because very quickly people would see people they know in their lives dying/becoming extremely sick. There's no uncertainly/disconnect to exploit in that scenario like there was with covid.

If the company supplies the hardware and software as a bundled unit, they are much more able to arbitrarily restrict and wall-in the device. It's just how the law works. This is how Apple seems to get away with a lot of super anti-competitive stuff that Microsoft simply could never with it's Windows OS (Microsoft being crucified for favoring IE being a prime example, while Apple blatantly does the same thing with Safari). That said, Microsoft can and does do all the same stuff on their Xbox or surface tablets, because in that case they do supply both the hardware and software. There's no "good" or "bad" company when it comes to this issue, as they both willing to do this in every scenario when they can get away with it.

Why it's structured this way, I've no idea. I don't think supplying the hardware should be the distinguishing factor that allows them to wall-in the device. It's one thing to force them to support and integrate devices/software into their product, which is probably not fair on the company, but it's another thing to actively get in the way. It's a thin line with a lot of grey area, but the way it's setup currently probably isn't right.

I'm so conflicted about this move.

On one hand you've got a generation that is being held back by these loans. The very people that are supposed to be starting businesses/building up capital/starting families and whom are the foundation of the future economy. When you view it through the lens of being an economic stimulus, it's actually a pretty good one and will likely be a net-positive in the long term.

On the other hand. While everyone is focused on the people who already paid theirs or who didn't get student loans to begin with, no one including this author ever properly addresses the impact on future students. As far as i can tell all future students are still going to have these huge loans (likely bigger) and this is a one time payout for current loan holders only. Those students are going to look back to now, see we got a one-time 10k payment courtesy of the taxpayer (which will be them) and rightly demand the same treatment. If they don't get it, they will view us as being just the same as the boomers were, cradle robbers that take advantage of the system and then take away the ladder once they are done.

We've essentially set in stone one of 3 paths. One, we periodically do these bailouts, probably blowing up tuition prices further so the students don't really benefit and the only winners are the loan companies+universities. Two, we commit to heavily reforming the system and fully paying for higher education. Or 3, we never do the bailout again and have future students not only pay for their own loans but service the debt we created just for ours as well. While i'd like for us to go with option 2, i don't think this is the likely path, it's too difficult and controversial to be done in the current political climate. The likely path, is that we're going to end up being just as morally bankrupt and selfish as the boomers collectively were.

It looks like with a series of changes they were able to mitigate the issue almost completely, but it's still there and the motherboard is obviously deficient in some way.

They mentioned they put the ram in 2 years ago and they've had this issue for 2 months. I suspect maybe it started when their OS's started using their TPM's but it's possible their board has just broken randomly. Likely on a hardware level.

I do see value in diagnosing the issue and making a post about mitigation's. I love people who do this so others with the issue can find it and get their boards refunded/RMA'd before their warranties expire. But once the tpm/ftpm was identified as being the issue and it was hardware/firmware related, they need to get a new board, not more mitigations (hopefully by getting a refund/RMA so the board manufacturer doesn't get a pass on this). I don't see how someone working in the tech space (we are VERY privileged salary wise) would tolerate having obviously faulty electronics.

While you may prefer it when people pull their masks down to talk to you. I would bet there's going to be another lipreader who would be aghast if i were to pull my mask down to talk to them. I'd need to establish you were okay with it first and that the communication is important enough to justify the risks. Even then it's not unreasonable to refuse unless the communication was essential, a genuine health risk is going to trump communication 99% of the time.

While i would be okay with doing this as i'm vaccinated and in a low risk category and don't live with high risk people, if that wasn't the case (most people) I wouldn't under any circumstances pull my mask down unless the communication was life or death. I would have a choice between inflicting a horrible death on myself/others or making your life unfairly difficult. And as unfair as that is to you, choosing the second doesn't make someone an asshole when you consider the options available.

The only solution I can think of would be everyone wearing clear masks/shields, but since they aren't widely available and are more expensive, I don't think it's reasonable to expect most people to do it.

I think your anger (justified as it may be) is being misdirected here and your response doesn't really relate to the comment you're replying to.

Doubt it. This IMO is probably the best PR maneuver ever conceived. I doubt they ever planned to do it.

The BBC was just about to release a long-researched exposé about all the moderation issues they have and how child porn and abuse were going unchecked on their platform. This was a supposed to be a huge deal that could destroy them if the media at large rallied around that story like they did with Pornhub. By making this announcement before it came out they stole the narrative and switched the focus away from that problem and towards the issue of what are all the sex workers going to do when they suddenly lose their income and also just how crazy the announcement was in of itself.

They did it with perfect timing and drummed up such a fuss with such a wild and seemingly out of nowhere change that when that article actually dropped, it was merely background noise and not the primary focus of media coverage. The media likes to hyper-focus on issues for a short period of time (with a few exceptions, trump/covid/amazon being a few) and then quickly move on regardless of whether the issue/story has finished or resolved itself in anyway. Which is what will likely happen here, OnlyFans will likely make it through this mostly unscathed and with a ton of publicity.

So i don't necessarily like OnlyFans and I think it's a dangerous game to play for contributors. That said, why are payment processors deciding which businesses get to exist? I understand that the fraud rate is higher than normal, but how high is it? Could it not be handled by a higher than normal transaction fee?

It bothers me that they have the power to shut businesses based on what appears to be their own subjective moral code. If a website is shutdown for any reason it should be due them breaking some law, not the payment processors feelings.

Regulation should passed to stop this from happening. While a lot of people may agree with their actions so far, it shouldn't be their decision to do this.

Important addition I'd like to add here is that you almost certainly won't owe any US tax. You just need to file the return. AFAIK You get a crazy high deduction and can also deduct all your local taxes, so it's almost always 0 or near 0 taxes owed. That said it can be expensive to actually prepare and file the return, as you need to find a tax specialist proficient in Local AND US tax law to prepare it for you and they charge higher than normal rates.

Another thing to know is that the US imposes worldwide reporting requirements on banking institutions for their US citizen customers. This problem is far less severe than it initially was, but depending where you go some banks/institutions may deny or restrict your access to financial products because they don't want to deal with the reporting requirements attached to you. Again, it's probably fine anywhere in Europe (nowadays anyway), but elsewhere in the world it may be extremely difficult to do something as simple as get a simple checking account.

I'm not referring the technology itself. That's actually quite useful with real-world applications that may be worth investing in. The ticketing use case and also Gamestop's rumored use of NFT for reselling digital game licenses are actually awesome ideas. I'd invest in companies using this technology provided they had a valid business case for it and aren't just chasing the hype.

The craziness i'm pointing out is the apparent sale/purchase of NFT tokens for lackluster pieces of digital art at insane amounts. You aren't really investing in the technology in this case, you're investing in that piece of art. It confers no proven legal privileges, meaningful ownership or protection from being copied. It just gives you the ability to prove to someone that at a specific point in time you made a token for that bitstring or bought it from someone who did. Would these pieces fetch the similar prices on the art market right now where you can actually buy real proven legal rights/ownership of the piece? I highly doubt it.